Words Walking Without Masters
Hurston, Jemisin, and the Theology of the Spoken Word
“My commands to the Enefadeh had to be simple and precise. I was to avoid metaphors or colloquialisms, and above all think about whatever I told them to do, lest I trigger unintended consequences.” — N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
A Note From Me
When I read this passage for the first time, I immediately recognized it. I had been here before, in a completely different context, sitting with a completely different text, thinking about a completely different tradition. And yet the instruction was the same: be precise. Be intentional. Think before you speak because words create reality.
I used to teach about this on my YouTube channel, drawing on the Kingdom theology of teachers like Myles Munroe—the idea that the tongue is not simply a communication instrument but a generative one, that the words we speak carry creative and destructive power far beyond what we consciously intend. That is not a metaphor in the Kingdom framework but a cosmological truth. And it is, I would argue, one of the oldest and most persistent theological convictions across human spiritual traditions, and also one that Jemisin has embedded into the architecture of her world. On first glance, it reads like a fantasy world-building maneuver. However, it functions more like a very serious theological argument.
This post is about that argument. It is about the power of words in scripture, Black folk tradition, the New Age imagination, academic theory, and in the pages of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. It is about what happens when we take language seriously as a force rather than a tool, and what Jemisin is asking us to understand when she builds a world where a carelessly spoken sentence can make a god mute, free, or deadly.
