What's Your Background, Set?

What's your background, Set?

A question I hear a lot whether it be in the literary world, investigative/ security sector or amongst my art community. Sometimes amongst long forgotten friends and acquaintances. Though in those instances, it's mostly intended to mean about my ethnicity. By which I reply with exasperation, "Black" because who has time to list out all the different types of black only to be mostly met with a hotep or self-hating reply. "So you're mixed. Wow, lucky." or "You're Arab." or my favourite, "Ethiopians are not black, they are Semites." I always find it amusing when folks will ask you your background only to impose their narrative on it. This article is not to set the record straight but rather an introduction on who I am and what my narrative is.

So allow me to reintroduce myself. My name is Set Zek. I am half Ethiopian and Jamaican. My pronouns are they/them and Agender. Sometimes I get the occasion to flip a coin on the he/she and see what side of the gender coin lands. I'm an Litigation Investigator in the private sector and a science and speculative fiction writer. I've been telling stories and had a hunger for the Whys for as long as I can remember. Always learned and questioned everything. Sometimes it got me into trouble. Who am I kidding, it got me into trouble most the time. It became my way of coping with the police brutality and experiences of the dystopia of my immediate environment. Home was a warzone. My neighbourhood was tumultuous. So, fed up with seeing death around me, I wrote newsletters for the Black Action Defense Committee and provided litigation support for the late Dudley Laws. Uncle Dudley was a great life mentor to me since I was a toddler. He also had encouraged me to write more of my works and get them published instead of having stacks of notebooks and binders piled in my room. He challenged me with my writing. "Yuh mus' write from di heart and yuh stomach. It's all feeling. Der's truth ina it." He was referring to that heavy feeling in your stomach when met with injustice and that fiery pit that well up to make a change or in my case, to write about change.

What constantly plagued my mind was what it would it be like to be without universal plight and conflict. Later in life I've come to understand that chaos comes in tides and even utopias can have it's issues. Nothing is absolute, but infinite and reoccurring. So, I write about the ups and downs of what is and could be of society centered around the evolution of humans and technology. This is the times we are in. We are living the They Live/ Brave New World, sprinkled with the society's emotional ambiguity of THX 1138 and the limited privacy and military industrial complex of Starship Troopers. Laws are advantageous to those of systematic benefit and economic suffocation of those it does not. I write the truth. My writings in speculative and science fiction bleed into one another when I discuss what may come out of our future when the human part of transhumanism is neglected. I'm no Luddite. Prosthetics made ethically and available to all humans when in need should be accessible to it's core and should without saying. To quote my favourite passage from Wu Cheng'en's Journey to the West, "In times of Chaos, The Soul is Immortal". But to what extent and for whom?

My medium draws from a conglomeration of my experiences from my upbringing, sexuality, gender expression and I challenge the thought process of the intersectionality of queer existence and experiences in the scope of future-tense social and governmental structures and complexes. Also my inspirations come from old childhood German horror stories and crime fiction. My favourite authors are Franz Kafka, Octavia Butler, Andre Lorde, Bell Hooks, Toni Morrison, Thomas Ligotti, Awa Thiam (her book Black Sisters Speak Out: Feminism and Oppression in Black Africa helped me find my voice) and many more.

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