Writer’s Voice: Laura Spinney & Tonya Todd on Language, Myth & Resistance

Episode Transcript

In this episode of Writer’s Voice, we explore how language shapes history—and how stories shape culture.

We first speak with Laura Spinney, author of Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global. She takes us into the world of Proto-Indo-European, a language spoken thousands of years ago and never written down, yet one whose descendants—including English, Sanskrit, and Latin—are spoken by nearly half the world’s population today.

“There is no such thing as a pure language.” -- Laura Spinney

Then, Tonya Todd joins us to discuss Comics Lit, Volume 1, a groundbreaking anthology of essays that treat comic books as serious literature. We talk about mythology, feminism, censorship, and how comic narratives challenge societal norms while giving voice to underrepresented communities.

“Comics themselves can be a form of high art.” -- Tonya Todd

Key Topics:

* Proto-Indo-European and its descendants

* Linguistic archaeology: reconstructing unwritten languages

* The Yamnaya culture and language spread via migration

* Ancient DNA and the “steppe hypothesis”

* Gender, power, and language history

* Language change as adaptation

* Comics as modern mythology

* The literary lineage of characters like Catwoman and Irene Adler

* Feminist subversion through femme fatales

* Ta-Nehisi Coates and Black Panther as political text

* Representation, censorship, and the war on imagination

* Diversity in literature and activism in publishing

Episode Transcript:

Laura Spinney

Laura Spinney, welcome to Writer's Voice.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Well, I loved this book, Proto, How One Ancient Language Went Global. The “proto” of the title refers to Proto-Indo-European, which you say is by far the largest language family the world has ever known. What are the Indo-European languages?

OK, so Proto-Indo-European is a language.

It's a hypothetical language.

It's the language that linguists think was the common ancestor of the entire Indo-European family, which is the largest language family on Earth, whether you measure it by speakers or by geographical spread.

So even in the ancient world, it spanned from Ireland to the subcontinent, even as far as northwest China.

And now, of course, and since sort of the 1500s, the age of exploration, the age of empire, when Europeans were going out all over the world and taking their languages with them, it spread even further afield.

So these days, you'll find the Indo-European languages spoken on every inhabited continent by nearly half of humanity.

And just to be absolutely clear, we're talking about 12 main branches in this family.

Two of them are long dead, Anatolian and Tocharian, which nobody will have heard of.

And then 10, which are at least in part still alive, Baltic, Slavic, Armenian, Greek, Albanian, Italian, including all the Latin languages, Celtic, Germanic, Indic and Iranic.

I don't think I've left any out.

Yeah, that's just an incredible spread.

I mean, I had no idea that Celtic was among them.

And, you know, just jumping in with both feet.

You say that Celtic was responsible, probably responsible for the rise of English.

In some ways, yes, because when some Anglo-Saxons came to the island of Britain and Ireland, they brought a Germanic language.

And when the Celtic locals, the Celtic-speaking locals, took up that Germanic language, in their mouths, with their Celtic lilt, it became the language we call Old English.

So you name three tools in studying languages, languages that have been dead for thousands of years and never written down, linguistics, archaeology and genetics.

Tell us about the first two before we go into a deeper discussion of the third.

Yeah, okay, so just to take a tiny step back, I mean, I'm sort of telling the story about the whole family, at least up to the point where they jump off these languages into the new world, if you like.

But a lot of the story, as I tell it, is focused on this common ancestor, the language we call Proto-Indo-European, and trying to find out where it came from, who spoke it, when, where.

And as you say, that is a language that, although historical linguists, that is people who study ancient and dead languages, although they think that it was a real language, or at least a cluster of dialects, and that it was actually spoken by real people, once in the dim and distant past, it has been dead for thousands of years, as you say, and it predated writing, at least in that part of the world, so it was never written down.

So you might think, quite reasonably, that knowing anything about it was impossible, but in fact that's not true, miraculously, and part of the reason why it's not true is linguistics, part of the reason is archaeology, and part of the reason is genetics, which, as you say, we'll come to.

But to start with the linguistics part, you can compare the living descendants, to put this in a nutshell, you can compare the living descendants of that language and also compare them with ancient, but dead relatives, things like Sanskrit, ancient Greek, Latin, that aren't spoken anymore, but for which we have preserved in texts.

And you can compare them and you can compare cognates, what linguists call cognates, so related words across those languages, and by comparing them and see how they diverge from each other, because linguists know sort of how sounds change in our mouths over time, they can start to reconstruct kind of previous forms of those words, forms in the ancient ancestors and ultimately in the common ancestor of the entire family, Proto-Indo-European.

And those words themselves can contain quite a lot of information about who the speakers were, where they lived and when, because they, you know, people tend to have words for things that matter to them and they don't have words for things that don't matter to them.

So you can very cautiously extract some information from that reconstructed vocabulary about what kind of people they were, how the world looked at their time and how they lived in it and how they moved through it.

Now, you can do that, but you need to be able to cross-reference that information with other sources of information about who might have been alive in the world at the time, sort of time you're thinking about, and, you know, who might have had a kind of culture, an economy, a way of life that might have matched that very sketchy word, sorry, word portrait.

And that's where the archaeology comes in and has come in for several hundred years.

Archaeologists and historical linguists have worked together to try and anchor, if you like, the speakers of that hypothetical language in the actual archaeological record, that is, in the actual material culture of people who lived in the ancient world.

And just for talking about linguistics, I thought the example that you use a number of times through the book is the word for king.

Tell us about it. Start with the Celtic.

Yeah, so the Celtic word was something like Rix.

You have to forgive my pronunciation a little bit because I'm not a linguist myself, but if you think about Vercingetorix, who was the great Gaulish supreme king, who was basically beaten by Julius Caesar and later executed, he has that word in his name and he spoke a Celtic language, Gaulish, and now extinct.

So that was the Celtic form, which is related to Rex in Latin and Reich in German, and probably all stem back to a word that has been reconstructed for Proto Indo-European, the common ancestor, a hypothetical word that is, which the pronunciation is very disputed, but might have sounded something like kregs, with a sort of guttural H sound at the front.

And the interesting thing about that is that the linguists working in concert with the archaeologists think that the original sort of instantiation of that personage might not have been a king in the sense that we understand it, but somebody more like a priest whose job was to sort of regulate or dictate what was right, maybe to sort of mediate in disputes, that kind of thing.

And so that information comes partly from the language itself.

You can see that in the word write and regulate, which is one of the reasons I find this exercise so fascinating.

And so Laura Spinney, let's talk about the third, that is genetics.

This book is, you know, at least partly about a scientific revolution in the study of ancient languages.

Tell us about that revolution, the use of ancient DNA.

Yeah, because this is really the reason that I wrote the book now, if you like.

I mean, people have been studying this mystery, one of the biggest, you know, intellectual mysteries, still outstanding, if you like, at least in the Western world, for hundreds of years.

But in the last 10 years, everything has been turned upside down by the advent of the ancient DNA.

Well, they call it a revolution, and it really is, because what happened was that gradually, over the last 20 years, scientists have been, geneticists have been perfecting the capacity to extract ancient DNA from ancient bones, and to analyze it, something that, by the way, many people never thought would be possible because of the risk of contamination by modern DNA.

I mean, even if you touch an old bone in a museum with your fingertips, you can introduce your DNA to it.

But basically, the scientists worked out a method of distinguishing the profile of ancient DNA, which is, to a greater or lesser extent, degraded with respect to modern DNA, and then differentiating the two, and then they could analyze the ancient DNA in a sort of pure form, if you like.

So what that meant was that you could suddenly start to extract a great deal more information from ancient cemeteries.

You could say whether this person buried in this cemetery was related to that person buried in that cemetery thousands of kilometers away, and how closely.

You could say whether a person had suffered from certain diseases, because you could also extract microbial DNA from their remains.

You could, to some extent, say what they looked like, what kind of health problems they had.

And all of this, in combination with the sort of material culture, the archaeological objects buried with them, gave you a treasure trove of information that hadn't previously been available.

And one of the reasons that's so important to the language story is because when we talk about Proto-Indo-European, we're talking about a language that was spoken, as I said, before writing.

So we have no historical texts to rely upon when piecing together the story of the speakers of that language.

But we do know that as a rule, throughout history, and even from what we can tell by our recent glimpses into prehistory, the dispersal of languages does seem to be driven to a very large extent by migration.

That seems to be a major, if not the main, motor, especially in prehistory, when there were no borders, no technologies like the internet, no schooling, no literacy, and so on.

So people, you know, when they move, they carry their languages with them.

That's still true today.

They carry them at least for a while.

Maybe they switch when they get to their new destination, if they plan to stay, or for other reasons.

But they do take them with them to begin with.

And that has an impact, obviously, on the linguistic landscape.

Dialects are separated.

The ones that go off come into contact with new languages, which influence them and change them.

And so, you know, this is how you get linguistic evolution, or one of the main forces driving it.

And so if, in a time before writing, you can trace the paths of those prehistoric migrants through space, then it's an enormously valuable source of information about where those languages have spoken initially, who might have carried them away, who might have dispersed them, and where they might have taken them to.

So it has been, you know, it has added a colossal amount of detail to the picture.

And it's also helped the people who are interested, that is linguists, geneticists, and archaeologists principally, to distinguish between certain rival theories that before 10 years ago were still on the table as to the origins of Proto-Indo-European.

Yeah, and one of those rival theories, maybe an older one, was that the language was thought to originate with the Aryan people, I guess, of the Indus Valley.

This was an idea famously exploited by the Nazis.

But that's not true, as we now know.

Tell us about the Yamnaya.

Okay, well, just a small correction to that, because the Nazis called themselves Aryans and their ancestors Aryans.

But in fact, Aryan was originally, of course, it's a very emotive word and carries a lot of sort of old, outdated ideological baggage with it.

But it was actually the name that old Indic and Iranian speakers called themselves.

So it sort of belongs to that Eastern branch, the Indo-Iranic branch of the family.

The Nazis sort of stole it, if you like, and then they kind of hitched a whole story to it, which kind of fit broadly with the archaeological ideas at the time.

And they came up with a story about Aryans living in the north of Germany and being blonde haired and blue eyed and making pottery in a certain style.

It's one of the ways in which this story of the Indo-European languages has been abused and distorted over the years.

There are people in the subcontinent now who claim that the whole family was born in India.

This is the so-called out of India theory and that from there it radiated to other places.

Very few people, very few serious scientists support that theory, don't have any evidence for language dispersal from there, whereas we do have evidence of a migration into India at about the right time to bring the Indo-European language, as though it's not a settled question.

So just to say that the background to this is many people have taken this story in the past and used it for their own political agenda.

And now I've forgotten your question, so can you ask it again, please?

Well, thank you for that, actually. So tell us the true story. Tell us about the steppe and the Yamnaya.

Until about 10 years ago, I suppose, the two rival theories were, one, that the languages were born in Anatolia, modern Turkey, about sort of 8,000 years ago with the farming revolution, and that when the farmers started to radiate out from that part of the world, east and west, they carried the languages with them.

And actually, nobody disputes that the farmers did radiate out east and west in massive numbers, or that they carried their languages with them.

It's just that another set of people did not believe those languages to be Indo-European.

So the rival theory, which is very much associated with Maria Gimbertas, the Lithuanian-American archaeologist who was so important in this field in the second half of the 20th century, and her student, Jim Mallory, and another important archaeologist who subscribes to her view, David Antony.

And their idea was that the Indo-European languages were born on the steppe, the Eurasian steppe, north of the Black and Caspian Seas, about 5,000 years ago, so more recently, and carried east and west by nomadic pastoralists, that is, herders, who moved with their herds and with the seasons, and eventually became so numerous that they needed more space, and that pushed them outwards into Europe and east into Asia, and that was the moment of the diffusion, earliest diffusion, of the Indo-European languages, and when they arrived in Europe and in parts of Asia.

And you say they spread out when they needed more space, but you also talk about how Proto-Indo-European, or that group, am I correct about this, probably came from a very small band of brothers, which is understood because of the study of ancient DNA.

Is that correct, and how did that happen?

Okay, so first of all, I should have finished my last answer by saying that thanks to the ancient DNA revolution, two papers were published about 10 years ago, almost exactly 10 years ago, in fact, 2015, which demonstrated a large turnover in the European gene pool about 5,000 years ago.

So that was taken by many in the field as corroboration of the so-called steppe hypothesis, that is, the Indo-European languages came out of the steppe 5,000 years ago with these steppe nomads, corroborating, if you like, Maria Gimbertus' theory.

So that is the leading theory today.

And indeed, the idea, again corroborated by genetics, is that initially, Proto-Indo-European, the sort of the parent dialects that gave rise to this huge linguistic diaspora, were spoken by a couple of dozen people at most, possibly, possibly only 100.

And the idea that they may have formed a brotherhood comes from the fact that the Y chromosomes, so the male sex chromosome associated with the earliest individuals that have been detected for that particular archaeological culture, which is known by its Russian name Yamnaya, form a very tight cluster.

In other words, those men who carried those chromosomes were closely related on their father's side.

We're talking about the sort of very earliest part of this story.

Later, that pool of Y chromosomes carried by those nomads' descendants became much more varied and diverse, probably as the people moved out and found wives for themselves in new places and the sort of gene pool expanded.

But to begin with, yes, it looks as if they may have been one quite tightly related group, which, you know, raises all sorts of other questions.

Why?

Well, who were they?

Where did they come from?

Why did they step out from their ancestral river valley?

Because another important part of the story is that the Yamnaya basically invented a revolutionary new way of life, which was entirely nomadic.

So their ancestors had sort of stuck in these river valleys, where they also had herds.

And when the grass was grazed down, they would take their herds out into the prairies, into the vast grasslands of the steppe.

But they would always return.

And the villages and those river valleys were occupied all year round.

The Yamnaya took that transhumance to the next level.

And they basically were on the move all year round.

They lived in the grasslands, in the open grasslands.

And they moved in a sort of circle, you know, following the seasons with their animals.

And they developed all kinds of resources and conventions and social institutions to help them survive year round in that very hostile environment.

Because the steppe is a hostile environment.

It can be very dry, it can be extremely hot in summer, extremely cold in winter, and there's no shelter.

So the fact that they were able to do that speaks to their ingenuity and adaptability, first of all.

But also, it was a huge sort of economic watershed, if you like, because it meant that they were able to tap the huge energy reserves of the steppe in the form of grass and convert it into animals and convert them in turn into food and fuel.

That's essentially what powered the population explosion that we think drove the expansion of the Indo-European languages in their earliest phase.

So you mentioned Maria Gimbutas.

I remember how popular she was in the women's liberation movement of the 1970s and 80s because she posited that women were the social leaders of an earlier time.

She was much criticized for that view by mainstream archaeologists.

Tell us about the connection between her theory and this great transformation.

Do you believe that the patriarchal revolution happened as a result of this?

Yes, so how do the two things tie together?

Maria Gimbutas's ideas of old Europe, the oldest farming culture of Europe, that which existed before these nomads arrived, and her ideas that they were matriarchal and that they worshiped the mother goddess, which indeed is what she's still best known for, I'd say today, though the theory has been discredited somewhat, and the arrival of the Indo-European language as well.

She was the main proponent of the step hypothesis in the post-war period, even though she met a lot of resistance to it at that time and sort of bravely carried on promoting it in a world that, by the way, was a lot more sexist at the time, so she took a lot of flack for that.

But her idea was that, yes, indeed, these sort of very patriarchal nomads came in from the steppe and basically finished off.

That was the end of peaceful, matriarchal old Europe.

They imposed their way of life, they imposed their languages, and that's what's come down to us today, essentially.

Now, although we think that her ideas about the languages were correct, I would say that nobody really buys that story anymore that Europe was matriarchal before the nomads arrived.

It was probably essentially patriarchal, even though, and I've just been writing about this actually for New Scientist, soon to be published, so keep your eyes peeled.

But the idea I'd say now is that there was a breathtaking diversity of social models when it came to gender, not just across Europe, but across the world, the ancient world.

But I think that most archaeologists would agree that patriarchy was the norm.

The point is that women could exercise power in many different ways that perhaps we don't appreciate because they don't map onto roles in our modern societies.

So when we're looking at the past, we don't necessarily see female power because we don't know what to look for.

But what the archaeologists are saying now is that, yes, it was predominantly patriarchal, but there were many exceptions to that.

And we're just learning how to read those exceptions in the archaeological record.

You know, one of the theories tends to be that languages displace other languages by means of violence.

But you say there could be many other reasons.

You know, for example, there are cases where the genes of females who spoke a previous language survive, but not the genes of males.

So, of course, when I read that in your book, I thought, well, that's probably because the males were all killed.

But you say that disease could be the reason.

So talk about disease and maybe other reasons, you know, more peaceful ways that languages can displace other languages.

So when the geneticists first discovered this big turnover in the European gene pool about 5,000 years ago, the discovery happened 10 years ago, as we said.

And there was also a turnover, by the way, in parts of Asia.

It was very pronounced.

I mean, it was almost complete replacement in parts of Europe.

And at that time, I'd say that the leading theory was that that could only have come about through violence, that is, mainly male groups coming into Europe, war bands perhaps, and, you know, sort of roaring across Europe, raping and pillaging as they went, perhaps even committing what we might consider genocide.

But by, you know, fair means or foul, preventing indigenous men from passing on their genes and mating with local women to pass on their own Y chromosomes, for example.

So I'd say that was the leading model then.

But honestly, the story has been transformed quite radically in the last 10 years, as more detail has been added, and as people have realized that they can and should entertain other theories.

So I'd say that now, the explanation is much more multifactorial, it hasn't by any means been resolved.

But, for example, it's clear now that that turnover took longer than we initially thought, at least in parts of Europe.

So for example, it might have taken 12 generations rather than one or two.

And as soon as you're talking about 12 generations, then you can imagine much sort of slower processes acting that would allow the kind of genetic and linguistic replacement that the experts see.

So for example, rather than, you know, a violent massacre in a place, you could imagine immigrants sort of trickling in over decades, and settling, and maybe trading peacefully with the locals before they started intermarrying with them and their children, you know, taking up the new languages, and so on.

But there might have been other factors in the mix, as you alluded to, there's now quite good evidence that epidemics, dangerous epidemics, tore across Europe.

The timing is a little vague still.

So, you know, it was probably just before those nomads arrived, but it's possible that those nomads brought the diseases with them and, and possibly because they, you know, were people who lived so closely with their herds, they might have developed some kind of immunity to those diseases that the farmers didn't have, who grew mostly, you know, crop plants.

And, you know, if those were zoonotic diseases, diseases that jumped from animals to humans, that could explain why the immigrants had a sort of immune advantage, if you like, with respect to the locals when they came into Europe.

So perhaps they were just settling vacated lands, in which case they easily would have imposed their languages because they were the only ones speaking there.

And then the part that I think is sort of most interesting is this idea that they might have done it through, at least partly through soft power.

So I mentioned that when they were out in the steppe, in order to survive in that very hostile environment, they had to develop a kind of range of social institutions that helped them maintain social cohesion when they were separated from related groups and clans for long periods of time and over huge, you know, huge swathes of space.

And what the archaeologists are saying, but also the linguists who've been able to piece together words that refer to these institutions, is that they had a very deeply anchored tradition or convention of hospitality and that you can even tell from the words that there was an expectation of reciprocity in this tradition of hospitality.

So the idea being, you know, I come to your land and you take me in and you treat me with a lavish feast and so on.

And when you come to my land, I will do the same.

And it might have been a way that, you know, allowed these very mobile people to move through the landscape, to cross each other's terrain without always getting into fights.

So when they came into Europe, the thinking is they brought that suite of social institutions and they were very good, better perhaps than the locals, at creating and maintaining alliances and hospitality was central to that.

Feasting, later drinking, storytelling, absolutely key.

And so the thinking is that perhaps they just sort of wooed these people who, you know, were building a picture of us being kind of desperate from famine and plague and probably also internecine quarrels and fights and wars.

So, you know, this was a black time in Europe and perhaps they looked towards the newcomers as promising a new and better life and being drawn into those feasts and events that were about bringing people together, cementing alliances, making, building friendships was something very attractive to them.

And when those people became the most powerful and the most wealthy, that was another reason to take up their languages and to pass them on to your children.

And eventually the thinking goes they could have become bilingual and stopped teaching their own languages to their children, which is how languages die.

And so that might too have contributed to the spread of the Indo-European languages through Europe.

So cooperation, not conflict, is a driver of evolution.

Well, I'm sure there was also violence in places.

In fact, we know that there was, but it may not have been the main driver.

It was probably just a bit player.

And all these other factors were very important in that spread of the languages too.

So as you mentioned in the beginning, this is a story about migration and how important it is in the development of human culture and the development of languages.

At a time when we face some of the potentially biggest migrations in human history in the shortest period of time due to climate change, what's the message you would like to leave readers about migration?

Well, yes, this language, Proto-Indo-European, who you could reasonably say was the most successful language the world has ever known since its offspring are spoken by nearly half of humanity today, was spread by migrants, no doubt about it.

And, you know, when you read this story, when you understand this story, you realize that there is no such thing as a pure language.

There is no such thing as a language that stays static, stays the same.

Languages must adapt because they are a tool.

In fact, they're a way that we adapt to our environment and the environment is always changing.

So a language that stands still dies and languages must adapt.

Otherwise they become useless.

Now, the question about migration today is, of course, a thorny one.

Nobody denies there's a climate crisis, but the experts are quite divided about whether that's going to bring a refugee crisis in its wake.

And the data don't show anything like that yet.

It looks as if levels of international migration have remained stable since about 1960.

So there is a disagreement about that.

There are those who say that the climate crisis is more likely to trap the most vulnerable where they are than to push them to move long distances, because moving a long way requires resources.

So all of that remains to be seen.

But nevertheless, there have been big changes in the direction of flux of migration with climate change.

And that itself is bound to have linguistic consequences.

So I raised it at the end of my book to sort of sow the seeds because of that question, which I don't think we've thought about at all.

Because even though linguists themselves say that language change is incredibly difficult to predict, I think that they would all say that the linguistic landscape in which we stand will no longer exist in a few hundred years, which is already quite a thought.

And maybe we should give more thought to the fact that languages don't and shouldn't stand still, and neither will they in the future.

And maybe we should be more accepting of change.

I think we should definitely be more accepting of change.

Well, this is just a fascinating book, Proto, How One Ancient Language Went Global, and Laura Spinney, it's just been great to talk with you about it.

It's been a fantastic conversation. Thank you very much. Great questions.

Tonya Todd

Tonya Todd, welcome to Writer's Voice.

Meow, and thank you for having me.

Now, Meow, we'll find out why that meow is there in just a little bit.

We're talking about Volume One of Comics Lit.

I kind of wondered if that might even be a little bit of a double entendre, comics literature, but also comics are lit?

Yes, it is.

Very good.

So tell us a little bit about this project.

This is Volume One, so I assume there's going to be more.

How did this project come about?

What's the vision here?

It came about when I was a guest on someone's show, Tony Farina, who is the A.R.

Farina, the co-editor for this series.

He has a show called Indie Comics Spotlight, and I was a guest on his show there to talk about an independent comic that I had read, and we were going to discuss it.

And when we got on to Zoom, because he's in another state from where I am, he had six Jane Austen novels in his background, like all six of her novels in the background.

And it was, wait a minute, we're here to talk about comics, but I am a huge Jane Austen fan.

Did we just become best friends, you know?

And so we got close.

We talked about literature.

We ended up kind of nerding out over how we love both mediums.

And he told me about this series that he had in mind called Comic Slit, where people would take different characters from comic books and compare them to classic literature characters that are probably the inspiration for these reincarnations of those characters.

And we gathered some of our super friends together who wrote these different essays.

And as we were working on it, it kind of took on a life of its own, much like art does.

Some of the essays weren't following that protocol anymore, but they were kind of evolving into something more, something that's more of like a statement on the fact that comics themselves can be a form of high art and the value in reading them, the value in teaching them in some cases.

And that's how it began and that's where it's evolved.

And the publisher liked it so much that they have given us carte blanche to continue with the series.

And we're working on issue number two right now, and we're already gathering authors for number three, for volume three.

Oh, wow, that's great.

The theme of volume one is the connection between mythology and comics.

On mythology, comic books here, I'm quoting from Comics Lit, comic books have always been modern reflections of the ancient power of mythology.

Explain that. How so?

If you look back at the different stories, you know, there are really no new ideas.

It's just modern takes on old ideas.

And that's, if you look at the different deity mythologies, if you look at classic literature, if you look at just regular short stories and novels, and just all of these different eras, we essentially go through the same stories time and time again, that bring us to the same conclusions, whether, you know, it could be a parable, it could be just some kind of fable, all of these different things recycle the same types of ideas, and at times, the same characters.

If you really just want to look at the Greek mythology and the Roman mythology, they did it almost word for word, you know, with the exception of Apollo, they just changed the names, but they kept Apollo with his name.

And your contribution to this volume, comics lit, volume one, is chercher la femme, trouver la chatte, that is, look for the woman, you'll find the cat.

So tell us about that.

So I am a huge Catwoman fan, hence the meow, and I was watching an episode of Sherlock, the BBC version of Sherlock, where they introduced the woman.

The woman is Irene Adler, and she has been a huge foil for Sherlock in the stories and in various versions, you know, various retellings, whether it's movie or a television series.

She's the one who can trick him.

She's the one who gets away.

And as I'm watching this particular version, I'm seeing that their Irene Adler is in a cat suit, and she is a dominatrix, and she uses like a writing crop.

She's very cat-like-esque, and I thought, oh, they're stealing from Catwoman to update their version of Irene.

And when I started looking into it, really, I had sat down to write an essay about the Hulk being Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but when I sat down, it was the Catwoman essay that came out, and so I started doing research about it.

And when I looked into it, I found that Catwoman had a lot of qualities from the original Irene Adler.

So if you go all the way back to the original short story, she is introduced in a certain way.

And when Catwoman is first introduced in the comics, she is introduced in almost the exact same way.

And the way that Batman catches her is the same way that Sherlock catches Irene.

And the way that she gets away is very similar to the way that Catwoman gets away.

Okay, so the BBC series was copying Catwoman, but Catwoman originally copied the short story, A Scandal in Bohemia.

What I found out more recently, which isn't in my essay, I really just found this out about two weeks ago, I was getting ready for a conversation in comics, which I was doing with a friend of mine.

And he told me he was going to be asking me about different versions of Catwoman throughout the year.

So I thought, okay, I haven't, you know, I didn't watch the entire 60s series.

So let me brush up on my Catwoman, if you will.

And what I found out is the Eartha kit, Catwoman had this whole storyline involving Belgravia.

Well, if you go to the BBC series that started this whole kick, it's called A Scandal in Belgravia.

So they were absolutely stealing from Catwoman who stole from them originally.

It's this whole cycle.

And now I'm learning even more about it.

Now, are you the first person who's actually seen this connection?

Or is this something that's kind of well known?

I have not seen anyone else write about this particular connection.

I won't claim that I'm the first to see it, but I'm possibly the first to have published something about it.

And so for our audience that may not know who Irene is, and you know, maybe even not even a whole lot about Catwoman because they may be too young to know about her.

Tell us about the connections that you see between them.

So they are both women in a world dominated by men opponents to their respective detectives.

Batman and Sherlock have both been called the world's greatest detective at a certain point, and it's no secret that Batman is in a lot of ways framed from pieces of Sherlock.

I mean, that's not the only person in history or character in history that was used to shape our modern day Batman, but it only makes sense that the one, we'll say opponent because she's not a villain, but the one adversary to get away from Sherlock was Irene Adler.

And he solved the crime, but she still tricked him, which is pretty amazing because he is the world's greatest detective.

And because of that, he respected her and he called her the woman.

Like that's what he called her in his mind is she's not a woman, she's the woman.

And then we have Catwoman who in her first iteration did the same thing.

She tricks Batman.

He eventually figures it out, but he lets her get away.

So it's almost the exact same type of storyline where there's a fire involved and an element of disguise and these men who are taken by her, not just because she's a woman or because of her beauty, but because of her mind.

They are so impressed with their minds.

And you connect Catwoman, you know, there's a whole aspect of sexuality.

You talk about the femme fatale.

I mean, I've always thought of the femme fatale as kind of an evil, you know, evil woman, but not so much.

Sometimes that's the persona someone needs to take to survive.

And I don't think that we should villainize a woman who's using what she is given and what she is allowed to fight with, if that's what it takes for her to get by in this world.

Yeah, I recently had a conversation with Sophie Gilbert, who's written this book called Girl on Girl, which is about how pop culture has been the engine of a backlash to feminism, you know, let's say, tracing the trajectory from Riot Girls to Spice Girls.

The thing is, all feminism means is that you think that women are equal to men.

We should all be feminists.

And so that's something that you're pointing out here, a woman who can trick the men, can, you know, use her sexuality or whatever she's given in a way to win the game.

And if they didn't underestimate her because she was a woman, it wouldn't work.

So let's talk a little bit about some of the other pieces in Comics Lit, volume one.

I thought it was kind of interesting, the essay about Superman as an analog of, well, he first says Christ, but then I think he's, the author actually speaks more about Moses.

Yes, he said that the obvious one and the one that's most out in the world is the comparison between Superman and Jesus.

But when he looked into it, his perspective is that here is someone who is a foreigner in their land, but they're supposed to rise up and help the people.

And that is more like Superman, that is more like Moses.

He isn't sacrificed, but he is removed from his own family, put in this different, this foreign land, and then it's his job to rise up and save the people.

Right. The stranger in a new land.

Yes.

So tell us who wrote that.

It's Eric Lee.

Eric Lee, and he is also an artist.

He actually draws.

He's just brilliant in multiple genres.

And have you been involved with comics before?

You're a podcaster, you're a writer, you're a performer, you're an actor.

Has comics been part of anything that you've done before?

Only as a consumer and as a cosplayer.

So I've portrayed comic book characters.

For a while, I was cast as a voice actor for a fan series.

And then I was also an actress for a fan series for a Marvel comic.

I was Blade's mother.

But as far as actually writing a comic or creating a comic, no, I have not.

Speaking actually of Marvel Comics, I must be one of the most ignorant people around, but I didn't know that Ta-Nehisi Coates was actually involved in the writing of the Black Panther, one of the series of one of the storylines in Wakanda.

Because he gets it.

He understood that this is a form of high art.

This is a way of sharing stories, connecting with people, and connecting us through human emotion, through different trials and tribulations, through love, through inspiration, through hope.

This is another medium that we can reach people and share these stories and do so in an elevated way.

Talk about this essay.

It's called Invisible Kings, Black Identity and Power in America by Tony Holt Jr.

It was really a fascinating essay about Ta-Nehisi Coates' treatment of Wakanda.

I guess it's called A Nation Under Our Feet, is that right?

A story about dramatic upheaval in Wakanda and the Black Panthers' struggle to do right by his people as their ruler.

Yeah, this was one of the essays that I actually teared up reading it.

He was so good with the comparisons that he was making and the research that he did.

It was a very powerful piece.

So much so that it's the one that more people have reached out to me about and asked me, hey, I'd like to interview him.

I'd like to learn more about this.

Now I'm doing this deep dive into Ellison.

It's just this whole thing.

He is inspiring readers to learn, comic book readers a lot of the time, inspiring them to learn more about this.

So it's interesting that you brought it up as well because it's just so powerful what he did.

Yeah, he says that Coates uses T'Challa as a mechanism to subversively address topics like colonialism, slavery, power, and the struggle to claim one's identity.

Yeah, it was a really fascinating article there in this very interesting collection of essays about comic literature as high art.

One of the essays is about teaching comics in the classroom, and they take the Saga comic book series.

And she [A.A. McCartney] talks about how the war on imagination, she says, subsumes all other wars.

I think this was very relevant for our time now.

Yes, yes, so relevant.

And she is a university teacher.

And what she's seeing is the attacks that are made on art, on speech, especially free speech.

And she wrote this before the current climate, like she saw the trajectory.

Yeah, I mean, right now we have not just a war on imagination, but I mean, outright censorship.

The universities are being told what they can or cannot do, cannot talk about.

Right.

Words that they're allowed to use.

Exactly.

She says, if we cannot imagine it, then it doesn't exist.

What she's really talking about is that comics or fantasy comics or sci-fi comics are reimagining worlds.

And it's the same thing that, you know, Star Trek did years ago, where here is this imagined world where all of these different types of people were at the time, were really not groups of people who were getting along in the world at all.

One of the most controversial choices was having a Russian in the fleet, but they showed that the future that we are striving for, the future that we see as ideal is one where we're all on the same team.

We're not tolerating each other.

We are accepting each other and we are building a better community together.

And this is something that sci-fi and stories in general can do, but sci-fis and fantasy stories and comic books, they have an opportunity to actually create these fantasy worlds, these ideal worlds where we can all be equal in this world.

Like you can write it without having to give credence to what happened beforehand, because it's a new world and in some cases a better world.

Sometimes it is a worse world and they're using it as allegories for the current world.

She also has a question here, which I really had to think about.

Why are we more adverse to depictions of sexuality?

And here we're talking about sexuality that is not maybe the gender norm of it.

Then we are about depictions of violence.

I'd like to get your take on that question.

Why are we more adverse to depictions of sexuality than depictions of violence?

Yeah, I mean, that is a great question.

And it is something that I think a lot of the people in power need to be answering for right now.

And not just right now, like through decades, because this isn't new.

This isn't something that we're having to deal with for the first time.

But why is it that a woman's body being shown is worse than showing an animal or a person being maimed or murdered on screen?

And I'm not suggesting that we censor that.

I'm not for censorship by any means.

But we should really investigate and dissect the reasons why that is more acceptable.

Well, one clue may be that one form of what seems to be acceptable to see is a woman being violated, a woman being attacked.

So what it really is saying is that depictions of sexuality that present women as equal as people in their own right is as powerful, let's say, is not as acceptable as depicting violence against women or violence in general, which is so much of a kind of toxic masculinity.

And it goes right back to what you were asking me earlier about how is the femme fatale considered a good thing in my situation.

This is exactly it. She's empowered.

She is not accepting the way other people tell her she is supposed to be, nor should she have to.

You know, Tonya, we've just been talking a little bit about the kind of censorship, the kind of, you know, policing of difference that is happening now.

This is very much a part of your work in your life.

You've talked about representation in your essay.

In fact, you said for a long time, you were looking for somebody who looked more like you and you found it in Catwoman.

Right.

And it wasn't really that at first, my connection to her wasn't her appearance so much as her personality.

It's like I connected with her on a personal level while I was still looking.

And then, wouldn't you know, eventually, that's where I'm seeing someone who actually looks like me, both in the comics and on screen.

There have been versions of a brown Catwoman.

So talk more about this.

What is it like for someone like yourself for whom this, the importance of representation, the importance of diversity is under so much attack right now?

Give us some of your thoughts about that and what people can do to fight back.

The easy thing for what you can do to fight back is to consume material, whether it's written or on screen or music, just consume art from people who are different from you.

Expand your horizons.

And this could be different in race, in gender, in sexuality, in nationality, in ethnicity, in whether you're someone with a disability or someone who is able-bodied.

Just read about people who are different than you, because it's going to open your mind and your perspective in ways that you never thought possible.

And when you do that, these battles that you're seeing happening, they won't feel like they're someone else's battles.

It'll be your battle too, because you will care.

It will affect your life because you will have opened your perspective and your mindset so that these are your goals as well.

And when it's your own goal and not something you think you're doing for someone else, you're probably more likely to do what's necessary to fight for it.

Now, in terms of what it was like growing up without that, it was the difference between thinking that I could be an author one day.

I absolutely did not think that I could pursue art in any medium as a career.

I thought that, you know, it might be fun to do on my own, but no one who looks like me could ever make a living from this.

Or if you do, it's so rare.

What I was seeing is that it was so rare, and the characters in the books that I was reading, they didn't look like me.

The heroes never looked like me.

At most, there might be some reference to a very pretty mulatto girl who's nameless and mentioned just so that the main character in the story can pat themselves on the back for feeling, you know, feeling good about how they're treating the servant.

When that's what you see yourself portrayed as in stories, you think that's all you can ever be.

It's a form of brainwashing.

Now, I don't think that it's necessarily intended that way for all people.

A lot of times, you'll get these writers who have been consuming the same type of art because that's all that was there, and all they're doing is putting back out in the world what they've already ingested.

It's not their fault that they were fed all of this and that's all that they have to give back.

You have to actually make an effort to consume outside of your own identity and then incorporate that into your own work.

It's the reason I think that there need to be a lot more perspectives in the room when they're creating television shows and movies.

It's possible to put out material that is offensive without any intention of doing so, without any harm intended, because you simply don't know.

And the reason you don't know is because all of us are limited.

Every person is limited by their own experience.

The more perspectives you have, the more likely you are to come across someone who has a different voice than yours, who has different experiences, has different histories to draw from in these situations.

It does seem like there's a lot more representation now than there used to be, and even that's probably one reason why there is this fierce backlash coming from the the MAGA crowd.

What's so interesting to me is that it's a backlash against women and against people who are diverse ethnically.

Anyone who's not a straight white man, you can say it.

Exactly.

And you're right, there is more visibility in the world.

I wouldn't say that it's a fair share, but there's definitely more.

Progress has been made.

The problem is there are people who see that as an attack on their space, and the argument has never been made that you have to choose one or the other.

It's just make room for all of it.

It's not like the people outside of that one majority group are not consuming that one majority group.

They do happily.

There's a lot of brilliant work written by straight white men.

There's no reason we can't appreciate art created by and for all different types of people.

You know, I just have to say you went from somebody who didn't think they could accomplish much in these kinds of spaces to someone who is doing so much.

You are a co-host of the Femme On podcast.

You also have a Femme On fitness.

You are host of a monthly author meet and greet.

You're serving as a co-chair for the LGBTQ writer workshop.

So tell us about your activism here in the literary space, because I think that this volume fits right into that kind of activism.

When I started writing, it happened because of a dream and I wasn't doing it to be published.

I was just kind of writing because it wouldn't leave me alone.

And after I'd written like 200,000 words of a story, I realized, okay, I think I need some help.

And I joined Henderson Writers Group and met an amazing group of people who helped me learn the craft better and helped inspire me to, you know what, maybe I can get this published.

Maybe I can pursue something like this.

And I'll let you know that this was a group of mostly straight white men, okay?

I mean, it wasn't entirely them, but that was the major force in those rooms.

But writers can be so supportive.

They were so encouraging and they were nurturing.

Writers are just incredibly supportive of other writers.

And so once I started putting my work out in the world and making an attempt, I started getting backlash.

I would submit my work to editors and to agents and I would get responses back like, your Black characters don't sound Black.

Like, wait, what?

How is that possible?

They sound like me and I'm Black, you know?

So how is it possible that I don't know how Black people sound?

Is it possible that maybe Black people don't all sound the same?

So that's kind of the seed for my activism in terms of own voices and spreading more diversity.

There are so many different voices even within the diverse factions of communities that we shouldn't say only one voice counts, only one matters.

It was by necessity.

I had to start voicing this theory that it is possible that not anyone in any particular group can speak for everyone in that particular group.

And then I ended up becoming the Education Chair for Henderson Writers Group, which elevated that platform even more because now I'm bringing in, you know, I'm doing my part bringing in speakers and instructors from all different genres to help with the authors in this group.

But in doing so, I'm also bringing in people of all different identities, just because they're more likely to have diverse perspectives.

And then eventually people in the group started asking me, okay, so I'm hearing this message, not just from me, but from other sources that I need to not have my work be homogenous.

Like, why would all of the characters in my story all have the same identity?

That's not the world in which we live in.

However, I don't want to get it wrong.

I don't want to write someone who's different from me and then use stereotypes or do something offensive.

What do I do?

And so I got enough of those requests as the education chair that I put together.

It was a five-hour workshop that had a panel of authors who have done just that, written works about people different from them and done so with compassion and empathy and understanding.

And then I brought in an instructor to help get to the root of what makes a character come to life without focusing just on, you know, maybe the color of their skin or their gender.

Doing a deep dive so that you bring this person about as an entire character or maybe subverting some of those stereotypes.

It doesn't mean that those stereotypes can't be present in any case, but making them a fully formed person and not a flat character who is nothing more than the sum of their stereotypes.

And that workshop took off to the point where I started getting invited to different conferences and being a speaker all over the place, whether online or in person, speaking on this very topic.

And then last year I did a series for Women's Fiction Writing Association where it was about how to be more inclusive within the actual writing community.

So it was called Ideal and it was talking about identity and diversity, like we're being inclusive and talking about ableism and just laying the groundwork for making sure that the entire community feels inclusive so that the people within it feel welcome regardless of their background.

And so again, this is not something that I ever expected to do.

I was never trying to do this, but my journey brought me here.

And if there's something I can do to help others, I'm going to go that path.

And so important to be doing that now, to keeping on with that work.

You know, it struck me the other day that the right wing is always talking about DEI this and DEI that.

They'll never say diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Right.

Because when you break down what it means, if you say you're against that, that means that you are prejudiced and nobody wants to be called prejudiced.

Well, Tonya Todd, it's just been great talking with you about this first volume in Comic Lit.

Looking forward to more volumes, indeed, of this.

And you are coming out with a book as well, 52 Love, Weekly Love Lessons and Bite Size Bits.

Tell us just very briefly, in just a few seconds, what that's about.

It is a book of love lessons, one per week, 52 weeks, 52 love.

And that's another one of those projects I never thought I'd do.

It was based on a blog.

Wonderful.

Tonya Todd, thank you so much for talking with us here on Writer's Voice.

Thank you for having me.