The Monsters We Defy

"It’s set in 1920s Washington DC, in the United States, within an African American community where there’s magic. It’s really dealing with issues of race, issues of gender, issues of sexuality – and what happens with magic in this mix, when the crime bosses have their own magical wizards and so forth to help them out. The Roaring Twenties: imagine that with magic, and it makes it a lot richer. I love the title, taken from a Jamaica-born poet, Claude McKay, who writes this poem, ‘If We Must Die’ during the infamous Red Summer of 1919. It’s a rebuttal to lynchings and anti-Black race riots that he’s seeing happening in the United States, when he moves to Harlem. One of the lines from his poem is “The monsters we defy” – I love that Penelope takes that line from this Harlem Renaissance era poem for her title. We follow a young woman, Clara, and her friends, as she is navigating these many worlds. She is trying to simply go about her life, working with scholars. She’s not part of this other criminal world – but she becomes more and more embroiled in it. And we have magical beings; we have bits of folk magic that people are doing; we get a fairy ball, which I was hoping had real fairies. But even better, it’s a ball for queer and cross-dressing Black men. And this is based on actual drag balls of the era! I loved it! Often people erroneously think such events are more modern aspects of society. But Penelope reminds us these drag balls and what-have-you were quite early. Absolutely!"