The self-described painter Torkwase Dyson contributed 59 works of charcoal on paper to Canisia Lubrin’s recently released book of short stories, Code Noir. Dyson’s erasures, shadings, geometric annotations, and marks of ruin correspond to each article in the “Code Noir,” a 1685 decree passed by King Louis XIV that outlined legal mandates relating to race and slavery across French colonies. A note at the end of the book explains that these drawings “interact, subvert, and comment on the fiction in these pages.” This mode of subversion informs Lubrin’s writing, which moves through Dyson’s spontaneous etchings, crossings, emphases, darks, and lights. Each article of the Code Noir and each drawing also correspond to a section of writing by Lubrin, which range in form, from a two-line evocative note to longer narratives.

The way I’ve introduced the structure of the book, where a legal article is paired with art and writing, perhaps gives a false sense that the three genres are related in some kind of logical manner. Instead, each of Lubrin’s fragments functions as an intervention into the very meaning of fiction, exposing the controlling white-supremacist fictions in the “original” Code Noir.

The reader travels from Timmins, ON, to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, to Roseau River, Saint Lucia, all the way to Côte d’Ivoire and Germany. In addition to the various settings, Code Noir contains a multitude of characters, animals, revolutionaries, and theorists. The style varies, from historical fiction to an otherworldly story set in the future. But the text hinges not on people, places, or things but on ideas and experiments. As the 10th section reads, “Thinking is what we’ve come to do.” In the basin of capitalist life, the room for thought is faint, often hardly perceptible. This book encouraged me to recall writing’s role in domination, the definitions of fiction, about what is named in the text as “the myth of being singular,” about what a novel is, and about the Black radical tradition with which Lubrin is in conversation (including writers like M. NourbeSe Philip, Édouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter, and Aimé Césaire).

The comprehensible ways we read and write reflect the paucities of our everyday. Challenging her reader, Lubrin wants to unveil the structural terms under which we read fiction, non-fiction, official order, legal sanction, and poetry. Lubrin defamiliarizes the familiar, encountering the novel form anew and imploring the reader to discover fictions in the very legal doctrines that constrict life.

Perhaps a book tells you how to read it. Not outright, not openly—but the more closely, intensely, and seriously you read, the more the text opens up to you. A late direct reference to King Louis XIV’s Code Noir, appearing about two thirds of the way in, sets up another way to read: “She admired being confused. She changed her mind about the world. She did not know the world she had lived in all along. And she was relieved for that renewed breath. The strangeness made something pure.” In that moment, “she” became the author and the author became me.