Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (17 page)

T
here's something about African American culture in particular that dictates that all cultural hallmarks and personal evolutions are recast in a historical lineage. Whether it's the concept of prophesy and speaking into the future or tropes of the past shadowing the present, whether by need or by narrative, many speak as if the future, past, and present are one. The threads that bind can be as divergent as a tersely worded tweet, musical chord, fiery speech, ancient Kemetic symbol, Bible quote, starry night, or string theory, but there's an idea that the power of thought, word, and the imagination can somehow transcend time. Just as the right words and actions can speak the future into existence, the same can recast the past, too. This cyclical nature of time and the contemplation of it all is a favorite theme and conversation point for Afrofuturists.

Time travel is a popular theme in science fiction. From H. G. Wells's
The Time Machine
to the classic film
Back to the Future
, the ideas of rewinding the clock or fast-forwarding into the future have piqued the curiosity of the world's best minds, creators, and scientists. In fact, the ideas are so ingrained in pop culture that the common time-zapping themes are nearly cliche. How many characters have leapfrogged into the past to “fix” some wrong only to screw up the future and be forced to DeLorean their way back again? How many times has a well-meaning attempt to alter time trapped the main character in a series of parallel universes? The morals and ethics have been tossed about by sci-fi fans and pop culture lovers alike. Even the new-school fields of quantum physics and quantum mechanics are based on the likely premise that time is relative. The popularity of documentaries like
What the Bleep Do We Know!?
, about quantum physics and new
discoveries about space and time, provides more proof of the abundant probabilities of jetting through the here and now.

“What physicists are discovering right now is so bizarre it almost sounds like science fiction, like we're not talking about science anymore,” said Fred Alan Wolf—aka Dr. Quantum—physicist and author.
¹

Time travel, parallel universes, the multiverse, and the Higgs boson are on a fast-track collision with the best in sci-fi. Time travel dominates Afrofuturism as well. Whether it's a lighthearted comic book about a time-traveling family or Sun Ra using time travel as a musical device as revealed in the film
Space Is the Place
, time travel is a broadly accepted tool in most Afrofuturistic works.

But for Afrofuturists, the notion of bending time erases the prism of race-based limitations that all too often lace the present and define the recent past. “I think we feel held hostage to time,” says D. Denenge Akpem, professor and artist. “There's this idea that if you can control time and your place in it, you can control the course of history and your own history. Afrofuturists create new visions. If you can create a new vision of the future, you can create a new vision of the past.” Time travel also alleviates regret, she adds: “It's about empowerment; you're reshaping yourself, reshaping reality.”

Parallel dimensions that can be channeled through music, desire, and thought are common themes among Afrofuturist artists. “A lot of people feel trapped in time and look at it as linear,” says Rasheedah Phillips, founder of the AfroFuturist Affair, a nonprofit arts collective in Philadelphia. “They feel like they have no control over the future or the past. The main thing with me doing Afrofuturism is helping to look at time as a cycle and
use that and the past for change. How can I use those cycles in a way that is more powerful for me to change my future?”

Jaycen Wise is one of the most popular African American characters in independent comics. He defies limitations of time and space with his gift of immortality. Wise, a scholar and warrior, is the “hero's hero” and the “last son of the African Empire of Kush.” He must battle ignorance while preserving light and knowledge. He can be in a battle in ancient Egypt or rescuing prized diamonds in modern-day Manhattan; Wise has the ability to be anywhere. “I have a passion for developing cutting edge material that pushes the boundaries of the imagination,” says Uraeus, the creator of Jaycen Wise, in the book
Black Comix.
²

One of the great dilemmas in the development of black characters in sci-fi is the question of handling race in the modern context. Time travel, immortality, reincarnation, and parallel universes create wormholes to supersede limitations of history while restoring power to both the narrative and its readers. The gaping hole of history and knowledge that Afrofuturism fills with fantasy and the multiverse embraces the greatest power a story can hold by reinstituting the ultimate hero's journey.

When Dr. Quantum was asked about the lessons of possible time travel and his scientific discoveries, he said, “The past is being created as much as the future. Once you get yourself into the position of creating the past, present, and future, rather than just being a victim of the past you become a magician.”
³
Sun Ra would feel vindicated. He's not alone.

“Time is not linear,” says graphic novelist Radi Lewis. “I think it folds in on itself. You can close your eyes and go back to a memory of when you're a kid; who's to say you're not going back in time?” Lewis wrote the graphic novel
Children of the Phoenix.
“I based it around my family, wife, and dog,” says the New York native, who recently relocated to Arizona. Children of the Phoenix follows the Phoenix family, a reincarnated version of Adam and Eve who are deemed the protectors of their five children. “It sounds corny, but I kind of feel that way about my wife. I've known my wife since I was fourteen years old,” says Lewis. They aren't immortal, says Lewis of his characters, but much like energy, “you can't destroy them, and they'll just reappear in another form. A secret race tracks the family down each incarnation and they sacrifice themselves for humanity.”

No one wants to revisit the atrocities of slavery in the antebellum South. Forget the scariness of a dystopian future; the transatlantic slave trade is a reminder of where collective memories don't want to go, even if the trip is in their imagination. But Octavia Butler defied time-travel norms by sending her heroine into American slavery in her epic work
Kindred.
“The immediate effect of reading Octavia Butler's
Kindred
is to make every other time travel book in the world look as if it's wimping out,” writes Jo Walton on
Tor.com
.
⁴

Butler's character Dana leaves her comfy life in 1976 California and is transported to a slave plantation in 1815. She faces her ancestors, including a young boy with a slave mother and slave-master father. Survival is her greatest triumph.

Slavery is neither the utopian future nor an ancient far-removed past. The tragedy that split the nation into warring factions has effects that can be felt in the politics of the present. Slavery is feared. The historic hot potato, there is no romanticized imagery that makes for fictitious time-travel stories in the antebellum South that aren't emotional firestorms. Slavery is a stone's throw away from exploring death, and even death writhes with freedom.

One of the greatest achievements of Quentin Tarantino's 2012 film
Django Unchained—a
slave revenge story told as part spaghetti western, part romance, and part action film—was the fact that a Hollywood hero story where the black former slave wins could even be told in the antebellum South and be historically relevant, entertaining, and relatable. The film defied all conventions and was a critically acclaimed blockbuster. Butler's book
Kindred
was published in 1979—but only after being rejected by many publishers, most of whom didn't understand how a sci-fi novel could take place in such an uncomfortable time and have a black hero. Butler made her point, a declaration of humanity and social justice, and the result is a classic.

The book likely has inspired other slave-based time-travel tales. For example, the independent movie
Sankofa
, directed by Haile Gerima, follows Mona, a model who has a photo shoot at a Ghanian slave castle that held captured Africans before shipping them to the Americas. Mona is instantly transported through time, survives the Middle Passage, and becomes a slave who eventually aligns with a rebellious West Indian plotting to rebel. Both Dana and Mona, who had been relatively disengaged from social issues and history, return to their modern worlds with a greater understanding of their slave and African lineage.

Butler argued that
Kindred
wasn't technically sci-fi because Dana didn't use scientific means to travel. The same can be said of Mona in
Sankofa
, yet both Butler and Gerima used time travel as a tool to ingrain the realities of slave life and the ensuing sense of responsibility into their protagonists. They used time travel to encourage connections to a painful past.

Time travel is a fun way to free black characters from the restrictions of the times. But the time-travel element transcends storytelling and is a popular, albeit unidentified, practice taken up by musicians and theorists alike.

“As African Americans and blacks in the diaspora, we think cyclically,” says musician Shawn Wallace. “We view time cyclically. We usually return to something in the past to interpret it. That's almost how we create our music; we go back to something and see how we can do it differently. Let's speed it up, let's slow it down.” Wallace points to Maurice White of Earth, Wind & Fire and the band's use of the kalimba, sometimes called the African thumb piano. “He took a very simple instrument that opened him up rhythmically and it changed his music. We're always going back to go forward.”

Almost reminiscent of Torah Midrash methods, a method of analyzing Hebrew text, Afrofuturists are constantly recontextualizing the past in a way that changes the present and the future. Sometimes seemingly distant occurrences are linked as an evolution of liberation consciousness. President Obama's election is recast as a manifestation of Dr. Martin Luther King's legacy. Hope
is a deep-rooted catchphrase anchored by President Obama that was echoed with as much fervor by Rev. Jesse Jackson and Dr. King before him. If you read passages by Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, and Frederick Douglass, you'd think you're reading the same person. How are these voices linked, and how do they inform the future? Is the narrative stronger that the speakers themselves?

“We're constantly trying to figure out how we got here,” says Wallace. “We are still grappling with how quickly our lives have changed as Americans and African Americans—how within my lifetime our family structure has so drastically shifted. I'm not saying one is better than another, I'm just noting a difference. Well, how did we get here, what music was the soundtrack? What theater were we into? What dances were we doing? What was our cultural output when we got to a certain point in our lives? Can we go back to that? I think, too, because of our particular experience in America, we're still piecing ourselves together and we're constantly going back to grab a piece as we move forward.”

Photographer Alisha Wormsley is working on her Reverse Migration Project. She writes, “In the interest of time travel, I'm following the reverse order of my ancestral migration. It will go something like this: Pittsburgh—Appalachian Mountains—Virginia—North Carolina—South Carolina—Barbados—Cape (Slave) Coast, West Africa. Then I will make something.”

The continent of Africa frequently serves as the alpha and omega of motherlands, a cosmic metaphor for a utopian future and the past. It's evident in Afrofuturistic comic art, music, and literature.

The AACM's motto is “Ancient to the Future,” and they work to play and teach the ancient musical healing traditions combined with the instruments of the past and today. “[Music] is a portal for time travel in a literal and figurative way,” says Khari B., president of the AACM.

“For an African American who's never left America, Africa feels like the future,” says musician Morgan Craft, who believes that great things will emerge from the continent. It's the reason you'll see graphic images of characters like Mshindo Kuumba's stunning illustration of Aniku, a mask-wearing, sword-wielding man with samurai leanings, or Demeke, a man in a golden cloak and African staff, and it's not clear whether they're images from the ancient African past or figures on a far-off planet in the future. “I think we as black artists are trying to come to grips with our epic past and what it could be again. The Garden of Eden of the future is in Africa,” says Craft.

“It's that sankofa effect,” says Khari B., referring to the Asante image of a bird that looks backward with the egg of the future on her back. He adds, “One step into the future while looking back. It's not that we're going backward, but we're evolving using the strength and characteristics of things that are why we're here today. We get to pull from our past to build our future. That's what Afrofuturism is about, going back to ancient traditions so that we can move more correctly into the future.”

But the idea of time travel, oddly enough, also reemphasizes the present. “Not being able to literally fold time, how do we think about time travel in the present?” asks Stacey Robinson, artist and cocreator of the
Black Kirby
exhibit. “What do we do in the present?” he asks, adding that staying in the present tense
reemphasizes responsibility. Even the hypothetical time-travel concept still alters the present. He says, “I would approach time travel as an extension of the person traveling. How would time travel affect me?”

Robinson is correct. If today is future's past, what does that say about the present? Who are we in real time?