Tochi Onyebuchi, Championed by Tom Schecter

The Champion Series

Guest author:

Tom Schecter

Presenting the fiction of:

Tochi Onyebuchi

Championing Tochi Onyebuchi, RIOT BABY, and Empathy

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This article is part of Literary Salon issue #7.

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Championing Tochi Onyebuchi, RIOT BABY, and Empathy

All right. So I’ve done one of these already. This one is going to hit a little different.

For one, the author I am here to speak for today has already made some waves. He’s won a few major prizes, been published in some serious-business anthologies, and even been interviewed on The Daily Show a few years back. He’s also an old high school classmate of mine, so obviously I am biased and should shut up.

But I believe Tochi Onyebuchi wrote a novel that needs to be read by every single person at least once, and Thaddeus has been kind enough to lend me several hundred extra eyes to make my case in front of, so on we go.

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I have been reading Tochi’s work for about a decade, since I got a notification that a high school classmate of mine was about to release his first novel, got curious, and got knocked on my ass.

By a YA fantasy novel.

First off, it was gorgeous. I knew nothing about West African folklore going in, and I was fully engrossed in the world and the imagery, and the story held up, too. But what got me was, it was tense, rippling with a really deep undercurrent of seething distrust of the powers that be. And it was for kids! And I remember thinking to myself, I wonder what he might do without an age restriction to make him tone it down?

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There is a reason why certain political and religious organizations are in the habit of vilifying empathy.

Two reasons, if I’m being generous.

The first is obvious: it’s a lot easier to separate people and make one group out to be the enemy of the other if neither group is given a chance to really, truly understand how the other feels.

The second? Well… Empathy has the potential to be really fucking uncomfortable. More uncomfortable than a lot of us are used to. More uncomfortable than a lot of us can tolerate. Which, of course, makes it easier for the bad actors from reason one to sell empathy as the problem (and there I go, back to being ungenerous. Oh well...).

The thing is, the discomfort is what makes empathy so incredibly necessary. We can intellectualize and sympathize all we want about how terrible situation X is, but in order to be inspired (read: forced) to get off our asses and do something about terrible situation X, often we need to experience it ourselves for a moment—even just emotionally—and hopefully that moment galvanizes us, makes us think “wow, this is fucking unacceptable,” and leads us to real action.

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Riot Baby is a profoundly upsetting story, and a lot of that upset is derived from its grounding in reality.

Let me qualify that: as you might have noticed, if you’ve ever looked at my profile picture at any point since I joined Substack, I’m…how to put this gently so as not to shock anyone?…not Black. My understanding of the experience of Black people in the United States is, by default, a limited one. I have read a ton of history, obviously, and I’ve gotten deep enough into the facts and the data and primary sources and whatnot that I know, on an intellectual level, that the experience has been horrific, on the whole, and that white people—wealthy ones in particular—have largely done whatever they can since Reconstruction to ensure that their former chattel remain permanently beneath them in the social and economic pecking order.

And I’m pissed about it, because I have this thing about bullies where I hate them and want them to suffer from terrible incurable hemorrhoids forever, and it doesn’t particularly matter to me what that bully looks like on the outside when I make that distinction. So I sympathize with the several generations of Black Americans who have suffered this treatment. While we’re at it, I sympathize with the literal majority of my countrymen who are at or below the poverty line these days simply because certain wealthy people want it that way and can pay off the right people to keep it that way.

But that’s different from living it. It’s different from panicking about what you can afford to buy to feed yourself and your loved ones.

It’s different from watching dozens of news reports about people who look like you getting shot and killed by law enforcement officers—or even just wannabe vigilantes or plain old domestic terrorists—who don’t look like you and who suffer little or no consequences for their actions.

It’s different from watching doctors treat your family members with indifference.

It’s different from watching hate groups march down Main Street in the town your high school is in—in Northern-as-hell Connecticut, by the way—and having your teachers have to tell you to stay as far away from certain blocks in town as possible on that day for your safety.

I don’t know (most of) those things feel first hand. And reading studies about housing discrimination, or doctors minimizing or flat-out ignoring black women’s pain complaints, or about how the bail system often leads to poor young men of color awaiting trial for years in prisons like Rikers Island (yes, in my own goddamn native city)...it’s upsetting, and I don’t like it, but it’s admittedly sometimes hard to feel the full force of it. Especially when it’s so pervasive. Especially since things like this have been going on for actual centuries.

Especially when it’s not my reality, and I don’t have to expect it and react to it daily and feel it every second of my life.

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I am wary of trying to describe the effect of this story before you get a chance to see some of it for yourself. I meant to, originally, but I don’t think I can do it justice. So, instead, I’ll give you a big fat block quote of the first instance of our co-protagonist Ella at six(?) years old, experiencing her “Thing.”

“Pretty soon, he’ll be ready for daycare,” LaTonya says, and even from the porch, Ella can see the light twinkling in her eyes.

Grandma smiles wide. “The way you look at that child…”

“I know.” LaTonya shows her teeth when she grins, bounces Jelani a little bit. “Doesn’t look a thing like his daddy, but don’t tell Ty I said that.” And the two women giggle.

“Well, you know Lanie’s getting her business started up soon, so you should stop by. She’s been sticking sticky notes on everything, and she’s been saving up for a playpen. Even talking with the library about getting books for the kids. Lanie says we’ll eventually get a computer set up, so the kids can play their games after school. I don’t know how I feel about them staring at a screen all day, but sometimes it’s best to be indoors.”

“Well, you let me know when it’s up and running. Jelani would love to make some new friends. Isn’t that right, Jello.”

Jelani buries his face in his mother’s chest.

“Oh, he’s so shy.”

The sun feels too bright outside like it’s washing the color out of everything, and dizziness hits Ella like a brick. Grandma and LaTonya are still talking when Ella staggers to her feet and stumbles inside, and the light falls in rectangles through the burglar bars over the windows. In the bathroom, she stands over the sink and lets the blood slide a little bit from her nose before tilting her head back up. It always feels like there’s something rumbling whenever she gets the nosebleeds, like the earth is gathering itself up under her, but whenever they stop, the nosebleeds, and she looks around, it’s like nobody else noticed a thing. Vertigo pitches her forward. She leans on the sink, squeezes her eyes shut and tries not to think of what she saw outside: the boy Jelani, grown to ten years old, walking the five blocks home from school, a bounce in his walk and his eyes big and brown before a low-rider screeches nearby and a man with a blue bandanna over his face levels a shotgun out the window at someone standing behind Jelani and, after the bang, everyone scatters, leaving Jelani on the ground, staring up at the too-bright son for the last, longest two minutes of his life.

(Sorry, was that too rough? Was the doomed baby too much to start with? Maybe I should have gone with one of Ella’s visits to her brother on Rikers Island later in the story, seeing in a fellow inmate’s face that he is pretty sure this is the last time he gets to see his infant daughter before a guard he’s run afoul of beats him to death–and then seeing it happen a few hours before it actually does. Maybe I should have gone with a depiction of an “inmate rodeo” in Louisiana that looks and sounds as civilized as an undercard bout in the Roman Coliseum. Maybe the fact that I’ve got a few more options rattling around in the top of my head is more important than which one I chose.)

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The thing I have always deeply appreciated about Tochi’s writing, regardless of target audience, regardless of whether the story leans closer to science-fiction or fantasy, is his ability to expertly toe the line between believable and fantastic.

And the thing that always hurts every time I read this particular work is that there’s too much detail for any of the source material to have been completely invented.

Riot Baby lives on two peculiar knife-edges: between reality and fantasy, and between depressing mundanity and vicious spectacle. He does a fantastic job of humanizing everyone we encounter on the page in small moments so that we can’t help but care when something puts them in danger. And when he has the opportunity to show us an injustice, he shows it from an unexpected angle and does not fucking hold back. We have to feel it too.

Even as it leans more towards the fantastic as the story progresses, as law enforcement gets “Augmented,” as entire neighborhoods get locked down with every angle of every street covered by video cameras, as parolee ankle monitors get replaced by implanted thumb chips capable of reading vitals and administering medication (and all of these things, by the way, feel one degree of separation closer to reality now than it did when I first read this book in 2020), we have to sit in these characters’ experience of the system they are prisoners of.

We have to feel all of it.

And that is the point, as far as I’m concerned. Feel someone else’s pain, and let that pain lead to fuller understanding, and let that understanding guide us towards being better to each other.

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A bunch of us have been talking for months about how fiction is a measure of a society’s culture, about how the quality of writing we see daily on this platform offers some measure of hope for a better future.

Well, part of that ethos is relying on the power of great writing to help us process our discomfort with the way things are now, with what makes them the way they are.

I haven’t ever fully stopped thinking about Riot Baby since it came out five years ago. It is in my subconscious. It is part of my values system now: it dares me to try to be kinder, be more understanding. It drives me to try to leave any person I interact with feeling slightly better than they felt before they ran into me.

I can’t make you read this book. But I promise I will never stop recommending it. The discomfort is the point. That’s fucking empathy.

Yours, as always,

TS