A truly compassionate soul, Octavia Butler in her fiction left allusions to sturdy cages of normative logic underpinning racism, poverty, sexism, ageism, injustice, hierarchy, homophobia, classism—whatever the debilitating “ism”—no place to hide. When she discussed her background with me during the writing of my dissertation, proverbial, mind numbing, estranging realities—literally legacies of slavery, classism, racism, and patriarchy—cut to the quick of the soul of an African American female whose rite of passage is learning to endure the experience of being alienated in a great society of millions of citizens constructing and upholding invisible barriers to keep the eschewed “other” out. Until her premature death at age 58, living out her destiny Black and female and creative mattered, and I like to think that each experience and everyone on her path of self-realization and self-empowerment contributed to the weaving of authentic threads of self-unfoldment etched in the fabric of Black feminist lexicology we read in her literature today.
In reading Black feminist lexicology I highlight transgressive creativity in Black women’s science fiction and speculative fiction. On the one hand, the transformative power of language is assumed in and beyond the text not only in Octavia Butler’s writing but in that of her exemplars Nalo Hopkinson, Andrea Hairston, ihsan bracey, Nisi Shawl, Jewel Gomez, Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu and others. I posit that language is reliably employed in Black feminist lexicology to claim, privilege, inspire, investigate, critique, and promulgate women’s experience of their reality, self-healing rituals, imagination, and emergent consciousness. On the other hand, African culture informs black feminist lexicology where Sankofa or identification with one’s roots (inexorably African) achieves the status of powerful mythological and symbolic referent in West Africa. Put another way, for these writers and many others, the future of this planet rests as significantly upon recognition and application of African wisdom and/or spirituality as it does recognition and appreciation of women’s history, divinity, and humanity.
Considered science fiction fantasy, “Desire,” written by Kiini Ibura Salaam, refutes the madonna/whore dichotomy in the story of a woman’s sexual journey. Pregnant Sené’s deeply wrinkled dry skin transforms her twenty-four years into forty (a harsh environmental consequence braving wind, and sand, and sun daily). A cliff dweller whose hands constantly serve the needs of husband, children, and mother-in-law, Sené fails to touch her own body. One morning, while boiling lemongrass behind the security and privacy of rock walls called home—husband and children out—she reclaims her untamed sexuality. With the power of mythic beings, Sené explores the height of her moist pleasure puissant and free as ubiquitous horny goats, crocodiles, chickens, and elephants. The joy of self-pleasure and sexual desire running hot through her veins, she successfully revives her husband Na’s singular desire for her love. Thus with exquisite sensitivity to the sexual needs of a wife and husband during pregnancy, Salaam debunks the anti-erotic in African women’s experience.
The landscape turns lush with color as African Caribbean oral tradition sets the undulating rhythms of an intoxicating island ripe with heavenly laden guava trees. This is Beatrice’s island home. Her story unfoldis as she spies a hungry snake stealing a kiskedee’s eggs from her feathered nest in Nalo Hopkinson’s “The Glass Bottle Trick.” Beatrice does not know it yet, but she is also in danger having paid a high price to be Mrs. Somebody. Of fair skin tone, she marries Sammy, a stodgy, intelligent, wealthy man of duplicitous character who hates his black skin. Beatrice longs to convince him of his ebony beauty hoping that the baby is the answer—a pregnancy of which Sammy is completely unaware. Conversely, she discovers, almost too late, the murderous lengths to which Sammy will go to ensure that he never sire a child as black as he. Beatrice sacrifices her studies to become a medical doctor, sublimates her passion for life and fun, her own sense of domestic aesthetics, her voice, the way she prefers to slump in a chair when relaxing, denies a life balancing romantic pleasure with intellectual growth, simply put, her freedom. Believing he was “the one man she’d found in whom she could have faith,” she chose to love Sammy instead expressing her love according to the requirements of his personality—seductively sweet vs. unpredictably violent. An intriguing science fiction mystery, this story leaves the reader wondering if a community of women will save Beatrice from herself and from Sammy, given the two women she discovers in an always locked icebox bedroom of Sammy’s home have a very frightening vindictive pregnant-wife story to tell.
Even though we have not yet destroyed the planet at the dawn of the twenty-first century, it is not easy to forget the misery African people suffered during the Atlantic slave trade’s Middle Passsage nor the brutal circumstances they met when ships regurgitated them chained, sick, pregnant, stinking, and depressed onto the shores of a strange world of “ghosts” who are reliant upon the Atlantic slave trade for commerce and profit. Ihsan bracy’s “Ibo Landing” engulfs our senses with this painful collective memory. Existentialist realities burgeon with disillusionment, dislocation, fear, brutal victimization, rape, anger, and courage. By the end of the day, the band of Africans muster enough energy to beget communal suicide, the singular remaining agent of liberation.
In “A Habit of Waste,” a Canadian landscape contrasts sharply with Hopkinson’s sweltering Caribbean in “Glass Bottle Trick,” evidencing the author’s deft skill in making selected scenes of her many places lived (Jamaica, Trinidad, the U.S., Guyana, and Canada) palpably rich with environmental texture. Yet “A Habit of Waste” is most memorable for its existentialist permeation reminiscent of ihsan bracy’s “Ibo Landing.” Interestingly, Hopkinson complicates the reader’s experience by developing a story within a story (or is it a trio of stories?) each arguably a take on the injustice inextricable to the African woman’s collective memory: European imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, poverty, slavery, apartheid, and the contested, deceptive, offputting notion of post-colonialism. “A Habit of Waste” begs the question: What’s so “post” in the poverty and self-annihilating hatred millions of “ex-colonised” people learn to endure and ignore, respectively, in the twenty-first century?
An award-winning Jamaican writer and editor, Nalo Hopkinson readily infuses African Caribbean cultural traditions, history, spirituality, and language in her fiction and elucidates the importance of doing so when interviewed. An author of science fiction histories and science fiction fairytales, Hopkinson’s credits include several awards and a Hugo nomination for Best Novel in 2001, one poem “For Winsome, Turning 50” (1998), one collection of stories Skin Folk (2001), four novels Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), Midnight Robber (2000), The Salt Roads (2003), The New Moon’s Arms (2007), twenty-three short stories published between 1996 and 2008, three anthologies of African Diaspora fiction Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction (2000), Mojo: Conjure Stories (2003), and So Long Been Dreaming edited with Uppinder Mehan (2004), as well as several essays and reviews.
Several things matter to me when I read Black women’s speculative fiction. At the top of the list is the desire to immerse myself in logos that makes me present to myself.
In other words, I want to see my life reflected through the multicolored prism of a quixotical imagination, that is, visionary extravagance informing a spiraling arc of Being: the unpredictable dance of material being and spirit being along a liquid trajectory of possibility and impossibility (what we know and do not know of the here and now), or infinity. Whether consciously or not, I yearn to be confirmed as significant consciousness my stories, culture, power, potential, purpose, hopes, fears, faith, dreams, even destiny explored.
When I read Black women’s speculative fiction, whatever else my response to the ideas there may be, I am always certain to lose myself then find myself in eternal shrouds of ontology, likely to embrace prescience. Such is my personal predilection as reader. And by the way, it is not too much to ask. Timeless literature has always served readers well classic in its irrepressible enigmatic light ignitin
g bright sparks of reevaluation and change within us.
Works Cited
See De Shazer for Ntozake Shange quotation details.
Bracy, ihsan. “ibo landing.” Dark Matter Reading the Bones. Ed. Sheree R. Thomas. New York: Aspect. 2004. 1–6. Print.
Butler, Octavia E. Patternmaster, New York: Warner Books, 1976, Print.
——. Mind of My Mind, New York: Warner, 1977, Print.
——. Survivor, Garden City: Doubleday, 1978, Print.
——. Kindred, Boston: Beacon Press, 1979, Print.
——. Wildseed, New York: Warner, 1980, Print.
——. Clay’s Ark, New York: Warner, 1984, Print.
——. Dawn, New York: Warner, 1987, Print.
——. Adulthood Rites, New York: Warner, 1988, Print.
——. Imago, New York: Warner, 1989, Print.
——. Parable of the Sower, New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993, Print.
——. Parable of the Talents, New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998, Print
Del Caro, Adrian. “Nietzschean Self-Transformation and the Transformation of the Dionysian.” Nietzsche, Philosophy and the Arts. Ed. Salim Kemal, Ivan Gaskell and Daniel W. Conway. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. 70–79. Print.
De Shazer, Mary K. A Poetics of Resistance: Women Writing in El Salvador,
South Africa, and the United States. Ann Arbor: Michigan P, 1997. 273–299. Print.
Hopkinson, Nalo. “The Glass Bottle Trick.” Dark Matter Reading the Bones. Ed. Sheree R. Thomas. New York: Aspect. 2004. 47–60. Print.
Hopkinson, Nalo. “A Habit of Waste.” Fireweed: a Feminist Quarterly of Writing, Politics, Art & Culture Late Spring (1996). Print.
Ibura Salaam, Kiini. “Desire.” Dark Matter Reading the Bones. Ed. Sheree R. Thomas. New York: Aspect. 2004. 61-77. Print.
“Octavia Butler’s Aha! Moment Eye Witness,” O, the Oprah Magazine Web. 19 February. 2011.
Sanchez, Ifalola. “Ifa yesterday, Ifa today, Ifa tomorrow.” Ifalola.blogspot.com. Web. 23 Feb. 2011.
Thomas, Sheree R. Introduction. Dark Matter: Reading the Bones. By Thomas. Ed. Sheree R.Thomas. New York: Aspect Warner Books, 2004. xi–xiv. Print.
“True Adventures of Junior G-Men,” Times Past Old Time Radio Archives. Web. 26 January 2010.
* * * *
Ayana R. Abdallah, Ph.D. coined the terminology Africentric transgressive creativity in her writing on Octavia Butler. Poet in residence and Visiting Scholar in African American Studies, University of Houston, she teaches Black Feminist Speculative Fiction and Writing Black Women’s Radical Future: Readings in Octavia Butler.
JACK DANN
(1945– )
I encountered Jack Dann’s anthologies long before I was familiar with his writing. He edited or co-edited a long series of breathlessly titled (but very readable) collections beginning with Aliens! in 1980, and his work exposed me to quite a few other writers. Discovering Dann’s own writing was quite a revelation for me: “Going Under,” an astonishing extrapolation of our reality TV culture written a decade before it existed, remains my favorite of his stories.
Originally from New York State, Dann relocated to Australia in 1994, where he married Janeen Webb and settled on “a farm overlooking the sea.” He won a Nebula in 1996 for the lyrical “Da Vinci Rising,” after being nominated ten previous times (including for “Going Under). Dann has also won the World Fantasy Award and the Australian Aurealis and Ditmar Awards. Author or editor of over seventy-five books, Dann is also a consulting editor for Tor Books.
GOING UNDER, by Jack Dann
First published in Omni, September 1981
She was beautiful, huge, as graceful as a racing liner. She was a floating Crystal Palace, as magnificent as anything J P Morgan could conceive. Designed by Alexander Carlisle and built by Harland and Wolff, she wore the golden band of the company along all nine hundred feet of her. She rose 175 feet like the side of a cliff, with nine steel decks, four sixty-two foot funnels, over two thousand windows and side-lights to illuminate the luxurious cabins and suites and public rooms. She weighed 46,000 tons, and her reciprocating engines and Parsons-type turbines could generate over fifty thousand horse-power and speed the ship over twenty knots. She had a gymnasium, a Turkish bath, squash and racquet courts, a swimming pool, libraries and lounges and sitting rooms. There were rooms and suites to accommodate 735 first-class passengers, 674 in second class, and over a thousand in steerage.
She was the R.M.S. Titanic, and Stephen met Esme on her Promenade Deck as she pulled out of her Southampton dock, bound for New York City on her maiden voyage.
Esme stood beside him, resting what looked to be a cedar box on the rail, and gazed out over the cheering crowds on the docks below. Stephen was struck immediately by how beautiful she was. Actually, she was plain-featured, and quite young.
She had a high forehead, a small, straight nose, wet brown eyes that peeked out from under plucked, arched eyebrows, and a mouth that was a little too full. Her blond hair, though clean, was carelessly brushed and tangled in the back. Yet, to Stephen, she seemed beautiful.
“Hello,” Stephen said, feeling slightly awkward. But colored ribbons and confetti snakes were coiling through the air, and anything seemed possible.
Esme glanced at him. “Hello, you,” she said.
“Pardon?” Stephen asked.
“I said, ‘Hello, you.’ That’s an expression that was in vogue when this boat first sailed, if you’d like to know. It means ‘Hello, I think you’re interesting and would consider sleeping with you if I were so inclined.’”
“You must call it a ship,” Stephen said.
She laughed and for an instant looked at him intently, as if in that second she could see everything about him—that he was taking this voyage because he was bored with his life, that nothing had ever really happened to him. He felt his face become hot. “Okay, ‘ship’, does that make you feel better?” she asked. “Anyway, I want to pretend that I’m living in the past. I don’t ever want to return to the present, do you?”
“Well, I…”
“Yes, I suppose you do, want to return, that is.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Look how you’re dressed. You shouldn’t be wearing modern clothes on this ship. You’ll have to change later, you know.” She was perfectly dressed in a powder-blue walking suit with matching jacket, a pleated, velvet-trimmed front blouse, and an ostrich feather hat. She looked as if she had stepped out of another century, and just now Stephen could believe she had.
“What’s your name?” Stephen asked.
“Esme,” she answered. Then she turned the box that she was resting on the rail and opened the side facing the dock. “You see,” she said to the box, “we really are here.”
“What did you say?” Stephen asked.
“I was just talking to Poppa,” she said, closing and latching the box.
“Who?”
“I’ll show you later, if you like,” she promised. Then bells began to ring and the ship’s whistles cut the air. There was a cheer from the dock and on board, and the ship moved slowly out to sea. To Stephen it seemed that the land, not the ship, was moving. The whole of England was just floating peacefully away, while the string band on the ship’s bridge played Oscar Strauss’s The Chocolate Soldier.
They watched until the land had dwindled to a thin line on the horizon, then Esme reached naturally for Stephen’s hand, squeezed it for a moment, then hurried away. Before Stephen could speak, she had disappeared into the crowd, and he stood looking after her long after she had gone.
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