Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (13 page)

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 heroines 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.

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.”

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 work 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.