At least once a week, someone points out to me that my ancestors are not from here [The United States}. And I always find it fascinating because (1) it is almost always someone whose ancestors came here as colonizers/genociders and (2) because it is always someone who is fully aware that my ancestors came her against their will.

Somehow, neither of those facts ever seem to matter to the people engaging in that type of rhetoric. To the average white American, the United States is a white country that happens to have Black and brown people in it as well. While the reality is that white people only exist in this country in the way that they do because America's history is filled with them murdering and enslaving the rest of us.

Why am I bringing this up? Because, well, that experience--of being in a country that forced me here while hating my presence--is what most attracted me to Elaine Ho's Cry, Voidbringer. I won't spoil anything, but one of the running currents in this story is a people who are forced to labor for the future of a country that stole them from their home only to resent them for being there. In fact, all three of our central characters are slaves to a Queen who has stolen them from their homeland and forced them to fight in a war that has nothing to do with them.

I often think about the fact that America is painted as a great melting pot. A nation built on diversity and a love for immigrants. They acknowledge that every aspect of our country and society was built by the merging of cultures and peoples, while ignoring the fact that those cultures and people were largely stolen or coerced. So now, after hundreds of years of stealing our language, our culture, our music, dreams and ideas, our country is run by people who want us all to believe that everything we have belongs to "real Americans", while the rest of us are conspiring to replace them and take it all for ourselves...which is insane... we built it.

I am sharing all of this because this is a feeling that I felt strongly highlighted in Cry, Voidbringer. Our main characters were each taken from their home and forced to come to a new land, where their power and drive was exploited in order to create hope for a people who would never accept them. Even as they lay their lives down to secure a future for these people, they are treated like they are less than human. They are reduced to their ability to fight and produce, while never being granted an identity of their own. In fact, two of our main characters are not even allowed names of their own. They are reduced to an identifying symbol on their foreheads and dared to attempt to forge any kind of purpose for themselves outside of the fight for other people's future.

As a Black man in America, that is a story I am very familiar with. Even today, 160ish years since my ancestors were supposedly freed, we are still being exploited for our creativity and for our ability to hope, while being told we are invaders, trying to take up space that rightfully belongs to others. We are a fundamental part of the "American dream" while being told we are arrogant and entitled if we dare to dream for ourselves.

I don't want to mislead you. Cry, Voidbringer speaks to a very different experience than Chattel Slavery and Elaine Ho did not build this world to point to America, but she did bring us a story that expertly highlights the experience of being stolen from your home and exploited for power that will never grant you acceptance from the people who have come to rely on you for their own survival. And that is something that marginalized people in the west can deeply relate to.

As I read this book, I resonated with the different path that each character takes in their pursuit of freedom. I resonated with the warrior who takes out her pain on every enemy she is pointed at. I resonated with the helpless child who is being groomed to fight in a war she is better left running far away from. And I resonated with the leader who fights every day to fix the system that uses their people as the glue to hold together a broken country of exploitation and suffering. In each of their stories, I saw a path that marginalized people have walked for centuries, searching for a way to find the freedom that we've been told is selfish to long for. In each of these women, I saw myself at various points of my life. I saw ideologies I have abandoned and ideologies I still cling to, and was left wondering what it looks like to actually abandon the weapons of my oppressor so that I can lift the ones that actually have the power to set me free.

I knew from the very first chapter that this would be our debut book and I have not regretted that choice even once. So if you are like me, and you are tired of stories that ignore the most vulnerable in their conversations about liberation, I truly believe Cry, Voidbringer will be for you. This is a story that remembers the most vulnerable and is desperate to tell their stories.

If that sounds as interesting to you as it did to me, go grab your copy now: https://bookshop.org/a/87137/9781964721521

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