In This Debut Novel, Afropessimism Gives a Black Female Serial Killer Motive to Kill
Imani Thompson jokes that she has never murdered anyone, despite the similarities some people in her personal life have found between her and the main character of her debut novel, Honey. “[Yrsa’s] a psychopath. Like, she murders multiple people!” Thompson tells me. Not unlike her protagonist, Yrsa, however, Thompson is tired of men and their violence.
In Honey, Yrsa is a PhD student who, in between the monotony of academia, kills men. All sorts of men including: a fellow academic, former lovers, and at some points, any man she can get her hands on to. When she’s focusing on her studies, she’s fixated on figuring out the validity of something the author Saiyda Hartman once wrote: “If violence turns subject into object, then it is through violence that one can return a subject to a subject position.”
I spoke with Thompson about her debut, writing about the manosphere, Afropessimism, and more!
Where did the idea of Honey come from?
I've always known that I wanted to be a writer ever since I was little. When I was in my final year at uni, I thought: "Okay, I need to come up with this novel that's gonna be my first book." I was sat in a cafe with my mom, and I was chatting to her about how I knew I wanted to explore the questions I had about being a woman of color in the world, the history of that identity, how identities intersect, the politics that I was studying. I probably knew I wanted to look at gender-based violence — the theory that I was looking at in university as well — and I kind of looked at all of these topics, and I thought: “That's quite a hard pitch." And then I thought, "What if I wrap that in genre?" So what if I write this book about a woman who's murdering bad men and I can engage with everything I wanna talk about, but in a way that is fun and accessible, and hopefully be able to make the book funny and satirize a number of things as well. So that's where the idea came from, 'cause I really didn't think I'd write a book about a serial killer. It came as a surprise.
How long from when you first got the idea to when you finally started to write it?
It was like Easter of 2022 because I was in my finals. Then I went home that day. I wrote the opening chapter, but then I didn't write anything until around September of that year because I was like, let me just finish my degree. So it was percolating as an idea through the months.
How much of yourself do you see in the character of Yrsa?
I like to think that none of myself is in there, but my little brother read the book, and after reading it, he said, "Oh, like, so she is you?" I said, "Jay, she's a psychopath. Like, she murders multiple people." And he was like, "Yeah, but I think she thinks about people like you think those things." So it's funny 'cause when I write, I try to get myself out the way as much as possible, so I don't feel a personal connection with her. But I think when writing, it's kind of this big pot where everything goes in, like my experiences, my friends' experiences, everything I read and watch, and it all kinda gets stirred up. So, of course, there must be a sprinkling of me in there, but I don't like to relate too hard to her because, well, I've never killed anyone.
In Honey, there's a character that seems to be a stand-in for Andrew Tate. What was it about him and the cultural space he occupies that you wanted to explore within this book?
So when I first thought, okay, I'm gonna write this woman who's murdering men, to make myself really interested in that because, as I said, I wasn't too interested in the whole serial killer thing, I thought what if she murders men in ways that women are often murdered, and I flip the lens on that violence? So then I was looking at spaces and at men where there is a lot of violence and so naturally this kind of took me into this incel culture that we're seeing really bloom on the internet and, as you say, figures like Andrew Tate. There's real latent misogyny in society that has been given this voice that men feel like they're allowed to have these views again, and I think it's so awful. I saw the news recently about the online rape academy and how many men had joined this, and I just felt like if I'm dealing with violence in this way, it kind of came to me as one of the most obvious places to look at. My agent at some point said, "Oh, we don't want the men to be caricatures. We don't want them to feel stereotypical." But I recently watched the [Inside the Manosphere] documentary, and they are caricatures of themselves. There’s kind of no way of getting around that with these men, as depressing as this is.
The crux of Yrsa's motivation seems to be centered on Saidiya Hartman's line from Scenes of Subjugation, where she writes, "If violence turns subject into object, then it is through violence that one can return a subject to a subject position." What was it about that line from Hartman's work that resonated with you?
It was interesting because I actually wrote a whole draft of Honey, like a draft that got me my agent, and I didn't have her studying Hartman in her PhD. I think I had scatterings, maybe of Hartman, but I didn't have the Afropessimism running through the book. The whole time I was writing, I knew her PhD is a really important thing, but I couldn't figure out what it was. Then my mom mentioned, "Oh, you should look at Afro pessimism," and that theory underlined the plot so perfectly. So a lot of this wove back into the plot. So when I struck on lines like this, I was like, oh, this is the perfect kind of line for Yrsa to be figuring out her justification for killing.
I find it interesting that you said that the Afropessimism angle wasn't in the initial draft of the piece because it feels like, in part, Yrsa is committing these acts of violence to navigate her skepticism towards the theory. So could you talk more about how you came to incorporate Afro-pessimism into the book?
When I read the theory … I thought it was a really perfect one to have her studying, to also bring a slight satire. It's such a theory of anarchy and nihilism which aligned perfectly with what she was doing. But I liked the fact too that she was cynical about the theory. There's a line where she says, "What am I meant to do? Like, go home and think about the only way I can liberate myself is to die?" And so I could also satirize academia and theories within academia and where theory meets real life, which I think is a really interesting thing to consider when we're studying, because often we have these grand theories, but it's like, but how does that play out in the day-to-day?
Yrsa understands her place in society. She understands how she's been socialized and all of these things, but she doesn't emotionally engage with it in the same way as other people. She is very detached, and she's a narcissist. She has this God complex, so she sits above everything that she's studying, and I found this quite a liberating position to write from.
