AUTHOR’S NOTE

On the day the second draft of this novel was due, a dust storm from the Sahara Desert traveled west, sprinkling cars with African dust and tinting the evening sky gold in parts of the UK and Ireland. Such a storm occurs at least once a year and illustrates a truth that otherwise remains amorphous: the reality that our world is but one place.

I wanted to write a novel that could do what the dust storm does: say a great deal about our shared experience in an organic, tangible way, and from this intention, They Dream in Gold came about. Rather than centering the external racial pressures that often drive narratives around Blackness and Black identity, I wanted to reckon with another important reality: the questions that arise and the transformation that occurs when different cultures within a diaspora are intimately engaged with one another.

Like the storm, the exploration of these ideas in fiction revealed to me the blurriness of the lines that divide us. How the cultures we all claim such rigid and separate allegiance to are perhaps necessarily and inherently enmeshed. That origin is not only a long-established point in the annals of our history, but also an internal, living place to which we all are constantly returning, in our lifelong struggle to be and know who we are.