CHAPTER ONE — INTERMENT The sky should hold its breath while we give you back to the ground. Instead, it breaks open, spilling a gray so heavy our heads bow without meaning to. Rain stripes the casket, beads along…
The Drowning Mothers asks: What happens when the world refuses to hold our dead? When the state erases, when archives misname, when news cycles swallow them whole? When I write about the dead, I am writing about the living: those who carry their names and burdens, who go on breathing inside an oppressive system that would rather they didn’t.
In the opening chapter, I wanted the rain to embody the sky’s sorrow and the shadow detaching from Naimah’s feet to act as an emissary from the unconscious, revealing truths she cannot yet say aloud. I grew up hearing that spirits live in rivers, gutters, and the corners of houses. That they hover at perception’s edge, speak through dreams, and press their hands against backs too tired to rise. I applied the same logic to water and grief: water as judge, historian, mother; grief as a presence that crowds rooms, dissolves the walls between worlds, and makes the mundane misbehave.
When Naimah watches her shadow slip toward the coffin, I wasn’t aiming for surrealism. I was writing a truth: for many of us, the boundary between the physical and the spiritual is thinner. African and diasporic storytelling refuses to separate the literal from the symbolic. A river is a river and a spirit. This logic shaped my understanding of narrative: the unseen is not opposed to the real; it is one of its registers.
Throughout The Drowning Mothers, rage, love, and terror alter the world’s physics. With its elastic time, porous worlds, and moral weight, folklore gives physics a vocabulary capable of holding contradiction: beauty beside brutality, hope within dread, tenderness inside fear. It becomes an architecture for surviving colonial, state, and family violence—the intimate, compounding betrayals that shape a life. Most importantly, folklore trains the moral imagination, asking us to think beyond the self, beyond a moment, beyond human-centered logic.
My craft leans on mythic precision. Toni Morrison’s concept of rememory—the past as a sentient force—is essential to my structure. Treated as a folkloric technique, rememory allows buildings, water, pigment, shadows, and names to function as living archives of collective history. It also solves a craft problem: how do you make history present without freezing the narrative in flashback? If the building itself is an archive, then past and present can speak in one breath.
The story stays in present tense so grief remains present-pulse, not past-perfect. The portal sequence, where bathwater is womb, Middle Passage, and spirit world, is intentionally mythic, written in call-and-response rhythm and spoken-word cadences. It collapses time, making past horrors audible in the now.
I wrote The Drowning Mothers to say: We have lost many. We will lose more. But we will not lose the memory of what was done. And we will not lose the fire that keeps demanding the world answer for it.
AISHATU ADO is an Afro-German author, poet, and peace technologist dedicated to social justice. She is the 2025 winner of the Fractured Lit Ghosts, Fables, and Fairy Tales Prize, and the 68th Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Contest. A 2025 Clarion West graduate, she has received fellowships from Tin House, VONA, Voodoonauts, Roots Words Wounds, and the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Her work is published or forthcoming in Afrofuturism Short Stories Anthology, Heartlines Spec, Obsidian, Kelp Books’s 2025 Ocean Poetry Anthology, and Liminal Spaces. You can find her on Instagram @miss.aishatu and Bluesky @aishatuado.
