Stories for Chip

by Nisi Shawl

  Talk about a gut punch! This man utilized all the power and privilege granted him in everyday life by his white skin to reduce my intellect, to make me feel small, to humiliate me in front of my friend, and to alienate me from the program. And I am certain he was unware of the power of his words and the extent to which they harmed me because further classes went on as before, with the exception that I no longer participated in discussions. I no longer had the desire to try out my ideas in a roomful of my peers—a devastating thing for the intellectual growth of a budding scholar. I am definitely not Frederick Douglass, but he acted like the slave-breaker Mr. Covey! Douglass captured exactly how I felt at that moment in his monumental Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: “My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died…and behold a man transformed into a brute!” (73).

  I remember the stunned and sympathetic look my friend gave me; I remember leaving the classroom and sitting in the stairwell feeling stupid, inconsequential, and disoriented while my buddy tried to console me with an expletive-laced diatribe against that particular professor’s intellectual abuse; and most of all I remember discovering Delany’s essay “Racism and Science Fiction” (1999) a short time later, reprinted in the back of Sheree R. Thomas’s Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Literature from the African Diaspora (2000), while writing my first ever book review for Science Fiction Studies.4 Delany scrutinizes racism’s systemic structure while tracing his own predecessors and successors in speculative fiction. He then shares a couple particular examples of racism from his own early career before offering possible ways of dismantling racism in science fiction by encouraging minorities to participate at conferences through panel discussions, open race dialogues involving writers and readers of different races, and confronting white comfort zones established by centuries of oppression.

  Delany explains two moments of straightforward racism in his early career. First, the legendary editor John W. Campbell, Jr.—commonly recognized as the shaper of the Golden Age of Science Fiction (1939-1948) through his editing of Astounding Science Fiction magazine and handling his stable of writers (Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and A. E. Van Vogt)—rejected Delany’s novel Nova (1968) for serialization because it had a black main character. Campbell spurned Nova after Delany won two consecutive Nebula Awards for best novel in 1967 (Babel-17[1966]) and 1968 (The Einstein Intersection [1967]) simply because Delany was black. In fact, Campbell was publicly hostile to conceding “civil rights for African-Americans” according to Albert Berger (187). Likewise, Gary Westfahl reveals how everybody in the science fiction community knew how “Campbell was a racist, a bigot, a sexist, and an anti-Semite” (50). At that point in American history, Delany was forced to accept Campbell’s racial intolerance in order to have a long and illustrious career.

  The second occasion occurred when Isaac Asimov flippantly called Delany a Negro in a private conversation at the 1968 Nebula Awards Banquet. Context matters here, because Delany had just been pilloried by the award presenter (who had not yet read Delany’s winning novel The Einstein Intersection) in front of science fiction’s leading lights as well as the author’s mother, sister, friend, and wife. Delany’s short story “Aye, and Gomorrah…” (1967) won the next award to be presented at that ceremony, too. While everyone applauded Delany as he left the podium and made his way to his banquet table, Asimov pulled him aside, leaned in and stated, “‘You know, Chip, we only voted you those awards because you’re a Negro…!’” (390) According to Delany, Asimov merely attempts to lighten the mood and ironize the tension with his well-known acerbic wit and really meant that race had nothing to do with Delany’s victory, only the writing’s high quality. Still, Delany never forgets this moment and recognizes that “the racial situation, permeable as it might sometimes seem (and it is, yes, highly permeable) is nevertheless your total surround” (391).

  This notion of total surround applies to all people of color, particularly blacks in America. Delany’s essay brought it home to me in stunning clarity. Consequently, I now understood what had happened to me in that English Philosophy Building classroom. This professor apparently did not realize the nature of his assault on my spirit, but I had yet another racial awakening and this time in the ivory tower of academia—the totality of this racial surround is profoundly real everywhere!

  Delany’s words proved the salve my nascent critical mind needed for recovery from this most bitter experience of my otherwise halcyon days on the U of I campus. “Racism and Science Fiction” changed the course of my graduate career. Truthfully, his brave decision to record these instances has clearly influenced generations of writers, readers, and scholars; it teaches us to stand up and speak out. Just consider his Clarion Writers’ Workshop student Nalo Hopkinson, and the confrontational and instructional nature of her chapbook Report from Planet Midnight (2012).

  I happened to be at the March 2010 International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts, where Hopkinson first performed “Report from Planet Midnight” as the Guest of Honor speech. (In fact, I, along with Patricia Melzer and Kim Surkan, proposed the conference theme that year—Race and the Fantastic.) With a bunch of blue alien people/creature images from various films flashing on the screen behind her as she stood at the podium, Nalo looked up at us. Then her chin bounced of her collarbone and she was possessed by this alien ambassador. Here’s a partial transcript of her speech:

  Since none of the images of real people from your world show blue-skinned beings, we can only theorize about what these images symbolize or eulogise. Perhaps a race of yours that has gone extinct, or that self-destructed. Perhaps it is a race that has gone into voluntary seclusion, maybe as an attempt at self-protection. The more pessimistic among us fear that this is a race being kept in isolation, for what horrendous planet-wide crime we shudder to imagine; or that it is a race of earlier sentient beings that you have exterminated. Whatever the truth of the matter, we’re sure you realize why it is of extreme importance to us to learn whether imprisonment, extinction, and mythologizing are your only methods of dealing with interspecies conflict.

  Here are some of the other communications with which we’re having trouble:

  You say: “I’m not racist.”

  Primary translation: “I can wade through feces without getting any of it on me.”

  Secondary translation: “My shit don’t stink.” (36)

  I was riveted by her performance and by her courage in delivering this fierce message to those particular members of the science fiction community, a largely white audience of writers and scholars. Surely some people did not understand the importance of this moment, but she received a standing ovation. And I believe that somehow, in some kind of way, Samuel R. Delany laid the groundwork for that moment.

  *Of all Delany’s writing “Racism and Science Fiction” unquestionably has had the greatest, profoundest, most emotional impact on me as a human being. But the essay which yielded the most influence over my critical thinking is “About 5,750 Words,” published in Delany’s first critical text, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (1977). I return again and again in my own thinking and scholarship to his notion of subjunctivity, the word-by-word corrective reading process used to analyze the literal metaphors of science fiction. Delany models a literalized metaphor with the sentence “The red sun is high, the blue low,” by examining each word of this sentence through subjunctivity and how it only makes sense as science fiction (Jewel 7). He does the same thing with the image of a “winged dog” and the images of other writers like Heinlein and Philip K. Dick (Jewel 12). As Delany argues, “The particular verbal freedom of SF, coupled with the corrective process [subjunctivity] that allows the whole range of the physically explainable universe, can produce the most violent leaps of imagery. For not only does it throw us worlds away, it specifies how we got there” (Jewel 12). In this respect, comprehending science fiction comes
down to understanding its language and how words are used differently from mainstream literature to create alien environments. Delany’s critical writing functions as one of my ideal sounding boards for my explorations of race and racism in an otherwise white genre in my own book Race in American Science Fiction (2011).

  *Mark Dery irks me (and I think Delany too) just a bit because he coined the neologism “Afrofuturism” after interviewing three astute black intellectuals (Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose) who establish some of the parameters for Afrofuturism. More than once, Delany indicts Dery’s “interpretative idiocies” for lifting a book, in this case William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), “out of its genre” (195), which indicates Dery’s “historical misunderstanding about the history and tradition of science fiction” (202). Even more problematic for Delany, Dery uses “White writers for [his] science fiction template for thinking about the problems blacks have in America” (195). For me, Dery misappropriates the philosophical verve of Delany, Tate, and Rose by wrongfully taking credit for the term Afrofuturism. Delany, Tate, and Rose do the heavy intellectual lifting in the set of interviews, where they make trenchant observations about science fiction’s relationship to black cultures and vice versa.

  Unfortunately, Dery’s limited definition has become the benchmark against which all other competing ideologies are measured. Dery states, “Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth century technoculture—and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future—might, for want of a better term, be called ‘Afro-futurism’” (180). Yet Afrofuturism is not just about technology and black uses of technology but is a way of viewing the world. That is to say, “our imaginings of the future are always complicated extensions of the past” (Nelson 35). Afrofuturism preserves “peoples of African descent, their ways and histories, [and ensures they] will not disappear in any credible future” (Kilgore 569). This sentiment is exactly why Delany believes that “if science fiction has any use at all, it is that among all its various and variegated future landscapes it gives us [black people] images for our futures” (Starboard Wine 31).

  A case in point: It is Delany who first links slavery with Afrofuturism in “Black to the Future,” not Dery. Slavery as the foundation of the US depended on the “systematic, conscientious, and massive destruction of African cultural remnants” according to Delany (Dery 191). (This parenthetical citation, Dery 191, is what vexes me so—some rich, white guy defrauding Delany’s thoughtfulness, not to mention Tate’s and Rose’s, and defining my science fiction for me.) Delany gets it exactly right in identifying how the vestiges of the Atlantic slave trade have formed and reformed black cultures on both sides of the ocean, something readily apparent in science fiction written by blacks in the Americas and increasingly on the African continent. In this regard, Afrofuturism means speculative writing by black people in a global context. Consequently, hope becomes a core Afrofuturist concept embedded within the still-oppressive conditions that blacks face on a daily basis going all the way back to antebellum America.

  Hope fuels the fundamental emotional drive that foments resistance, rebellion, and subversive writing by and for black people. Hope unsettles the white order of things. Hope also makes allies between the races. That’s why I greatly admire the work of Mark Bould and Lisa Yaszek on Afrofuturism, among others.5 To paraphrase Yaszek, there are three basic goals for Afrofuturism: tell good stories, recover lost black histories and their influence on contemporary black cultures, and think on exactly how such recovered pasts “might inspire” black future “visions” (2).

  As I see it, Afrofuturism provides a set of race-inflected reading protocols designed to investigate the optimisms and anxieties framing the future imaginings of people of color. It’s the first of the alternative futurisms related to race and ethnicity to emerge and disrupt the colorblind future envisioned by white writers, but not the last by any stretch of the imagination: Indigenous Futurism and Chicanafuturism have now gathered critical masses along with Asian American futurisms that refute yellow peril science fiction and techno-orientalism. Such a rich intellectual legacy belongs to the greatest Afrofuturist of all—Samuel R. Delany.

  In truth, I have debated writing this penultimate section of my Delany encounters and re-encounters. This internal dispute centers on one question: “Who on Earth would want to hear about my favorite Delany novels?” Yet, the essay feels somehow incomplete without it. I think John Pfeiffer nailed my feeling for Delany’s fiction nearly forty years ago with this declaration:

  Delany’s work is a rich lode awaiting discovery by the socially conscious general reader. It could not exist apart from a bonefelt knowledge of the past and present Black experience. It extrapolates this history, rather, and its vision is of encounters with the racisms of a post-revolutionary age, subtle to the point of being metaphysical, presaging a future in which certain sociological problems of the present, then solved, must be met once again on the level of the individual. (37)

  If Pfeiffer didn’t do it, then Jane B. Weedman did thirty-two years ago when she declared: “Delany uses the distancing technique to approach his white audience with the realities of black culture…as the product of his double-consciousness” (11). And if the essence was not captured by Weedman’s incisive remarks, then Sandra Govan’s did so thirty-years ago when she opined, “Delany parades black characters across the spectrum of his speculative fiction not simply to attest to black survival in the future, but to punctuate his social criticism of our present” (48). If Govan didn’t, then Takayuki Tatsumi surely did articulate my feelings twenty-seven years ago when stating, “As a writer, [Delany] has certainly been concerned with genres of minority literatures, for instance, science fiction, science fiction criticism, feminist literature, sometimes pornography or gay literature, and of course black literature” (269). Or if these older pronouncements on Delany’s magnitude fail to capture my sentiments, then Jeffery A. Tucker did so a mere five years ago by testifying that “In Delany’s work, science fiction presents itself as a genre that is particularly suited to, even a necessity for, contemporary African American intellectual inquiry, with Delany as a specific and exemplary model who guides his readers through a variety of webs—epistemological and semiotic as well as electronic” (251).

  It seems I have no words of my own. Delany is a living genius, rendering identity politics in all of its manifestations and vagaries. For me, his portrayals of race and racism make all the difference in science fiction. Others treasure his representations of gay identity and alternate sexualities, his descriptions of social and political class designations, his masterful use of critical theory. My own list of favorite Delany novels follows in reverse order, in true David Letterman style.

  #5 The Einstein Intersection (1967): Humans have left the Earth, and an alien race has settled down on the planet to live among the remnants of human culture. The story is told by Lo Lobey, a brown-skinned simian-like humanoid, who has the gift of music: he plays on his machete. The functional members of this alien society have titles such as Lo, La, and Le, denoting purity and normalcy among the race, whereas the unfunctional are caged, cared for, and killed when necessary. Lobey learns his music through old recordings of groups like the Beatles and by listening to his elders make connections between 60s pop culture and Greek myths such as Orpheus. The story centers on Lobey’s search for his lost love La Friza through the debris of human culture as he encounters a giant bull underground, a feminine computer named Phaedra, killer flowers, dragon herders, and other functionals who are different such as Spider, Green-eye, Dove, and Kid Death. Delany suggests that we break away from entrapping myths through this absolutely brilliant race novel.

  #4 Dhalgren (1975): I enjoy the challenge of Dhalgren and understand it as an ironic commentary on segregation. Dhalgren forced me to take my time, reading in five- to ten-page spurts on a nearly daily ba
sis in order to absorb its many textures. Kid, a half-Native American drifter-poet-criminal in search of his forgotten identity, enters the stricken imaginary Midwestern city of Bellona, a city where the fabric of reality unravels. Some nameless disaster impacts this city to the extent that entire city blocks burn one week and are unharmed a week later; time dilates and does strange things; two moons rise on some evenings, or a gigantic sun rises and sets. For Kid, Bellona “is a city of inner discordances and natural distortions” populated by youth gangs, rapists, and murderers, as well as gays, transvestites, and local celebrities, in addition to questionably sane individuals (14). While othering himself in the process, Kid finds no resolution in this broken city despite trying out many identities not his own. The novel culminates at its beginning and continues to challenge me.

  #3 Trouble on Triton (1976): The reformed Martian prostitute Bron Helstrom, immigrates to the Neptunian moon Triton in search of happiness as some kind of masculine ideal, as near as I can figure. Political and economic tensions escalate between the inner planets (Earth and Mars) and the solar system’s outer moons, eventually leading to interplanetary war. Against such a backdrop, Bron does not find happiness, because of his self-absorption and the difficulty he has in forming meaningful relationships. He meets and falls in love with a theater woman known as the Spike, and loses her in his desire to possess her. Ultimately, he becomes a woman by undergoing sexual orientation reassignment and body modification in the hope of finding the male that he desperately wanted to be before the change. Bron as man or woman cannot be happy. This novel taught me a great deal more about identity politics beyond racial parameters.

  #2 Babel-17 (1966): Galaxy-famous “Oriental” poet Rydra Wong is enlisted by the military to decode an alien language known as Babel-17 and help fight the invasion of alien humans. She puts a spaceship crew together herself to decipher the language from the site of the next incident. From the start of the mission, things go wrong: her ship communications are sabotaged, she realizes that there is a traitor among her crew, an important military official is assassinated in her presence, her ship is tampered with again, and she and her crew are taken captive, then rescued by a space pirate working for the alliance. While participating in the fighting, Rydra teaches a murderer named the Butcher the concept of “I” in language. Somehow, Rydra’s mind becomes linked with the Butcher’s through Babel-17, whereupon Rydra figures out that the language of Babel-17 is a flawed weaponized language. The novel ends with the Alliance turning the tables on the Invaders with the corrected language. Delany conveys that racial antagonisms can be overcome through communication—either that or violence.