Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (360 page)

“[T]he front lines aren’t always what you think they are”

—Ntozake Shange

As scholar and teacher, I typically question the role speculative fiction plays in defining human beings, how imagination is employed to redefine it, and for what purpose. How does speculative literature speak specifically to the needs of women and what is the significance of messages therein for women of color? I question how ideas, characterization, language/ voice, structure, time, setting, rhythm, space/place, action, and meaning establish a sense of purposeful movement between spheres of subjectivity, spheres of being, spheres of consciousness, or spheres of epistemology in the literature. In the classroom, I also pose additional questions: Why do Black women authors create characters (dark female heroines) that evolve (survive or transform) in communities teetering between self-destruction and struggle, waste and complacency, tradition and freedom? Have particularities such as obfuscation of gendered and racialized subjects lost urgency in their writing? I ask students to consider and investigate a core sensibility in Black women’s writing otherwise referred to as
Africentric transgressive creativity
—exploring characteristics of creative resistance in Black women’s literature.

Africentric transgressive creativity
in African descended women’s speculative fiction heralds the primacy of research and creativity that move from known constraints on the dark (feminine) subjectivity (logos, religion, education, slavery, apartheid, dislocation, poverty, illiteracy, mysogeny, colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, patriarchal tradition, cultural oppression, all gendered and racialized modes of disenfranchisement ) to articulation of the possibility of freedom. Ahh! Freedom. Freedom from nagging socially constructed limitations on Black women’s internal and external universe of experience (or according to distinctions, a woman makes, between fact, reality, and belief), freedom as realizable concept for individuals and community alike, freedom and the means of attainment. Each is a contested point among scholars, artists, healers, and others. Nonetheless, one point on which Black women in the Americas concur is that African women’s suffrage before slavery, during slavery, and beyond lies at the center of African Diaspora discourse. A woman may have no legal rights to her body or movement or future, yet (as the ancestors have taught) if she is to survive (indeed, to thrive in peace and contentment) she must rely unfailingly upon her eternal faculty which can never be bound: Such is true freedom. The eternal faculty, or
ori
as it is labeled in West Africa’s Yoruba land, has myriad names throughout Africa. Yet the ontological root yields one understanding best translated as
soul
or spirit in Western logos.

Hence an authentic critical response to Black women’s speculative fiction is utterly impossible for me minus certain ontological, metaphysical, or epistemological considerations. In fact, theorizing African descended women’s speculative fiction fails altogether where African roots and a history of women’s
transgressive creativity
or creative acts of resistance to oppressive circumstances are absented, undermined, or not read as tightly interwoven variables of women’s experience. Sheree Thomas sustains my observation of the centrality of cultural roots in Black speculative fiction in her assertion that black speculative literature “reaches deep into Afrodiasporic traditions” revealing among other things “love and lore, oppression and abuse, identity, and community, revelations and new forms.”(xiv) Thomas edited the first anthology of Black speculative fiction,
Dark Matter: Reading the Bones
(2004). Interestingly, stories by writers of color published in the same year are featured in editors Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan’s anthology
So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy.

A striking feature that sets Thomas’s work apart from other anthologies of speculative fiction is
Dark Matter’s
anthologized treatment of “desire” and imagination forming a single purpose—Black speculative fiction created “to alter one’s path, to understand how things have come to pass” (xi). With abundant significance, Thomas highlights the crucial role of Africana metaphysics in literature. In so doing, she simultaneously references the importance of ori in Yoruba culture, where an elaborate ancient system survives to serve people in their quest to know and appease their soul urgings and thereby improve their destiny. From another perspective, perhaps more familiar to contemporary Americans, given Thomas’s emphasis on the transformative power of the word in Black speculative fiction (essentially likened to ubiquitous divination practices), it is possible to see how writers employ language to actualize what may be termed an avatar aspect of self/being. The use of avatars in this writing points up the harmonious blend of soul, spirit, and consciousness in action. Endowed with an avatar’s choice to alter the course of events, it may be argued that these writers create according to the dictates of the story they must tell to affect social change.

Interwoven throughout my discussion of Octavia Butler and her exemplars are ideas illuminating
Africentric
transgressive creativity
as a mitigating impulse in postcolonial discourse. We begin with review of Octavia Butler’s fiction with an eye toward transgression of debilitating worn out notions of gender, sex, class, and race exemplary in her 1) meditation on the Black woman’s tenacity, spirituality, leadership, and survival skills. 2) employment of logos to create liberated(ing) space and 3) attention to cultural transgression inherent in symbiogenesis. I further offer analysis of Black feminist lexicology in ihsan bracy, Kiini Ibura Salaam, and Nalo Hopkinson’s selected fiction Octavia Estelle Butler (1947–2006) is a writer whose metaphors of transgressions provided exemplars of unequalled power, authenticity, imagination, and sincerity. Be it in an interview, essay, short story, or novel Butler’s insight, creativity, intelligence, and compassion provided her readers with new (challenging) ways of thinking about old problems of personal identity, consciousness, community, relationships, war, ethics, and failures.

Butler’s
Patternmaster
is a fast-paced quest story which manages to interrogate homophobia via the character Amber, a lovely bisexual female healer and warrior, who teaches the male protagonist how to effectively use his fledgling psionic powers. The semiotic encoding germane to both
Patternmaster
and
Mind of My Mind
is fertile linguistic soil for cultural analysis of the espistemology of magic and ethics. In
Mind of My Mind
, telepaths unite for the common good. Mary, the novel’s African American heroine, outwits the charmed chameleon Doro, a four thousand year old murderer. He remains immortal as long as he feeds on his carefully bred worldwide stock of humans with psionic powers, a delicacy he finds unequivocally appealing in taste. However, Mary does not work alone to dethrone Doro. She could not have destroyed this Nubian power minus the collective help of a heterogeneous commune of telepaths who despite their fear, reservations and/or resistance to her telepathic abilities, eventually, learn how to live and work together to help save the lives of others suffering with mental abilities they do not understand or cannot control.

The magic in
Wild Seed
is ultimately knowledge of self. Here an African woman Anyanwu demonstrates amazing ability to heal others as well as to reshape her body into whatever animal form she chooses, a fantastic phenomenon which Butler deconstructs in order to explore the power of humans’ focused awareness and manipulation of energy. What is deconstructed is signified in Anyanwu’s exploration of healing energies; it is the very notion that certain nonwestern healing practices and/or perceptions of spatial realities the human body inhabits are illegitimate. Comparable to the mesmerizing Shirley Anne Williams’s “Meditation on History,”
Wild Seed
consistently exploits power of the word as a means of interrogating master narratives e.g., patriarchal values and/in western logos as singular authorial reality. Like
Kindred
,
Wild Seed’s
critiques of slavery, colonialism, imperialism, avarice, and desire not only deromanticize colonial assumptions in the “New World,” but signify a power struggle that never transcends a Manichean aesthetic.

Kindred
narrates the significance of biracial ancestral lineage via a Black woman’s humanity, compassion, memory, and sexual relationships with White men from slavery to the present day. Between June 9, 1976 and July 4, 1976, Dana, a twenty-six year old African American, woman grows mysteriously dizzy seconds prior to vanishing before Kevin, her White American husband’s, unsuspecting eyes. She travels inexplicably through time from Los Angeles back to a slave plantation in Maryland to save and protect her great great ancestors—Alice Greenwood, a Black girl, and Rufus Weylin, a small White boy. Note that Butler goes the extra mile illustrating liberated(ing) space by countering the brutality of racist laws past and present in this novel. Not only is Dana’s slave lineage biracial, her 1970s biracial marriage was not a possibility in some parts of the U.S. as late as the 1960s, given miscegenation laws alive and well—as eminent science fiction author Sameul R. Delany’s personal experience attests.

Note also the ambiguity surrounding
Kindred
as genre specific literature. It is common knowledge that Butler did not ascribe “science” as an aspect of the novel, but her reason for that and typology created by readers responding to the novel do not overlap. In my conversations with Octavia Butler, my uncertainty about how to classify the novel was clear as I struggled to grasp a clearer distinction of terms. Is
Kindred
science fiction? Science fantasy? Why?
Kindred
is “grim fantasy” according to Butler and not science fiction because she did not bother with scientific design of a time machine. Ostensibly
time machine
is the operative phrase here, yet inferred scientific phenomena occur, explainable or not. In this sense,
Kindred
is an excellent example of liberated(ing) space where an author’s predisposition dictates form. Science fiction and speculative fiction are slippery literary terms yielding any number of possible classifications: Add to grim fantasy the idea of science fantasy, speculative history, science fiction history, fantastic science, and science fiction fantasy, then definitely leave room for the not yet born distinctions germinating in the rich irrepressible soil of imagination and authorial privilege.

Nonetheless in
Kindred
commonly held limiting beliefs about present and future homonid realities (realities constructed in the collective homo sapiens consciousness) are consistently critiqued where logos empowers dark heroines with agency to construct and put forth (actualize) particularities of their own history, experience, and truth throughout time and space.
Survivor
is another puissant example.

In
Survivor
, Alanna, an Afro-Asian heroine, experiences metamorphosis when she travels to another planet with White missionary foster parents. She befriends the Garkohn people (who the missionaries consider inhuman and godless because their bodies are covered with thick fur). Alanna likewise learns Garkohn language, marries into their clan, gives birth to a daughter who is later murdered by enemies and, still grieving her daughter’s violent death, returns to the missionary colony with a courageous plan to save White people from destruction in yet another colonial war in outer space. Alanna decries xenophobia, hypocrisy, and the role of religion as imperializing agent, and in so doing actualizes the voice of a future campaign against imperialism, colonialism, and slavocracy.

On the other hand, incurable diseases like leukemia and AIDS are prominent in the novel
Clay’s Ark.
Geologist Eli, the lone survivor of a failed space mission, returns to Earth infected by an intergalactic organism that is bent on colonizing the human race as host for its own survival. Eli’s unfortunate predicament compromises the well-being of people on Earth to the extent that we must at least try to answer pivotal questions. (1) When is a person no longer human? (2) Do ethics determine one’s humanity? (3) Is there life after being diagnosed with an incurable disease? The novel makes these contemporary questions implicit via characterization of the day-to-day lives of diseased desperate humans, their offspring, and their prey.

The symbiotic trilogy
Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago
might be Butler’s most widely read space novels. Race purity and how humans and aliens respond to the subject are central to the trilogy. The trilogy’s heroine is a Black woman: Lilith lyapo whose personal courage engenders birth of a new race of people while inviting thrilling vistas of intellectual freedom, personal identity, fearlessness, wisdom, courage, family, and humanity. But first she must survive the shock of being held captive in strict isolation by intelligent, antihierarchical beings in outer space. And the most damning set of obstacles to her freedom (and that of other humans on the ship she will awake from sleep) are caused by fear of estranging difference and female authority. Still Lilith Iyapo learns to overcome fear. Vital too is Butler’s brilliant vision of Lilith’s potential to make decisions in harmony with her ori, personifying African American women’s determination, leadership, desire, culture, collective knowledge, and overall valuable energy in her literature.