In an interview with The Rumpus, Solomon has said the Matilda is based on the Clotilde, the last ship known to carry enslaved people to the United States. History for these characters is trauma: “the past swooping in, an unkindness of ghosts” (p. Ghosts-as traces more than as characters-show up repeatedly in the novel: this is a future tied to the past.
“I’m chasing my mother’s ghost,” she explains (p. Seeing connections between these two events and her mother’s death during another blackout twenty-five years ago, Aster begins to investigate.
The story begins with two related events-a series of blackouts on Matilda and the ship’s Sovereign taking ill and subsequently dying. On a quest to find an apocryphal after-Earth promised land, the Matilda has journeyed for more than three hundred years with what’s left of humankind in its hull. Meet Aster, a healer, sharecropper, and rebel who lives in the lower decks of the spaceship HSS Matilda. With an Afrofuturist premise grounded in a queer neuroatypical worldview, An Unkindness of Ghosts is the post-Butler novel many of us have been waiting for.
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