Introduction

Numinous Animal is an odd book. When I first started it, I wasn’t sure what I was writing. I resolved to keep going and allow its shape to reveal itself eventually. But 10,000 words into the project, it only felt like a weird hybrid — somewhere between biography, a regional history, and a classroom slide presentation. Nothing was coming together. What’s more, there was a nagging question of should those three things be coming together at all? It took some work to get there, but now I see the hybridity of this book as its central feature — its dimensionality a necessary structure. At one point during the writing, it occurred to me that one of my biggest influences — James Baldwin — had already written a similar kind of hybrid. No Name on the Street is sometimes considered social memoir because it never cleanly separates itself from one or the other genre. I should be so lucky as to consider myself in the same general category as James Baldwin, but I do think we both, at least, share the concern for how one relates to “home” when home feels inhospitable at best, hostile at worst. We certainly share an anger at being forced into having to contend with these two constricting sides of home. In fact, for many years of my life, anger was my go-to tool for coping with this insufferable situation. As it turns out, it is necessary to grapple with the history that one has inherited in order to properly come to grips with one’s anger, with the hows and whys of home’s inhospitality. Anger has its problems, Baldwin shows me, and at the same time he reminds me that anger also has its uses.

Only after I finished this manuscript did it occur to me that it also has a modern template in Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother, a text that effortlessly straddles the personal and the historical. I might have felt more confident sooner in the writing process had I thought of these works, but as it was, I discovered my own legitimizing pathway forward and settled into its groove. The pathway was literally another form of waymaking: trails, specifically cowboy trails. These meandering paths are historic but they are also deeply personal. They follow very specific directions, linking ranches to markets, but they also follow natural contours of the land. Herding cannot move as the crow flies, from point A to point B. It must adapt to the landscape; it must allow for watering and grazing, which, again, is dictated by where and what the land offers up. And in this sense, it is once more deeply historical: trails do not spring up instantly out of the demands that markets make, but they have been shaped by traditions that have been listening to the language of the landscape for millennia. Cowboys followed trails already long established by Indigenous peoples; Indigenous communities followed trails created by the wildlife they were in rhythm with; the wildlife pursued patterns of vegetation that inspired the rhythm. I offer up this book in that tradition of purposeful, meandering music. It moves from idea to idea, from biography to history, from North America to Africa. It moves purposefully, slowly, around bends, along contours. It meanders musically.

In an important way, anger is also a part of that meandering music. Here’s how: I once received an email that really took me aback. It began, more or less, with the words “how dare you,” and carried on from there, spitting venom and fury for five or six paragraphs. The cause for this anger was an article I had written: an encyclopedia entry for Black fur traders. If you find that surprising, so did I. Encyclopedic entries are not the usual category to drum up outrage from a reader. What surprised me even more, though, is that my detractor was Black, or to be accurate, Afro-Indigenous. Most of my writing is dedicated to restoring the lost, ignored, or dismissed histories of Black communities in this part of the world. I’ve only ever received encouragement or gratitude or solidarity from people of African and/or Indigenous descent who have read my work. Receiving an angry message from someone who is usually allied with me was disorienting, to say the least. I would like to think that my writing about history is dynamic enough to deserve the heightened emotions of this email, but mulling over portage trails and detailing the canoeing duties of middlemen hardly merited the reaction it got in this case. From what I could tell, though, in the plaintiff’s mind there was actually nothing wrong with the content of what I had written. The problem was that I had written it at all. In other words, the problem was representation and appropriation. This actually made me pause. It is not an accusation I have ever faced before in any sense, but even less did I expect to encounter it with respect to my writing about Black history. How could I, a Black writer, appropriate Black history in my work? As far-fetched as it might have seemed, some instinct in me wasn’t ready to dismiss the complaint as ill-conceived and just drop the question as irrelevant. While I didn’t agree with the thrust of the argument that was made in the email, it did open up a line of questioning that never would have occurred to me otherwise. What right do I have to represent histories that I do not directly access through lineage or community participation? Of course, I am rigorous in my historical explorations, and I can always retort that no one else was writing these histories and so — appropriation or not — I am responsible for showing them the light of day. But as a question, it is valid, and I’ve considered it repeatedly in all of my writing ever since. In fact, this book, Numinous Animal, is very much a furthering of that question directly applied to the Albertan context. Most of my writing is concerned with Black history on the Prairies, and I take the responsibility of engaging that topic personally. However, I have no personal or family history rooted in this region. My family immigrated to Canada from West Africa. So what claims can I make on Black Alberta’s historical roots? That is the question at the heart of this book.

It began with my tenure as writer in residence at Athabasca University throughout 2024–25. The major project I worked on in that role was a collection of poems based on the lives of Black cowboys and ranchers at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. The joy of that project was in representing the lives of these forgotten figures, along with researching and discovering any cattle brands they may have registered at the time. To my pleasure, I found about a dozen. The culmination of that project is this book’s turn to Afrofuturism: a font I developed based on the designs of the cattle brands I had found. Identifying the marks of Black historical figures who had been forgotten felt like an important recovery. But it inspired me to go further. Discussing them in a book is thrilling, of course, but let’s face it, books only have limited scope, limited impact. I wanted to return this lost history to our present times in a central, fundamental way. Afrofuturism is ambitious. It is not just fixed on the future, but accommodates dualities, particularly the incorporation of the past — of history — in the living possibilities for what might come. The idea of creating a font fit this ambition perfectly. On the one hand, I could compose some of the poetry using this font; in this way, the object of the poetry becomes the subject — the poetry is not just about Black cowboys but is also composed in collaboration with their designing minds, their expressions of individuality, their poetic impulses. On the other hand, I could make the font available to the public, so that these designs become a general part of everyday life in random documents, emails, texting. Both aspects — the precise poetry and the random texts — represent powerful acts of reclamation that I felt others would find important as well, not just me.

Numinous Animal charts the process of developing this font. But it is much more than that. Because the development of the font demanded the recovery of certain historical narratives, this book also had to be about the recovery of those narratives. And because my angry emailer remains on my mind with any historical project I consider, I had to reckon with the appropriateness of making any kinds of claims on the histories of Black cowboys in this region. To me, this one felt easier to accomplish because I’m from this region and I grew up immersed in particular icons of “Albertaness” which included cowboys (and homesteaders and oil rigs, etc.). Yet, I didn’t want to take that for granted. If anything, my angry emailer reminded me of the care that every historian should take with their subject (topic) and their subjectivity (agency). And so Numinous Animal became as much a confrontation with my personal claims on Black history from this part of the world as it was a revelation of that history and how it impacted my poetic practice. Spoiler alert: I win the confrontation. But that’s because this thing called Blackness, which was not enough to appease my angry emailer, is a flattening thing that forces people into relation, who under almost any other circumstance — noted by my angry emailer’s anger — would have no relation to each other. But in this sense, I also lose the confrontation. We all do. Because we didn’t choose that flattening. I didn’t choose to be forced into a relation with my angry emailer. But I am. As he is with me. History forced us together and therefore I am forced to make claims on the many tangled threads of that history. As carefully, and, yes, as angrily as I can.

Calgary, 30 December 2025