Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
My beginnings were in the dark. We all dwelled in the dark, mad scientist and SpeciMen alike. (6).
On her Twitter account page, Afrofuturist novelist Nnedi Okorafor includes a picture of herself atop a building with huge black wings behind her. She appears composed and confident in her ability to lift into the air. The photo is an obvious reference to The Book of Phoenix (2015), which was written as a prequel to her World Fantasy Award–winning novel, Who Fears Death (2010). Composed in first-person vignettes, The Book of Phoenix is a troubling tale that rises again and again from its own ashes. Phoenix’s story begins about eighty years from now in a post-apocalyptic Manhattan that is mostly underwater; however, it is set in a frame that occurs about two hundred years later when Sunuteel, an elderly storyteller, finds a discarded computer with an audio book that contains Phoenix’s narrative. Sunuteel’s name is significant because it implies a brightness and positivity that is absent in the dark story that Phoenix relates.
Phoenix is a growth–accelerated genetic experiment who is routinely tortured by corporate, neo-Nazi-like scientists in order to become a more efficient military weapon for the American government. She is literally a slave who has known no other life:
Before I started to heat myself, they would place me in a heated room and watch me sweat and wheeze for hours. In my second year of life, they started burning me. With hot needles, then larger broader instruments. On my face, belly, legs, arms, they burned every part of me. I knew the smell, sound, and sight of my cooking flesh. (66)
As her story begins, she is imprisoned on the twenty-eighth floor of Tower 7, a 200-year-old skyscraper located in Times Square that specializes in “advanced and aggressive genetic manipulation and cloning” (8). Like Iraqi War profiteers such as Blackwater and Halliburton, LifeGen, the international company that owns the Tower, is representative of the militarization of corporate culture.
At age two, Phoenix has the body of a forty-year-old woman but the emotional intelligence of a toddler who has grown up without tenderness (47). Phoenix’s brain has fully developed, but her consciousness has not. She is just beginning to recognize the reality of her situation. “To them, I was like a plant they grew for the sake of harvesting” (9). Child development authorities such as Piaget, Kohlberg, and Gilligan agree that moral development is set in the first three years of life. Phoenix lacks any preverbal, intimate relationship that can become the basis for emotions such as compassion, shame and guilt, but like most infants she does have a basic tendency toward facial connection and bonding. The focus of Phoenix’s LifeGen education has been to repress her affection, empathy, and altruism as well as her response to pain (14), so she has intentionally been subjected to extreme emotional neglect and repeated trauma.
In “Mother–Child Discourse, Attachment Security, Shared Positive Affect, and Early Conscience Development,” Deborah Laible and Ross Thompson explain that
a warm, supportive mother–child relationship and early conversations about the child’s behavior infused with discussions of feelings and values advance a child’s early conscience development. (1424)
However, Bumi, the Nigerian scientist who has cared for Phoenix since her birth, is also her torturer. Bumi routinely puts her in a machine that heats up like a furnace. When Phoenix screams in pain, Bumi responds with soothing aphorisms like “Nothing great comes without pain” and “Just relax” (17). Later Phoenix concludes, “She’d told me stories while she caused me pain; she was what lies were made of, even though her stories were truth” (53).
In her groundbreaking book, Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, psychotherapist Alice Miller describes the early lives of mass murderers such as Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Höss, and Joseph Stalin: all are characterized by “a brutal upbringing aimed at enforcing unthinking obedience and total contempt for the child” (83). Miller goes on to explain that “The victims of such an upbringing ache to do to others what was done to them” (84). Miller mentions three principles of Nazism that are particularly applicable to Phoenix’s early upbringing:
Disobedience and criticism are unthinkable, because they will be punished with corporal punishment and death threats.
The lively, vital child should be turned, as early as possible, into an obedient robot and slave.
Unwelcome feelings and real needs must, consequently, be suppressed to the maximum. (89)
Part of the horror of Phoenix’s story is that LifeGen is entirely aware that they are creating a monster. The triumph of the story, however, is that in Okorafor’s universe, there are forces more powerful than human hubris. (This can also be seen as a response to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.)
In “The Origins of Morality in Early Childhood Relationships,” Carol Gilligan and Grant Wiggins write that
If recurrent childhood experiences of inequality are less mitigated by experiences of attachment ... compounded by social inequality in adolescence ... feelings of powerlessness may become heightened and the potential for violence may correspondingly increase. (116)
Although this is most typical of boys, Phoenix has been raised not as a girl but as an intelligent weapon. Despite being a genius who can read a 500-page book in two minutes, she is treated like a lab animal, a “speciMen” rather than a human being (9). (The capitalization of Men in speciMen is significant, a return to the concept of the male being the gender default.) The ability to care and feel compassion for others is grounded in attachment, but Phoenix has not experienced it except with her friend Saeed, another cyborg experiment who has been altered to be an apocalypse soldier able to live on refuse, rust, and gravel (15). Thus, Phoenix’s morality is artificially constructed from the thousands of books she has read (7). When she is told that Saeed has died from eating an apple she gave him, she believes that she has nothing left to lose. He was the only one who listened to her. Gilligan and Wiggins write that
Moral outrage can be provoked not only by oppression and injustice but also by abandonment or loss of attachment or the failure of others to respond. In a study of high school girls, moral passion marked their descriptions of situations in which someone did not listen.... (120)
Phoenix’s moral outrage has been internalized. Artificially perimenopausal, she is experiencing hot flashes so serious that her body actually begins to burn, and electronic devices explode in her hands. A desperate escape attempt causes her to discover and awaken Seven, who is suspended in midair from an enormous tree in the Tower’s greenhouse, his feathered brown wings stretched wide (27). Phoenix sees him as similar to a picture from the Bible, but he also evokes the Hanged Man of other mythologies. Like the Hanged Man of the tarot, he does not appear to be suffering. In turn, Seven recognizes her as Change; he has been waiting for her.
Seven, we find out later, is a returning character from Okorafor’s earlier YA novel Akata Witch (2011). He is the reincarnation of a wrestler who was killed while fighting for the Zuma International Wrestling Championship. When he died, brown feathers unfurled from his back, and he shot up into the sky like a rocket (Akata 239). In Okorafor’s universe, death is not final for those who have fulfilled their purpose, but an opportunity to achieve higher purpose in a changed form. Later in the novel, he tells Phoenix that as he died, he remembered a song that called him to be one with God (Phoenix 179). He then chose to become the Guardian of New York: “Africa bleeds, but it will be fine,” he said. “I go where I am most needed” (180). Seven is to become a kind of meta-human father figure for Phoenix.
During her escape, Phoenix is able to reach the lobby of the Tower before the Big Eye guards kill her, and in dying, she explodes with heat and light, bringing down the building. Unable to die and stay dead, she rises out of the rubble after a mystically important seven days, and she sprouts wings. Hunted like an abomination, she escapes through the streets of New York and learns to fly:
I tried my wings and it was easy. The feathers had dried and all I had to do was imagine that I had another set of powerful arms. Powerful arms whose every curve, fold, muscle I could control. I could flex them, retract them, move specific parts. I ran.
Then I flew for my life. (52)
Seven helps her to escape and fly to Africa:
After destroying the helicopter, the winged man flew with me for miles. I was glad for the cover of night and his silent presence ... He flew so effortlessly, barely needing to flap his huge wings....
He seemed human, yet how could he be? There was something so steady about him, so even. (55)
The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets says the phoenix was first connected to the Phoenician god Phoenix who rose to heaven in the form of the Morning Star after his immolation, death, and rebirth (798). After the Egyptian pharaohs died, their bodies were cremated, and their souls were believed to take the form of the Horus-hawk (ibid.). Although he is twice as large as she is, Seven and Phoenix share a hawklike resemblance.
At first, Phoenix tries to find a way to live a normal life in Ghana despite her wings, but she continues to be chased by the Big Eye mercenaries, who consider her property that needs to be retrieved. When they kill her lover, a doctor named after Kofi Annan, she explodes again, and when she reincarnates her wings are red gold. Like Dana, the heroine of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, she develops the ability to slip through time as well as space. Each time she rises from her own ashes, her wings have changed color, and she is more powerful.
After she connects with a reincarnated Saeed and his friend, Mmuo, a Nigerian shapechanger who was also able to survive the fall of the Tower, she enters a more normal time where she is able to experience true friendship. Her body glows with light reflecting the chakras: orange, red, yellow, and a hint of blue that symbolically relates to the throat and a nascent ability to speak with compassion (115). This period proves to be the calm before the storm.
When the three friends become part of a cybernetically connected, meta-human resistance, Phoenix learns that she has DNA from the Mitochondrial Eve and a surrogate mother who had wanted to keep her but wasn’t allowed to do so (147). At this point, her flight foreshadows what she will soon become:
... in the sky, above and away from everything, with no one but the sun and the spiraling columns of warm air during the day and the moon and whipping cool winds at night, it was easy to be that which knew death intimately. (158)
Thus, like the vine-entwined dada hair from Okorafor’s earlier stories, flight becomes increasingly entwined with anger, metaphorically a moving response to bigotry and repression: feminist, cultural, political, and interracial, a response that includes both “flight” and “fight,” a pattern of behavior commonly found in trauma and abuse survivors. Psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman describes it as the result of a powerful need to reestablish control over bodily and emotional responses that reaffirms “a sense of power” (Herman 199). Herman writes, “Taking power in real-life situations often involves a conscious choice to face danger” (197). Herman goes on to explain that dangerous behavior may be a reenactment of earlier trauma, but “it is undertaken consciously, in a planned and methodical manner, and is therefore far more likely to succeed” (197).
Throughout, Seven provides a kind of moral compass, and Phoenix muses, “Things felt balanced and right when I was near him” (180). Despite Phoenix’s attraction to Seven’s emotional balance, it is necessary to note that he is also a lethal weapon who has clearly left most of his humanity behind. He takes a longer view of mortality and suffering. He knows things that Phoenix does not, and his perspective is farsighted rather than immediately altruistic:
“All things are part of The Whole,” he said. “All things can heal. All things have spirit. Everything is powerful, Phoenix Okore. But the towers are violating all that is natural, they are endangering life on earth in its totality—” (152)
(The title “Okore” ties her to Okorafor, but it also suggests Kore, the Greek Holy Virgin and Mother Earth, the Heart of the World [Walker, 514].)
When Phoenix tells him she does not believe in God, he just laughs and pats her on the shoulder implying that she has much yet to learn (179). His advice to Phoenix is also counterintuitive: “If you are unsure of what to do, go with the choice that hurts your heart. It is the correct one” (180). In other words, look to the long term and don’t simply make a choice that avoids short-term harm.
Gradually, in response to the evil techno-military power structure that controls the world, Phoenix’s anger becomes a weapon she can focus. The cyborgs with whom she now fights have drawn meaning from previous human rights revolutions. An ungrammatical letter rescued from the team’s demolition of LifeGen Tower 5 reflects early slave rebellions as well as second-wave feminism:
Do you remember the man Nat Turner? You don’t because he has been erased from your files or buried in disconnected databases. Replaced with your commercials about skin, sex, hair products, food, sparkling water, and money. We tell his story by mouth. Then we sent his story amongst us by electronic file. Then the Phoenix struck and his story came to life (192).
The letter echoes feminist issues clearly outlined in Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1974):
... if only you took proper care of your smells, your hair, your boobs, your eyelashes, your armpits, your crotch, your stars, your scars, and your choice of Scotch in bars—you would meet a beautiful, powerful, potent, and rich man who would satisfy every longing, fill every hole ... and fly you to the moon (preferably on gossamer wings), where you would live totally satisfied forever. (15)
The rebellion is a spontaneous explosion of rage against corporate neo-imperialism. However, it is not a human rights revolution. Okorafor’s fiction is clear that her meta-humans are the product of a post-human evolutionary movement that has always been in process. LifeGen’s genetic tampering simply accelerates what is already happening. With all of written history at their disposal, those in the meta-human resistance recognize this and demand the right not to be property despite the capital investment that went into their creation.
In Primate Visions (1989), Donna Haraway defines a cyborg as “the figure born of the interface of automaton and autonomy” (139). Phoenix’s memoir describes a process by which autonomy can be gained through questioning and critical thinking. Phoenix with her injected nanomites and her titanium bones represents the “binary oppositions of meat/metal” described in Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” a chapter of her book, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991). For Haraway, the cyborg is a “myth about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities” (154). In creating Phoenix, LifeGen transgressed moral boundaries, and she is indeed a dangerous possibility, but she also represents a kind of long-term wild card morality that endures beyond corporate control. Thus, her story becomes mythology again through the discovery of her memoir and its subsequent retelling.
Eventually, like Kali Ma, the Hindu triple goddess of creation, preservation, and destruction, Phoenix embodies Death itself: “the reaper come to reap what was sown” (221). Life and birth are always bound up with death and destruction (Walker, 488). Okorafor’s characters all are angry at a world where so much inhumanity occurs, but Phoenix is angry with a difference. She has a morality that comes out of abomination and a preordained ability to create change. Phoenix destroys, and her story languishes for two hundred years in the darkness of the junk pile, but in the long view, time means next to nothing. After Sunuteel’s discovery, her story rises from its ashes to become “the most read book in the last one hundred years” (230). The Book of Phoenix is not an ending but a beginning. 
Sandra Lindow lives in Menomonie, Wisconsin.
Works Cited
Butler, Octavia. Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979.
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982.
—— and Grant Wiggins. “The Origins of Morality in Early Childhood Relationships,” Mapping the Moral Domain. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Haraway, Donna. Primate Visions. New York: Routledge Press, 1989.
——. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Horror. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
Kohlberg, Lawrence. Essays on Moral Development. 2 volumes. New York: Harper and Row, 1981.
Jong, Erica. Fear of Flying. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1973.
Laible, Deborah J. and Thompson, Ross A. “Mother–Child Discourse, Attachment Security, Shared Positive Affect, and Early Conscience Development.” Child Development, Volume 71, Number 5 (September/October 2000).
Miller, Alice. Breaking Down the Wall of Silence. New York: Meridian, 1993.
Okorafor, Nnedi. Akata Witch. New York: Viking, 2011.
——. The Book of Phoenix. New York: DAW Books, 2015.
——. Shadow Speaker. As by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu. New York: Hyperion, 2007.
Piaget, Jean. The Moral Judgment of the Child. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co, 1932.
Walker, Barbara G. The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983.
Comments