But “Message in a Bottle” suggests – as do many other works of Afrofuturism, not to mention Indigenous, queer, and other futurisms – that Derrida’s monstrous deconstruction of order, and Edelman’s “radical challenge to the very value of the social itself,” are not the only frameworks in which to conceive of alternative futurities. Kamla tells Greg that he would find her future world almost as oppressive and unpleasant as she finds his (and our) present one; but she still tries to assure him that, although “ours is a society that you would probably find strange,” nonetheless “we do have moral codes.” She warns Greg that politics and social values, no less than technologies, will be radically different in the future from what they are now; but “art helps us know how to do change.” This is why she is a curator, and why she was “excited by the idea, the crazy, wonderful idea” of going back in time to recover lost works of art – despite all the difficulties and dangers involved.
Greg tries to get a modicum of comfort from this by thinking that at least Kamla is interested in his art. Indeed, he is vain enough that his “heart’s performing a tympanum of joy” at the very suggestion that “The Excavations” might appear in a distant-future art retrospective. In spite of everything, Greg is still excited by the thought that his “legacy” might “get to go the future” after all.
But alas, this is not to be. Greg’s hope turns out to be yet another misconception. In one final twist of irony, Kamla tells Greg that she isn’t interested in his installation itself. Rather, she has come back in time to recover a seashell that she finds buried in the dirt covering the floor of the gallery. Greg himself can “barely remember putting that in there”; it is one of the “blanks that trigger no stories.” The shell is only part of the exhibition by chance, because “the dig where I got it from used to be underwater a few centuries ago.” Greg has no idea that, in the future, this seashell will be regarded as a greater work of art than anything he or his contemporaries have made. As Kamla explains to him,
Human beings aren’t the only ones who make art … Every shell is a life journal … made out of the very substance of its creator, and left as a record of what it thought, even if we can’t understand exactly what it thought … Of its kind, the mollusc that made this shell is a genius. The unique conformation of the whorls of its shell expresses a set of concepts that haven’t been explored before by the other artists of its species. After this one, all the others will draw on and riff off its expression of its world. They’re the derivatives, but this is the original.
Greg finds this difficult to accept. It is “familiar territory” for him to concede that “bower birds make pretty nests to attract a mate. Cetaceans sing to each other.” But he still insists on human exceptionalism: “we’re the only ones who make art mean; who make it comment on our everyday reality.” Kamla, however, denies this. Other animals also have values, express meanings, and comment upon the realities they encounter. The poignancy of this claim for a nonhuman aesthetics rests upon a new, expanded understanding of the limits of communication. We need to respect the artistic creations of other entities, Kamla says, even though
we don’t always know what they’re saying, we can’t always know the reality on which they’re commenting. Who knows what a sea cucumber thinks of the conditions of its particular stretch of ocean floor? … Sometimes interpretation is a trap. Sometimes we need to simply observe.
This is not inconsistent with the mainstream of modern (post-Kantian) Western aesthetics. Kant poses a paradox at the heart of what he calls “aesthetic taste.” On the one hand, each instance of beauty that we encounter is unique; it is irreducible to, and incommensurable with, any other. On the other hand, and at the very same time, my ability to find something beautiful implies a certain “universal communicability”: that is to say, my encounter with an instance of beauty is not a private, inner experience, but something that I can point out and describe, and share with others (Kant 2000). In other words, we can recognize the beauty and power of an aesthetic expression, even though “we don’t always know what they’re saying, we can’t always know the reality on which they’re commenting.” Aesthetic experience allows us to approach points of view that aren’t our own, and that are strange to us; we can appreciate these other perspectives, even though we cannot adopt them, or even fully understand them. Such is the basis of Kamla’s work as a curator (or perhaps we should say, of the work of her “original,” Vanda, whose memories as well as genes she shares).
The real question for Western aesthetics is how far this process of recognition – even in the absence of comprehension – extends. Up through the mid-twentieth century, the circle was fairly small: recognition was only accorded to a small number of elite European and North American works, usually created by white men. Over the past half century, the circle has greatly expanded. This is due to two developments: first, the increased recognition of works by white women and by people of color; and second, the breakdown of the once rigid boundary between “high” and “mass” culture.
“Message in a Bottle” suggests that aesthetic recognition will continue to widen in the years to come. Kamla explains to Greg how “the nascent identity politics as expressed by artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,” such as Greg himself, “was the progenitor of current speciesism.” This latter term seems to designate the “defining concept through which we understand what it means to be human animals,” by grasping the parallels, as well as the differences, between our own aesthetic expressions and those of other organisms. The expansion of our own ability to recognize the “universal communicability” of the works of many cultures, not just the white European one, leads ultimately to a still broader recognition of aesthetic works and processes across the species barrier.
What are we to make of this extension? Addie Hopes, commenting on another text by Hopkinson (her 2007 novel The New Moon’s Arms), points to a tension between Black Studies and what has come to be known as the “nonhuman turn” in the humanities (cf. Grusin):
Black studies scholars have long been suspicious of (white) scholars’ attempts to break down the lines between human and the nonhuman, particularly as black humanity has only recently begun to be seen as such within the academy and is still, politically, a fight far from won.
(Hopes 2018)
But Hopes notes how Hopkinson conciliates this opposition with her mythical invention of the “sea people” (or “black mermaids”) in The New Moon’s Arms. These people are the descendants of kidnapped Africans who escaped the Middle Passage by jumping off slave ships and adapting to life in the ocean. They are web-fingered, and they have the power to transform themselves at will into seals. In this way, the sea people both assert their humanity against a racist system that denied it to them, and cross the species barrier that would estrange human beings from all other forms of life. Hopes reads this double movement in terms of Sylvia Wynter’s notion of genres of the human:
Hopkinson’s mermaid maroons inspire readers to do as Katherine McKittrick asks us to do: to “recognize ‘human genres’ other than those of Man … and open up the possibility for … imagining alternative forms of being” … and becoming-with: intimate and co-constitutive relations between humans, monk seals, gods, red snapper fish, and toxic pollutants …
(Hopes 2018, citing McKittrick and Wynter 2016)
Here, recognizing other genres of humanity is continuous with recognizing nonhumans as well, and establishing “intimate and co-constitutive relations” with them. The crucial move is to reject the hegemony of capital-M “Man,” which is an exclusionary, white European concept. An opening to other genres of the human is also an opening to many sorts of nonhumans, and to futures (in the plural) outside the purview of capitalist realism and reproductive futurism.
“Message in a Bottle” also offers us such a prospect: a future that exceeds the boundaries of our conventionally humanist understanding, and that may thereby allow for hopeful developments that we are not currently able to imagine. Inst
ead of bringing Greg’s artistic “legacy” into a future that would just be another expanded repetition of the past and the present, Kamla charges Greg with the responsibility for nurturing a different future, an odd future, one that he does not and cannot ever experience for himself. Kamla is all too oppressively aware of the horrors – institutionalization or worse – that our current society has in store for her. She is still a small person, without the rights and powers of an adult, regardless of what is in her head. She knows that it won’t be forever; as she defiantly says, “we’re going to outlive all our captors.” But she also knows that she is in for a lot of grief along the way. At the very end of the story, she begs Greg to keep the seashell safe for her in the meantime. “It’s your ticket to the future,” she tells him. Greg for his part resents this. He ends the story with a zinger: “I lied. I fucking hate kids.” But I am inclined to think that he remains bound, nonetheless, by Kamla’s charge to him – or, to put it differently, by the promise he did not give.
Chapter 6
Dark Eden
Chris Beckett’s 2012 novel Dark Eden (Beckett 2012) – together with its sequels, Mother of Eden (Beckett 2015) and Daughter of Eden (Beckett 2016) – tells the story of a small group of human beings stranded, far from Earth, on a dark rogue planet, somewhat ironically named Eden. This planet is alone in the cosmos. It does not circle any star, and it does not have any moons. This means that it is perpetually dark. There are no seasons, and no diurnal cycles. As Eden lacks a sun, its sole energy source is geothermal. Heat arises from deep within the planet’s core, and warms the surface to Earth-like temperatures. The gravity, too, seems to be Earth-normal; and the planet has plenty of water, and an Earth-like atmosphere that is thick enough to preserve the heat. The lower altitudes of the planet’s surface are warm and fertile; while the higher elevations are cold enough to be covered in ice and snow. The skies are usually overcast; but sometimes the clouds congeal into fog and warm rain (at the lower elevations) or snow (at the higher ones). At other times, the ubiquitous clouds dissipate for a brief while; the air gets cooler, and in the blackness of the sky the inhabitants can see what they call the “Starry Swirl.” Apparently this is our own galaxy, the Milky Way, appearing in its full spiraling glory.
Living organisms have evolved in this environment, both on land and in water, in forms roughly analogous to what we know as plants and animals. Of course, Eden’s plant-analogues – which the inhabitants call trees and flowers – do not photosynthesize as Earth plants do. Rather, they use the planet’s geothermal energy for fuel, pumping it up from deep beneath the surface. They “warm the air with their trunks,” and drive the ecosystem of the planet as a whole. Animals, for their part, bask in this warmth; they either forage upon the plants directly, or prey upon other animals. These animals are roughly analogous to terrestrial organisms – the inhabitants call them bats, monkeys, leopards, and so on – but they are unrelated to Earth life, and alien to human sensibilities and expectations. They have “green-black blood and two hearts and six limbs,” together with “round and flat” eyes that “don’t turn from side to side” the way that our eyes do. They don’t have facial expressions or bodily gestures that we know how to interpret. People find it hard to empathize with them.
The native life-forms provide Eden with its only light. The plants display softly glowing “lanternflowers”; animals similarly have “soft white lanterns on the tops of their heads.” The forests and valleys of Eden are thereby illuminated with “a dim light – pink, white, blue and yellow.” Such light “wasn’t much brighter than moonlight is on Earth”; but it is enough to allow the human inhabitants to see. However, the fertile areas, lit by abundant plant and animal life, are separated from one another by “Snowy Dark” – much more sparsely populated snowy ridges and mountain ranges. At these higher elevations, everything is “dark dark” and “cold cold.”
How did human beings come to inhabit Eden? It was all an accident. Five astronauts from Earth came upon the planet after passing through a wormhole. Three of them had illicitly commandeered a spaceship in order to go on a joyride; the other two were orbital police, who followed and tried to stop them. They all ended up landing on Eden after damaging their spaceship. Two of the astronauts – Angela Young, one of the cops, and Tommy Schneider, one of the joyriders – remained on the surface. The other three left, hoping to signal Earth for help; Angela and Tommy never saw them again. Dark Eden takes place some 160 years after this first landing. All the human inhabitants of the planet are descended from the founding heterosexual couple who remained. Tommy was a Jewish man from Brooklyn; Angela was a Black woman from London. We are told that they were not exactly companions by choice:
They say that Angela and Tommy didn’t get on so well. It’s said he got angry when he didn’t get his way. It’s said she was full of bitterness for what he’d done to her … She’d never have come here at all of her own choice, and she’d never have been with a man like him either.
Nonetheless, as the sole human beings on the planet, Tommy and Angela felt impelled to be fruitful and multiply. They had a son and three daughters, who in turn had more children, and so on. One of the results of this inbreeding, or lack of genetic diversity, is an accumulation of birth defects: many of Angela and Tommy’s descendants are “batfaces” (people with cleft lips and palates) or “clawfeet” (people with clubfeet). A smaller number are intellectually disabled.
At the time Dark Eden begins, there are slightly over five hundred human inhabitants of Eden. They are all huddled together in Circle Valley, an enclave bounded by mountains and cliffs on all sides. The people think of themselves as a single (capital-F) Family, subdivided into eight “groups” or tribes, each of which has its own last name. The people of Eden are hunter-gatherers, who eke out their existence at a subsistence level. They live in a state of what might be considered primitive communism. They all work together, and equally share their food and other goods. Everyday life rests mostly upon the guidance of custom and myth. There are few explicit laws, and most decisions are made by consensus. Authority, such as it is, resides in the hands of the elders, and particularly the women. “Having a slip” – the term the people on Eden use for having sex – is a frequent and quite casual activity. The only rules about it are that “you mustn’t slip with a child or with anyone that doesn’t want to do it … and grown men mustn’t slip with young girls.” There is no monogamy, no sense of anything like a nuclear family, and no “ownership” of wives by husbands. Children are raised collectively; they retain ties with their mothers and their maternal siblings and cousins, but most of the time they do not know who their fathers are.
Despite all this, the people of Eden do not think of themselves as living in a paradise. Rather, they acutely feel that they live diminished lives, compared to their ancestors on Earth. This primitive Eden is already a fallen one. The people have heard stories about – and bemoan the lack of – such seemingly magical things as “Rayed Yo” (radio), “Telly vision” (television), and “Computer,” not to mention, more generally, “metal and plastic” and “lecky-trickity” (electricity). As the altered words suggest, their language has also been stripped down and simplified. It’s hard to retain the integrity of words whose referents and concepts are entirely unavailable. Some of Edenic speech also sounds a bit like baby talk. For instance, the people use repeated adjectives instead of intensifiers: they say “dark dark” instead of “very dark.” Everything on Eden, from language to lifestyle, is something of a degraded replica. Everything is haunted by the ghosts of what is missing.
Above all, the people of Eden are aware of being deprived of their “far-off world full of light … Our eyes need the bright light.” Their legends tell them that the Sun of Earth is “so bright that it would burn out your eyes if you stared at it.” But they have no way to imagine what such illumination would actually be like; it goes too far beyond the bounds of their actual experience. Instead, they associate bright light with promises of salvati
on. They see themselves as exiles, and desperately want to return to the place of their origins:
We live as if Eden wasn’t where we really lived at all but just a camp like hunters make when they stay out in forest for a few wakings. We’re only waiting here to go back to where we really belong … We shouldn’t be here, that’s the real problem: it wasn’t the world we were made for. We were meant to live in light … We were trapped inside a dark little cave with no way out of it. And even though I’d never known anything else, and probably never would do. I longed and longed for that different world that was full of light.
This almost Gnostic yearning is the core of what can only be called the Edenites’ religion. The people live in hope for the moment when – however long it takes – a spaceship arrives from Earth, in order to take them back to their true home. Perhaps the spaceship will also take back the bones of the dead, and restore them to life. Other religious motifs stand out as well. For instance, the people tell the story of the astronaut Michael, who – just like Adam in the Bible – first “named the animals and plants.” This explains why the alien life-forms of Eden have Earth-reminiscent names.
By the start of Dark Eden, however, the ostensibly temporary condition of exile has already lasted for six generations. The Polish aphorist Stanislaw Lec wrote that gossip grown old becomes myth; and Chris Beckett himself has noted that “a lot of the Old Testament is small domestic stories elevated to a mythical level” (Goldschlager 2014). We literally see this process take place in Eden. The whole society is organized around the ostensibly “True Story” of Angela and Tommy. The Story contains many unpleasant details. We hear about Angela’s outbursts of rage, and her despair after losing the ring that her parents had given her back on Earth; Tommy’s violence (“once twice he even hit her”), and his ultimate suicide; and the brother-sister and father-daughter incest that were needed for the Family to grow in its early days. But this old gossip, however changed over years of oral transmission, is the only tradition or heritage that the people of Eden have.
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