Magic Is Real
Many Afrofuturist authors are described as sci-fi and Afrosurrealist, magical realist and fantasy, simply because their work links science, nature, and magic as one. It’s a thin line to walk.
L. A. Banks wrote the Vampire Huntress series. Although her work is technically horror and follows a young woman coming of age, the multiculturalism, historical context of African and South American cultures, and the earth-based magic had her writing beyond genre. Toni Morrison is known for mixing hauntings and spirituality, too. Neither woman used Afrofuturism as her paradigm, but this world-crossing quest where the visible is as alive as the invisible punctuates art by black women. Artist/ professors John Jennings and Stanford Carpenter call this presence of ghost stories and hauntings in black literature and art the “ethno-gothic” and believes it’s a way of dealing with cultural trauma. But the expression of mysticism and nature is reminiscent of the divine feminine recognized in faiths across the world.
In general, Afrofuturism is a home for the divine feminine principle, a Mother Earth ideal that values nature, creativity, receptivity, mysticism, intuition, and healing as partners to technology, science, and achievement. The divine feminine is the other side to the information-gathering process, and tapping into it is a process of choice for many Afrofuturists. There’s a widespread belief that humankind has lost a connection to nature, to the stars, to a cosmic sense of self, and that reclaiming the virtues of the divine feminine will lead to wholeness. Many men in the genre embrace the principle as much as the women do.
In film, the idea of a divine feminine is best represented by the Oracle in the Matrix trilogy. Played by Gloria Foster in the first two films and Mary Alice in the third, the Oracle is Neo’s guide to understanding himself. But rather than giving clear-cut advice, the Oracle is more likely to give Neo thoughts to ponder, and he must make sense of her wisdom with his power of choice.
“You’ve already made the choice,” she tells Neo. “Now you have to understand it.”2
Valuing the divine feminine is one way that Afrofuturism differs from sci-fi and the futurist movements in the past. In Afrofuturism, technological achievement alone is not enough to create a free-thinking future. A well-crafted relationship with nature is intrinsic to a balanced future too.
The feminine aspect of humanity reigns freely in Afrofuturism. The subconscious and intuition, which metaphysical studies dub as the feminine side of us all, are prioritized in the genre. This feminine side is neither guided by Western mythology nor limited by popular takes on history. Women Afrofuturists have decision-making power over their creative voice. They make their own standards and sculpt their own lens through which to view the world and for the world to view them. Most important, their voice is not specifically shaped in opposition to a male or racist perspective. While Afrofuturist women are obviously shaped by modern gender issues, their creations and theories themselves emerge from a space that renders such limitations moot. The main commonality is their individuality and a desire to encourage free thinking and end the -isms that have plagued the present and the recent past.
Afrofuturist women get a kick out of rewiring their audiences. The muses and icons that’ve inspired the genre always appear to have sprung up from nowhere. Grace Jones, Octavia Butler, Erykah Badu, Janelle Monáe, for example, are just hard to place. Even their personal histories and private lives are shrouded in mystery. On the surface, these women don’t fit neatly into any artistic movement or the history of the times without a healthy dose of explanation.
“Am I a freak? Or just another little weirdo? Call me weak, or better yet—you can call me your hero, baby,” Janelle Monáe sings in the song “Faster.”
“That’s what I’ve always been fighting for,” Monáe says, “making sure that people love themselves for who they are, and we don’t pick on people because we’re uncomfortable with ourselves, or who they are. That’s been my message, from when I was young to now. There are lots of young girls out there who are struggling with their identities, afraid of being discriminated against or teased. I take risks and use my imagination so that other people will feel free and take risks. That’s my hope.”3
Read Nnedi Okorafor’s book Who Fears Death, visit D. Denenge Akpem’s performance installation Alter-Destiny 888 or a dance performance by A’Keitha Carey, and flip through Afua Richardson’s comic illustrations, and there’s a conscious reorientation process that takes place, almost as if you were dropped into a far-off land. But the land feels familiar, a reality that is soothing for some and unsettling for others. It’s as if the artists want you to remember something, and they discuss it in such a matter-of-fact way that you figure you must know. But do you? There’s an unconscious game of trying to remember a memory, a time or space when and where these familiar oddities weren’t so bizarre. It’s the familiarity with the seemingly bizarre that leads to the aha moment. Female Afrofuturists create their own norm, and the rest of the world just tries to catch up.
A Star Is Born
Afrofuturism has a star-is-born quality to it. Either morphing from the head of Zeus or crafted from clay like Wonder Woman or her black sister Nubia, there’s just a supernatural quality to engaging in the work. Grace Jones is no exception. Jones is a pop-culture phenom whose bold antics, outlandish personality, and dazzling looks defied all norms. There was absolutely nothing about her that was conventional when she hit the world stage in the late 1970s. She is Josephine Baker post women’s lib and the black liberation movement, with a steely, feminine-yet-androgynous look that came to define early ’80s style and has resurged in the twenty-first century.
A preacher’s daughter born in Jamaica, Jones moved to New York as a child and built on her theater training to make the world her stage. Her rocket was launched in the club scene and fashion houses of New York and Paris, where she bridged the exotic and the futuristic in a shock-and-awe manner that screamed power. She was a muse to Andy Warhol, and while she was popular in the 1970s and ’80s, by the twenty-first century—when nouveau pop stars recreated her style—she had juggernauted into legend status.
Jones recorded a couple of disco singles in the mid-1970s and eventually landed a record deal with Island Records in 1977. She went on to record a string of underground dance hits in the late ’70s and ’80s and continued to make music into the 2000s, most recently in 2008. Although her electronic new-wave sound captured the radical shift in music in the 1970s, she is most popular for her radical fashion and style. “I’ve always been a rebel,” says Jones. “I never do things the way they’re supposed to be done. Either I go in the opposite direction or I create a new direction for myself, regardless of what the rules are or what society says.”4
In a 1985 performance at Paradise Garage, an underground dance club, Jones’s body-paint adornments and colorful metal-and-wire costume (both designed and executed by artist Keith Haring) morphed native art ideas into futuristic fashion.
A tall, lithe, brown-skinned woman whose angular features were accented by her square-shaped hairdo, everything Jones did in fashion became iconic decades later. “Models are there to look like mannequins, not like real people. Art and illusion are supposed to be fantasy,” she says. Her red-carpet looks were jaw-dropping. Her concerts were scary gender-bending carnivals of role reversals. She sported a flattop and fade, a style many black men would adopt nearly a decade later, when most women were going for big-hair glam looks. She established the shoulder-padded look of the ’80s that made a high-fashion comeback in 2010. She sported severely tailored pantsuits just as more women entered the workforce.
Styled almost exclusively by Jean-Paul Goude from the late 1970s until the mid-1980s, everything about Jones’s outfits, from nude appearances in body paint to floor-length hooded gowns, has been mimicked by Madonna, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, and others. Her style and aggression, boldness and otherworldly reach, embodied Goude’s look of the future. Jones’s appearances were—and still are—spectacles. In 2012, at age sixty-four, she perf
ormed at Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee celebration. She twirled a hula hoop around her svelte physique while singing “Slave to the Rhythm” and wearing a black-and-red bodysuit and a giant red headdress.
Jones redefined the ideas of beauty, sexuality, and femininity. She wielded fashion as her weapon of choice and inverted beauty standards and women’s roles, mesmerizing people in their discomfort. Although she had the help of stylists and producers, Jones has always been Jones.
“But I’m a free spirit,” she says. “Where is the wrong? How do I put a limit to freedom?”5
Feminist Space
“Afrofuturism is a feminist movement,” says Alondra Nelson, Columbia University professor and Afrofuturism theorist who launched the now-legendary Internet Listserv for Afrofuturists. The complex black women characters in black sci-fi stories and the plethora of Afrofuturist women in the arts and beyond are no accident, she says. “There have always been black feminists at the center of the project,” she adds.
Many women theorists expanded Afrofuturism’s early infatuation with music titans and film to include other arts and social transformation. Sheree R. Thomas, editor of Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, assembled the first major collection of African American science fiction, even including a short story by W. E. B Du Bois. University of Southern California professor Anna Everett organized the early AfroGEEKS conferences that tackled the potential use of the Internet for social change and transformation. And Professor Kara Keeling forged groundbreaking queer-studies research through Afrofuturism.
But claiming a space as feminist doesn’t mean it’s for women only. What makes a feminist space? “One characteristic is the empowerment of women to work and make decisions in an egalitarian environment,” says feminist Jennie Ruby. “Another is the acceptance of women’s bodies in all shapes, ages, sizes, and abilities.” She continues that, in a feminist space, there’s a democracy, a sharing of the workload, and a goal of “valuing nurturance and cooperation over aggression and competition, and working against sexism, racism, heterosexism, ageism, and classism.”6
“[Afrofuturism] is not a space that women are finding identity; it is a feminist space,” Nelson affirms. “Of course it’s a space for women to feel empowered, because it’s a way to critique the ways people associate with science and technology. I think technology inherently opens the space for women to be central figures in that.”
Just as contributions from African descendants to the world’s knowledge are frequently viewed as cultural, rather than scientific, the same can be said when looking at the contributions of black women, says Nelson. She points to Madam C. J. Walker, who is widely known as being the first self-made woman millionaire in the US, though she was never hailed as an inventor for creating the products that launched her hair-care empire.
“If Afrofuturism is Africana or black people and engagement and invention around imagination around science and technology, then Madam C. J. Walker fits squarely. The work she was doing was chemistry. It’s a kind of technology that was at the prowess of her as a businessperson,” says Nelson.
Butler’s Renaissance
Octavia Butler is the third point in the Afrofuturism trinity (Sun Ra and George Clinton are the others). Although Harlem-born sci-fi writer Samuel Delany was the first widely recognized black sci-fi writer, Butler struck a special chord with women. “As much as there is an Afrofuturism lineage that comes from Sun Ra, there’s one that comes from Octavia Butler,” says Nelson.
In a hypermale sci-fi space where science and technology dominate, Butler provided a blueprint for how women, particularly women of color, could operate in these skewed realities and distant worlds. Butler set the stage for multidimensional black women in complex worlds both past and present, women who are vulnerable in their victories and valiant in their risky charge to enlighten humanity.
Butler is known as a sci-fi writer, but like author Nalo Hopkinson, she includes magical surrealism, or seeming magic, in her chosen realities. Moreover, Butler’s religious metaphors, central feminine narratives, use of African diasporic mysticism, and the transformative power of love are tenets that many Afrofuturists weave into their work. She gave many women a voice and validated their mashed-up mix of women’s issues, race, sci-fi, mysticism, and the future.
“She blew my mind,” says award-winning sci-fi writer Nnedi Okorafor, who is amongst Butler’s biggest fans. “I was writing these things, and I didn’t realize that what I was writing could be published until after I read her work.” Okorafor is author of several books, including Zahrah the Windseeker and Who Fears Death. Both books have hero lead characters with mystical abilities.
“Octavia Butler in her own way served as a role model,” says speculative fiction writer N. K. Jemisin. “The [sci-fi] genre itself sends a very clear message that you are not welcome here. I know that every black female writer felt, ‘Oh, here’s someone like me, and it’s OK for us to be here.’ Without that moment of validation, that it’s OK to be here, I don’t know if you’d have as many black women writing in this arena,” says Jemisin, who estimates there are at least fifty established black women sci-fi and fantasy writers who are published.
Jemisin was writing sci-fi and fantasy when she was a child. But she didn’t write black or women lead characters until she stumbled across Octavia Butler as a teen. “While reading, I said, ‘Holy crap, I think this woman is black.’ I looked for a photo, and there was none. Instead the book’s cover was plastered with the image of a white woman.” Photo aside, it was a lightbulb moment for Jemisin. “I had never seen that in sci-fi before,” she says. She never thought her lead could be anything other than a white man.
Jemisin’s debut novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, was nominated for a Nebula Award, Hugo Award, and the World Fantasy Award. Her follow-up series, The Killing Moon, traces the journey and politics of priests in a society reminiscent of ancient Egypt.
There are more women images in science fiction, thanks to Butler and writers like Tananarive Due and Nalo Hopkinson, and the emergence of female sci-fi writers is changing the dynamics of women characters in sci-fi and fantasy. In general, Jemisin feels there’s more fascination with the female physique and function than the woman as a whole in most science fiction. She says, “It’s a woman through the male gaze—what a woman has to look like to be interesting to men. But it’s not as common as it used to be.”
Butler herself is often described as a writer’s writer. Born in 1948 and reared in sunny Pasadena, California, she says she was inspired to write at age twelve after she watched a campy sci-fi film and figured that she could do better. She is most known for the formerly titled Xenogenesis trilogy, since renamed Lilith’s Brood for reissue by Warner, the novel Kindred, and her Parable series. Her heroines are intriguing, overcoming traumas in new lands as a right of passage of sorts in their own evolution.
Alanna Verrick, the adopted daughter of white missionaries, is the heroine in Butler’s Survivor, the genesis of her Patternmaster myth. Alanna leaves Earth with her adopted parents in the twentieth century to form an Earth colony on an already inhabited planet where half of the planet’s warring indigenous citizens are addicted to a powerful drug. Although the missionaries side with the more human-looking, drug-addicted inhabitants, Alanna leads the opposing rebel crew, overcomes addiction, and guides them to a better place in a style reminiscent of the biblical Moses. Her incredible diplomacy, love, and sacrifice win respect.
In Wild Seed, Anyanwu, a West African healer with shape-shifting abilities, wrestles with love, desire, and fate through a tortuous bond with the immortal Doru. The twisted relationship sends them through the Middle Passage to Slave States America. Anyanwu, on a quest to create gifted lineage, moves through time and space operating as both man and woman to father and mother ingenious offspring. At one point, she morphs into a dolphin.
Many Afrofuturist writers and artists credit their complex story lines and the popularity of women heroin
es in Afrofuturist novels and art to Butler’s influence with writers, filmmakers, and artists. They point to Butler’s quintessential writing as both benchmark and inspiration. Celebrated choreographer and performance artist Staycee Pearl staged Octavia, a dance project that dissects Butler’s work and life story. Nicole Mitchell composed a symphony to accompany Butler’s work, and artist Krista Franklin makes art that depicts Butler’s stories. The Carl Brandon Society, an organization dedicated to increasing the representation of people of color in fantastical genres, offers an Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship. Moreover, Spelman College, a college in Atlanta for black women, hosted the Octavia E. Butler Celebration of the Fantastic Arts.
Windseeker
Nnedi Okorafor won the World Fantasy Award in 2011 for her novel Who Fears Death. The story follows a black woman in postapocalyptic Africa who studies under a mystical shaman to discover powers that can end the genocide of her people. The child of a brutal attack, her sandy color raises the ire and curiosity of all who see her. Her name is Onyesonwu, which means “who fears death.”
Like many Afrofuturist authors, and Butler, before her, Okorafor has a tendency to write beyond the tropes of genre. Her book has been described as magical surrealist, fantasy, and sci-fi. Okorafor says, “There’s shamanism, there’s juju in it, there’s magic, genocide, female circumcision. It deals with issues of African men and women. I based my juju on actual Ebo traditional beliefs. It pulls on the fantastical too.”
Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture Page 9
