Okorafor, a Nigerian immigrant to the United States and professor at Chicago State University, writes characters who are outsiders that straddle two worlds. Her books are also pointed cultural critiques. Her depiction of female circumcision, a controversial procedure, drew criticism from several African academics. She named her main character in Zahrah the Windseeker Dada, which means “a child born with naturally (dread)locked hair.” “Before colonialism, that was very special. But after colonialism, it was considered evil,” she says. And her flagrant use of the term had some calling Okorafor a witch. She says, “My fourth book was titled Akata Witch. It’s a derogatory term for African Americans or American-born Nigerians. Akata means ‘bush animal.’ It’s not a very nice term. The book deals with those issues too.”
Collective memory and trauma is an issue that concerns some Afrofuturists, and many women artists and writers use the aesthetic as a healing device. D. Denenge Akpem, who teaches Afrofuturism as a pathway for liberation, studies how ritual healing in art can heal trauma, particularly in women. Her performance installation Alter-Destiny 888 was one of her foray’s into the possibilities of Afrofuturism as ritual. The show opened on August 8, 2008 (8-8-8), at the Roger Smith Hotel in New York. For ten days, Akpem performed a self-created ritual of song, including the creation and destruction of clay babies, the building of an elaborate headpiece in honor of the trickster god Pan, and the mashing of remaining clay to dust. “The piece was based on the concept of the alter destiny and of transformation that Sun Ra addressed,” Akpem told Tempestt Hazel, curator/cofounder of Sixty Inches From Center: The Chicago Arts Archive and Collective Project. “But it was personalized in the sense that I focused primarily on the question of whether one does have the power to alter one’s destiny and whether one might act as conduit to affect global destiny or to heal trauma in collective cellular and psychic memory,” she said, noting that women hide their trauma.7
She continued, “What alternate destinies were set in motion through this performance-installation, I am honestly not sure. What I do know is that the intention was there; the manifestation occurred.”
Butler may have inspired black women in sci-fi, and Delany, a sci-fi titan we’ll discuss later, helped shape the literary canon of the twentieth century, but African American sci-fi and speculative fiction began long before either of them was born.
W. E. B. Du Bois is an American icon. He is known for countless achievements that shifted race dynamics in America: he was one of the quintessential proponents of civil rights in the early twentieth century, he was amongst the founders of the NAACP, he was a proponent of higher education among blacks, he was one of the early black-history documentarians and founded a sociology department at Atlanta University, he was a Pan-Africanist. Du Bois’s theories defined turn-of-the-century strategies on race. His dueling views with Tuskegee University founder Booker T. Washington are classic. Both men, we’ve discovered, were right. Du Bois’s essays on double consciousness and the Talented Tenth are still hot topics in the new millennium.
But few know that Du Bois was also a science fiction writer.
“The Comet,” a short story that first appeared in a 1920 collection titled Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, is Du Bois’s primary sci-fi work. The story follows Jim Davis, a black man who quietly resents the nation’s skin games. He’s sent into a dangerous underground vault to retrieve records—a task no white man would do, he dutifully notes. During his subterranean quest, a mysterious comet hits, and Davis is the last man standing. But he quickly grows comfortable with his ill-timed fate, dining in a whites-only restaurant and driving his own car. Suddenly the freedom that escaped him in daily life is at his fingertips. Clearly, this disaster has some advantages. He meets a young white woman who was also saved in the peril. Although she initially can’t see Davis past her bias and views his brown skin as alien, she moves past prejudice and falls for him. The responsibility of repopulating Earth consumes her passion. Just as the two are about to consummate their love, they are discovered by a rescue team. To Davis’s dismay, the comet destroyed New York, but the rest of the world is the same. The woman returns to her wealthy husband, and Davis remains at the bottom of the status quo.1
In Du Bois’s analogy, race imbalances were so entrenched that only a catastrophe could bring equity. What is a catastrophe for most of the city—a town ravaged by death and destruction—is a fresh new start with thwarted hopes of self-expression and prosperity for Davis and people of color.
I’m not surprised that Du Bois would write a sci-fi story. As a man who devised strategies for eradicating race imbalances for much of his life and who staunchly believed that intellectual achievement could bring political parity, sci-fi was both a great release and the ideal tool to ponder the what-ifs in climbing through a rigid race-based social structure. He placed a thoughtful black man at the heart of his story and displayed the frailties and dilemmas of hope in a world resistant to change. As a fervent activist, Du Bois pushed for many social changes, most of which blossomed after his lifetime. With the tug and pull of a transitioning landscape at the turn of the century—the hope of the end of slavery, the horror at the institution of Jim Crow and mob lynchings, the progression of a small upper class, and the undermining of the larger masses—I wonder if Du Bois, too, felt like he was seesawing between progress and devolution.
However, Du Bois was one of many activists who, beginning in the nineteenth century, used speculative fiction and sci-fi to hash out ideas about race, re-create futures with black societies, and make poignant commentary about the times. We don’t know how many black speculative writers were published in the late nineteenth century. The dime novels and pulp magazines of the day didn’t reveal the race of their writers, and it was assumed they were white.
“I believe I first heard Harlan Ellison make the point that we know of dozens upon dozens of early pulp writers only as names: They conducted their careers entirely by mail—in a field and during an era when pen-names were the rule rather than the exception,” writes Samuel Delany, one of the first major African American science fiction writers of the twentieth century. “Among the ‘Remmington C. Scotts’ and the ‘Frank P. Joneses’ who litter the contents pages of the early pulps, we simply have no way of knowing if one, three, or seven of them—or even many more—were not blacks, Hispanics, women, native Americans, Asians, or whatever. Writing is like that.”2
However, a number of short stories and articles have surfaced, most written by well-meaning activists who, for fleeting moments, turned to speculative fiction to articulate their frustrations and hopes for the future. Martin Delany, for example, was born in West Virginia to a free mother and slave father in 1812. He became one of the first African Americans to attend Harvard Medical School and was the first African American field officer in the Civil War. It was allegedly his proposition and not that of colleague Frederick Douglass that convinced Lincoln to use black soldiers in the war. Delany helped Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison launch the North Star newspaper, one of the leading abolitionist papers of the era, in the 1840s. An abolitionist himself, Delany worked with escaped slaves and adopted early black nationalistic beliefs, later doing some work to acquire land in Liberia.
However, Delany was a writer as well. Shortly after the slave insurrection panics of 1856 and the Dred Scott decision of 1857—which declared that blacks were not citizens of any state—and a year shy of the war that would split the nation in two, Delany released Blake: or, the Huts of America, a speculative fiction serial. The story follows Henry Blake, a revolutionary who convinces blacks in the United States to rise up and found a black nation in Cuba. The story was partially published in the Anglo American in 1859 and republished in the Weekly Anglo American from 1861 to 1862.3 Blake was published as a book in 1970.
Social activist and Baptist minister Sutton E. Griggs was born in Chatfield, Texas, in 1872. He published more than thirty-three books encouraging African American solidarity and pride. But his best-known w
ork is the controversial Imperium in Imperio. Published in 1899, the book is a response to Edward Bellamy’s utopian Looking Backward and a criticism of its handling of race. Imperium in Imperio follows African American friends Belton Piedmont and Bernard Belgrave, both of whom graduate from college. Bernard is elected congressman, and Belton heads to a black college in Louisiana, only to be lynched. Belton survives the lynching, kills the doctor who tries to vivisect him, and wins in court due to Bernard’s stellar defense. Belton invites Bernard to join the Imperium in Imperio, a secret African American government in Waco, Texas. Belton wants assimilation; Bernard wants revolution. Bernard’s plan to take over Texas and make it an African American nation state is approved by the society, and Belton is executed by the Imperium.
New York lawyer and educator Edward A. Johnson also was inspired by Looking Backward and wrote the book Light Ahead for the Negro in 1904. A work of utopian speculative fiction, Johnson’s book depicts an African American at the turn of the twentieth century who visits America in 2006. Blacks in the South can read, and the coveted forty acres and a mule have finally been distributed. The book shows how the post-racial world evolved over the century. A decade later, in 1917, Bellamy was elected the first African American to serve in the New York State legislature.
Francis E. W. Harper was a social reformer, feminist, and one of the most popular poets of her time. Her book Iola Leroy, published in 1892, takes place against a feminist backdrop in which the races are unequal. Iola, the main character of the story, is a pro-slavery Southern belle who learns that her mother was a slave of mixed heritage, therefore meaning that Iola, too, is a slave. “The rest of the novel captures her adventures, and concludes with the establishment of Harper’s version of the ‘ideal polity’—women active as doctors and activists, large schools taught by married women, and an area in which former slaves can live peacefully and productively. In the context of 1892 and Reconstruction South, this image was indeed a fantastic utopia,” writes author and librarian Jess Nevins.4
In 1902 Pauline Hopkins, one of the most influential black editors of the early twentieth century, wrote Of One Blood, a book that was serialized in the Colored American. Protagonist Reuel Briggs, who has little interest in African American history, travels to Ethiopia on an archaeological expedition and discovers the ancient city of Telessar, inhabited by the descendants of the Ethiopia of 6000 BCE and owners of advanced crystal-based technology and telepathy technology.
George S. Schuyler was a Rhode Island–born journalist who both criticized organized religion and was known for more conservative views. He was not a fan of most literature from the Harlem Renaissance nor was he an admirer of Du Bois. His book Black No More profiles a scientist who discovers how to turn black people white. The satire includes a horrid description of the lynching of the money-grubbing inventors by a crowd of whites that painstakingly recreates the gruesome lynchings of black men in the South. In his series “Black Internationale” and “Black Empire,” published in the Pittsburgh Courier between 1936 and 1938, is the story of Carl Slater, a journalist for the fictional Harlem Blade who covers a global battle between white people and people of color. A wealthy intellect leads the battle, gathering top minds in the black diaspora who are frustrated with inequality. The brilliant collective, called Black Internationale, brings the United States to its knees with biological warfare, liberates Africa from its colonizers, and launches air raids that crush Europe. A young, white, female stockbroker aids the movement and becomes head of the European espionage unit.5
The idea of using sci-fi and speculative fiction to spur social change, to reexamine race, and to explore self-expression for people of color, then, is clearly nothing new. The black visionaries of the past who sought to alleviate the debilitating system and end the racial divide used these genres as devices to articulate their issues and visions.
This tradition continued with Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, and Nalo Hopkinson, all of whom merged issues of race, class, sex, sexuality, culture, and identity to make sense of the changing times. Their worlds included people of color, but the issue of otherness was wrapped in a sci-fi space saga that zapped from shape-shifters to gender benders to alien pods, time travel, and killer bodysuits.
Nalo Hopkinson was born in 1960 in Kingston, Jamaica, to a Jamaican mother and Guyanese father. She has lived throughout the Caribbean and South America with stints in the United States and Canada. One of the foremost speculative fiction writers of modern times, she’s edited anthologies and published dozens of books and short stories. Caribbean dialect and culture are entrenched in many of her stories, and she candidly deals with postmodern issues of culture, race, and sex.
Brown Girl in the Ring was her first novel. Published in 1998, the dystopian tale depicts a rebel-led Toronto under siege, and the book was hailed for depicting the Carribean community in Toronto and adeptly writing in dialect. The story combines Carribean mysticism and futuristic medicine and includes a disturbing plot involving organ harvesting. But the terror of the city leads the main character to discover some of the old ways and traditions of her grandmother. The book Sister Mine follows formerly conjoined twins Makeda and Abby, daughters of a demigod and a human mother. One has magical powers and the other does not, but the two must reconcile to help find their father who disappeared mysteriously.
Hopkinson’s short story “Ganger (Ball Lightning)” is a sci-fi story that almost reads like a dark comedy. Published in the anthology Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora in 2000, Hopkinson’s story plays off Isaac Asimov’s 1940s robot stories. Cleve and Issy are a married couple who don’t talk anymore. They buy full-bodied sex suits in hopes of saving their marriage only to have the suits turn on them.6
“She’s a powerful writer with an imagination that most of us would kill for,” says Pulitzer Prize–winning author Junot Díaz. “I have read everything she has written and am in awe of her many gifts. And her protagonists are unforgettable—formidable haunted women drawn with an almost unbearable honesty—seriously, who writes sisters like Nalo? Takes courage to be that true.” According to sci-fi scholar Gary K. Wolfe, Nalo’s family-centered dramas inspired other writers to go beyond sci-fi norms and build on family relationships, too.7
By age twenty-six Samuel Delany had written more than eight sci-fi books and won three Nebula Awards. Algis Budrys, a critic with Galaxy magazine, declared that Delany, fresh off the release of Nova, was “the best science fiction writer in the world.” He is one of the most decorated and best-known science fiction writers in the world, credited with influencing cyberpunk as well as Afrofuturism. Some of his later books include intense sexuality that Delany himself has called pornography. He is an inductee in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and has won four Nebula Awards and two Hugo awards. He has more than twenty novels to his credit.
However, in his essay “Racism and Science Fiction,” Delany questions the desire of science fiction institutions to group him with former students Butler and Hopkinson, noting that outside of their race, their work, backgrounds, ages, and perspectives are drastically different. However, the Harlem-born legend adds that the best way to end the “pre-judging” in science fiction worlds is to encourage more nonwhite readers and writers to participate and discuss issues at conferences. When some 20 percent of the audience is composed of people of color the landscape for writers and readers will change, he writes.
When Delany’s essay was published in 2000, Afrofuturism as a defined genre had taken root and cadres of writers were looking to Delany, Butler, Hopkinson, and others as literary hallmarks in a genre that was all too dismissive of diversity. In 1999, the Carl Brandon Society was created to increase diversity in speculative fiction. One of its tenants is to “fantasize for its own sake and as an agent of social change.” The society offers an Octavia Butler scholarship, honors accomplished writers, and provides supports for new work. More than a decade later, the diversity of sci-fi work and the creators in fiction ha
s given rise to writers like Nnedi Okorafor and N. K. Jemisin, but there are countless others emerging as well. Words inspire visuals. Afrofuturism’s visual aesthetic is a playground for the imagination.
Images are powerful. Although the image-making process isn’t shrouded in smoke and mirrors like in the old days of Hollywood, and anyone can pull up an editing tutorial on YouTube or watch behind-the-scenes footage on Netflix, the fact remains that most consumers don’t process film, videos, photos, paintings, billboards, postcards, and images as a creation by someone else. Viewing images is a pretty passive affair. For many, an image is a statement of fact, even when the image is fictitious.
If I ask you to imagine an alien, chances are that you won’t imagine anything. The first wave of images will be flashbacks from movies, comic books, and video games. Whether it’s the big, hollow-head ghostlike figure from the alien documentaries or the monstrous humanlike giant in the blockbuster Prometheus, it’s highly likely that the first pictures to hit your brainwaves will be plucked from popular images in media. I’m placing special emphasis on the word popular, because it’s the repetition of an image that embeds it in the collective consciousness as a shared emblem.
Images aren’t these stand-alone silhouettes. Each comes with a belief system and set of personalized traits. Some of these beliefs are projected by the creator and others are projected by the viewer, but even in this clash, there is a basic consensus, a space where fiction meets some aspect of reality. A drawing of a single smiling fairy can be interpreted as cute, sweet, and sometimes mischievous, in part because the interpretations are based on rehashed stories of the past. But such smiling innocence would never denote the makings of a murderer or the day-to-day work of a stockbroker. There’s simply no reference for that association to take place. Fairies aren’t killers, and fairies aren’t stockbrokers.
Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture Page 10
