In recent years women of color have consistently won awards for their often transgressive speculative fiction. Hugo and Nebula award winner Nnedi Okorafor is one of these nontraditional writers who have achieved success by taking African history and culture and giving it a fantastic, futuristic feminist twist. In the September/October 2017 issue of Asimov’s, sf old guard writer/critic Norman Spinrad calls her Hugo-winning novella Binti “something else again,” suggests that “nothing quite like this has ever been written and published in English” and concludes that “This would be a kind of post-modern space opera if it weren’t so serious in literary, psychological, and anthropological intent” (204). Structurally Okorafor’s stories often depart from both golden age sf and the heavy, complexly interwoven literary novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but they do not come out of nowhere. (Until now, Spinrad obviously has not been paying attention to a substantial sea change that has been occurring in the genre particularly since the beginning of the twenty-first century.) Most of Okorafor’s work is well-honed YA hero journeys, often structured in a series of vignettes similar to comic books or graphic novels. (In her Wahala Zone Blog, Okorafor explains that she learned about Joseph Campbell’s hero journey from her instructor at Clarion, Steven J. Barnes [“My Report”].) Furthermore, the lives of her characters are inextricably entwined with popular culture: food, music, art, and technology. To best understand her work, it is valuable to examine its dynamic connection to the Afrofuturist movement that began after World War II.
Afrofuturism is a way of looking at the past and imagining a future where Africans, African-Americans, and other African diaspora can be equal participants in creating a sustainable, egalitarian future. It is a movement that has been significantly influenced by music and art. Like other writers of color such as Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, N.K. Jemisin, and Nisi Shawl, Okorafor was informed by the Civil Rights Movement’s active reclamation of black history and culture that resulted in the Afrofuturist movement. Beginning with stories written in early creative writing classes, Okorafor takes contemporary problems such as bullying, racism, bigotry, ecological disaster, and out-of-control venture capitalism and moves them into the fantastic landscapes of Afrofuturism.
Going Back to the Roots
The roots of the Afrofuturist movement began decades ago in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s when people of color sought to reclaim the cultural richness of African descent through music and art as well as literature (Womack, 16–17). Although slavery had been officially abolished, ideological and political racism remained. Despite DNA proof of the unity of the human race, segregation continued to divide cities and performance of specific racially defined behaviors was expected. (In the late ’50s, this author’s Tennessee aunt had a black housekeeper who cooked fried chicken for the family but would not join us for dinner because it was not considered proper.)
Beginning in the ’50s, Afrofuturism was informed by the futuristic music of American jazz composer Sun Ra, born Herman Poole Blount (1914–1993), who legally changed his name to Le Sony’r Ra. Inspired by the space race, he sometimes wore spacesuits when he performed and claimed he was an alien abductee from the planet Saturn on a mission to preach peace. Throughout the rest of his life, he refused to recognize any other cultural identity (Wilson np). Correspondingly, ’60s psychedelic poster art combined with an Afrocentrist Black Arts movement that melds modern digital art techniques with fantastic African patterns and colors (Womack, 144). It is a surreal expressionist style that informs contemporary comic books and graphic novels and has recently rebloomed on the covers of scholarly books and literary anthologies created by artists such as John Jennings, “an advocate of using comics to shape black identity and Afrofuturism” (Womack, 144). In January 2017, Jennings published a graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred.
Cover to Damian Duffy & John Jenning’s adaptation of
Octavia Butler’s Kindred (Abrams 2017)
Cover to Mothership, edited by Bill Campbell and Edward Austin Hall (Rosarium Press, 2013)
Four of Jennings’s covers are shown here. They demonstrate a blending of historical, technological, tribal, and magical tropes, an intertextual weaving seen in Okorafor’s work as well. The cover illustration of Mothership is reminiscent of Phoenix, the main character in Okorafor’s novel The Book of Phoenix (2015).
Cover to Afrofuturism by Ytasha L. Womack (Chicago Review Press, 2013)
The illustration on Ytasha L. Womack’s
Afrofuturism perhaps bears a resemblance to a prosthetically enhanced, techno-feminist Lieutenant Uhura, magically cyborged by the third eye of enlightenment.
Octavia’s Brood, edited by Walidah Imarisha & Adrienne Maree Brown (AK PRess, 2015)
These and the cover of Octavia’s Brood all depict young women who have been empowered in various magical ways, suggesting that the line between science fiction and fantasy has been breached. (Throughout her work Okorafor has explored the transformative nature of art. This is particularly true in her children’s book, The Girl with the Magic Hands [2016]. Similarly, transformation of the human body through technology is central to The Book of Phoenix.)
Space, the Final Frontier
The 1960s Star Trek series began with the line “Space, the final frontier.” The metaphor of the frontier is important in the American mindset: it represents an often lawless place where problems of contemporary culture can be explored and redefined and a new order restored. Early science fiction writers such as Leigh Brackett (1915–1978) frequently wrote both in sf and other pulp genera such as westerns and mystery. Later, writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler used extraterrestrial frontier worlds to explore the dynamics of dystopia and utopia-in-progress. In the wagon train era of US history, the frontier was reached by crossing the Mississippi. During the Golden Age of Science Fiction, crossing the dangerous emptiness of space held similar promise of freedom in new lands. Within the context of Afrofuturism, crossing the emptiness of space has the significance of an escape from a kind of modern-day slavery characterized by economic barriers and low-end jobs. The Negro spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” includes the line: “The River Jordan is deep and wide, milk and honey on the other side.” Before the Civil War, the River Jordan codedly referred to crossing the Ohio River that divided the slave South from the free North, but later the song continued to have significance due to the dangerously swift and wide social and economic rivers that had to be crossed in order to partake in the American Dream.
Okorafor first won recognition for her stories based on their magical re-envisioning of African culture. Initially she was hesitant to write about space flight; she mentions on her blog, “I am not a fan of flying. It’s a control thing.” However, she recently moved her stories into outer space with Binti, which received the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Novella. On July 15, 2011, her blog describes how she and her daughter, Anya, attended the final space shuttle launch from Kennedy Space Center:
I’ve always had a hard time writing about space. I am very much an earthling. I don’t see myself ever leaving this planet while I am alive (I may be more adventurous after I die, heh). There is so much yet to discover (and fix) on earth, why look elsewhere? And my spiritual beliefs and the systems of magic I’m attracted to are earth-based, born and rooted deep in the soil. They are not in the “heavens.” Also, when I write about something, I have to get and feel close to the subject. I never feel close to “space,” no matter how much research I do. Maybe if I see the Space Shuttle launch this will change, I thought. (“Space Flight Awareness”)
Later she describes the launch as a “serious” “o-m-g moment,” and then she concludes that “maybe I can write about space now” (ibid.). Her description of the launch is intensely personal:
Once everyone saw the plumes of exhaust, people started cheering.... It was happening right in front of me..... And I was tingly with exhilaration and fear, it was so close. Then there was the noise. It was pressing on my face. Vibrating through my body.
Up up up, it went. Then it punched through the thin clouds. And then it was gone. You could see its shadow reflecting on the clouds. It took less than a minute. (ibid)
The immediacy of the launch seems to have overcome Okorafor’s hesitancy to write about space. Binti begins like a futuristic wagon train saga. It describes a young Himba woman’s travel between the stars, living among strangers who do not share her ways or respect her customs. In this story, the cultural artifacts and red clay earth that she takes with her are essential in resolving an interstellar conflict. When Binti takes a spaceship to a university on another planet, her ship is attacked, and her fellow students are murdered by warriors from a spear-wielding alien culture who have a legitimate grudge against the university. Through intelligence, quick wits, and endurance, Binti is able to overcome her fears enough to communicate with the jellyfish-like aliens.
In the story, Binti is looking for the “milk and honey” of an off-world university education. During the ’60s, many young black women’s dreams of extraterrestrial “milk and honey” possibilities were first sparked by Nichelle Nichols’s Star Trek character, Swahili-speaking Nyota Uhura (1966–69). (“Uhuru” is Swahili for “freedom,” and “Nyota” is “star.”) When Nichols considered resigning after the first season because she had so little to do in those initial episodes, Martin Luther King met her at a convention and asked her to reconsider: “You are changing the minds of people across the world. For the first time, through you, we see ourselves. What we can be, what we are fighting for, what we are marching for” (Womack 99). Fortunately, Nichols decided to continue, for Womack writes that Dr. Mae Jemison, the first black woman to go into space, was, as a child, inspired by Uhura to become an astronaut. In 2012 Jemison launched the 100 Year Starship project, a nonprofit whose goal is to achieve interstellar travel by 2112 (Womack, 99).
Racism, Double Consciousness, Cognitive Processing of Oppression
Much of Okorafor’s fiction evolves from her anger regarding sexism and racism. Early Afrofuturism was informed as a response to the conscious and unconscious racism that was an intrinsic part of American culture from the beginning. In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois described the inability of blacks to have a single unified identity as a “double consciousness.” In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois wrote:
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. (3)
Black identity was separate from American identity, and Du Bois implied that full adulthood as a man depended on an as-yet-to-be-defined psychological integration of identity; however, African Americans had internalized the racist concepts that kept them in their place, making integration extremely difficult if not impossible. Furthermore, black women had an even deeper hurdle to overcome because they were objectified in their own culture as well as in the American, a problem Du Bois could not see when in Chapter 13, “Of the Coming of John,” he wrote:
“Why, there isn’t even a girl worth getting up a respectable flirtation with,” he growled. Just then his eye caught a tall, willowy figure hurrying toward him on the narrow path. He looked with interest at first, and then burst into a laugh as he said, “Well, I declare, if it isn’t Jennie, the little brown kitchen-maid! Why, I never noticed before what a trim little body she is. Hello, Jennie! Why, you haven’t kissed me since I came home,” he said gaily. (111)
Afrofuturism was a literary movement that generated popular and critical interest in writers of color who were aware of their own biases and could use “double consciousness” as a tool to depict their characters’ struggles as universal human struggles against the evils of colonialism and paternalism. Being gender queer or female was no longer a literary problem because those issues could be safely discussed when set outside the here and now in the landscapes of Afrofuturism. In the ’70s, alienated young people who felt like cultural outsiders sought vicarious empowerment though books like Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren (1975) and Butler’s Kindred (1979), novels where viewpoint characters use their wits to battle against the forces of evil and oppression. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, Butler’s Patternmaster series (1976–84) became very popular with college students partly because it championed the creation of networks to battle against evil. What is important is that a metacognitive environment had been established where black writers could envision a future that cherished who they were and where they came from and transcended the lingering post-colonial limitations that had caused them to be ghettoized in northern cities and eyed skeptically whenever they were in white neighborhoods. Okorafor has mentioned that as a member of the only black family to move to South Holland Park, a suburb of Chicago, she was often the focus of racist comments and abusive behavior by other children; however, her family support had given her the self-esteem to keep from being broken by racism. She explains:
The racism was “quite epic,” she says.
We were always running from racist older kids. But racism never deterred me from doing anything. Coming from Nigeria, my parents were aware that the United States had a lot of issues, but they were also aware that it had a lot of opportunities. I was instilled with that attitude—there are issues here but you get over them. Obstacles should not keep you from attaining what you seek. (Hand, n.p.)
This courage to press onward is depicted throughout Okorafor’s fiction. It corresponds with a measured response to racist behavior that recognizes it but doesn’t let it distract from personal goals. This is particularly depicted early in Binti when Binti feels her hair being pulled by a group of veiled Khoush women but does not allow this to deter her progress through the line at the shuttle station. She straightforwardly returns the gaze of the offending women but keeps her future goals at the forefront of her mind: “Those women talked about me, the men probably did too. But none of them knew what I had, where I was going, who I was” (17).
Black Power, Women, and the Comics
One of the ways that Afrofuturism has found self-expression is through digital art and comic books. Beginning with the early American comic books, the nature of power has been explored through primary colors, spiky lines and text interjected with all the prerequisite whams, bangs, and pows. In 1966, Stokely Carmichael acclaimed the importance of “Black Power” and black became “beautiful”. In “Brave Black Worlds: Black Superheroes as Science Fiction Ciphers,” Adilifu Nama explains that
Indeed, “black” not only became the appropriate term for designating a new type of political consciousness, but it also provided a synchronous template for the creation of a regal, super-intelligent, and highly skilled hunter-fighter black superhero [named Black Panther] from the fictional African nation of Wakanda. (137)
Black Panther usually appears as if he has been carved from particularly heavy black onyx and ebony. His yellow-eyed, sculptured, sweat-shiny, hulking power is evident. The message is that to be truly powerful, a man must appear invincible to the point that he no longer appears really human. But what does it mean to be a powerful black woman? At first, although women could claim the beauty of being black, power was essentially a male descriptor. In 1964, a Black Panther spokesman—either Carmichael or Chaka Walls—had announced that the only position for women in SNCC (The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) was “prone” (Daniel, 305). By “prone” he clearly implied sexually enhanced support services, but black women who had been essential to the movement from the beginning were envisioning their own paths to power.
After World War II, women had been moved out of powerful, well-paying, “hard” factory jobs and back into “softer” homemaking roles, but by the ’60s women had begun to rebel against these restrictions. Girls growing up in the ’50s and ’60s wanted to read comics where women as well as men had powers. Wonder Woman, perhaps the oldest feminist icon in popular culture (predating even Rosie the Riveter), first appeared in 1941 and had a mid-70s TV show which inspired a generation of little girls to lobby for belts and armbands and to spin around just like Wonder Woman. (In the 1970s, Samuel R. Delany wrote two issues of Wonder Woman, part of a longer series where she temporarily abandoned her super powers to become a secret agent [202 and 203]. Wonder Woman was restored to her original costume and powers in part in response to her adoption as a symbol by Ms. Magazine in 1971.) Stanford Carpenter, president and cofounder of the Institute for Comics Studies, has explained that such cosplay is about “empowerment.” He believes that it “inherently pushes against many of the stereotypes that are thrust upon us” by pushing the boundaries of what a person can be and in so doing, imagining “a whole new world and possibilities that can extend beyond the cosplay experience” (Womack, 14). Little girls believed that if Wonder Woman could fly, perhaps they could, too. Despite her initial conventionality regarding heterosexual love, marriage, and family, Wonder Woman still inspired self-confidence and the ability to leave everyday restrictions behind. (Depiction of Wonder Woman’s sexuality has evolved. The highly acclaimed 2017 Wonder Woman movie starring Gal Gadot and directed by Patty Jenkins implies her bisexuality, as have many recent storylines in the comics. Diana is an Amazon princess and comes from the island of Themyscira but already understands sexual pleasure when American World War I pilot Steve Trevor, played by Chris Pine, crashes offshore of the island and is rescued by her.)
In “The Mother of All Superheroes: Idealizations of Femininity in Wonder Woman,” Zechowski and Neumann explain that “central” to Wonder Woman’s power “is the idea that any woman (or girl) could be a Wonder Woman” (124). It can be argued that Wonder Woman evinces each era’s idea of the intersection of femininity and power. The Wonder Woman movie depicts a Wonder Woman who is not only strong and smart but also an effective leader able to do what men think impossible. In a June 16 review in the Learned Fan Girl, author Inda explains, “The entire No-Man’s Land sequence is a defiant refutation of the idea that a thing can’t be done just because men tell you it’s not possible. Not only can women tread (and stomp, and smash) where men say they cannot, they can inspire others to follow and fight for themselves.” Comic books, which gained considerable cultural importance for Baby Boomers, were marketed to girls from their inception in the 1930s. Black-clad characters such as Catwoman, who first appeared in Batman #1 in 1940, could be considered codedly black, a possibility that was eventually explored in the 2004 Catwoman movie where the eponymous character was played by Halle Berry.
Although the first superheroes were adults, teenagers soon became a focus. Supergirl was created in 1958 and was a recurring feature in the Superman line of comics of the ’60s. She appeared in her own comics beginning in the ’70s. Although blond, blue-eyed, and perpetually teenaged, she did have agency and the ability to have her own adventures, paving the way for other young superheroines who appeared later. (The present Supergirl TV show, which debuted in 2015 starring Melissa Benoist, reflects twenty-first-century values, allowing an adult, not teen, Supergirl/Kara Danvers to have a career in publishing as well as having adult relationships.) In 1993, Milestone Comics, the first comic book company formed by black writers, artists, and editors, created Raquel “Rocket” Ervin, the first black teenaged unwed mother to become a superhero. Her inertia belt allowed her to manipulate kinetic energy. The name of the belt is interesting, having a double consciousness of its own. While in physics, inertia refers to the property of a body to remain at rest if it is at rest or to remain in motion if it is in motion, in popular parlance, the word commonly refers to apathy or an inability to move or act. This psychological stagnation is exactly what the Afrofuturist movement attempted to thwart by supporting hopes and dreams.
Much of Okorafor’s fiction explores the nature of power and what it means to be powerful, and her work has taken hold with feminists partly because women of every ethnic background readily see the value of rising above gender stereotyping and prejudice. At present she’s writing a comic arc starting Black Panther as well as another Marvel comic based on the character Ngozi (created by Okorafor with artist J. Tana Ford), a Nigerian teenage girl who is bonded to the alien symbiotic organism Venom.
The adventures of superheroines who can fly intersects with African-American legends of people who flew away from slavery, both becoming fantastic histories that informed Okorafor’s early Windseeker stories and later her post-apocalyptic The Book of Phoenix. Flight is one of the central unifying tropes of Okorafor’s fiction, and her work demonstrates a conscious attempt to explode the previous cultural limitations on a young woman’s right to be a hero and use powers equal to a man’s. For the most part her viewpoint characters are believably young and imperfect but also magically talented, super girls on the verge of becoming wonder women. In “How Inyang Got Her Wings” (2013), a short story taken from an early unpublished novel, a young woman realizes that she has inherited the ability to levitate and even fly. It begins:
She circled high above her village, looking down. It would be the last time she ever saw it as it was. Okodon-Ndem, Calabar, Nigeria, 1929. The rectangular adobe sleeping quarters with cooking fires burning in front of them. Built in a circle. A courtyard in the center. The spaces between the huts filled in by forest. Yam and manioc farms close by....
She shed no tears. Instead, she looked ahead. To the east. The sun was rising. (61)
Here the rising sun symbolizes a chance at a better life less controlled by the traditional values that kept women in their place. Like Octavia Butler before her, Okorafor is deeply interested in the idea of autonomy and having control over one’s life/destiny.
The most significant black female superhero in comics is Ororo Munroe, known as Storm, who first appeared in the X-Men series in 1975, created by Len Wein and Dave Cockrum. An earlier “Storm” appeared in 1961, when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the superheroine Susan Lee Storm, the Invisible Girl, as part of Marvel Comics’s Fantastic Four. They (particularly Lee) still wore the sexist blinders of the ’50s and seemed to lack any clear understanding of how a girl could be heroic. Sue was, in fact, initially expected to disappear when the Four faced danger, and she often needed to be rescued because she had not yet grown into her own powers; it took until 1985 for her to become “The Invisible Woman” (Durowski, 202, Edmunds, 212). However, by the ’70s and ’80s, T. Keith Edmunds writes that comic book heroines seemed “more independent and purposeful than their predecessors” (212). In an article in African Identities, Adilifu Nama suggests that Storm “epitomizes the imaginative space between science fiction and the supernatural” with her mutant abilities to fly and to change the weather, powers associated with the elemental energy of earth and air as well as the environment” (142). Symbolizing the struggles that women of color face and resist, Storm, the orphaned daughter of a Kenyan tribal princess, overcomes her early life on the streets of Harlem and Cairo to become a competent leader of the X-Men, a superhero organization dominated by white men (142). Storm has appeared in five installments of the live-action X-Men film series, where she is portrayed initially by actress Halle Berry and by Alexandra Shipp in the most recent, X-Men: Apocalypse.
Okorafor’s early Windseekers, genetically mutated humans who can fly, may be seen as literary descendants of Ororo. Okorafor begins her chronicle of these Windseekers before the turn of the twentieth century. To have a future, the past must be clearly understood, and her windseeking characters follow a learning curve that parallels the history of the Women’s Movement in the United States, although The Book of the Phoenix reflects a dystopian future where rights violations are once again common but now horrifyingly intertwined with scientific advances in genetics and technology.
The Name of the Game
Although the roots of Afrofuturism were already deep in American cultural soil, the movement itself was not identified as such until the 1990s when there was renewed interest in Afrocentrism. As Ytasha L. Womack explains in her book Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (2013), Afrofuturism reflects an “intersection of imagination, technology, the future, and liberation” (9). Nisi Shawl says it a slightly different way: “Afrofuturism is a movement focused on African contributions to, perspectives on, and presence in the future” (Inda). The term was first coined by cultural critic Mark Dery in “Black to the Future,” his 1993 essay that included interviews with black writers Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose. With a bit of contextual dark humor, Dery wondered why so few African Americans were then writing sf since they could be considered the descendants of “alien abductees” (180). To which, Delany theorized that black literary writers had more in common with Toni Morrison and Ishmael Reed than with the hard science fiction writers of the sf Golden Age. In response, Tate suggested that “Black people are already living the estrangement that science fiction writers imagine” (212), and he noticed that black teenagers were increasingly drawn to the elaborately enhanced “Sci-Fi” superheroes that were then appearing in pop culture comics, video games, TV, and movies (109). Tate also noted an integration of outer space themes with contemporary music by black groups, demonstrated by the cover of the X Clan record, To the East, Blackwards, which depicts a pink Cadillac heading into starlit space carrying the faces of black martyrs and reflecting the mysticism embraced by many musicians of the time (Dery, 210).
Although the role models pictured on the cover are for the most part male, the Cadillac is very pink. What “Black to the Future” describes is a conceptually fecund atmosphere for something to happen, and in the next few years, it does: A literary movement takes shape that embraces both male and female, past and future. As Tate explains, “You can be backward looking and forward thinking at the same time” (211), and this backward/forward dynamic is one of the major unifying principles throughout Okorafor’s fiction.
Okorafor and the Landscape of Afrofuturism
This backward and forward looking was taking place on college campuses when Okorafor enrolled at the University of Illinois as a freshman in 1992. Chicago at that time was becoming a focal point for Afrofuturist thought and culture. Growing up, Okorafor had spent many summers in her father’s home village in Nigeria where, despite her love for the flora and fauna, she was frequently bullied for believing in her own rights as a young woman. In America, Okorafor’s family lived within a closely knit Nigerian-American community that had always honored African customs and traditions; however, as a result of a renewed interest in African Studies classes, American black college students were also celebrating African food, clothing, and culture, and some of these students were also participating in sf fandom, conventions, gaming, and cosplay while following larger-than-life black superheroes in comics, television and films. Lando Calrissian, portrayed by Billy Dee Williams, first appeared in the second Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes Back, in 1980. More recent movies provide easy access to contemporary Afrofuturism. From 1986 to 1993, black actor LeVar Burton starred in Star Trek, the Next Generation (and in films after that); his blind character, Geordi La Forge, wore a prosthetic visor that allowed him to see. Movies such as Wesley Snipes’s Blade Trilogy (1998–2004) and Denzel Washington’s The Book of Eli (2010) explored post-apocalyptic Afrofuturist landscapes. For the most part the biggest black stars were male with Halle Berry the exception, but in 2009 Zoe Saldana starred in the neocolonial adventure, Avatar, and beginning in 2014, she has starred as green-skinned Gamora in Marvel Studios’s multicultural hit series, Guardians of the Galaxy.
Womack explains that these students identified race as a kind of “technology, a human–created categorization process enforced by law and violence that deemed darker people as alien” (Uncanny). They theorized that if race were an artificial construct, it followed then that “imagination and improvisation” could become tools for mastering racism and transcending the impacts of racial bias through technology. They concluded that when all humanity was valued, all isms would end (Uncanny, n.p.).
Imagination and improvisation are essential tools of Okorafor’s hero journeys as well as characteristics of her own life. When she entered college, she assumed she would be a professional athlete. She came from an athletic family. Her parents were excellent athletes, her mother part of Nigeria’s Olympic javelin team, her father a famous hurdler in Africa. She ran track, and as teenagers, she and her sister were nationally recognized in tennis, but after her freshman year in college, she was temporarily paralyzed after spinal fusion surgery to correct her scoliosis. It was during her slow recovery that she began to write and then took her first creative writing class her sophomore year.
With her complicated cultural background, Okorafor was in the perfect place to move to the forefront of what would be identified as Afrofuturist writing. Her early stories meld technology with African mythology, culture, and landscapes. In “Spider the Artist,” 2008, her first clearly science fiction story, she describes a robotic AI designed by the military industrial complex to protect Nigerian oil pipelines:
The government and the oil people destroyed our land and dug up our oil, then they created robots to keep us from taking it back.
They were originally called Anansi Droids 419 but we call them ‘oyibo contraption’ and most often Zombie. (Kabu Kabu, 104)
Eme, the viewpoint character, is a young woman living in an environmentally destroyed village with an alcoholic husband who beats her. Eme’s hero journey is emotional. She is clearly in despair when she essentially falls in love with one of these robots who has developed consciousness, as well as an appreciation and aptitude for music that can work to heal dysfunctional relationships. Eme calls him Udide Okwanka, a name that in Igbo means “spider the artist” (111). In many African mythologies, Anansi the Spider is considered the trickster-creator of all stories. In this story, Anansi’s name has been appropriated and corrupted by capitalism. The number given to the spider-shaped robots is also significant because 419 is the number for banking-fraud scams in the Nigerian criminal code. The intent of the robot developers is to protect their investment at all costs, but it becomes apparent that a true Anansi spirit is working through this robot when it goes rogue to befriend and protect Eme. In her later novel, Lagoon (2014), Okorafor further identifies Udide as narrator and author of all stories, a synesthetic spinner who can “feel taste” and “hear touch” (291). Udide is cousin to Anansi and an immortal who has been called from semi-retirement under the city of Lagos to protect the city from environmental destruction through its trickster talent and willingness to “play dirty” (293).
WisCon at Work
While Okorafor was at work developing the Afrofuturist universe that interconnects her novels and short stories, the novement picked up support from a slightly different direction: WisCon, the feminist science fiction convention that in 1990 created the Tiptree Award for gender-bending speculative fiction. WisCon, which first began in 1977 as a small, regional convention held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, had always welcomed writers of color, but beginning in 1997. panels considered how the feminist community could be more supportive of writers of color. Then in 1999, discussions regarding Delany’s essay “Racism and Science Fiction” published in the New York Review of Science Fiction (August 1998), led to the creation of the Carl Brandon Society, a group whose mission is to “increase racial and ethnic diversity in the production of and audience for speculative fiction” (CBS website). Delany wrote:
Because we still live in a racist society, the only way to combat it in any systematic way is to establish—and repeatedly revamp—anti-racist institutions and traditions. That means actively encouraging the attendance of nonwhite readers and writers at conventions. It means actively presenting nonwhite writers with a forum to discuss precisely these problems in the con programming. (“Racism,” n. p.)
Since 2005, the Society has offered two $1000 awards, the Kindred and the Parallax, for speculative work by writers of color and for works that examine race, ethnicity, and culture. In 2007, Okorafor won the Parallax Award for Shadow Speaker, and in 2010, she received the Kindred Award for Who Fears Death.
According to Womack, the Afrofuturist movement began to develop momentum in 2000 when Alondra Nelson, a student–turned–professor, created an Afrofuturism listserv that became “a discussion portal for students and artists wrestling with the dynamic intersection of black history, technology, and the future” (“Afrofuturism Rising”). Since 2000 there has been a flowering of fiction and criticism that explores Afrofuturist landscapes and concerns, as well as increased recognition for those who write it. Part of this renaissance has involved discovering and republishing stories by African American writers. In 2000, Sheree R. Thomas published an important Afrofuturist anthology, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, which included a story published by Charles W. Chesnutt that had been written as early as 1887 and one by W.E.B. Du Bois that was originally published in 1920. In 2004 Okorafor published a short story in Thomas’s second volume, Dark Matter: Reading the Bones.
By the beginning of this century, writers of color were beginning to draw considerable critical attention. Many of them were women. In 2002, Nalo Hopkinson was the first person of color to be a WisCon guest of honor. In 2010 Nnedi Okorafor shared the honor with writer/editor Mary Anne Mohanraj, and since then there have been six more Afrofuturist guests: Nisi Shawl, Andrea Hairston, N. K. Jemisin, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Sofia Samatar, and Nalo Hopkinson again. The WisCon web site has announced that the 2018 WisCon’s invited guests of honor are Saladin Ahmed, writer of Black Bolt for Marvel Comics, and award-winning novelist/screenwriter Tananarive Due, who teaches Afrofuturism at UCLA. The feminist sf community has embraced these writers, and they in turn have infused feminist sf/f with creative energy at a time when the original second-wave feminist sf writers are no longer in the forefront. Their popularity is based on their willingness to break the mold of traditional sf tropes and not be guided by the constraints of Western mythology. They also tend to ignore essentialist concepts of gender and binary norms. Womack writes that “Women Afrofuturists have decision-making power over their creative voice. They make their own standards and sculpt their own lens through which to view the world and for the world to view them” (104). Feminist Afrofuturists such as Okorafor are creating their own norms and their own characters based on their own experience and their own understanding of history. Their protagonists tend not to reflect the stereotypical “modest maidens, wicked temptresses, pretty schoolmarms, beautiful bitches ... [and] faithful wives” that Joanna Russ found so limiting in her 1972 essay “Why Women Can’t Write” (81). Adjectives like submissive and subservient don’t usually describe their protagonists, and they envision cultures where women, children and animals are respected while males, especially white males, no longer have some of the uncontested privileges they have so long enjoyed. In doing so, they have aroused the ire of some male sf writers and fans, an opposition, however, that has done little to slow the feminist Afrofuturist momentum. (In 2015 and 2016, a group called the Rabid Puppies, led by sf writer and publisher Vox Day, tried to rig the Hugo Awards, a move that caused fans to rally in support of writers of color with the result of the 2016 awards for fiction all going to women, with four of the five women of color. Vox Day had previously called N.K. Jemisin an “ignorant half savage” although Jemisin has a master’s degree in education from the University of Maryland. The World Science Fiction Convention, which issues the Hugo Awards, responded with a series of rules changes to make such hijacking much more difficult in the future.)
In her essay, “Race in Science Fiction: The Case of Afrofuturism,” Lisa Yaszek suggests that historically, Afrofuturist stories have been created in response to a series of questions: “Will there be a future for black people?” “What is it that black people will have to do to secure a future where they are free citizens?” “Is some kind of apocalyptic event required to level the playing field?” and “What role can science and technology play in creating a less hierarchical future?” (Yaszek, 6). Whereas Okorafor’s early Windseeker stories depict secret fantastic histories, beginning with Zahrah the Windseeker (2006) her work examines the importance of soft sustainable technology, and with The Shadow Speaker, (2007) she depicts the results of apocalyptic events such as the Peace Bomb, a device that, once detonated, destroys electronics and opens a gap between alternate universes. In addition to Yaszek’s questions, Okorafor joins Nalo Hopkinson in asking, “What role will the mythic supernatural have in human evolution?“ and like Octavia Butler before them, “What role will alien intervention play?” (Hopkinson interweaves mythology and the supernatural in her fiction often in transgressive ways as in her novel The Chaos where Baba Yaga and her flying chicken-legged house appear in downtown Toronto. Butler’s Xenogenesis series describes the spacefaring Oankali who travel the universe exchanging genetic information and thus changing every intelligent culture they meet.) Is an infusion of alien influence and genetic material necessary to end man-unkind’s propensity toward prejudice, corruption, violence, and war? Okorafor explores this question in her novel Lagoon. Furthermore, her answers must be interpreted through the lens of third-wave feminism and a desire to recreate a world where all women have equal respect and agency.
Heartfelt Heroines
Okorafor’s heroines earn the right to succeed through intelligence, hard work, and perseverance. She is part of a generation of women of color who were informed by a media landscape that was taking tentative steps toward racial equality and feminism. (The first interracial kiss on American network television occurred in a Star Trek episode, “Plato’s Stepchildren,” which aired on November 22, 1968, when Captain Kirk [William Shatner] kisses Lieutenant Uhura [Nichelle Nichols].) She grew up at a time when women’s rights were being dragged, sometimes forcibly, to popular culture’s center stage. Beginning in 1972, feminine physical strength was being validated through Title IX equality in education programs. Ms. Magazine, boasting a cover picture of Wonder Woman, was first published in December 1971 and very early began to champion the writing of women of color. Writers such as Joanna Russ recognized that within the constraints of cultural conventions, it was hard to write heroic women and insisted that girls had a right to their own hero stories. (Russ published Kittatinny, her own Bildungsroman for girls, in 1978.) Science fiction by women writers bloomed in the ’70s and ’80s, creating female characters who were strong and brave and just as likely to rescue as to be rescued. Beginning in 1969, Ursula K. Le Guin insisted on black protagonists in her Earthsea series and later books. In Butler’s Kindred (1979) and Jewelle Gomez’s ethical vampire book The Gilda Stories (1991) Afrofuturism attempts to redirect the hopeless futurelessness of the slave/minority mindset and to redefine morality in a way that transcends the imposed political/ideological limitations of the dominant culture, what Martin Luther King described in 1963 as a “deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars” (King).
In transcripts from a 2008 Black Writers Conference at Medgar Evers College, Walter Mosley suggests that science fiction and speculative fiction are the only forms of fiction that are “truly revolutionary” (ibid.). Mosley concludes that sf/f is revolutionary in that it “overthrows a way of thinking” and puts pressure on the writer “to figure out, what are you going to do now that you’re here?” (ibid.). Okorafor’s protagonists Zahrah, Ejii, Sunny, Onye, and Binti all must rethink their behavior and create meaning from novel Afrofuturist environments, a process that is essential to their moral development. In each case there are revolutionary personal and societal results. In Octavia’s Brood : Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, Sheree Renée Thomas has written that social justice represents one of the most serious challenges to the conscience of our world” (Thomas, 1). In the Introduction, Walidah Imarisha explains that “Visionary fiction is a term intended to differentiate science fiction that validates ‘freer worlds’” than those depicted in mainstream sf, a landscape which, according to Imarisha, “most often reinforces dominant narratives of power” (4). Correspondingly, Okorafor writes fiction that evolves from social justice issues. In particular, The Book of Phoenix is a cautionary tale about what happens when social justice is denied.
In “Outro,” the conclusion to the Brood anthology, Adrienne Maree Brown provides three tools for writing fiction that explores current social justice issues through an sf lens. The first tool is visionary fiction that evidences “power inequalities” and is “conscious of identity and intersecting identities” by centering in particular on those who have been marginalized. With her emphasis on the Bildungsroman adventures of young women from minority cultures, Okorafor’s work clearly represents this focus, in particular when her viewpoint characters are bullied and harassed for being different.
Brown’s second tool is “emergence,” which looks at providing strategies for change that is not “linear, hierarchical,” or “outcome oriented” or developed in ways that cannot adapt to changing conditions (280). Emergence respects and valorizes change as emphasized in Butler’s Parable of the Sower, where protagonist Lauren Olamina’s mantra has become an sf cultural icon: “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change” (1). Beginning with her early short stories, Okorafor consistently depicts emergent talents and cultures. Butler’s mantra is particularly reflected in the second chapter of The Shadow Speaker, which begins, “History is change” (10). Okorafor’s ideal for change is primarily that of natural, sustainable emergence although there are specific cases where out-of-control evil is met with revolutionary violence. As Okorafor demonstrates in The Shadow Speaker, change that is based on coercion cannot last, but change that is built on an understanding of nature and human nature has a chance. Although preparedness is essential (and all her heroines prepare for their journeys), there is always an aspect of life that cannot be controlled; because of either chaotic natural forces or unfathomable divine design; throughout her work, a mythopoeic trickster tendency exists that is always at work generating serendipitous events and unexpected answers; therein lies a sly, cosmic humor.
Brown’s final tool is networking. One reason for the recent flowering of Afrofuturist fiction has been effective mentoring and communicating. Samuel R. Delany, whose apocalyptic landscapes defined early Afrofuturist fiction, began publishing in 1962, and in 1970, Delany mentored Octavia Butler at Clarion. Clarion, which has been in existence since 1968, has consistently provided literary midwifery for the genre. Butler’s first story was workshopped at Clarion and published in 1971. Later, Butler taught at Clarion, and in 1995 she was the recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellows (the so-called “Genius Award”). After Butler died in 2006, a Clarion scholarship for writers of color was established in Butler’s name. Steven Barnes first published in 1974 and later became a teacher at Clarion. Many of Okorafor’s early stories were created in 2000 and workshopped at “The Future (Re-)Envisioned,” the 2001 Clarion Writers’ Workshop in Lansing, Michigan. One of her teachers was Steven Barnes; another was WisCon Motherboard member Pat Murphy. Prior to Clarion, many of her university instructors had tried to warn her away from sf/f, but after Clarion, she found her place in a vibrant community.
In conclusion, Okorafor is presently part of a loosely connected network of writers of color who know and support each other that, among others, includes Steven Barnes, Tananarive Due, Andrea Hairston, Nalo Hopkinson, Walidah Imarisha, N.K. Jemisin, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Nisi Shawl, and Sheree Renée Thomas. A 2015 conference, attended by many of the aforementioned writers, generated the following manifesto:
We claim the freedom to write whatever the fuck we want and be the artists we need to be.
We commit to supporting each other’s growth.
We recognize the power/danger/potential of the images we create and proliferate.
We experiment and learn: “Never a failure; always a lesson!” (Shawl, 157)
Clearly this manifesto is one that Okorafor has embodied from the beginning of her career, and now there is strength in numbers, an ever-increasing number of award-winning Afrofuturist stories and novels where women have power and the powerful tools to say what needs to be said and do what needs to be done.
Sandra Lindow lives in Menomonie, Wisconsin.
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