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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations
The Graduate School
2014
My Left Arm, Her Twin Blades: Narratives
of Resistance in Black Speculative Fiction
Joshua Burnett
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FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
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MY LEFT ARM, HER TWIN BLADES:
NARRATIVES OF RESISTANCE IN BLACK SPECULATIVE FICTION
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By
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JOSHUA BURNETT
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A Dissertation submitted to the
Department of English
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
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Degree Awarded:
Spring Semester, 2014
© 2014 Joshua Burnett
Joshua Burnett defended this on March 5, 2014.
The members of the supervisory committee were:
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David Ikard
Professor Directing Dissertation
Maxine Jones
University Representative
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Alisha Gaines
Committee Member
Candace Ward
Committee Member
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The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and
certifies that the has been approved in accordance with university requirements.
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This dissertation is dedicated to my wife Casey Yu, who makes me better in every way; to my
children, Matthew Burnett, Lindsey Yu, and William Burnett, who make me laugh like nobody
else in the world; to my committee members, who have helped me along; and to Jane Lazarre,
whose mentoring and undergraduate courses on race, writing, and identity set me off on the
intellectual path leading to this dissertation.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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I would like to thank a number of people for their invaluable assistance, advice, feedback,
and, above all, time during the process of writing this dissertation:
The members of my doctoral committee, including Professor Alisha Gaines, Professor
Candace Ward, Professor Maxine Jones, and, especially, my Chair, Professor David Ikard, for
their intellectual acumen, for their generous willingness to help me through the process of
writing this dissertation (and surviving graduate school generally), and for talking me down off
the ledge more than once.
Terry Rowden for his extensive feedback and assistance on the Samuel R. Delany
chapter, in conjunction with the special issue of African American Review on Delany he is guest
editing.
Bénédicte Ledent and Daria Tunca, organizers of the What is Africa to Me Now?
Conference. both through the conference itself and through the special issue of Research in
African Literatures they are guest editing, they have provided me with extensive feedback and
assistance with the Nnedi Okorafor chapter.
My wife and fellow graduate student, Casey Yu, without whose support and
understanding I could not possibly have gotten this far. For more than twelve years, we've been
through everything together, and having her in my life makes me so much better in so many
ways.
Finally, Liz Polcha, Regina Bradley, Lisa Bolekaja, Shelah Woodruff, Karin JohnsonButler, and Jenna Adler for their kindness taking the time to read and provide feedback on
chapters from this dissertation.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract...........................................................................................................................................vi
1. INTRODUCTION: RECLAIMING THE PAST, REWRITING THE FUTURE:
CONSIDERING BLACK SPECULATIVE FICTION ...................................................................1
2. “MY LEFT ARM”: ALLIES, COMPLICITY, AND THE PROBLEM OF RESISTANCE IN
OCTAVIA BUTLER’S KINDRED ................................................................................................21
3. SECOND ELEVATION: THE HOPE FOR RACIAL UPLIFT IN COLSON WHITEHEAD’S
THE INTUITIONIST ....................................................................................................................45
4. THE GREAT CHANGE AND THE GREAT BOOK: NNEDI OKORAFOR’S
POSTCOLONIAL, POST-APOCALYPTIC AFRICA..................................................................71
5. THE COLLAR AND THE SWORD: QUEER RESISTANCE IN SAMUEL R. DELANY’S
TALES OF NEVÈRŸON.................................................................................................................91
6. CONCLUSION: BEAUTY, DEFIANCE, AND RESISTANCE.............................................117
REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................130
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................................134
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ABSTRACT
My Left Arm, Her Twin Blades: Narratives of Resistance in Black Speculative Fiction,
explores contemporary (1979-2010) Black Speculative novels by four key writers in the genre,
including Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead, The Shadow
Speaker and Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor, and Tales of Nevèrÿon (the first volume of the
four-part Return to Nevèrÿon series) by Samuel R. Delany.
Using these five texts, I explore resistance to both everyday and political oppression, as
well as to hegemonic racist, sexist, and homophobic ideology as a persistent theme within the
field of Black Speculative Fiction. Not only are these five texts (and others in the genre)
interested in resistance, they challenge and trouble our understanding of what resistance means.
Central to all five is the question of resistance's potential (or lack thereof) for producing
meaningful counterhegemonic change. What's more, they simultaneously pose and complicate
new models for resistance and identity in the African American and Diasporic African cultural
context, particularly queerness and sexuality as models for resistance. My Left Arm, Her Twin
Blades explores and analyzes these critiques of and new models for resistance, and argues that
these texts point toward a new conceptualization of black identity, which I am calling
"Speculative Blackness." Speculative Blackness is a deessentialized vision of blackness (and
broader racial identity) which nevertheless insists upon the constant interrogation of race and
racial history as both a personal and political imperative. Furthermore, Speculative Blackness
integrates queerness into blackness, locating non-heteronormative sexuality (be it same-sex
attraction, interracial coupling, nontraditional forms of polygamy, BDSM, or radically equitable
heterosexuality) as a key site for black resistance to oppression. Speculative Blackness draws on
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Foucauldian conceptualizations of of sexuality and identity as culturally constructed categories
that relate and respond to power relationships in complicated ways.
While scholastic engagement with Black Speculative Fiction is hardly new, most existing
criticism that treats the field as a whole has tended to be historical in scope, establishing the
genre through unearthing its often neglected history. While this focus has been useful in
establishing a Black Speculative canon and dispelling notions of African American Literature
and Speculative Fiction as mutually exclusive categories, insufficient critical attention has been
paid to mapping out the tropes and cultural constructions that distinguish Black Speculative
Fiction from mainstream/white Speculative Fiction, as well as to theorizing how these tropes and
contributions play out across the genre. With the intent of addressing these difficulties, my
dissertation utilizes an intersectional approach to Black Speculative Fiction's unique
formulations of black identity with particular attention to exploring how gender and queerness
inform diverse experiences of racialized subjectivity and resistance strategies.
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CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION: RECLAIMING THE PAST, REWRITING THE
FUTURE: CONSIDERING BLACK SPECULATIVE FICTION
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"This I learned from Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany's science fiction: any and all truth is a
tale I am telling myself"
- Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid
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"There will be no redemption because the men who run this place do not want redemption"
- Colson Whitehead
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This dissertation explores five contemporary (1979-2010) Black Speculative novels by
four key writers in the genre, including Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, The Intuitionist by Colson
Whitehead, The Shadow Speaker and Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor, and Tales of
Nevèrÿon (the first volume of the four-part Return to Nevèrÿon series) by Samuel R. Delany.
Using these five texts, I explore resistance to both everyday and political oppression, as well as
to hegemonic racist, sexist, and homophobic ideology as a persistent theme within the genre of
Black Speculative Fiction. Not only are these five texts (and other Black Speculative texts)
interested in resistance, they challenge and trouble our understanding of what resistance means.
Central to all five is the question of resistance's potential (or lack thereof) for producing
meaningful counterhegemonic change. What's more, they simultaneously pose and complicate
new models for resistance and identity in the African American and Diasporic African cultural
!1
context. I explore and analyze these critiques of resistance and new models for resistance, and
argue that these texts point toward a new conceptualization of black identity, which I am calling
Speculative Blackness.
While scholastic engagement with Black Speculative Fiction is hardly new, most existing
criticism that treats the field as a whole has tended to be historical in scope, establishing the
genre through unearthing its long but often neglected history. While this focus has been useful in
establishing a Black Speculative canon and dispelling notions of African American Literature
and Speculative Fiction as mutually exclusive categories, insufficient critical attention has been
paid to mapping out the tropes and cultural constructions that distinguish Black Speculative
Fiction from mainstream/white Speculative Fiction, as well as to theorizing how these tropes and
contributions play out across the genre. With the intent of addressing these difficulties, I utilize
an intersectional approach to Black Speculative Fiction's unique formulations of black identity,
with particular attention to exploring how gender and queerness inform diverse experiences of
racialized subjectivity and resistance strategies.
Defining and Positioning Black Speculative Fiction
While widely regarded as a foundational figure of Black Speculative Fiction and, indeed,
as one of its foremost practitioners, Samuel R. Delany has questioned whether Black Speculative
Fiction exists as a discrete genre. In his 1999 essay "Racism and Science Fiction," Delany writes:
The fact is, while it is always a personal pleasure to appear with her [at
conventions], [Octavia] Butler and I are very different writers, interested in very
different things...I think that the nature of the generalization (since we have an
extraordinarily talented black woman sf writer, why don't we generalize the
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interest to all black sf writers, male and female) has elements of both racism and
sexism about it...Butler and I, born and raised on opposite sides of the country,
half a dozen years apart, share many of the experiences of racial exclusion and the
familial and social responses to that exclusion which socially construct a race. But
as long as racism functions as a system, it is still fueled by aspects of the perfectly
laudable desires of interested whites to observe this thing, however dubious its
reality, that exists largely by means of it having been named: African-American
science fiction. (395)
To some extent, Delany plays the provocateur in the essay, as it was written for Dark Matter, an
anthology specifically dedicated to Black Speculative Fiction and essential in facilitating current
interest in the genre. Still, Delany rightly confronts the dangers of essentialism and the tendency
of white liberals to consider race only when engaging with black cultural production, while
leaving whiteness invisible, normative, and uninterrogated. Still, there is no denying that Black
Speculative Fiction exists as a unique form and introduces useful critical models for thinking
about and interrogating white male hegemony, including within Speculative Fiction itself.
Mapping out the themes and tropes particular to Black Speculative Fiction is necessary in
addressing Delany's critique of Black Speculative Fiction as problematic, racist, or nonexistent. I
define three key characteristics that uniquely position Black Speculative Fiction as fertile ground
for critiquing of white supremacy and exploring new resistance strategies: (1) the emphasis on
and visibility of black and brown bodies in types of speculative narratives from which they have
traditionally either been excluded or have appeared in in tokenized or stereotyped forms, along
with the ubiquity of race as an explicit thematic concern, (2) the long-standing thematic use of
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queerness and non-heteronormative sexuality, and (3) the consistent theme of resistance to
hegemonic ideology, and the complication of what that "resistance" means and can accomplish.
First, with few exceptions (such as Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series, where all the
characters are dark-skinned1), most white Speculative Fiction ignores race, either out of
disinterest in the needs, lives, and cultures of people of color or due to the misguided liberal
notion that, in the future, race will no longer be politically or socially relevant. On the rare
occasions when race is a central theme, often aliens stand in for people of color, clearly a
problematic and othering approach. In Black Speculative Fiction, on the other hand, not only are
black characters (and other characters of color) almost always present, writers in the genre
explicitly explore and theorize race. As an example, Delany's Return to Nevèrÿon series
maintains the white/black binary in its sword-and-sorcery setting, but reverses its value, with
black becoming normative and white devalued and racialized as "barbarian." Additionally,
Butler's most famous work, Kindred, has race at its heart, as it tells the tale of a twentieth-century
black woman and her white husband traveling back in time to an antebellum Maryland slave
plantation. Finally, George S. Schuyler's Black No More, a speculative satire, imagines a preCivil Rights era America where technology allows African Americans to physically "become
white." Despite Schuyler's ultra-conservative bent and his harsh criticism of Civil Rights leaders,
the novel's satire actually illustrates the pervasiveness of race and racism in America. While this
new technology is expected to end racial tensions and stratification, it instead exacerbates both
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Not surprisingly, when the series was adapted into a television miniseries, most of its characters were
whitewashed, as Danny Glover was the only black actor hired for the project. To her credit, Le Guin
publicly excoriated the series's producers for this decision, highlighting the importance of depicting
characters of color in Speculative Fiction and writing, "[T]he beauty of science fiction and fantasy [is]
freedom of invention. But with all freedom comes responsibility. Which is something these filmmakers
seem not to understand" (Le Guin).
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problems, leading to the leader of a white supremacist terrorist organization almost being elected
President.
Another key theme running throughout the corpus of Black Speculative Fiction, but
found only occasionally in mainstream/white Speculative Fiction, is that of queerness and other
non-heteronormative sexuality2. In Black Speculative Fiction, queerness and nonheteronormative sexuality is and has always been front and center. While it is tempting to
attribute this to the openly queer Delany's formative role in the genre's increased visibility in the
mid-to-late twentieth century, the fact is that it far predates him. Among early twentieth century
Black Speculative works, transgressive interracial sex is a major trope, being found in, among
others, Schuyler's Black No More, Du Bois's The Dark Princess and "The Comet," and Sutton
Griggs's Imperium in Imperio. Here, I draw on Cathy J. Cohen's expanded concept of
heteronormativity and queerness, locating "all those who stand on the outside of the dominant
constructed norm of state-sanctioned white middle- and upper-class heterosexuality" (25) within
queerness and outside of heteronormative privilege. Given the racial politics of the time (and
arguably the present), it seems fair to describe such transgressive interracial sex as nonheteronormative under this expanded definition, even though, in these texts, sex is exclusively
heterosexual. This theme remains in more contemporary Black Speculative Fiction, as seen
explicitly in texts like Butler's Kindred and Parable of the Sower, Okorafor's Who Fears Death,
Delany's Return to Nevèrÿon series, and, obliquely, Whitehead's The Intuitionist. However,
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I do not wish to overstate queerness's absence from white Speculative Fiction, as there is a long history
of it in the genre; indeed, the Lambda Literary Awards, awarded annually for LGBT literature, includes as
a category "LGBT Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror" ("Lambda Literary Award Winners"). However, in
mainstream/white Speculative Fiction, queer issues have largely been relegated as a niche concern, or
have been dealt with obliquely.
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contemporary Black Speculative Fiction writers have exploded the genre's thematic use of
transgressive or non-heteronormative sex far beyond interracial sex, to include gay male and
lesbian sexuality (Delany's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand and Jewelle Gomez's The
Gilda Stories, respectively), counter-normative polygamy (The Shadow Speaker), bisexuality
(Nalo Hopkinson's The Salt Roads) BDSM (Return to Nevèrÿon), omnisexuality (Delany's
Dhalgren), and even new, speculative forms of sexuality (Delany's "Aye, and Gomorrah"3).
Finally, Black Speculative Fiction consistently and explicitly explores resistance to
hegemonic power, white supremacy, and misogyny. While white/mainstream Speculative Fiction
often conceptualizes resistance in military terms (or other forms based in force), resistance in
Black Speculative Fiction is conceptualized in far more myriad and ambiguous terms. Certainly,
it can mean force, military, magical, or otherwise, as in Tales of Nevèrÿon, whose protagonist,
Gorgik the Liberator, seeks to end slavery through an armed insurrection. As another example,
The Shadow Speaker features a secondary character, Sarauniya Jaa, who enters the novel by
beheading a patriarchal ruler. Yet even then, the use of violence as a resistance strategy is
problematized. Delany undermines the notion that Gorgik can or even should end slavery
through his insurrection. Similarly, in The Shadow Speaker, the sword used in Jaa's beheading
transforms into a living, growing plant, changing from a tool of death to one of life.
The Literary Tradition of Black Speculative Fiction
While Speculative Fiction has traditionally been an overwhelmingly white and male field,
Black Speculative Fiction is now booming, not only among African Americans but, increasingly,
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“Aye, and Gomorrah” is set in a future where exposure to radiation in space travel has rendered longterm astronauts asexual, degendered, and incapable of feeling desire, and a new sexuality has grown
around attraction exclusive to them, essentially fetishizing their inability to return desire.
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among Afro Caribbeans and black Africans as well. As Delany points out, we can find elements
of "proto-science fiction" (383) in nineteenth century African American novels such as those by
Martin Delany, M. P. Shiel, and Sutton E. Griggs, as well as a few early twentieth texts such as
W.E.B. Du Bois's novel The Dark Princess and short story "The Comet" (383). Yet it was not
until the 1960s when Delany himself became the first prominent African American science
fiction novelist. Delany's ascendency and initial popularity occurred during a period of intense
African American literary creativity and invention that also included the Black Arts Movement
and the beginnings of postmodernism's influence on African American Literature, as seen in the
works of writers such as Ishmael Reed. Much of the era's African American artistic output
reacted against the prior ascendency of Richard Wright-style propagandistic realism and
complicated the didactic tendencies of Wright and his successors. Speculative Fiction began its
own similar transformation in the era with the arrival of the so-called New Wave writers such
Roger Zelazny, Joanna Russ, Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, and Philip K. Dick. Delany's complex
Speculative Fiction, infused with postmodernism and poststructuralistism and deeply engaged in
questions of both race and queerness, melds the literary innovations occurring in both African
American Literature and Speculative Fiction at the time. Delany's work stands as very much both
the product of and perfectly suited for its moment, explaining his success breaking through as the
first prominent Black Speculative Fiction writer. Subsequently, in the 1970s, with the advent of
second wave feminism, Octavia E. Butler became the first prominent African American woman
science fiction novelist. For some time, the two dominated the genre of Black Speculative
Fiction. Indeed, although other black writers such as Charles R. Saunders and Steven Barnes
published Speculative Fiction, their work never approached the acclaim or popularity of Delany
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and Butler. However, since the publication of the first Dark Matter anthology (edited by Sheree
R. Thomas) in 2000, the field has exploded. In part, this is due to more black writers, having
come of age reading Delany and Butler, writing Speculative Fiction. Certainly, the influence of
Delany and Butler is clear in younger Black Speculative Fiction writers such as Nnedi Okorafor,
Nalo Hopkinson, Tananarive Due, and N.K. Jemisin. But just as importantly, scholars, critics,
and readers have, in light of Dark Matter's success, paid more attention to previously neglected
traditions of Black Speculative Fiction. Increasingly, critics have reinterpreted canonized African
American writers such as Schuyler, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Ishmael Reed through the lens of
Speculative Fiction, and wider audiences have discovered pre-Dark Matter Black Speculative
Fiction writers such as Jewelle Gomez, Saunders, and Barnes.
Previous Criticism on Black Speculative Fiction
While mainstream scholarly attention to Speculative Fiction dates back at least to the
1960s, critical work specifically on Black Speculative Fiction is newer and still developing. As a
result, while some scholarly work has been done in the field, a great deal more remains.
Perhaps the most important scholar in considering Black Speculative Fiction is also the
genre's most prominent writer, Samuel R. Delany. Following the publication of 1984's Stars in
My Pockets Like Grains of Sand, his last explicitly science fiction novel, Delany largely
abandoned his pursuit of creative writing for a decade, instead pursuing a career as a college
professor and academic critic4. Even before 1984, Delany had produced an impressive body of
scholarly criticism, much of it dealing with Speculative Fiction. Particularly relevant to this
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Delany did publish the final two volumes of his Return to Nevèrÿon series in 1985 and 1987,
respectively, but otherwise he published no original fiction from 1984 until he released the gay erotica
novel The Mad Man in 1994.
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dissertation is his 1968 essay, "About 5,750 Words," which is collected in The Jewel-Hinged
Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. In the essay, Delany characterizes Speculative
Fiction as a literary language and argues it represents an entirely different language than
mainstream (or, in his terms, "mundane") fiction. That is to say, language operates in
fundamentally different ways within the genre than it does outside of it. As an example, he coins
the phrase "winged dog." The phrase itself could be used in any literary genre, but within the
confines of mainstream literature, it can only be meaningful as a metaphor; in realistic writing, a
literal winged dog simply cannot exist. In Speculative Fiction, however, a winged dog can be
literal as well as metaphorical, and this fact changes everything. By writing "winged dog," a
Speculative Fiction writer immediately creates a reality that can support such a creature:
One must momentarily consider, as one makes that visual correction, an entire
track of evolution: whether the dog has forelegs or not. The visual correction must
include modification of breastbone and musculature if the wings are to be
functional, as well as a whole slew of other factors from hollow bones to heart
rate; or if we subsequently learn as the series of words goes on that grafting was
the cause, there are all the implications (to consider) of a technology capable of
such an operation. All of this information hovers about and between those two
words. (12-13)
These implications go beyond the dog itself: one must then also consider the social and practical
challenges that would be presented by winged dogs, from the risk of aerial dog attacks to the less
life-threatening but no less daunting threat of winged dogs defecating mid-air. That is to say, the
phrase "winged dog," through its deployment, begins to create an entire new speculative reality
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that can contain the concept, and the implications of this creation extend far beyond the winged
dog itself. That all of this is created by the combination of two simple words shows the power of
Speculative Fiction, both as a literary form and as a framework for articulating
counterhegemonic discourse.
A more recent critical text valuable in considering Black Speculative Fiction is Madhu
Dubey's Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (2003). Dubey's stated subject matter is
postmodern African American urban fiction, rather than Black Speculative Fiction, but many of
the writers who she champions under this rubric, including Whitehead, Butler, Reed, and,
especially, Delany, are either primarily known as Speculative Fiction writers or, as in the case of
Reed and Whitehead, have produced major works that can be classified as such. Dubey argues
that the work of these urban postmodernists/Speculative Fiction writers is, far more than writers
such as Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison, who Dubey identifies as engaging in a "Turn South"
which is invested in nostalgia for a rural Southern past when African American unity supposedly
protected its people from the worst excesses of white supremacy, uniquely positioned to "directly
confront a range of questions pivotal to debates on postmodern urban culture" (15).
Finally, although it is very brief and written by a novelist rather than a trained scholar,
Nalo Hopkinson's Introduction to her 2004 anthology So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial
Science Fiction & Fantasy (co-edited with Uppinder Mehan), is a key critical text for
understanding the intellectual and political stakes of my larger argument about Black Speculative
Fiction's counterhegemonic potential. Genres such as science fiction and fantasy, Hopkinson
acknowledges, have long and deeply problematic histories of depicting conquest and colonialism
as glorious enterprises, and also often engage in the othering of indigenous people to the point
!10
where they literally become non-human. However, Hopkinson argues that people of color and
postcolonial people must engage with, and not just critique or attack, these genres. Accordingly,
our imagined futures cannot be exclusively white and western, with people of color absent or
peripheral, either way written out of humanity's future and past. Instead, postcolonial writers
must "take the meme of colonizing the natives, and, from the experience of the colonizee,
critique it, pervert it, fuck with it" (9). In this sense, Hopkinson calls for black and postcolonial
writers and readers of Speculative Fiction to be both critics and tricksters. Critics to the degree to
which they map out in their fictions new speculative frameworks that liberate rather than oppress
colonized peoples. Tricksters to the degree to which they deploy older, oppressive speculative
frameworks and signify on them, revealing readers' investment and indeed complicity in
Speculative Fiction's oppressive legacies.
Toward a Theory of Speculative Blackness
Black Speculative Fiction's ascent in the past decade has been remarkable, both in terms
of the numbers of new writers emerging in the genre and in terms of the growing popular and
critical interest in it. There are various potential cultural and historical explanations for this,
including Okorafor becoming the first black woman to win a World Fantasy Award, the
popularity of Janelle Monáe as perhaps the most vital performer of Afrofuturist music since
Parliament-Funkadelic, publicity surrounding Butler's untimely death in 2006, the growing
visibility of writers such as Tananarive Due and N.K. Jemisin, the formation of the Black
Science Fiction Society in 2008, and–ironically, since several prominent Black Speculative
Fiction writers denounced it as racist–the release of the hugely successful (but mostly white)
South African science fiction film District 9 in 2009. Doubtless, all of these factors have
!11
contributed to Black Speculative Fiction's newfound prominence. I believe, however, something
far deeper and more significant is happening here. Increasingly, new identity models are
emerging as our cultural relationship to identity factors such as race, sexuality, and gender grow
ever more complicated. This is not to say that Black Speculative Fiction's popularity represents
some achievement of emerging postracial or postblack society. On the contrary, Black
Speculative Fiction consistently exposes and interrogates race's trickster-like persistence in our
postmodern, post-Civil Rights era, often changing, sometimes hiding, but never vanishing or
lessening in its power.
Instead, the emergence of Black Speculative Fiction reflects and articulates a new sort of
identity model for blackness. This new model is rooted in the concept of assemblage, developed
by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guttari and articulated by Jasbir K. Puar:
As opposed to an intersectional model of identity, which presumes that
components–race, class, gender, sexuality, nation, age, religion–are separable
analytics and thus can be disassembled, an assemblage is more attuned to
interwoven forces that merge and dissipate time, space, and body against linearity,
coherency, and permanency. Intersectionality demands the knowing, naming, and
thus stabilizing of identity across space and time, relying on the logic of
equivalence and analogy between various axes of identity and generating
narratives of progress that deny the fictive and performative aspects of
identification: you can become an identity, yes, but also timelessness works to
consolidate the fiction of a seamless identity in every space. (212)
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Assemblage, unlike identity as understood through an intersectional frame, is not a fixed
category but an event in time that brings together multiple identity factors in ever-changing and
potentially unstable and unquantifiable ways5.
Within the Black Speculative texts I will analyze in the forthcoming chapters, we can see
one such assemblage emerging from several seemingly discrete categories of identity and
uniquely positioned to confront the trickster-ish complexities of identity in the post-Civil Rights
era. While I do not believe this assemblage exists only within Black Speculative texts, the genre,
always fascinated by queerness and non-heteronormative sexualities, has proven fertile group for
developing and articulating its contours and its cultural significance. As such, I am calling this
new assemblage "Speculative Blackness" and will explore its deployment in each of the Black
Speculative texts I analyze. Speculative Blackness is a deessentialized vision of blackness which
nevertheless insists upon the constant interrogation of race and racial history as both a personal
and political imperative. Furthermore, Speculative Blackness integrates queerness into blackness,
locating non-heteronormative sexuality (be it same-sex attraction, interracial coupling,
nontraditional forms of polygamy, BDSM, or radically equitable heterosexuality) as a key site
for resistance to racialized oppression. As such, Speculative Blackness signifies on oppressive
tropes of black hypersexuality and the so-called “collapse” of the black nuclear family as
justification or explanation for black subjugation, and refigures non-heteronormative black
sexuality as a site for black cultural resistance to white supremacist narratives of
5
In utilizing assemblage theory here, it is not my intent to critique or dismiss intersectionality as a critical
framework for identity issues. Indeed, intersectionality remains a vital concept for considering multiple
identities across all sorts of counter-hegemonic discourses, including feminism, anti-racism, queer
activism, and disability activism. However, assemblage theory is particularly well-positioned for
articulating the formation of and function of complex and emerging identity structures, as I am attempting
here.
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heteronormativity. Speculative Blackness contests binary distinctions between race, gender, and
sexuality as discrete categories of identity not only in the terms of intersectional analysis, which
investigates how separate categories interact with each other within racialized, gendered, and
queered bodies, but also in the terms of assemblage, which collapses all those identity categories
into each other.
Chapter by Chapter Outline
This dissertation will be divided into four chapters, following this Introduction. Chapter
One, titled “'My Left Arm’: Allies, Complicity and the Problem of Resistance in Octavia Butler's
Kindred,” focuses on Butler's Kindred and considers her treatment of historical complicity as
relates to the historical and present day intertwining of oppressor with oppressed, rendering black
resistance to white supremacy compromised if not impossible. Additionally, I explore the ways
in which Butler contests liberal narratives of the white “ally” in anti-racist work through the
character of Kevin Franklin. Kevin is a liberal white Californian, born in the twentieth century
and married to the novel’s black protagonist, Dana Franklin. In the novel, Dana finds herself
inexplicably traveling in time between her 1976 Los Angeles home and the nineteenth century
Maryland plantation where her ancestors were enslaved and where she meets Rufus Weylin, her
distant white ancestor and son of a slavemaster. In traveling through time, Dana is given the
perverse task of protecting Rufus’s life, allowing him to live long enough to rape Dana’s other
ancestor, the enslaved Alice Greenwood. Through this speculative frame, Butler explores the
complications and limitations African American history places on counterhegemonic resistance,
both for Dana as an African American woman and for Kevin as a white ally. Rufus, even as a
child, is overtly racist, and will grow to become a rapist and a slaveowner, yet he is every bit as
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much a part of Dana's identity as is Alice. Thus, Dana has no choice but to become complicit, not
only in Rufus's future rape but in his role perpetuating slavery and exploiting slave labor. To
resist this complicity would be to undo Dana's very existence; she literally cannot exist as a
twentieth century African American woman without an investment in white supremacy. As Adam
McKible succinctly puts it, “Alice's rape and continued brutalization constitute a precondition of
Dana's existence” (228).
Kevin is still more compromised by his investment in the white supremacy that is
fundamental to American history. During one of Dana’s trips back in time, he is stranded in the
past for several years and emerges literally and figuratively scarred and increasingly resembling
the slaveholding Weylins in appearance and attitude. Yet the novel makes clear that Kevin’s
investment in white supremacy and misogyny predate his sojourn in the antebellum past, calling
into question the possibility of his ever being an anti-racist “ally” in any meaningful sense
despite his good intentions and emotional and physical intimacy with Dana.
I also analyze Kindred’s famous closing scene, which raises questions about the price
African Americans must pay for resistance. During her final trip to the past and following Alice’s
death by suicide, Rufus attempts to rape Dana. Dana stabs and kills him, and returns to the
present, but this act renders her physically, as well as emotionally, incomplete: her left arm
materializes inside one of the walls of her home, and the part of her arm that she loses is the
exact same part that Rufus grabs as she kills him. In killing Rufus, even in self-defense, and even
due to very well-justified anger, Dana kills a part of herself, and can never be whole again. In
this sense, Kindred represents a deeply pessimistic vision of African American resistance. Butler
explodes romanticized notions of black resistance and highlights the complexity of historical
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black negotiation of pathological white supremacist ideology. While I acknowledge the power
and importance of this critique, subsequent chapters will show the ways in which other Black
Speculative Fiction writers have attempted to negotiate new forms of resistance to bypass the
problems of complicity and entangled identity that Butler so deftly articulates.
Chapter Two, titled "'Second Elevation: The Hope for Racial Uplift in Colson
Whitehead’s The Intuitionist” analyzes Whitehead's complex depiction of Intuitionism, an
ostensibly counterhegemonic but also problematized ideology in the curious field of elevator
inspection. In the novel, Whitehead constructs a world and a recent past that is like our own and
yet not quite our own. In this counter-factual recent past, elevator inspectors are high profile civil
servants and elevator theory is a field for academic study. Lila Mae Watson, an Intuitionist
inspector who is supposedly "never wrong," is implicated in an elevator crash. In investigating
the conspiracy she assumes leads to the crash (since she is not–cannot–be wrong), Lila Mae
comes to believe she has discovered plans for a perfect elevator, the "Black Box," which will
lead to a "Second Elevation" and reshape the entire urban landscape, requiring new buildings and
a wholesale redrawing of the map to accommodate elevators that not only elevate individuals but
society itself.
The Intuitionist also deploys the seemingly old-fashioned trope of passing in a new and
interesting way through the character of James Fulton, who dies prior to the novel’s events but
whose ideas remain a persistent presence in the novel. Fulton, the founder of Intuitionism, is
revealed to have been a black man passing for white, and his theoretical texts are subsequently
reframed as critiques and even satires of both white supremacist society and the consequent lack
of black social advancement. This critique turns on Fulton’s written line, “horizontal thinking in
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a vertical world is the race’s curse” (151), which initially seems to refer to the human race and
the difficult philosophical shifts necessitated by the elevator’s reshaping of the urban landscape.
Following the revelation of his passing, it instead comes to mean the black race and critiques a
seeming lack of black resistance to white supremacist ideology. Lila Mae interprets this
revelation as her “luminous truth” (230), yet the novel complicates this triumphal narrative by
revealing in its closing pages that Lila Mae has profoundly misread Fulton. She believes, based
on a marginal notation in Fulton’s notebooks, that he anointed her as his successor just prior to
his death. However, in fact, the notation merely refers to him noticing her presence in a library,
and in reality he considered her somewhat foolish.
As in Kindred, The Intuitionist's speculative frame complicates notions of resistance for
African Americans, yet the message is not quite so bleak. In her misguided attempt to solve the
elevator crash, Lila Mae begins to acquire a "new literacy" (230) which may lead to her
developing a new, truly counterhegemonic discourse, to do the work that Intuitionism has at least
partially failed to do. This “new literacy” is founded on Lila Mae’s misreading of Fulton, yet the
novel pointedly leaves open the question of whether or not this means her carrying on of Fulton’s
purported project is doomed to failure or whether she might still meaningfully resist white
supremacy through developing his utopian “black box” designs. In the chapter, I take on this
question and consider the potential success of Lila Mae’s utopian project, informed by the
revelation of Fulton’s passing, and contest its philosophical grounding.
Chapter Three, titled "The Great Change and The Great Book: Nnedi Okorafor's
Postcolonial, Post-Apocalyptic Africa" analyzes two of Okorafor's novels, The Shadow Speaker
and Who Fears Death. In these two novels, Okorafor takes on Hopkinson's proposed project of a
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postcolonial Speculative Fiction which plays both the critic and the trickster, that takes the often
white supremacist past (and sometimes present) of mainstream/white Speculative Fiction and
"critique[s] it, pervert[s] it, fuck[s] with it, with irony, with anger, with humor, and also, with
love and respect for the genre" (9). In both novels, Okorafor deploys the trickster trope of
signifying as a way of complicating simplistic postcolonial narratives of good/colonized and bad/
colonizer while still maintaining a strong critique of colonialism, and deploys the Speculative
trope of the post-apocalyptic landscape to articulate a way forward beyond our current
neocolonial reality. Okorafor takes on the trickster role in both The Shadow Speaker and Who
Fears Death through the characters of, respectively, Sarauniya Jaa and Mwita. Through Jaa, she
signifies on the symbolism of conservative Islam, such as polygamy and the burqa, simplistically
read in the west as oppressive, and refashions them as tools of women's liberation and resistance.
Through Mwita, Okorafor unsettles the similarly simplistic good/evil, oppressed/oppressor
reading of society through his own racialized body. Mwita and Onyesonwu are both interracial
people called Ewu. However, while society assumes that all Ewu are conceived through rape of
Okeke (victim) by Nuru (oppressor), Mwita reveals his Okeke other fell in love with his Nuru
father and that they were rejected just as brutally by the Okeke as they were by the Nuru. Thus,
Mwita's story unsettles the oppressed/oppressor binary that inhibits postcolonial progress by
focusing only on redressing past oppression rather than on building a new, truly postcolonial
society. In both novels, Okorafor uses post-apocalypse as a way to imagine a new form of
postcolonialism. Critics have long argued that the term "postcolonialism" is itself a misnomer, as
we exist in a neocolonial world where the economic power of western corporate capitalism has
replaced the military power of western governments. Okorafor's post-apocalyptic Africa, a land
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where juju is reality, reality is shifting, and the very basis of western rationalism has been
undermined, becomes a space where a true postcolonialism is at least possible. The result is not a
romanticized utopia. It is, rather, a dangerous and often frightening place where travel from one
town to another can be fraught with many dangers. However, it is also a place where Africa is
truly independent and where cultural contact happens on equal terms. In these novels, Okorafor
shows Speculative Fiction's powerful potential as a site for counterhegemonic discourse, as, in
the tradition of Delany's winged dog, it allows us to examine possibilities that are impossible
within mainstream literature.
Finally, Chapter Four, titled "The Collar and the Sword: Queer Resistance in Samuel R.
Delany's Tales of Nevèrÿon" investigates the first of a four volume-series which refigures the
sword-and-sorcery sub-genre into something strikingly new, at once decidedly postmodern and
overtly queer. Through the characters of Gorgik the Liberator and the masked woman warrior
Raven, Tales of Nevèrÿon radically critiques and reshapes our understanding of what resistance
can mean and accomplish. In Delany's hands, as Robert Reid-Pharr points out, "the adolescent,
(hetero)sexually unrestrained, sword-and-sorcery hero is replaced by Delany's adult, homosexual
character Gorgik" (350). Gorgik earns the appellation "The Liberator" but is almost never seen
actually liberating anyone, save for one scene which I read as both comic and ironic. The
traditional role of the villain-slaying hero is given over to Raven a warrior from the Wetsern
Crevasse, a strictly matriarchal culture outside of Nevèrÿon. In her hands, the usual phallic
symbolism of the sword is reversed, becoming instead a vaginal symbol. What's more, while
resistance to slavery, oligarchy, and hegemony is one of the book's central preoccupations,
Delany consistently and provocatively challenges our familiar understandings, forcing us to
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consider new narratives of resistance more suitable to our current era. While Kindred makes
meaningful resistance rhetorically impossible for black people, Tales of Nevèrÿon articulates,
most clearly of the five texts discussed in my dissertation, a new understanding of resistance,
specifically a queered understanding of resistance within racialized communities. Yet it also
consistently muddies the waters of the very forms of resistance it develops. Through Gorgik and
Raven's exploits, the lines between slavery and freedom are blurred, and queer sexuality serves
as both a site of agency and a marker of how one's own enmeshment in an unjust society
confines and limits the scope of that agency; even the most ardent opponents of slavery must
forever play out the roles that slavery has cast for them. Those roles can be critiqued by
appropriating their terms, but there is never a possibility of living completely outside of those
roles and terms.
!
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CHAPTER TWO
"MY LEFT ARM": ALLIES, COMPLICITY AND THE PROBLEM OF
RESISTANCE IN OCTAVIA BUTLER'S KINDRED
Often, a certain vocabulary dominates discussions of race in some, primarily but not
exclusively white liberal, circles. Key terms in this vocabulary include the familiar “privilege,”
“ally,” and “social construction.” What is curious about this vocabulary is that, while it purports
and attempts to articulate an anti-racist discourse, it actually foregrounds and privileges a
primarily white perspective on discussions of race. Many white students, for example, arrive at
college after spending their childhoods in predominantly white communities where race is rarely
discussed but overt displays of racism are certainly discouraged. There, if they take a course
focused on identity issues, they encounter for the first time the concept of race being a social
construction, and they breathe a sigh of relief. Race, they learn, is not “real,” and that means they
no longer have to think about it. Similarly, they learn about “privilege,” and if they do not
immediately and defensively dismiss the idea, they often learn the wrong lesson from it as well:
they are given a list of their privileges as white, or male, or straight, or all of the above. They
learn that, if they remember this list and do their best to be conscious about their privileges and
openly acknowledge the ways in which they benefit from them, they will be a good “ally.” What
is too often absent from this type of discourse, however, is any real consideration of oppression
or of the people being oppressed. What’s more, the notion of the “ally” is often vaguely defined
to the point of meaninglessness, and has a smug ring that lends itself to undeserved selfcongratulation. A post on the weblog Spectra Speaks sums up the problem succinctly:
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I’ve met hundreds of “white allies,” for instance, many of who profess their
“consciousness”…via some self-congratulatory speech masquerading as a
relevant anecdote…especially when surrounded by women of color…But, here’s
the thing: half the time, I never ever remembered…any of our conversations
moving beyond the scope of the burden of racial consciousness they had taken up
for themselves as “the good white people.” In fact, it took me quite a while to
figure out that most of the “white allies” I’d meet in social change spaces…were
only ever “white allies” around women of color, and mainly to seek my/our
approval. (“Straight Allies, White Anti-Racists”)
If not framed by a complimentary discourse of and engagement with oppression, privilege
discourse rhetorically focuses conversations about race, gender, and sexuality on those who have
the most privilege and marginalizes those who have the least6. That is to say, these white liberal
discourses often reproduce the very racist systems they attempt to critique, privileging white
male perspectives on and responses to racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression and valuing
conversation about privilege over action addressing the lived experience of those on the other
end of unequal power dynamics.
6
When privilege discourse is connected to an analysis of structural oppression, it can be a far more
useful source for anti-racist work, but it also can generate responses of extreme defensiveness and
hostility from privileged students. Such students often recoil at the idea of being implicated in oppression.
An extreme case of this occurred in 2013 at Minneapolis Community and Technical College when three
white male students filed a discrimination complaint against Shannon Gibney, a black woman professor,
for discussing both white privilege and structural racism. Disturbingly, the university did reprimand Gibney,
claiming that she had “single[d] out white male students” (Rupar). As with the Wise incident, this serves to
reinforce the pervasive nature of structural racism. Gibney’s students leveraged their white privilege to
spur racist structures within the university to punish a black woman for the “crime” of discussing structural
racism.
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These dynamics recently ignited a social media controversy centered around the antiracist activist and media personality Tim Wise. Wise has long been controversial among black
activist circles on social media platforms such as Twitter, where many critique him for earning
his fame through parroting others’ ideas and for enriching himself through anti-racist public
speaking and media engagements which he, as a white man, has greater access to than a black or
brown anti-racist activist would. Angered by these critiques, some of which turned personal,
Wise lashed out on his Facebook account in September 2013, writing:
[E]very second that fools troll my site, complaining about how I take up all the
antiracist space so they can't be heard, is a moment they aren't setting up their
own website, blog, or writing their own book...plenty of people of color get book
deals and speaking gigs each year...if u didn't its not on me...it's cuz u havent said
anything that anyone finds valuable...Maybe another POC blew up your spot
rather than me...ever think of that? No, of course not...cuz that would require
critical thought rather than simplistic hater bs...u will lose this beef..badly… (qtd.
in “Anti-racism Activist”)
Wise was widely lambasted for the comments. Some used the incident as a launching point for
critiquing privilege discourse, as I am here. One such critique was published in the weblog
Orchestrated Pulse:
Conceptually, privilege is best used when narrowly focused on explaining how
structures generally shape experiences. However, when we overly personalize the
problem, then privilege becomes a tit-for-tat exercise in blame, shame, and guilt.
At best, we treat structural injustice as a personal problem, and moralizing
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exercises like “privilege confessions” inadequately address the nexus between
systemic power and individual behavior. (“Failure of Privilege Discourse”)
Wise subsequently apologized for the post, but whether or not he can ever recover his reputation
in anti-racist circles remains an open question. Even if we assume the apology is genuine, it
arguably does not change the problems revealed by the post itself. While Wise may, as he says,
have valid reasons for anger at some of his critics or “trolls,” a dismissive term indicating poor
intentions and lack of substance among his critics, the fact that his anger took the form it did is
telling. Wise, who has made a lucrative career through his use of privilege discourse, reacted
with rage when people of color turned the very same critique on him. Essentially, Wise lashed
out in an overt attempt to silence his critics and even subtly threaten them (the “beef” comment).
What’s more, the rhetoric he deployed in attacking his critics resembles nothing so much as a
socially conservative “bootstraps” rant, championing meritocracy and “hard work” and
dismissing out of hand any notion that structural racism or unequal power arrangements could
possibly play a role in his success and visibility relative to black or brown activists. This is
fundamentally the opposite of an anti-racist critique. That the post was written in a time of
intense stress does not excuse Wise but only makes the entire thing more damaging, as it is often
in such moments when we fall back on our worst prejudices and reveal uncomfortable truths
about ourselves. This incident not only exposes Tim Wise to scrutiny, but the entire category of
the white “ally” as well. Clearly, both the term and the concept lend themselves far too easily to
smug self-congratulation. If I talk about racism and privilege, the white ally says, then you, the
person of color who I am “helping,” must thank me and must not criticize me. If I have
intellectual investment in anti-racist work, or if I have emotional investment in personal,
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romantic, or familial interracial relationships, I am clearly not a racist and cannot be criticized
for any sort of complicity in racism. My personal life, essentially, trumps any potential
complicity in structural systems of racism. Again, this becomes less an anti-racist critique and
more an exercise in white liberal self-congratulation.
While these issues of privilege and the white ally are especially prominent in the socalled “postracial” world of the twenty-first century, Octavia Butler’s third novel, Kindred
(1979), insightfully explores them as well, often in ways that remain surprising and revealing
today. In particular, the character Kevin Franklin serves as a sort of fictional analogue to Tim
Wise. Kevin, too, is as a white man who becomes deeply involved in anti-racist activism (in his
case, helping slaves escape to freedom) yet who, in difficult moments, betrays a continued
investment in racist attitudes and a willingness to excuse and defend the racist social structures
he still benefits from, his liberal racial attitudes notwithstanding. As with Wise, these telling
moments call into question the notion of the white anti-racist ally. What’s more, the extent to
which many critics have excused and even championed Kevin despite his serious flaws raises
troubling questions about the ease with which the racist and misogynistic attitudes and actions
can often be excused or explained away, provided they come from someone who embodies the
role of “ally.” There are important differences between Wise’s professionalized version of
allyship and the role Kevin takes on as an abolitionist. In a sense, however, this serves to make
Kevin’s failings all the more troubling. While much of the criticism of Wise has focused on the
corruption of his intentions by the profit motive underlying his work, Kevin has no such motive,
thus making his anti-racist work seemingly more noble and selfless. What’s more, Kevin is
married to and genuinely in love with Dana, a black woman, giving him clear personal stakes in
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anti-racism. Yet for all this, Kevin’s attitudes and behaviors remain at least as suspect of Wise’s if
we look beneath the surface.
Kindred is described by Butler as a “grim fantasy” (qtd. in Crossley 269). In it, Butler
collapses several generic distinctions, including that between Black Speculative Fiction and the
Neo-Slave Narrative. Butler’s protagonist, Edana (or Dana) Franklin, finds herself, in the run-up
to the United States’ Bicentennial celebration, inexplicably traveling back and forth through time
between her 1976 life as a writer and black wife to a white husband and an early nineteenth
century Maryland plantation where her ancestors were both enslaved and enslavers. Tellingly, in
the nineteenth century, these identities as writer and wife are quickly obscured. Writing is too
dangerous for Dana to openly practice in the past, and her literary aspirations turn to the furtive
project of teaching slaves to read, coupled with the sanctioned but morally troubling task of
tutoring Rufus in reading. Additionally, for much of her time in the past, Dana is separated from
Kevin, sidelining her role as wife. When Kevin is present in the past, the two are forced by the
realities of the time to pose as slave and master, roles which quickly begin to feel uncomfortably
real. Kindred is arguably the most acclaimed and most read novel in the entire corpus of Black
Speculative Fiction. Certainly, there is more academic criticism treating Kindred than any other
novel I analyze here, perhaps more than all the other novels combined7. Yet what is striking in
the existing criticism is the extent to which scholars have undersold the novel’s grimness,
particularly in its narrative of anti-racist resistance and in its treatment of Dana’s interracial
marriage to her likable but deeply flawed white liberal husband, the aforementioned Kevin
7
For all this, I would argue that Kindred remains underappreciated and deserves recognition as one of
the most important African American novels of the twentieth century, along with such canonized classics
as Beloved, Invisible Man, and The Color Purple.
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Franklin. Through her unflinching examination of complicity, historical complexity, and the
pervasiveness of white liberal investment in white supremacy, Butler casts into question notions
of the white anti-racist ally and of the possibility of effective resistance to racism and racialized
hegemony. Further, Butler also exposes the ways in which attempts at resistance can harm others
and leave the self no longer whole.
Both thematically and structurally, Kindred is centered around Dana’s distinct yet
overlapping relationships with three seemingly very different white men: Kevin, her ancestor
Rufus Weylin, and Tom Weylin, Rufus’s father and the master of the Maryland plantation. While
Dana’s relationships between the three men initially seem very different, those distinctions blur
and, at moments of extreme stress, collapse entirely, as the novel goes on. Similarly, the
seemingly iron-clad distinction between the nineteenth century plantation and 1976 Los Angeles
blurs as well, to the point where Dana and Kevin both feel unsure which one is home, and which
one is more “real.” Karla F. C. Holloway insightfully frames this collapse of the two eras in
terms of the black feminist concept of intersectionality: “Butler’s strategy complicates the
perceived distinction between the past and present until their intersection becomes more real than
their separation” (113). Yet, even framing the issue in these intersectional terms, Holloway’s
reading maintains something of a binary understanding of past/present that privileges the “free”
present over the enslaved past. As Holloway writes, “the collision of the past and present is a
shuttling between what is the objectivity of her essentially unrecovered past and the subjectivity
of her contemporary life” (114). Certainly, this reading is in many respects valid: in Kindred,
1976 is safer, both for Dana and for Kevin, than the nineteenth century for any number of
reasons (and, similarly, Kevin is preferable to the Weylins). Yet to understand the truly radical
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nature of what Butler is doing in Kindred, we must consider the ways in which Butler collapses
the binaries between ally and racist and between past and present, and the ways in which Dana’s
subjectivity is every bit as threatened in 1976 as it is in the nineteenth century.
As Kindred opens, Dana and Kevin have moved from Los Angeles to a home in the
working class suburb of Altadena. Significantly, the novel opens in June of 1976, in the build-up
to the marking of the United States’ Bicentennial, an event whose celebratory nature was
designed to obfuscate the nation’s recent traumatic experiences of Watergate and the Vietnam
War and reestablish the dominance of American exceptionalism and a triumphalist and
progressive narrative of American history. Within the novel, the celebratory Bicentennial’s
juxtaposition with the memory of antebellum slavery serves as a reminder of the ways in which
America’s founders and founding documents were actively complicit in the perpetuation and
ideological justification of slavery, such as through the infamous Constitutional compromise
which legally defined African Americans as three-fifths of a human being. Not only do the events
that follow obliterate the triumphalist narrative of the Bicentennial, they also call into question
the more liberal narrative that Dana and Kevin embody: that, through personal connection and
vague liberal ideas but absent meaningful action or engagement with racialized history,
America’s racist legacy can be overcome or ignored. While with Kevin in their new home, Dana
is abruptly “called” back to the past. She materializes along a Maryland riverbank and saves a
young white boy, later revealed to be Rufus Weylin, from drowning. For her efforts, Tom Weylin
points a shotgun at her face, and, just as mysteriously, she returns to Kevin and 1976 California.
Upon her return, Kevin is incredulous and finds it difficult to accept the reality of her experience,
despite several undeniable physical clues (she disappears in front of his eyes and returns soaking
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wet and covered in mud from the river). Subsequently, Dana makes five additional trips to the
past. While the trips’ duration varies from hours to months, each lasts significantly longer than
the initial trip. While no scientific explanation is ever given for Dana’s time travel (thus Butler’s
classification of the novel as “grim fantasy” rather than Science Fiction), Dana learns that Rufus
is her distant ancestor and that he is somehow able to “call” her back to the past to save him
when he fears his life is in danger; Dana, in turn, returns to the present when she feels her life is
in danger, as when Tom Weylin points the shotgun at her.
Further complicating this already impossible situation is Rufus’s whiteness and the issue
of the endemic rape of black women by white men on the antebellum slave plantation. While
Rufus is white and a slaveowner’s son, Dana’s other ancestor, Alice Greenwood, is black and
rejects Rufus’s constant advances. Alice is initially born free, but loses her freedom after she is
caught helping her enslaved husband Isaac in a failed escape attempt. Throughout his life, Rufus
is sexually obsessed with Alice, and he is humiliated and enraged when Alice chooses a loving
relationship with Isaac over concubinage with him. Rufus, for his part, is unable to comprehend
or accept her decision, decrying his former childhood friend Alice for “[getting] so she’d rather
have a buck nigger than me” (123). Stung by this, Rufus is caught by Isaac during his first
attempt to rape Alice. The incident leads to a tragic series of events in which Isaac beats Rufus
nearly to death, he and Alice attempt escape, are caught, Isaac is sold south, and Alice loses her
freedom and becomes Rufus’s slave and forced concubine. Once she is enslaved and separated
from her husband, Alice can no longer resist Rufus’s advances, and while other slaves come to
believe she is Rufus’s willing partner, she remains horribly conflicted and traumatized by the
arrangement until her suicide in the novel’s final section. As Alice endures years of rape and
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humiliation by Rufus, Dana has no choice but to remain complicit. Since Rufus and Dana are her
distant but direct ancestors, for Dana to even attempt to resist Rufus would be to literally negate
her own existence. As a twentieth century African American woman, Dana’a genetic and
historical existence is contingent upon the legacy of socially approved white-on-black rape, a
fact often swept under the carpet in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries yet made very much
present through the Speculative device of Dana’s time travel.
Kevin plays an increasingly large role as the novel goes on, and as he becomes more and
more prominent, his position in the novel grows more and more problematic. Essentially, he
moves from being a sympathetic white liberal and loving husband to someone who Dana
increasingly cannot distinguish from the Weylins. As such, as Robert Crossley puts it, “[t]he
most problematic white man in Kindred is not the Maryland slave owner but the liberated,
modern Californian married to Dana” (275). Butler, whose work is often skeptical of
heteronormative marriage, herself explains that she “gave [Dana] that husband to complicate her
life” (qtd. in Crossley 276). In part, this transformation happens as a result of Kevin’s own trip to
the past. When Rufus “calls” Dana back for the third time, Kevin grabs hold of her and is pulled
back as well. Together in the past, Dana and Kevin are read as slave and master, and their sexual
relationship is interpreted as one of concubinage, mirroring Rufus and Alice. Immediately, Dana
recognizes the unique perils Kevin faces as a progressive white man suddenly living in a slave
society, and she laments that she doesn’t “want this place to touch [Kevin] except through
me” (59). This fear plays out through what Asharaf Rushdy describes as Kevin’s “easy
acceptance of this ‘particular segment of history’–especially the accommodations they have to
make to live in the house of a slaveholder” (149). Tellingly, however, Kevin recognizes none of
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this, only seeing how his privilege in the past relative to Dana’s might make life easier for both
of them. His notion of how to survive the past comes very much out of privilege discourse: he
should use his white and male privilege to make life better for Dana.
Initially, Dana views these outside perceptions as “roles” they must play that do not
reflect their true characters or the reality of their marriage. However, as their time together in the
past continues, she realizes an uncomfortable slippage of the line between role and persona.
When Tom Weylin sees Dana leaving Kevin’s bedroom one morning, Dana finds herself
ashamed, as suddenly the role she is playing no longer seems entirely like a role. Instead, she
feels as if she “really was doing something shameful, happily playing whore for my supposed
owner” (97), and she is left stunned by “[h]ow easily we seemed to acclimatize” (76) as a
purportedly egalitarian married interracial couple to the profoundly unequal dynamic of slave
and master8.
As Dana fears, Kevin uncritically and all-too-easily adopts problematic ideas while
trapped in the past. Shortly after arriving in the nineteenth century, Kevin mentions that it would
be a great era to live in, if only they could get away from the South and, perhaps, experience the
“Old West” (97). In the moment, Kevin’s casual ignorance is laid bare: he seems to think that he
and Dana could forget about slavery as long as they physically got away from it, ignoring the
entire nation’s complicity in the economics and politics of slavery, and displaying the typical
white northern liberal blind spot around slavery: that if you are not in or from the South, if your
family was not directly involved in slavery, slavery has nothing to do with you. Further, as Dana
8
The theoretical impulses and contributions of performance studies offer a way to further consider
slippage between external role and internal experience. Theorists like E. Patrick Johnson in
Appropriating Blackness, Nicole Fleetwood in Troubling Vision, and Daphne Brooks in Bodies in Dissent
offer critical approaches to reading Kindred through the work of performance studies.
!31
points out, he ignores the oppression of and genocide against Native Americans, who filled the
same role as racialized other in the West as black slaves did in the South. But when Dana says all
this, Kevin simply “looked at [Dana] strangely. He had been doing that a lot lately” (97).
Similarly, when Kevin learns Dana is teaching the slave Nigel to read, Kevin is clearly
uncomfortable with the idea, and not only because it endangers Dana. After commenting on how
mild the plantation’s slavery seems to him, Kevin warns Dana of the dangers of her actions and
tells her, “You think someday he’ll write his own pass and head North, don’t you…I see Weylin
was right about educated slaves” (101). While Kevin quickly recovers and encourages Dana to
continue teaching Nigel, the moment in which he parrots Tom Weylin cannot be undone; the
connection, or at least the potential for a connection, between the two has been firmly
established. What’s more, his comments about the relative mildness of the Weylins’ plantation
reveal the failure of his imagination to grasp slavery’s pervasive psychic terror. Slavery, to
Kevin, is only truly brutal when it comes with whips and chains. That the Weylins’ “mild”
slavery includes the sale of children from parents, the criminalization of education, and the
constant onslaught of white supremacist ideology, barely registers.
Eventually, Dana returns to the present without Kevin, who is unable to reach her in time
as she dematerializes. He is subsequently stranded for several years in the nineteenth century,
and while he does not sell out his progressive beliefs–indeed, he becomes an abolitionist and
works with the Underground Railroad, suffering physical harm for his anti-slavery work–the
growing conflation between him and the Weylins continues nevertheless. When he finally does
return to the present with Dana, she cannot help, even in the midst of her bliss at their reunion,
but to note that “[Kevin] had a slight accent…Nothing really noticeable, but he did sound a little
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like Rufus and Tom Weylin” (190). His temper and impatience with Dana also tie him to the
Weylins as he struggles to re-acclimate to the present, which now seems frivolous and unreal to
him. He demands to be left alone and gives Dana “what almost seemed to be a look of
hatred” (195), closely mirroring Tom Weylin’s rage towards her. To Tom Weylin, the free,
educated Dana is simply illegible as black; she is outside his definition of what it means to be
black or be a woman, let alone the intersectional identity of a black woman. Now, troublingly,
the same is increasingly true of Kevin. In some sense, although he has returned to 1976, he
remains ideologically trapped in the nineteenth century, calling into question whether or not the
two were ever so distinct to begin with. Even though he fights against the nineteenth’s century’s
overt and enforced racial hierarchies, he is now only able to think in the terms of those
hierarchies. The nineteenth century’s binaries of master/slave and slaver/abolitionist seem more
“real” to him, and certainly more easy to comprehend, than the more complex, postmodern, and
covertly racist world of 1976. Just as Dana’s time in the past reveals the extent to which her
existence as a black woman relies upon the histories of slavery and white supremacy, Kevin’s
time in the past reveals the extent to which Kevin, as a white liberal, remains invested in the
white supremacy the Weylins overtly embody.
Yet even more striking is the way in which, as the novel goes on, it reveals the extent to
which Kevin was invested in white privilege and racist and misogynistic attitudes long before his
stranding in the antebellum past. While alone in 1976, Dana remembers how they first decided to
marry. Disturbingly, the memory is tied into Kevin’s sense of entitlement and his unexamined
assumptions about Dana’s role, being black and a woman, to serve him, being white and male.
Both Kevin and Dana are writers, although Kevin, being older, has found more success thus far
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than Dana. When they first begin dating, Kevin asks Dana to type his manuscripts and she goes
along with it although she hates the task. When she eventually refuses, he is visibly irritated, and
when she refuses multiple times, he calls the entire relationship into question, because, as Dana
puts it, “if I couldn’t do him a little favor when he asked, I could leave” (109). Dana does, in fact,
leave, but only temporarily. Even after they reconcile, Kevin persists in this attitude so resolutely
that, despite his deep emotional connection to Dana, he still cannot comprehend her objection.
When she returns, he makes a weak joke about how he will “let” (109) her type his manuscripts
if she will marry him. Dana is not amused, and again Kevin’s anger and wounded pride surface.
He repeats the request, and when she bluntly answers “No” (109), he lashes out by simply
saying, “Dammit, Dana…!” (109) before finally falling silent and dropping the point. Even after
all this, we are given no evidence that Kevin ever apologizes, regrets his inconsiderate behavior,
understands that what he did is offensive, or even shows any interest whatsoever in trying to
understand Dana’s feelings in the matter. The scene uncomfortably mirrors Dana’s second
meeting with the young Rufus, who similarly expresses a variety of racist and misogynistic
assumptions while remaining blissfully unaware that anything he is saying could possibly be
offensive. In describing his first encounter with Dana, Rufus casually mentions that his mother
calls Dana “just some nigger she had never seen before” (24). When Dana confronts him, Rufus
is confused and irritated by her anger, much like Kevin:
“She said I was what?” I asked.
“Just a strange nigger. She and Daddy both knew they hadn’t seen you before.”
“That’s a hell of a thing for her to say right after she saw me save her son’s life.”
Rufus frowned. “Why?”
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I stared at him.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Why are you mad?” (24-25)
If anything, Kevin comes off worse in the comparison. Rufus is a child and a slaveowner’s son in
the nineteenth century, and as such he has been actively and explicitly socialized his entire life to
dehumanize black people and to ignore their needs and feelings. Kevin should have no such
excuse. While he, too, has been raised in a (more covertly) white supremacist culture, he is an
adult, ostensibly “liberated,” and has, by this point, established considerable emotional intimacy
with Dana. Yet still, his investment in white supremacist and misogynistic disregard for black
women and assumption that it is Dana’s place to serve him shines through in moments of
conflict. In this regard, Rufus represents Kevin’s baser self, the unthinking racist that lurks
beneath Kevin’s white liberal veneer.
A similar problematic echo surfaces after Dana agrees to marry Kevin. Both have no
surviving parents and few remaining family members with whom to share the news. Dana is
clear-eyed about the difficulties this will present: she knows that her aunt and uncle will
disapprove of her marriage to a white man, although her aunt eventually accepts it “because any
children [they] will have will be light” (111)9. Kevin, though, is far less insightful when it comes
to his own family. While he is convinced that his sister will love any woman he marries, quite the
opposite proves true. In fact, she tells Kevin she will not allow him in her home any longer if he
marries Dana, as well as other things that he refuses even to repeat to his fiancée. Kevin’s lack of
insight into his family’s racial attitudes is telling, yet what is even more striking is the
9
Again, Kevin’s racial naiveté shows here, as he seemingly cannot comprehend the way Dana’s aunt
simultaneously opposes interracial marriage yet expresses internalized colorist attitudes. Such seeming
contradictions are familiar to anyone who has lived or studied African American history and culture, but
Kevin responds by simply staring at Dana, apparently uncomprehending.
!35
misogynistic way in which he reacts to his sister’s betrayal. First, he shifts the blame for this
racism from his sister to her husband, who he says “would have made a good Nazi” (110), as if
his sister is not an adult capable of forming her own opinions, no matter how objectionable they
might be. Having deflected the ultimate blame, he then verbally attacks his sister in highly
misogynistic terms. When Dana asks why she married her “Nazi” husband, Kevin says it was
due to
[d]esperation. She would have married almost anybody…In high school, she and
this friend of hers spent all their time together because neither of them could get a
boy friend. The other girl was black and fat and homely, and Carol was white and
fat and homely…[S]he and the girl sort of comforted each other and fell off their
diets together and planned to go to the same college…She wound up marrying the
first dentist she ever worked for–a smug little reactionary twenty years older than
she was. (110-111)
While this rant remains largely uncommented upon (Dana simply shrugs, “not knowing what to
say” (111)), the nastiness of its bile is striking, forcing us to reconsider his character. Kevin
cannot accept that his sister is responsible for her own racism. That must be passed off on
unlikable other, safely outside of his own blood relationships so that it does not reflect on him.
Still, he follows that up with misogyny that is nearly as mean-spirited as anything we might
imagine his sister might have said about Dana. He cannot bear to call his sister a racist, but he
thinks nothing of calling her fat, ugly, and so desperate for male companionship that she would
marry anyone who could stand to look at her. Again, Kevin is so secure in his own righteousness
that he remains remarkably unselfconscious about all of this, and again, the scene uncomfortably
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mirrors Rufus, and specifically his relationship with Alice. The two grow up innocently as
friends, as close to siblings as is possible for a black and a white child to be in a world corrupted
by slavery and white supremacy. When they get older and questions of sexual attraction enters
into the picture, Alice rejects Rufus, as Kevin is rejected by his sister. Like Kevin, Rufus finds
this incomprehensible; both assume that the women to whom they are attached will follow them
unquestioningly, and are stung when they do not. While Kevin lashes out by calling his sister fat,
ugly, and subservient to her vile husband, Rufus takes it much further, attempting to rape Alice.
Clearly here, Rufus is far worse in his actions than Kevin, but it is in his bafflement at the
rejection that he again mirrors his descendent’s husband. When Dana sarcastically tells Rufus
Dana rejected him because “[s]he must have thought she was a free woman or something” (123),
Rufus misses the point, simply saying, “I would have taken better care of her than any field hand
would have” (123). Like Kevin’s attack on his sister, Rufus’s response is deeply invested in
misogyny. Any question of Alice’s personal preferences, emotional needs, or love for Isaac is
subsumed to her assumed need as a woman to be “provided for.”
That both of these incidents occur before Kevin travels to the nineteenth century, and that
Kevin’s behavior in both strongly mirrors Rufus’s worst moments, is deeply troubling in
considering the relationship or its implications for any notion of Kevin as a potential anti-racist
ally. Yet for all this, much of the academic criticism on Kindred is curiously positive towards
Kevin and his relationship with Dana. For example, Diana R. Paulin describes their marriage in
1976 as an unrealistically “trouble-free existence” (179) and argues that both “attempt to
disregard the historical complexity of their relationship” (179), apparently ignoring both the
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conflicts described above and the imbalance between Dana’s understanding of their
relationship’s racialized complications and Kevin’s ignorance/disinterest in it.
More troubling still is Angelyn Mitchell’s often strikingly positive reading of Kevin.
Mitchell essentially excuses Kevin’s behavior in the fight over typing manuscripts, describing
him as simply “naive” (65) as opposed to misogynistic or oblivious. She also argues that “[t]heir
interracial relationship can be read as a metaphor for how American may be healed. Their
relationship, in other words, represents what is necessary for Americans to alleviate the pain of
our common history” (70). Not only does this reading paper over the complexity and ambiguity
of the relationship, it also engages in the problematic and unfair discourse of interracial
relationships as “solving” racism, a strikingly simplistic solution to the structural nature of
American racism. After all, considering the challenges any long-term relationship faces, let alone
one that transgressively crosses racial lines less than a decade after Loving v. Virginia, to add the
responsibility of having to solve racism seems unduly burdensome. Furthermore, Mitchell reads
Dana’s fears of the past touching Kevin as largely unrealized, writing, “remarkably, Kevin is able
to stay true to his twentieth-century concept of freedom and equality as he participates in
abolitionist work when he is left in the past without Dana” (59). While it is certainly true that
Kevin’s abolitionist work is commendable, and that he pays a significant physical and
psychological price for it10, it cannot whitewash his occasional but persistent forays into nasty
misogyny, racism, and blindness to both the oppression that surrounds him and his own
complicity in it. Yet what is even more remarkable is that Kevin’s noble work in the past and his
intimate relationship with Dana fail to correct his preexisting problematic tendencies or to truly
10
It should be noted, however, that the physical price Kevin pays is substantially unequal to the one paid
by Dana: while she loses an arm, he is simply left with a scar on his forehead, ugly but not disabling.
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protect him from the morally corrosive effects of living as a white man in a time of slavery. Thus,
through Kevin, Kindred calls into question the notion that white liberal men can ever truly cast
aside their investment in white supremacy to truly become allies–or, indeed, whether the term
“ally” is even a useful concept at all. If white people are to play a meaningful role in anti-racist
work, or if men are to meaningfully engage in feminism, a new sort of model is needed to replay
the ally, one which prioritizes meaningful action over labels and which does not so easily
reproduce the racist systems it purports to critique.
Even though Kevin courageously acts as the ally in his public life in the nineteenth
century, his private life with Dana in 1976 remains problematic and tainted with his own
unexamined version of white supremacy, subtler than the Weylins’ yet just as insidious. Thus,
despite the harrowing nature of his experience, Kevin again brings to mind Tim Wise, managing
at once to fight and critique white supremacy while simultaneously reproducing it in his personal
life.
At the novel’s conclusion, two connected major events occur, both extremely important
for thinking about the novel’s treatment of resistance. First, once Dana’s ancestor, Hagar Weylin,
is born, Rufus tries to rape Dana, and she finally fights back and kills him. After Rufus’s death,
the slave Nigel helps Dana to cover up the killing by lighting the house of fire. Second, when
Dana returns to 1976, her left arm materializes inside the wall of her home, and she loses it. The
novel itself connects the two events, although it does not spell out the significance of the
connection. As Dana rematerializes in the twentieth century, she tells us:
Something harder and stronger than Rufus’s hand clamped down on my arm…
painlessly, at first, melting into it, meshing with it as though somehow my arm
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were being absorbed into something…The wall of my living room…I was still
caught somehow, joined to the wall as though my arm were growing out of it–or
growing into it…I looked at the spot where flesh joined with plaster, stared at it
uncomprehending. It was the exact spot Rufus’s fingers had grasped. (260-261)
In sharp contrast to Kevin, who sees 1976 as soft and unreal after his years in the nineteenth
century, Dana’s time in the past reveals to her the ways in which 1976 is still very much caught
up in the legacies of nineteenth century slavery. Indeed, not only is 1976 not “soft,” but Dana’s
home itself, initially seen as a refuge from Rufus and slavery, becomes in the end “harder and
stronger” than Rufus’s touch. The fact that the exact part of Dana’s arm that Rufus touched is
now the one that materializes inside the wall is key to reading the passage. After months (or,
from Rufus’s perspective, a lifetime) of forced complicity, Dana has finally fought back against,
and, indeed, murdered Rufus. Yet Dana does so at great personal cost. For Dana, the price of
fully rejecting Rufus’s legacy of rape, slavery, misogyny, and overt white supremacy, is the loss
of her own bodily integrity. Here, Butler anticipates the neo-slave narrative trope of black
women’s bodies bearing the physical markers of slavery’s trauma. Much as Toni Morrison’s
Sethe, from Beloved, would several years later embody the physicalized trauma of slavery
through the chokecherry tree on her back, so Dana does with her left arm. The tree on Sethe’s
back is the “price” and the marker she just forever bear for having the audacity to consider
herself a human being with agency over her sexuality and her reproduction, and the loss of her
left arm is the price Dana must pay for putting an end to her active complicity in Rufus’s legacy
of rape and concubinage. Because Rufus’s rape and oppression are necessary preconditions of
Dana’s existence–and because, speaking more widely, the existence of African American culture
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and history itself would not exist without the horrors of slavery–she cannot fight Rufus and hope
to remain whole.
However, her left arm is not the only price Dana must pay for her final act of resistance.
She also must live with the awareness of how her murder of Rufus will likely affect his slaves.
The fire Nigel sets is not an act of rage against Rufus or solidarity with Dana, although he does
understand her motivations. Instead, it is a desperate act of self-preservation. In many ways,
although his slaves hold no Uncle Tom’s Cabin-style love for Rufus as a “good master,” Rufus’s
death is nevertheless a catastrophe for him. With Rufus dead, they are likely to be sold off,
perhaps into harsher conditions, and many slave families will certainly be split up. In this sense,
Dana’s resistance, put off by her forced complicity for so long, is once again undermined and
even made into complicity, not with Rufus but with the larger slave system. Indeed, Dana’s
ability to resist complicity in slavery is so compromised that resistance itself becomes
complicity, her justified murder of Rufus ultimately serving to reinforce the slaves’ status as
helpless and powerless. By stabbing Rufus, Dana does nothing to assault slavery as an institution
or even to ease the suffering of Rufus’s own slaves; instead, killing him will only worsen their
lot. What’s more, since Rufus has clearly been murdered, blame will inevitably fall on the slaves
themselves, and their resulting suffering could be far worse than being sold “down the river” or
being split apart from their loved ones. This, indeed, is why Nigel starts the fire–to cover up
Dana’s murder of Rufus and disguise Rufus’s death as accidental. When Dana returns to the
twentieth century, she is unable to learn what became of Rufus’s slaves. The house itself is
“dust” (262), the tremendous pain and suffering it contained replaced by the banal combination
of a Burger King, a Holiday Inn, and a Texaco. If Dana’s assault on Rufus was intended as an
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assault on slavery or its twentieth century legacy, it has failed. Rather, the burning down of the
house has served to paper over the memory of slavery and replace it with three symbols of the
neoliberal multinational capitalism whose foundation rests on the legacy of the slavery economy.
None of the current residents know anything of the place’s plantation past, and while Dana finds
archived newspaper clippings about the fire and the subsequent sale of slaves, Nigel, Sarah, Joe,
and Hagar’s names are all missing, and there is little hint what became of the slaves who were
listed as having been sold.
Butler leaves open the question of what will happen to Dana’s marriage to Kevin, now
that it has been so challenged by their mutual sojourn to the nineteenth century. Several critics
have speculated on the issue. Rushdy, for example, argues, “everything we are told suggests that
[Dana and Kevin’s relationship] will grow stronger because of this experience” (154). Yet there
are darker hints here as well that Rushdy misses. Interestingly, when I have taught the novel to
undergraduates, I always pose this question to them–do you think Dana and Kevin will remain
married after the novel ends? Their response is fairly consistent: yes, they will, but not because
their bond is now “stronger.” Rather, they, and particularly Dana, seem to have little choice in the
matter. Dana has been traumatized forever by her experience, and will always bear the
psychological and physical marks of her experience. Clearly, she will need tremendous help and
support to live with all of this, and due to the fantastical nature of what has happened to her,
Kevin is quite literally the only person in the world who she can talk to about her experiences;
that much is made clear by the impossibility of her explaining how her arm got trapped in the
wall to the police. While prior critics have said relatively little about this moment, it constitutes
one of the novel’s bitterest, most brutal ironies. It is the moment when Speculative racial
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imagination meets the police state, officially desegregated in the twentieth century but still
deeply invested in systemic racism. Throughout the novel, Dana has been subject to the
brutalizing forces of white male supremacy and without recourse to any higher authority for
protection. Now, finally, when the police believe she has been victimized, they are wrong. Not
only that, but they do not believe, cannot possibly believe, her story. As such they serve as a final
example of the dynamic Dana experienced with the Weylins: one more face of embodied white
male authority questioning Dana’s right and ability to speak the truth of her experience. What’s
more, the police are not alone in this. No friend or family member could ever possibly accept
Dana’s story, and a psychiatrist would likely try to institutionalize or medicate her. This serves as
the novel’s final irony, and the final parallel of Kevin with Rufus and Dana with Alice. Alice was
trapped with Rufus, unable to leave him without her life surrendering, metaphorically and
literally. Now, Dana too is trapped with Kevin, who has come to resemble Rufus. Whether or not
she wants to remain with him is largely immaterial. She cannot process her trauma without
support, and nobody in the world can give her this support but Kevin. So, in essence, she cannot
leave him. To do so would be to sacrifice her psychological and emotional integrity, much as she
has already sacrificed her physical integrity. In the nineteenth century, Dana could not leave or
reject Rufus and hope to remain physically whole; now, she cannot leave or reject Kevin and
hope to remain psychologically whole.
In discussing Dana’s lost arm, Rushy argues that the loss reflects what he calls “Butler’s
most spectacular gesture in Kindred” (143), that being Dana’s ability to change history. Yet if we
consider the novel from a generic perspective, this “spectacular” gesture seems unremarkable in
the extreme. In fact, the ability to profoundly change the present through very minor actions
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while traveling to the past is a Speculative Fiction trope more than half a century old, going back
at least to Ray Bradbury’s 1952 short story “A Sound of Thunder,” in which a time traveller who
steps on a prehistoric butterfly and changes history so that the present-day United States is led by
a fascist demagogue. From this perspective, what is actually most remarkable about Kindred’s
deployment of the time travel trope is, in fact, how little Dana and Kevin do or can change. This,
ultimately, is the meaning of the novel’s central racial parable: how little things have or can
change despite extraordinary intervention, Speculative or otherwise. Dana makes six trips to the
nineteenth century and remains there for months; Kevin remains there for several years. Both
take an active role in history, Kevin by helping slaves escape, Dana by manipulating events to
ensure her own survival, teaching slaves to read and attempting to train Rufus as an anti-racist,
and ultimately committing murder. In stark contrast to the single butterfly that destroys American
democracy, the entire result of their time and activism in the past is a single burned down old
farmhouse–a farmhouse which may well have been torn down by 1976 regardless. This, and not
the ability to change the past, shows us what is truly radical about Butler’s vision in Kindred, and
what makes it truly, as Butler herself says, “bleak.” Dana and Kevin both suffer so much and
sacrifice so much, but in the end are left with very little to show for all that they have done
except the knowledge that they have done it–knowledge which they can never share with anyone
except each other for fear of being thought insane. Beyond this knowledge, the biggest changes
are the loss of Dana’s arm, the trauma of her forced complicity in her ancestor’s rape, and the
increasing conflation between her husband, the supposed white liberal ally, and her ancestors, the
slaveowners, white supremacists, and rapists.
!
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CHAPTER THREE
SECOND ELEVATION: THE HOPE FOR RACIAL UPLIFT IN COLSON
WHITEHEAD’S THE INTUITIONIST
While Kindred deeply problematizes the idea of effective African American
counterhegemonic resistance, many Black Speculative Fiction texts written in its wake attempt to
map out new spaces for resistance. One such text is Colson Whitehead’s debut novel, The
Intuitionist [1999]. Whitehead’s novel does not fit neatly into one of the standard sub-genres of
Speculative Fiction, such as science fiction, fantasy, or horror. Instead, it mixes elements of
several genres, including detective fiction, noir, and the passing narrative. Additionally, and most
importantly for my purposes, Whitehead uses elements of utopian science fiction in the novel
through the related concepts of the “black box” and the “second elevation,” and ties both of those
science fiction elements explicitly and implicitly to race and particularly to blackness. The
“black box,” a concept advanced by James Fulton, the “father” of Intuitionism, is a theoretical
elevator which would be so perfect that it will transform not only buildings but “will deliver us
from the cities we suffer now, these stunted shacks” (61), essentially ushering in a new utopian
reality known as the second elevation.
While not explicit, the racial implications of both concepts are fairly straightforward. The
“black box” is, of course, also the name of a real device, designed to survive airplane crashes and
allow investigators to determine what went wrong. The irony of the supposed delivery system for
a supposed technological utopian future sharing its name with a technological device associated
with disaster and death is striking, and should guide how we read Whitehead’s black box.
Ostensibly, the black box is so-called because “we can’t see inside it” (61), meaning that, in a
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pre-black box world, we are incapable of imagining the black box or the world it might produce.
Like the Speculative notion of the singularity11, it is impossible to imagine under current
limitations. That the black box is defined by an outside observer’s inability to see or comprehend
the inside also speaks to the inability of a dominant culture to “see” as fully human the oppressed
other it defines itself against, here associated with blackness. Similarly, the second elevation
directly refers to the possibilities of a new architecture and verticality enabled by the black box,
mirroring the existing verticality of skyscrapers made possible by the first elevation, that being
the historical invention of the elevator itself. Yet on the symbolic level, the black box clearly
echoes blackness itself, and the term connects the possibility of any positive transformation of
the cityscape to blackness. In the novel’s Civil Rights era space, Whitehead suggests, the city is
increasingly becoming a black space. As a result, any positive transformation of the city must
privilege the needs and problems of this emerging black urban class. Similarly, the second
elevation signifies on the notion of racial uplift, particularly rhetoric about “elevating the race.”
While both are potent metaphors within the novel, Whitehead leaves unclear whether either is
actually a practical possibility. Indeed, their possibility seems dubious, and the novel raises
serious questions as to whether or not their promised “utopia” would even be desirable if
accomplished.
Isiah Lavender III insightfully describes the novel, with its linkage of Speculative tropes
with blackness, as constituting a “counterfactual ethnoscape” (191). Further, he posits that all
11
In this context, the term “singularity,” as described by the Speculative Fiction writer Vernor Vinge, refers
to the idea that “[w]ithin thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman
intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended” (Vinge) due to the exponential progress made
possible by artificial intelligence. Like the black box’s utopia, the reality produced by the singularity is
impossible for humans as they currently exist to understand.
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African American cultural production can be viewed through the terms and tropes of Speculative
Fiction since, in a world of black double consciousness, "Black people live the estrangement
[Speculative Fiction] writers imagine" (187). To this end, Whitehead constructs a world, a recent
past, and a racial environment which echo our own and yet not quite the same as our own. In this
counter-factual recent past, elevator inspectors are the highest profile civil servants and elevator
theory, where debate rages between rationalist Empiricists and instinctive Intuitionists, is a major
academic field. the protagonist, Lila Mae Watson, is at once an anomaly, a symbol, and a shining
star. She is the city's first black woman elevator inspector (and second black elevator inspector,
after a man named Pompey). She is also an Intuitionist, and as such she holds special symbolic
importance to the leaders of the Department's Intuitionist camp, who fancy themselves as
forward-thinking liberals in contrast to the stodgy, conservative, and often overtly racist
Empiricists. Aside from her symbolic (tokenistic?) importance, Lila Mae, we are told, holds the
highest accuracy rate in the Department. While Intuitionists as a group are mysteriously rated
10% more accurate than Empiricists, Lila Mae, remarkably, is said to have a perfect,
unblemished, 100% accuracy rating–at least at the novel's opening.
The novel’s counterfactuality is established by the slipperiness of its setting, both in terms
of time and place. The novel is set, it seems, in mid-twentieth century (pseudo) New York City,
or pseudo-New York. The novel never explicitly states the city is New York, but based on
internal evidence, there is no other city it could be. Indeed, Whitehead seems almost playful in
his refusal to ever name New York, even as he gives clues which make the city’s identity clear to
anyone with even a passing familiarity with the city12. The novel’s time period is far more
12
For example, Whitehead references Times Square.
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difficult to untangle. The setting is vaguely Civil Rights-era, but where exactly it is meant to be
situated within that era seems to change from page to page. Indeed, if we are to assume the novel
is set in New York, its time period is a logistical impossibility. Whitehead describes the city as
having, among other things, "two baseball stadiums" (23), which means it must be after 1964,
following the demolition of the old Polo Grounds in Harlem and Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, and
the construction of Shea Stadium in Flushing, giving the city two stadiums (along with Yankee
Stadium in the South Bronx) instead of three or one. Yet Clifford Thompson, in his own
comment on the elusiveness of the novel's setting, points out based on internal evidence that the
novel's time period is "definitely before the advent of dial-tone phones" (8). Yet dial tones were
widespread in the United States before the end of the 1950s, and by 1961, the dial tone was so
universal that, when a post-Presidential Dwight Eisenhower did not recognize one, it was
considered an amusement ("Eisenhower National Historic Site"). In another novel, this might
seem an anachronism or an error on the author's part, but within Whitehead’s counterfactual
world, the anachronism would be for it to be anchored in a specific, easily identifiable and
strictly historical time and place. What’s more, this slipperiness is clearly neither accidental nor
incidental. Rather, it serves to attune the reader to the novel’s very counterfactual nature and its
deep suspicion of the simplistic nature of static realism and the easy answers of unproblematized
ideologies. By untethering the narrative from an easily identifiable time and place, Whitehead
leverages Speculative Fiction’s generic potentials, freeing himself from the limitations of
narrowly defined realistic representationalism.
Against this counterfactual backdrop, Whitehead explores several potential spaces for
resistance to racialized oppression, particularly Intuitionism and, curiously, passing. However, as
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with Octavia Butler in Kindred, Whitehead also ultimately muddies the waters of resistance
within these spaces. Indeed, the novel’s opening pages are not about elevation at all, but about its
opposite: a catastrophic elevator crash that occurs under highly suspicious and politicized
circumstances. Ironically, it is Lila Mae’s investigation of this crash which leads her, she
believes, on the trail of the black box and the second elevation it promises. While much of the
existing criticism reads the black box and second elevation as straightforward metaphors for
racial uplift, Lauren Berlant identifies the crash that leads to both as a red-herring, and argues
that, in its aftermath, "the building, symbolically embodying a US that supports racial
uplift....reveals the machinery of white supremacy as at the heart not only of politics and
corporate ideology, but engineering itself" (824-825). If we follow Berlant's reading, the
conclusion is not a happy one. The black box is not only a likely practical impossibility, but also
a piece of engineering itself and thus implicated in engineering's "machinery of white
supremacy." The utopian project is fundamentally flawed philosophically as well as practically:
it seeks to dismantle the master's house using the master's tools. What's more, while the novel’s
narrator consistently claims that Lila is "never wrong," the text reveals that she is consistently
wrong, from her perceptions of a conspiracy she sees shaping around her to her reading of the
motivations of her colleagues. Her fellow Intuitionists are just as corrupt, menacing, and violent
as the Empiricists. While the Intuitionists are not overt white supremacists like the Empiricists,
they are covertly and subtly racist, using Lila Mae as a pawn in their political machinations and
giving lip service but little more to a watered-down form of progressive racial uplift. Through the
lens of this suspicion, the second elevation remains a metaphor, but a far more complex one, as I
will explore.
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While investigating the elevator accident, which becomes politically charged and occurs
under suspicious circumstances, Lila Mae comes to believe in the "luminous truth" (Whitehead
230) that James Fulton, the founder of Intuitionism, was a black (or "colored," in the novel's own
vocabulary) man passing for white13. This discovery, she believes, fundamentally changes how
his work can and should be read, requiring a "new literacy" (Whitehead 230). By the end of the
novel, Lila Mae sequesters herself away from the world, Invisible Man-style, in a small room
overlooking a factory14. There, she takes up the task of completing Fulton's unfinished
theoretical and practical work. Fulton's unfinished project is his own black box design, built
using Intuitionist principles. Existing criticism on the novel generally trusts Lila Mae's
perceptions both of Fulton's passing and of her project in carrying out his utopian dreams.
However, a careful reading of the text deeply problematizes Lila Mae's reliability as a judge of
character and intentions (that is to say, as an Intuitionist), thus muddying her "new literacy" in
reading Fulton's identity and his political/utopian project, and also calls into question the
desirability and obtainability of the new world the "black box" purports to promise, and the
extent to which Intuitionism itself is actually preferable to much-maligned Empiricism.
Initially, it may seem a curious anachronism for The Intuitionist to evoke so conventional
and seemingly old-fashioned a trope as passing. Walter Benn Michaels argues that passing can
only be understood within a framework of essentialism, because “identity that is irreducible to
13
While such analysis is beyond the scope of my current project, exploring passing as a Speculative
concept could provide interesting possibilities for future work. Passing, seen through a Speculative lens,
might be seen as a sort of lived technology of survival against a hostile white supremacist world. George
Schuyler’s Black No More would be an interesting text for exploring this premise.
14
The situation of Lila Mae’s new room over a factory seems to directly reference the Invisible Man’s
“battle with Monopolated Light & Power” (Ellison 7) and to signify upon it. Whereas the Invisible Man
battled the forces of white supremacy as represented by engineering (Monopolated Light & Power), Lila
Mae seeks to refigure and appropriate them towards her own ends.
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action is essential, not socially constructed” (142). In other words, if race is not not essence, it is
performative, and if a person changes their performance, they do not "pass"; rather, their identity
itself simply changes. They are no longer black. In this reading, Fulton cannot be said to be
“passing as white" unless we abandon the notion of race as a social construct; instead, he chooses
to “become” white. Rather than subject oneself to such analytical conundrums, Michaels
suggests, one should reject notions of race as social construction and as essence, and instead
simply view it as a "mistake" (143). Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield critique Michaels's
arguments on essentialism for collapsing race-as-biological-category with racialized culture into
a single, inseparable unit, and for preemptively dismissing any structural counter-arguments,
writing, “Michaels sidesteps the social environments in which racism and race get deployed. His
position excludes social relations not only from the analysis of racialized culture but also from
any methodological discussion of the legitimacy of this exclusion.” (753) This reading preserves
Fulton’s passing as legible within a social construction framework, as it highlights the ongoing
significance of Fulton’s personal history as culturally black in constructing a racial identity that
goes beyond public presentation.
Michele Elam further counters Michaels's analysis. First, she evokes Toni Morrison's
proclamation that, "It always seemed to me that the people who invented the hierarchy of ‘race’
when it was convenient for them ought not to be the ones to explain it away, now that it does not
suit their purposes for it to exist" (Playing in the Dark 126). Secondly, she uses The Intuitionist
itself to refute Michaels's assumption about how passing operates, writing that Fulton's passing
does not signify "passing from what he 'is' or 'is not'" (764). Instead, his passing reflects his
utopian longings and refusal to accept the social limitations that come with blackness. Passing
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here is not an affirmative rejection of false racial categories or a negative self-denial of "true"
racial essence, but a means of resistance, perhaps the only one available to him within such a
deeply racist system. In this reading, it is not simply that passing allows Fulton to pursue his
career (although it does), but that his escape into the unmarked invisibility of whiteness allows
him to author Intuitionism as a savage satire and critique of whiteness’s absurdity as a social
category without, apparently, anyone ever suspecting his satirical intent.
Indeed, this is how Lila Mae reads the situation in the novel. This is her "luminous truth":
"Fulton was colored ... Natchez did not lie about that: she has seen it in the man's books, made
plain by her new literacy. In these last few days she has learned how to read, like a slave does,
one forbidden word at a time" (230). To Lila Mae, her "knowledge" of Fulton's passing-asresistance has enabled the "new literacy" she speaks of; it has allowed her to, after having read
Fulton's texts on one level many times before, to suddenly read them on multiple levels
simultaneously. This seems to suit her purposes far more neatly than formal Intuitionism ever
did: now, Intuitionism is not just a methodology for elevator inspection or a theoretical
framework for considering mechanical things as they interact with humanity, but also a critique
of whiteness, of segregation, and of the basic nature of twentieth century American society itself.
The question, then, is to what extent we should trust Lila Mae's perceptions of these
matters. On the surface level, the novel tells us that Lila Mae is remarkably insightful and
"accurate," and thus it trains us to believe in both the foundations and the aims of the project she
embarks upon at the novel's end. The novel opens with Lila Mae, professional and poised, at
work in a building previously inspected only by Empiricists and escorted by a condescending
superintendent. Her knowledge is on full display, instantly dispelling the legitimacy of later
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Empiricist claims that Intuitionists are simply practicing "voodoo," in the pejorative (and racist)
sense:
The elevator is an Arbo Smooth-Glide…Lila Mae remembers from an Institute
class on elevator marketing that Arbo spent millions promoting the Smooth-Glide
in trades and at conventions. They were the first to understand the dark powers of
the bikini. On a revolving platform festooned with red, white, and blue streamers,
slender fingers fan the air, summoning the contractors hither. (3-4)
Lila Mae, ignoring the super's skepticism, goes on to diagnose a mechanical flaw in the
building's elevator and imposes a fine. She does this, of course, through her Intuition: she doesn't
break open the elevator's bowels with a toolkit. Rather, she rides the elevator, carefully attunes
herself to its sounds and rhythms, and knows almost immediately what the problem is. Finally,
she refuses to be influenced by a bribe (although she coyly keeps the money placed in her
pocket), and it is made obvious that previous inspectors have taken such bribes as a matter of
course. All at once, Lila Mae is cast as both accurate and ethical, while Empiricist inspectors are
cast as unscrupulous and feckless.
If it weren't already clear where the readers loyalties should lie, Whitehead then hammers
it home, ending the scene with a refrain that Whitehead returns to in the novel's final section:
"She is never wrong" (9). This refrain is oft-quoted in criticism on the novel, along with the
novel's statistical assertion of Intuitionists’ accuracy rate, 10% superior to Empiricists’, as
evidence for Lila Mae's "impressive" abilities as an Intuitionist. Curiously, though, what is less
noted is that Whitehead immediately follows "she is never wrong" with a darker-tinged echo:
"She doesn't know yet" (9). This could refer to many things, as, in fact, the novel shows us that
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there are a great many things Lila Mae does not know. Most directly, however, it references the
aforementioned elevator accident, as well as its fallout. Across town, in the Fanny Briggs
Memorial Building, a shiny new government building named for an escaped slave, an elevator
has suddenly and catastrophically fallen in so rare a fashion that several characters describe it as
an impossibility. Two factors in the accident make it both important to the novel's plot and
suspicious to Lila Mae. First, the accident happens in the immediate build-up to an important
Departmental Guild election pitting the incumbent Chair, the hard-line Empiricist Frank Chancre
against the Intuitionist Orville Lever, and secondly, because Lila Mae has just inspected, and
given a clean bill of health, to Fanny Briggs’s elevator stack.
Immediately, the politically savvy Chancre turns the accident to his political advantage,
fueling suspicion in both Lila Mae and the reader that the whole "accident" was orchestrated by
Chancre's forces to discredit Intuitionism as "voodoo," a common anti-Intuitionist slur whose
racial significance becomes perfectly clear in Lila Mae's presence. Quickly, a press conference is
convened, featuring first the mayor and then Chancre himself. Asked if the inspector was an
Intuitionist, Chancre quickly moves in for the political kill:
Yes, the inspector of the Fanny Briggs building, a Miss Lila Mae Watson, is an
Intuitionist. I'm real reluctant to turn this terrible affair into a political matter, but
I'm sure most of you are well aware that my opponent in the election for Guild
Chair is also an Intuitionist…Gentlemen, it's just these very kinds of occurrences I
have been trying to eradicate as Guild Chair. (26-27)
Given the ways in which the novel has trained the reader to identify with Lila Mae and with
Intuitionism, the storyline to come seems clear here: Chancre, the slimy political opportunist and
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racist, has orchestrated the whole "accident," and will stop at nothing to savage his opponents
and protect his own power, but eventually he will fall to the forces of Intuitionist righteousness.
This is, in fact, what Lila Mae herself "intuits" about the situation. If she is indeed the wonderworker the novel tells us she is, if she is "never wrong" in her intuition, and if Intuitionism is
indeed the progressive, post-rational, Africanist force that many critics have read it as being, this
is what should happen. It is not. In fact, Lila Mae's intuitive understanding of the situation is
spectacularly wrong in almost every way.
To begin with, the very notion that there are only two possible, mutually exclusive
explanations for the Fanny Briggs elevator disaster proves false. This is the operating assumption
everyone, including Lila Mae, makes from the beginning. Either Lila Mae failed to predict the
accident because she, and Intuitionism by proxy, is a fraud, or the "accident" is a conspiracy,
orchestrated by Empiricists to discredit Lila Mae personally or Intuitionism generally.
Ultimately, however, neither premise is correct: the crash proves to be was a freak accident, an
incredible coincidence so unlikely that neither an Intuitionist nor an Empiricist could have
possibly predicted it based on available evidence:
Total freefall. What happens when too many impossible events occur, when
multiple redundancy is not enough. Scratching heads over this mystery of the new
cities....They won't find any reason for this crash, trace the serial number back to
the manufacturer, interrogate an arthritic mechanic's trembling fingers. This was a
catastrophic accident. (228)
If the elevator accident is, in fact, an accident and not a conspiracy, then it cannot be, as Lila Mae
initially intuits and subsequently assumes, a racist, anti-Intuitionist conspiracy perpetrated by
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Chancre and his cronies. A conspiracy does unfold, but it is not the conspiracy Lila Mae sets out
to uncover. Instead, the conspiracy is perpetrated by one of the rival elevator manufacturing
companies, whose concerns are capitalistic in nature and transcend the Empiricist/Intuitionist
ideological split that seems all-consuming to Lila Mae. What’s more, they are not responsible for
the elevator accident itself. Rather, their conspiracy is motivated by profits, not by ideological
purity, and it centers not around the accident but the competition to find and control the black
box and the profits it promises to bring. Lila Mae's assumptions about who the players in this
conspiracy are and what terms they are playing under, and what goals they hope achieve, are,
again, entirely wrong.
Additionally, Lila Mae misreads Pompey, the city's first Black elevator inspector and an
Empiricist, who she initially assumes must be key to the conspiracy she imagines. Lila Mae
reads Pompey as an unreconstructed "Uncle Tom," forever smiling and praising his supervisors
as a way to punch his own ticket through the career ranks at the expense of his own dignity:
When Holt called him upstairs, Pompey believed his appallingly obsequious
nature, cultivated to exceptional degree during his time in the Department, had
finally served him well ... Holt offered him a cigar... Pompey brushed his tongue
across the inside of his cheeks to forage the residue of the faintly cinnamon
smoke, the very wisps of Holt's esteem…[Pompey] went along with the joke,
even after Holt told him to bend over. Which he did. Pompey continued to chortle
until Holt kicked him in the left ass cheek with the arrowhead of one of his
burgundy wingtips ...The next day a small memo appeared on Pompey's desk
informing him of his promotion to Inspector Second Grade. (25)
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Later, Lila Mae's reading of Pompey appears to be confirmed at the Funicular Follies, a
Departmental function where the entertainment includes, alongside scantily clad women and
other "good old boys" staples, a blackface minstrel performance called "Mr. Gizzard and
Hambone." Lila Mae, in self-imposed exile as she investigates the supposed conspiracy, attends
disguised as a maid. In essence, she passes, but not as white. In traditional passing, the passer's
race becomes invisible when they refuse to acknowledge it, but here, it is Lila Mae's
individuality that becomes invisible when she subsumes herself into the role of a maid,
performing one of the classical tropes of Black female subservience. As Lila Mae watches
Pompey in the audiences, she sees him playing out the classic role of the Uncle Tom, the one
Black face in the white audience who makes sure to always laugh the loudest: she "sees Pompey
rub laughter-tears from his eyes, lean against Bobby Fundle to steady himself." (157). That
Pompey is responsible for the Fanny Briggs "accident" becomes self-evident to Lila Mae, the
natural conclusion of her intuiting of his character. He is the Uncle Tom, laughing loudest at the
racist joke and rushing to be the first volunteer to attack the only other Black elevator inspector,
not lifting as he climbs, but climbing through pushing down others. Lila Mae is guided in her
conclusions about Pompey by "Natchez," supposedly a relation of Fulton, and also the character
who first "reveals" that Fulton was passing as white.
When Lila Mae confronts Pompey, telling him, "I know what you did to the Fanny Briggs
stack" (190), this whole narrative begins to unravel. While Lila Mae has constructed the narrative
of Pompey as "Uncle Tom" and believes in it fully, her own approach in confronting him
replicates the language of white supremacy. After Pompey denies her charges, she says, "I'm
through kidding with you people" (193). Pompey immediately calls her on the racialized
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language. Yet Lila Mae continues to push her “Uncle Tom” narrative, telling him, "You don't
have to shuffle for me, Pompey ... You'd cover for them? You'd go to jail to protect them, after all
they've done to you?" (193), and then reading his suspenders as "chains."
Pompey, however, confounds Lila Mae's expectations. Not only is she wrong in intuiting
that he, as Chancre's pet, is directly responsible for the accident (since no one, in the end, is
responsible), her reading of his "Uncle Tom" role proves inadequate. While Pompey does indeed
play a subservient role in his professional life, he does so out of a very real need for selfpreservation and with a degree of self-awareness and thoughtfulness that Lila Mae's simplistic
account does not allow for, as he tells her:
This is one of Chancre's cigars …We all know they taste like shit but we smoke
them anyway because he them gave to us ... I do his work. We all do. Three
months ago, the man calls me into his office. I don't know what he wants. I've
never spoken to him even though I been there longer than most of those white
boys. He asks me if I need money…He asks me if I heard anything about his
friendship with Johnny Shush. 'Friendship' he calls it, with his big feet on the desk
like I don't know what's going on. Like I'm some dumb nigger. I say yeah.
(193-194)
Pompey goes on to reveal he has taken on a side job, cleaning up the messes Johnny Shush's
cronies leave behind. Again, there is a sort of conspiracy afoot, but one largely unrelated to what
Lila Mae has intuited. Still, she reacts indignantly, invoking the oath Pompey took as a public
servant, but he continues to resist her moralistic narrative:
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Don't talk to me about oath...I got two boys…I was raised in this neighborhood.
It's changed…You see them kids play ball? Ten years from now half of them be in
jail, or dead, and the other half working as slaves just to keep a roof over they
heads. Ten years from now they won't even be kids playing ball on the street.
Won't be safe enough even to do that. Walk down this street, you can smell the
kids smoking the reefer…A few years from now, it won't be reefer…but some
other poison. My kids won't be here when that happens. I need money to take
them out of here. (194)
Throughout the novel to this point, the reader, only seeing Pomey through Lila Mae's eyes, has
had the luxury of dismissing him as easily as she does. Yet this passage turns the table and upsets
her whole narrative, not only about Pompey as "Uncle Tom," but of his role in the conspiracy
and thus the conspiracy itself. Lila Mae, "never wrong" yet often wrong, casts Pompey as the
lowest of the low, reducing his lived experience to a racialized caricature not much more
sophisticated than the minstrel show they both witnessed. Lila Mae's hopes for the future are all
tied up within the utopian dream of the black box and the Second Elevation, dreams which, like
all utopian visions, will not and cannot ever truly come to pass. Yet here, in his analysis of the
inner city's post-Civil Rights Era future it is Pompey who seems almost preternaturally accurate.
His vision of his neighborhood’s future, the reader knows, is the one which will be borne out by
history. Indeed, Pompey’s accuracy, like the claim of Lila Mae's 100% accuracy, seems so
perfect as to be unbelievable, yet unlike with Lila Mae, whose accuracy rate rests on statistics
whose compilation are never shown, we can actually evaluate the accuracy of Pompey’s vision
because we live in his future.
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In the end, Lila Mae finally accepts Pompey's story. However, she still clings to her antiIntuitionist conspiracy narrative, as well as the either/or proposition that comes with it: either it is
a conspiracy, or she is responsible:
Such modesty, she thinks. No one wants to take credit for such a handy piece of
sabotage. She believes Pompey, and his story jibes with Chancre's...If they didn’t
do it, she muses, then who did–because if no one is responsible, she is negligent.
And she is never wrong...She was so sure about Pompey, that shuffling
embarrassment. She files her botched interrogation away. (197)
Again, the novel's opening claim is advanced, just as confidently although it now strains
credulity: Lila Mae is "never wrong." She was wrong about Pompey, but she is "never wrong."
Just as she clings to the conspiracy narrative despite the revelations of her theory's flaws, so too
she clings to the narrative of her own infallibility, even in the face of her intuitions being
demonstrably wrong.
While we may choose to take the novel at its word that she is never wrong in her
intuitions when it comes to elevator repair, this belies the demonstrable fact that we quickly learn
that Lila Mae is often wrong when she follows her intuitions outside of the "box" of elevators. In
fact, Lila Mae is wrong often enough, and about such fundamental issues, that her very faith in
Intuitionism itself must be brought into question. Much of the criticism on The Intuitionist,
however, remains curiously uncritical on the subject. Clifford Thompson associates Intuitionism
with cultural Blackness, positing it is "almost certainly an allusion to black people's perceived
inclination toward nature and emotion rather than intellect" (8), whereas for Lavender,
Empiricism is associated with whiteness, and its stereotype of cold rationality and objectivity
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(192). Madhu Dubey connects Intuitionism to Fulton's rejection of the deeply racist structures of
modernity, as "an indictment of an Enlightenment epistemology that builds a system of racial
differences on pseudoscientific visual evidence" (239). These accounts conform with Lila Mae's
own perceptions; she describes Empiricism as dealing with "white people's reality ... built on
what things appear to be" (239). Yet we have already seen that Lila Mae's perceptions here are
wildly unreliable, specifically so where Pompey is concerned; thus, it seems dubious to put our
faith in an understanding of Intuitionism's relationship to Empiricism that conforms with her
own, and especially to draw conclusions about racial roles and race relations from that
understanding.
Certainly, Intuitionism aspires to be, and has been read as, a revolutionary theory with all
its visions of profoundly changing the urban landscape, altering the fundamental ways humans
interact with machines, and even ushering in utopia. It weds the utopian vision of the black box
and verticality with the gritty, mechanical world of elevators, and it reimagines the seemingly
mundane and objective task of elevator repair in post-rational terms. As such, it brings the
mechanical into the realm of poststructral and postmodern discourse, as well as linking it to
quantum physics; when an Inruitionist professor poses Fulton's "Dilemma of the Phantom
Passenger" (101), asking what happens to an empty when a passenger presses the call button and
then departs before it arrives, and Lila Mae gives the "correct" response: “[a]n elevator doesn't
exist without its freight. If there's no one to get on, the elevator remains in quiescence" (102).
The reference to Schrödinger's cat is clear. Yet there is also something fundamentally absurd in
both Intuitionism's theory and its political project. An elevator, after all, is not a quantum state, as
in the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment. It is a constructed physical object that, barring
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malfunction, conforms strictly and in very limited ways according to user input. The elevator is a
product of rational engineering which Intuitionism strains to refigure as a post-rational signifier,
yet its very nuts and bolts betray this logic, anchoring the elevator firmly to engineering’s narrow
physical laws and assumptions of a rationalistic clockwork universe, rather than to more effete
Intuitionist notions of “elevatorness.” The button is pushed, the elevator comes. For Whitehead
to have his characters earnestly discussing the question of the elevator's need for passengers to
exist, or its "quiescence," is absurd on so basic a level that it is almost inconceivable that he
cannot have some comic intent. And put into practice, Intuitionism seems effete and elitist in its
rejection of and scorn for the physicality and manual labor associated with Empiricism. Put
simply, the Intuitionists want to gain the social prestige associated with elevator inspection in
Whitehead's counterfactual world, but they don't want to get their hands dirty. Much as
Empiricists insult Intuitionists in racialized terms as practitioners of "voodoo," Intuitionists scorn
Empiricists in deeply classist terms as "ol' nuts and bolts" and "stress freaks" (58), for
Empiricists' habit of checking for signs of physical stress in elevators. While the overtly classist
“grease monkey” does not appear on the list of Intutionist insults for Empiricists, those that do
are remarkably similar in tone.
If we think of Fulton's work not as a mystical formula for a post-rational and/or postracial urban utopia but as a flawed revolutionary theory, then Sharon P. Holland points us in the
direction of a better understanding of Intuitionism and the politics of the black box:
If we remember Barrett's caution that revolutionary theories are not always a sign
of revolution, then we return to the work of criticism with both theory and
practice in mind...theory's practice reveals itself as a somewhat jaded entity
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returning home, like a Nietzschean dream, rather than delivering the promise of
its revolutionary moment. (335)
Certainly, at the time The Intuitionist takes place, it has failed to deliver on its revolutionary
promise. The black box, at the center of the Intuitionist revolution, seems little more than a
theory for Lila Mae to pursue. And if, as in Lila Mae's reading, Intuitionism and the black box
are Fulton's blueprints for the overthrow of racial hierarchy, their usefulness for the task is
questionable at best. As several critics have noted, Intuitionism fits neatly within existing
stereotypes of Black as non-rational and white as coldly mechanical and materialistic. If
Intuitionism is a critique of modernity's racial hierarchies, it is thus one that ultimately accepts
the terms of those hierarchies, if not their consequences.
The black box itself is also a questionable model for social change. As Lavender
observes, it mirrors white flight in its aspirations:
Blacks cannot rise…The black box is a re-imagining of white flight, but instead of
outward to the suburbs it goes upward. Rather than being locked in an inner city
with blacks and other minorities, the whites…move upward to display their
superiority and to separate themselves from contact with blacks permanently
locked, motionless, in the lower class. After all, suburban whites still have to
come into the inner city to work, but if whites are elevated, they can leave that
"ghetto" behind permanently. (194)
The black box, we are told, promises to reshape cities just as profoundly as the original invention
of the elevator itself. In real terms, it is difficult to imagine how this could look, but one thing is
clear: it will destroy and remake the city as we know it, creating a new order and a new
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geography. While this may seem a desirable aim, given the bleak picture of Black urban
experience the novel paints, the novel itself deviates from the description of this "second
elevation" in utopian terms: "there are other cities, none as magnificent as this, but there are
other cities. They're all doomed anyway, she figures. Doomed by what she's working on. What
she will deliver to the world when the time is right" (254). Plainly, this vision is not one of
salvation but of damnation. By the next page, Lila Mae's utopian visions have returned: Fulton's
black box "truly understands human need" (255). Yet the image of the doomed city cannot help
but linger, showing us that the black box, far from truly utopian, is an instrument of destruction,
a weapon. It is the ultimate articulation of the brutal logic of urban renewal, destroying the city
for the good of the city, displacing the residents for the good of the residents. The black box
posits a future in which whole cities will be razed, neighborhoods will be destroyed, and,
ultimately, the lived experience of people is held secondary to the vaguely defined "benefits" of
these new "perfect" elevators. The fascist overtones of the black box's utopian vision are, to put it
mildly, unsettling.
Yet still, the Intuitionists' 10% figure remains, along with Lila Mae's purported 100%
accuracy rating. Clearly, it seems, there must be something to Intuitionism if, for all its flaws, its
inspectors are able to out-perform Empiricists without cracking open a single elevator shaft.
Although, as Lila Mae learns, Intuitionism began as a joke perpetrated by Fulton on his pompous
colleagues, it is a joke that apparently exposes a greater truth. The answer to this argument,
however, lies in its own foundation. We are told that Intuitionists are ten percent more accurate
than Empiricists. For all of Intuitionism's aspirations to post-rationality, the proof of its
effectiveness lies within the framework of the very rationality it seeks to critique: it justifies itself
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through statistical measurement. There is also the question of where these figures come from,
and how much faith we can place in them, particularly if, as the novel trains us to, we come to
suspect Empiricism and modern rationalism itself. What’s more, Lila Mae has only seen the
control room from which orders and observations supposedly emanate once. Then, she found it
empty, leaving the legitimacy of its observation and analysis of accuracy rates very much an
open question. Regardless, the argument for Intuitionism is made–can only be made–using the
language of Empiricism. As such, Intuitionism cannot be truly revolutionary, only reactionary. It
does not operate outside of the Empiricist system it strives to supplant, but instead remains
contained within Empiricism’s binary constraints. Intuitionism cannot replace Empiricism; it can
only critique it and measure itself against it.
Ultimately, then, we must interrogate Intuitionism's founder, Fulton, and the titular
"luminous truth" of his passing as discovered by Lila Mae. That Fulton is passing is first
"revealed" to Lila Mae by Natchez, supposedly his nephew, a Black man working for the
Intuitionist camp of the Department of Elevator Inspectors. Immediately, Lila Mae latches onto
Natchez's account of Fulton as passing:
His words recede. Who else knows that Fulton was colored. Mrs. Rogers. Did he
tell her? Was she his mistress like they insinuate? What they say about colored
people when they're not around. What did Fulton do when they acted white? Talk
about "the colored problem" and how it is our duty to help the primitive race get
in step with white civilization. Out of darkest Africa. Or did he remain silent,
smile politely at their darkie jokes. Tell a few of his own. (139)
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In the end, this becomes the one "luminous truth" Lila Mae clings to, even after all the novel's
uncertainties have been revealed. The account of Fulton's supposed passing is confirmed by Mrs.
Rogers, who worked for Fulton as a domestic prior to his death and who tells Lila the story of
her discovery of Fulton’s passing when his darker-skinned sister came for an unexpected visit.
On the surface level, then, the case that Fulton is a Black man passing for white seems as
air-tight as Lila Mae herself believes, with the direct testimony of two eyewitnesses backing it
up. But by the end of the novel, both are discredited. "Natchez" turns out to actually be "Combs,"
an executive for the elevator company Arbo. He is, then, engaged in his own act of passing,
although his deception is based on class, not race. Although he still seems to believe that Fulton
was passing after his deceit is uncovered, he is not Fulton's nephew and is not in a position to
know for certain. Mrs. Rogers, on the other hand, is not passing for anything, but she does lie to
Lila Mae about Fulton, and the events following his death, with the plans for the black box at
large:
I gave them everything and they still didn't believe me. Somebody broke in here
the day we buried James. Knocked everything over looking for something. I told
them someone had broken in here and maybe they took something, but they still
didn't believe me. (93)
By the end, though, Mrs. Rogers admits the whole story is a fabrication. After a break-in occurs,
Lila Mae confronts her:
Lila Mae leans forward in her chair. "This is the first time, right? When you told
the Institute that this place had been broken into after Fulton's death and his
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notebooks sotlen, you made that up, correct?" "It may have been a lie," Mrs.
Rogers shrugs. Stands. (235)
Thus, in the end, the "truth" of Fulton's passing rests on three pieces of evidence: the testimony
of two known liars and the often-wrong intuition of Lila Mae. One additional piece of evidence
seems to confirm the passing story, that being a section that purports to tell the story of Fulton’s
youth, coming of age, and decision to pass. However, the veracity of this section is unclear. It
immediately follows Natchez’s lie that Fulton was his uncle, and once it concludes, the story
immediately returns to Natchez’s lies about Fulton. Thus, it is not clear how the story should be
read: is it Fulton’s genuine biography? A continuation of Natchez’s fraudulent story? Lila Mae’s
intuition filling in the details of Natchez’s supposed revelation? Again, the case is anything but
air-tight.
For all that, though, none of the existing criticism on The Intuitionist attempts to argue
against the "luminous truth" of Fulton's passing; indeed, no critic even raises the question.
Instead, it is taken as a given, as a known fact. The question, then, is why this is the case. The
answer, I believe, is two-fold. First, the narrative structure of the book tricks us into overidentifying with Lila Mae and her Intuitionist philosophy. While a close reading reveals how
misguided our trust in Lila Mae and Intuitionism is, Whitehead reveals his counterfactual world
through Lila Mae's eyes, and his narrator who, like Lila Mae, appears omniscient yet is often
wrong (for example, in the very claim that Lila Mae is "never wrong”). The narrator insists to the
very end that we identify with and trust Lila Mae, closing the novel with the lines, "She returns
to the work. She will make the necessary adjustments. It will come. She is never wrong. It's her
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intuition" (255). What's more, believing in Fulton's passing gives the reader political comfort,
just as it does for Lila Mae. As Dubey writes:
Intuitionist philosophy is meant to instruct "the dull and plodding citizens of
modernity that there is a power beyond rationality," and this makes perfect sense
to Lila Mae once she understands the complicity between racism and modern
reason. Through his Intuitionist approach to elevators, Fulton yearns to reenchant
the world of objects and to transcend the subject-object dichotomy of modern
knowledge. As Fulton's most devoted disciple, Lila Mae performs her job of
elevator inspector by closing her eyes and communicating with the various genies
of the elevator, which speak to her "in her mind's own tongue." (239)
All of this makes for an appealing narrative: Intuitionism as a covertly black counter-discourse to
modernity, to narrow rationalism, and to brutal racism. Yet to commit ourselves to this
understanding of Fulton and of Intuitionism, we must engage in the very type of essentialism that
Michaels sees in all discourse on passing. We must connect modernity to whiteness, postrationality to Blackness, and we must accept that Fulton's counter-discourse can only have been
written by a Black man: its insights and hidden truths reveal his racial essence, so long clouded
and disguised behind the veil of passing yet still present, still fundamental to his character, and
always yearning to break free. This is, fundamentally, an essentialist reading of Fulton's identity.
I do not intend to argue that Fulton is not passing Indeed, his passing seems probable, and
certainly the book gives us no clues that it is not true. However, to read Lila Mae's "luminous
truth" of Fulton's passing uncritically belies the novel's couterfactual discourse, its destabilizing
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of identity, and its consistent assault on the reader's assumptions about the nature of the
conspiracy, about Intuitionism, and about Lila Mae herself.
In a final irony, Whitehead reveals Lila Mae’s most significant misreading of Fulton in
the novel’s final pages. Her Invisible Man-inspired retreat into isolation from the world as she
works on her great project of fulfilling Fulton’s black box dream is motivated by a note she finds
written in his journals: “Lila Mae Watson is the one” (211; emphasis in original). The marginal
notation, written in Fulton’s final years while Lila Mae was studying elevators, has a profound
effect on her for obvious reasons. It serves as Lila Mae’s ultimate validation, the confirmation
that she is Fulton’s chosen successor, and the only person who can carry out his utopian work
and bring it to its final completion. However, in the novel’s penultimate section, told from
Fulton’s out perspective, Whitehead plays the trickster, discrediting this reading and revealing
the annotation is, in fact, utterly meaningless. Fulton did indeed see Lila Mae in his final days,
and he did write the note, yet this does not mean he was declaring her his successor or the black
race’s savior. Rather, it arises from Lila Mae’s habit of studying late at night and Fulton’s own
propensity for scribbling down notes about everything he sees:
He sees her through the window now, as he has for many nights recently…Hers is
the only light on in the whole building…She doesn’t look like she eats much. She
looks so frail and slight through the window. He wishes she had better sense. But
he cannot concern himself with her. The elevator needs tending. He lifts his pen.
He notices he has written Lila Mae Watson is the one in the margin of his
notebook. That’s the name of the only person awake at this hour of the night. She
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doesn’t know what she’s in for, he thinks, dismissing her from his mind. He’s
always writing things in the margin. (253)
Once again, everything Lila Mae intuits about the situation proves hopelessly, almost comically,
misguided. “Lila Mae Watson is the one” does not coronate her as Intutionism’s savior,
appointed and anointed by Fulton himself. Instead of seeing her as savior or successor, we learn,
Fulton condescends to her, seeing her as weak and lacking sense, and what little time he devotes
to thinking about her is quickly dismissed as a waste of his time and effort. This misreading
stings far more than almost all the others because it reaches the very heart of her life and work:
her hero worship of Fulton and her dedication to Intuitionism and the black box. Her entire turn
at the novel’s end is predicated on her unique connection to Fulton as the only one who
understands both his Intuitionist principles and the “luminous truth” of his apparent passing,
making her the only one who can fulfill his plans for the black box. In this one passage,
Whitehead tears down all of that, stripping Fulton’s final message of all of its meaning.
Strikingly, Whitehead also withholds this information from Lila Mae while he provides it to the
reader. The revelation exists only in Fulton’s thoughts, and Fulton is dead, meaning Lila Mae
will remain forever ignorant of how misguided she is in her reading of Fulton. Thus, her project
of developing the black box as a weapon of resistance against racial oppression will forever
remain not only flawed but also fundamentally misguided, based as it is on a series of false
premises and discredited intuitions.
!
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CHAPTER FOUR
THE GREAT CHANGE AND THE GREAT BOOK: NNEDI OKORAFOR'S
POSTCOLONIAL, POST-APOCALYPTIC AFRICA
While Black Speculative Fiction is primarily associated with African American writers, a
variety of African, diasporic, and postcolonial writers have emerged within the genre as well,
including Nalo Hopkinson, Karen Lord, and Nnedi Okorafor. While all three of these writers
explore resistance and other themes analyzed in this dissertation, I will focus on Okorafor, whose
novels The Shadow Speaker (2007)15 and Who Fears Death (2010) not only exemplify her
counterhegemonic artistic impulses, but also illuminate how speculative fiction is uniquely
qualified to intervene as a politically transformative force within postcolonialism. Through this,
Okorafor revises our image and understanding of a postcolonial Africa which is free of outside
hegemonic bonds. While Okorafor was born in the United States, her parents were Nigerian
(specifically Igbo), and she considers Nigeria as her “muse” (“About the Author”). Okorafor’s
Speculative novels are either in future versions of Africa or on imagined worlds with strong West
African cultural influences, and she takes a strongly postcolonial and feminist view within her
fiction, at once championing African culture and critiquing its gender roles and certain other
cultural practices.
Delany’s “About 5,750 Words” [1968] introduces the concept of the “winged dog,” a key
critical model for considering Black Speculative Fiction’s counterhegemonic potential. Delany
uses the concept to explore the unique ways language operates in Speculative Fiction.16 In The
15
The Shadow Speaker was originally published under the name “Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu.”
16
This chapter will focus on the essay specifically in relation to Okorafor’s novels. For an extensive
discussion of the essay in the context of wider criticism on Black Speculative Fiction, see the Introduction.
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Shadow Speaker and Who Fears Death, Okorafor’s “winged dog” is postcolonialism itself,
which she, using the speculative form, deploys in ways not possible in mainstream literature.
Okorafor does not use the term postcolonial directly in the way Delany discusses. However, the
idea of a Speculative postcolonial Africa pervades both novels. Speculative Fiction is uniquely
able to intervene into issues of postcolonialism, as Okorafor shows us through her deployment of
of the generic trope of post-apocalypse. Both recent history and lived experience show us that
“postcolonial” is best understood as an aspirational notion rather than as something already
achieved (or, perhaps, that is even achievable). In this sense, postcolonialism is a form of and
framework for resistance not just against a specific colonial power, but also against larger and
more amorphous notions of empire and imperialism. Some critics question whether the term or
category is useful at all. As Anne McClintock argues, speaking of “postcolonialism” in a
neocolonial world is “prematurely celebratory and obfuscatory” (13). To simplistically call our
world “postcolonial” is to ignore the ongoing hegemonic power of the colonizers on the excolonies. However, if we abandon any notion of “postcolonial” we lose the ability to imagine
what a truly postcolonial world might look like, and how such a world can achieve meaningful
postcolonialism. Okorafor’s novels are instructive if we are to consider how we can critique the
deployment of the term without abandoning it entirely. Scholars McClintock critique the term
because it does not adequately describe the reality of places like Africa, which are still often
economically and ideologically influenced or even dominated by their former colonizers and the
west in general. However, Okorafor demonstrates the usefulness of “postcolonial” as a
Speculative conceptual framework, creating a space for us to think our way out of hegemonic
neocolonial dead ends. While such a framework does not in itself create a “true” postcolonialism
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(ie one that transcends neocolonialism), it does advance the sort of counter-hegemonic thinking
that is a precondition for creating meaningful change. This, along with Okorafor’s overt use of
postcolonial thinkers such as Fanon in her work, makes clear that her novels engage in and
expand postcolonial discourse even though they are not set in the “real” postcolonial world and
Okorafor does not use the term directly. The Speculative postcolonialism depicted in Okorafor’s
novels is hardly a utopia; her Speculative future Africa is a violent, often frightening place.
Okorafor’s characters legitimately fear leaving their hometowns and venturing into the shifting
postcolonial reality, and everyone lives with the threat of new kinds of war and oppression. Yet
this Africa is also a place where radical change is possible and where the hegemonic forces of
neocolonialism, patriarchy, and racialized oppression can be effectively resisted. Through
Okorafor’s novels, we can begin to see how Speculative Fiction can intervene by showing us
ways forward into truly postcolonial imagined worlds.
The Winged Dog: Speculative Postcolonialism in The Shadow Speaker
To say that postcolonialism is Okorafor’s “winged dog” is to say that, through its
speculative form, The Shadow Speaker transforms postcolonialism from aspirational ideal to
lived reality. Okorafor reimagines the real, and deeply troubled, West African nation of Niger
into a new, speculative form. This new Niger is postcolonial in reality, not just aspiration, and is
also post-apocalyptic in the sense that its new and radically changed reality has been created by,
and could only be created by, some cataclysmic event in the past which destroyed the old order.
Indeed, the postcolonial and the post-apocalyptic are conflated within the novel’s future history.
In the book, a group of postcolonial subjects called the Grand Bois International Underground
Army develop a new weapon called the “Peace Bomb” (55) which fractures the structure of
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reality itself. When the Grand Bois drop the “Peace Bomb,” they create the “Great Change,” in
which the laws of physics themselves are altered and certain kinds of science, including that
underlying the atomic bomb, simply no longer work. Additionally, geography begins to shift and
mapping becomes impossible and “metahumans” (55), people born with magical abilities such as
creating thunderstorms or speaking to all-knowing shadows, appear. The Grand Bois create the
“Peace Bomb” as an attack on the enduring military, cultural, and economic power the former
colonizers continue to wield to maintain their power, even in an ostensibly postcolonial word.
The “Peace Bombs,” Okorafor tells us, “create where the nuclear bombs destroyed” (55).
Ultimately, the “Peace Bomb” is an attack on the structure of both imperialism and western
rationalism itself, destroying the foundation of Enlightenment rationality and replacing it with
West African juju.
Through this imagined landscape, Okorafor’s novel radically revises our understanding of
the possibility of postcolonial existence. For Africa to become genuinely postcolonial, we must
realize, some sort of apocalypse is necessary, destroying the institutional power structures that
presently make neocolonialism so persistent and difficult to undermine. Revolution, and not
evolution, is called for, and it must be a truly profound and transformative revolution. We cannot
have a postcolonial Africa when Africa remains so geographically, militarily, intellectually,
ideologically, and economically vulnerable to Europe and the rest of the West.
The Shadow Speaker is not, however, an anti-technology or anti-cultural contact
narrative. While some science stops working after the Great Change, other technologies advance;
for example, the Internet now mysteriously works forever without any maintenance or
infrastructure, and the novel’s protagonist, Ejii, is often seen writing and listening to hip hop on a
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sort of futuristic iPad called an e-pal. The novel’s depiction of Africa is also deeply multicultural,
with several African societies existing alongside one another, both real (for example, the Hausa)
and imaginary (for example, the “New Tuareg,” an invented culture with which social outsiders
choose to identify when the cultures they are born into become unsatisfying). In this new world,
people or groups of people are sometimes suddenly transported halfway across the world for no
apparent reason. For instance, Ejii encounters a group of white Americans who appear one day in
the middle of the Sahara. And often, when people cross boundaries, they find they can now speak
and understand foreign languages that they have never encountered before. In this sense, the
Great Change has facilitated cultural contact, but with one caveat: with western hegemony
disrupted, the cultures must confront one another as equals. This new post-apocalyptic
postcolonialism does not require isolation, although cosmopolitan contact can still create
conflict, but rather requires some sort of revolutionary change which disrupts traditionally
destructive power imbalances.
The Shadow Speaker’s vision of postcolonial change is embodied in the character of
Sarauniya Jaa, called the Red Queen of Niger. Jaa enters the novel when she returns to Ejii’s
hometown of Kwamfa and cuts off Ejii’s father’s head. Jaa previously ruled Kwamfa as an
egalitarian and matriarchal city. Upon her departure, however, Ejii’s father seizes power and
quickly reasserts patriarchal domination, attempting to recreate the social norms of pre-Great
Change Nigerien society. His commitment to social stratification is so extreme that, when Jaa
beheads him, Ejii sides with her even against her own father. While the latter is strictly
traditionalist, Jaa represents cultural and political fluidity, a sort of post-Great Change version of
Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial hybridity, involving a vision of “hybridity as camouflage, as a
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contesting, antagonistic agency” (277); she deploys cultural forms and traditions often associated
with misogyny and oppression, yet, in their disguise, does radical work against that very
misogyny and oppression. Jaa neither fully embraces nor rejects pre-Great Change ideals, but
rather appropriates and signifies on them. She is a practicing Muslim and wears a burqa, but one
which is transparent about the face, emphasizing rather than obscuring her individuality. She also
practices polygamy, but hers is polyandry rather than polygyny; she has two husbands who travel
with her. Jaa takes on old forms and makes them new, both in her personal life and in her larger
political project of creating an egalitarian and postcolonial African society. It is through Jaa that
Okorafor takes on Nalo Hopkinson’s Speculative trickster project. Jaa is perhaps most clearly
defined by her constant crossing of boundaries, both literal and metaphorical, one of the classic
trickster tropes. She literally travels between worlds in the novel, and she also crosses all
boundaries of feminine expectation. This includes not only “traditional” submissive and
deferential femininity, but also the patronizing expectations of traditional white, western, and
middle class feminism, which reject such things as the burqa and polygamy as fundamentally
misogynistic and patriarchal. Jaa actively refuses to be submissive or deferential, but she also
refuses to reject the markers of Islamic and African culture which are often seen in the west as
anti-feminist. Instead she defies all these expectations. In doing so, she creates a new and
uniquely West African trickster feminism whose power cannot be questioned, although the novel
does at times problematize the violence of her methods.
This sort of tricksterism also illustrates Okorafor’s deployment of Speculative
Blackness17. Jaa’s resistance politics are firmly rooted in her embrace of a sexuality which is
17
For an explanation of Speculative Blackness, see the Introduction.
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non-heteronormative even while it is heterosexual. As a black woman whose sexuality is not
constrained by heteronormative monogamy, Jaa cannot be contained by racist narratives of black
women as hypersexual. Rather, within the novel’s Speculative frame, her refusal of
heteronormativity is recast from deviant to a key component of her trickster-informed African
feminism.
Through Jaa, Okorafor also invokes the spirit of Frantz Fanon, arguably something of a
trickster figure himself in his philosopher/revolutionary persona, moving without hesitation
between theorizing colonialism and engaging in untheoretical violent action.
“Why’d you have to kill [my father]?” Ejii finally asked. Her chest tightened. For
so long she’d wanted to ask Jaa this. She looked at Jaa’s left hand, the hand that
had carried the sword that beheaded her father. “A great philosopher, Frantz
Fanon, once said, ‘Violence is a cleansing force,” Jaa said. (193)
Jaa is a highly Fanonian figure in the novel, refusing any form of domination or oppression
(except, perhaps, her own) and using righteous violence as her tool against tyranny. While such a
feminist invocation of Fanon may seem odd, given, for example, his patronizing treatment of
black women as perpetuators of internalized anti-black racism in Black Skin, White Masks, this
seeming contradiction fits into Okorafor’s larger usage of trickster troping and bricolage,
particularly through Jaa. Much as Jaa takes the burqa and transforms it into a symbol of feminist
resistance, so she takes Fanon, with all his problematic gender politics, and uses and transforms
his theoretical framework for revolution into something she, as a feminist revolutionary, can
embrace Jaa’s violence is carried out and symbolized by the green-bladed sword she wields.
With it, she beheads Ejii’s father, thus liberating Kwamfa from patriarchy and domination. The
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sword is made of material from another world, and, at the novel’s end, when her violence has
become counterproductive rather than revolutionary, at Ejii’s intervention its blade turns into a
living and growing plant. This suggests that the Fanonian project of revolution through violence
is a necessary condition for creating and maintaining a postcolonialism that is both postcolonial
and non-oppressive, but violence alone cannot accomplish these things. Ideological
transformation must accompany violence, as we see in Okorafor’s later novel, Who Fears Death.
Refiguring Imperialism, Print, and Postcolonial Struggle in Who Fears Death
Who Fears Death is set in the same future as The Shadow Speaker, although the formal
connections between the two novels are extremely subtle and tenuous18. While The Shadow
Speaker represents a postcolonialism that is actually postcolonial, Who Fears Death engages
with the struggle against a rebirth of colonialism within the novel’s post-apocalyptic space. Who
Fears Death is set in a post-apocalyptic Sudan, although that detail is not made clear until the
close of the novel. In this future Sudan, the dark-skinned Okeke people live in towns and small
cities in, and on the edges of, a great desert. While they have access to electronic devices such as
laptops, technology plays only a peripheral role in their lives. Juju magic is far more
commonplace and important, both in the Okeke’s quotidian lives and in their cultural identity.
The lighter skinned Nuru people live in the more fertile west, a land marked by its several rivers
in stark contrast to the harsh Okeke desert. In these bountiful western lands, the Nuru carry out a
brutal genocide against the Okeke. Here, the novel’s speculative metaphor rather directly
references the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the centuries of colonialism that followed. While life
18
The connection is established via an apparently throw-away reference in Who Fears Death: the
characters find an ebook reader, displaying a book called The Forbidden Greeny Jungle Guide. The book
appears more prominently in Okorafor’s debut novel, Zahrah the Windseeker (2005), and describes a
location on the planet Ginen, which is linked to Okorafor’s post-apocalyptic Earth. Ginen also appears as
a location in The Shadow Speaker; thus, the three novels are all set in the same future.
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is hard in the black homeland, the wealthier, more cosmopolitan west offers no shelter; instead, it
slaughters and enslaves black Africans. The eastern Okeke, like many West African tribes during
the trans-Atlantic slave trade, are not blameless; while they are aware of the violence in the west,
they are too complacent to do anything about it, and they do not believe the massacres will ever
reach them. Furthering this parallel, Nuru soldiers use sexual violence as a tool of terror against
black (Okeke) women. Aside from intimidating the Okeke, Nuru soldiers rape them to produce
mixed race children, called Ewu, who live amongst their mothers’ people but are not fully
accepted in either society.
Additionally, Okorafor links her speculative future Africa to African American history as
she signifies on the use of Christianity as a slaveholder’s religion, creating a religious text, holy
to both the Okeke and the Nuru but actively hostile to the Okeke. It is called “the Great Book”
or, simply, “the Book.” The Great Book’s creation myth echoes the racist readings of the Biblical
“Mark of Ham,” which for centuries was used to justify the enslavement of Black Africans in the
Americas19. According to the Great Book, the Okeke, marked by the creator goddess Ani with
black skin and fundamental inferiority, were intended to be slaves to the Nuru, but rebelled in the
past, causing a disaster, and now they must be punished20. Thus, the Great Book justifies not only
a slavery-based colonialism, but also an active policy of genocide.
19
This is one of several ways in which the novel signifies on tropes of American slave narratives and neo-slave
narratives. This signifying is less obvious than the novel’s African influences, but equally important to
understanding its counterhegemonic discourse. Other examples include the novel’s narrative arc as a slave uprising
(cf. the slave uprising in Martin Delany’s Blake, or the Huts of America), Onyesonwu as the mixed race child of an
initially unknown slave master father (cf. Frederick Douglass in his Narrative), the use of female sexuality and
fertility as forms of resistance (cf. Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), and Onyesonwu’s
circumcision and scars as an example of black women’s bodies physically bearing the emotional scars of slavery (cf.
the “tree” on Sethe’s back in Toni Morrison’s Beloved).
20
Presumably, “Ani” is derived from the Igbo goddess Ani, also known as Ala (“Igbo Mythology”), particularly
given Okorafor’s Igbo heritage and her frequent use of Igbo culture and religion in her works.
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Through the character of Onyesonwu, the novel’s narrator and protagonist, the Great
Book also becomes the focus of resistance, and a potential site and source of liberation. This
parallels Christianity’s history as, simultaneously, a slaveholder’s religion and a slave religion in
North America. While Christianity was selectively interpreted to slaves as justifying their
enslavement, slaves also transformed it into a liberatory religion, identifying themselves with the
enslaved Old Testament Jews from Exodus and their white slave masters with the cruel Pharaoh.
This proved a sophisticated and powerful rhetorical strategy of resistance, allowing slaves to
articulate a critique of slavery in full view of their slave masters because they appeared to speak
in the slave masters’ own language, in true trickster fashion. In Who Fears Death, a similar
rhetorical transformation occurs in speculative form through Onyesonwu’s magical “rewriting”
of the Great Book. Here, Okorafor’s fulfillment of Hopkinson’s call for postcolonial speculative
criticism and tricksterism becomes clear.
Onyesonwu, an Ewu girl, is conceived when Daib, the chief Nuru sorcerer and leader of
the genocide, rapes Onyesonwu’s Okeke mother. Through this rape, Daib hopes to father a son
powerful in magic; Onyesonwu’s “failure” to be born a son will prove key to analyzing the
novel. This son, Daib believes, will grow up to serve as his chief lieutenant, destroying the
Okeke from within. Throughout her childhood, Onyesonwu is keenly aware of her mixed race
Ewu status. She knows too well that her very skin marks her mother’s rape, but she is unaware of
her father’s specific identity, knowing only that he is a Nuru soldier. It is only when she comes
into her magical power, which, in Okorafor’s world, comes with adolescence, that Onyesonwu
realizes her father’s true nature. As her father’s daughter, she is the only person powerful enough
in juju to lead the Okeke resistance against the Nuru. This resistance, it becomes clear, centers
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around the need to “rewrite” the Great Book, an act which seems impossible as the Great Book’s
stories and ideologies have guided both Nuru and Okeke thought for decades, if not centuries.
As such, Okorafor’s Great Book also reflects a postmodern usage of the trope of “the
book-within-a-book,” which Madhu Dubey identifies as a major preoccupation of postmodern
black fiction in her critical work Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism [2003] (2).
Dubey divides the novels that employ the book-within-a-book trope into two camps: first those,
such as Sapphire’s Push and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which “employ some variant
of a ‘Book of Life’ to test the utopian promise of the modern print legacy in the dystopian
conditions of postmodern cities” (15) and second those, like Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon
and Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, “which strain unsuccessfully to refigure reading as
listening” (15). While Dubey focuses exclusively on African American writers, much of her
critique can be applied to black African and diasporic African writers as well. As in African
American literature, many of the most established African and African diasporic writers draw
from history and folklore, while a new generation of writers is beginning to take African and
diasporic African literature in new, often speculative, directions.
In Who Fears Death, Okorafor explodes this binary. Despite the novel’s rural setting and
its use of juju, associated with oral tradition and listening rather than print, the Great Book very
much traffics in the utopian/dystopian “Book of Life” trope in a complex way. The Great Book
has created a colonialist dystopia for the Okeke, as seen when genocidal Nuru soldiers attack
Okeke women and sing a sort of twisted hymn, their words and ideology inspired by the Great
Book’s racist/colonialist construction of Okeke-as-natural-slave:
The blood of the Okeke runs like water
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We take their goods and shame their forefathers.
We beat them with a heavy hand
Then take what they call their land.
The power of Ani belongs to us
And so we will slay you to dust
Ugly filthy slaves, Ani has finally killed you! (18-19)
Again, this signifies on white western hegemony’s deployment of a white-washed Christianity as
both a justification for slavery and a colonizing apparatus. The Nuru’s twisted hymn echoes the
slave song described by Frederick Douglass in his Narrative : “I am going away to the Great
House Farm! O, yea! O, yea! O!” (23), in which a slave house is substituted for heaven and
racial hierarchy and oppression are given religious sanction. Similarly, the Nuru’s hymn
substitutes genocide for salvation. Unlike Douglass’s slave song, it is the oppressors who sing the
Nuru hymn, yet, strikingly, Okorafor shows us again and again that most Okeke accept the
racialized oppression the song codifies as their natural lot, precisely what Douglass’s slaves do as
they sing. In other words, as with Douglass’s slaves, most Okeke internalize this white-washing,
never questioning their own Great Book-endorsed inadequacy. Powerfully, these examples show
us how oppressors remain oppressors not just through conventional force, by holding the largest
weapons or controlling governmental institutions, but because they imprint ideologies onto
themselves and the oppressed which remake the oppressors as extensions of the divine and the
oppressed as something less than human.
Yet through Onyesonwu, the Great Book also holds the potential to produce utopia.
According to prophecy, she will bring about her people’s salvation not only through physically
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battling her father’s Nuru armies, but also through somehow “rewriting” the Great Book,
revealing a benevolent and liberatory essence that has been obscured by the text’s racist
corruption and its co-option by fundamentalist Nuru nationalism, which twists the meaning of
the text and its words.
We can see evidence for how this corruption twists the Great Book through a section
called “The Lost Papers,” which explains the cause of the Okeke’s fall and justifies their current
oppression. The Lost Papers
go into detail about how the Okeke . . . were mad scientists. The Lost Papers
discuss how they invented old technologies . . . and invented ways to duplicate
themselves and keep young until they died. They made food grow on dead land,
they cured all diseases. In the darkness, the amazing Okeke brimmed with wild
creativity. (337)
The Nuru, we are told, “like to cite [The Lost Papers] whenever they want to point out how
fundamentally flawed the Okeke are” (337). But it is difficult to say what exactly is supposed to
be dystopian about a society that cures diseases, staves off old age, successfully pursues useful
scientific research, and, apparently, does so within a non-oppressive framework; there is never
any suggestion that, in their glorious past, the Okeke ever oppressed the Nuru. Only the term
“mad scientist” itself implies dystopia and, by the end of the passage, this impression is dispelled
by the description of the pre-fall Okeke as “amazing” in their “wild creativity.” Yet not only do
the Nuru invoke the passage as proof of Okeke inferiority; the Okeke also accept this reading,
and are “embarrassed by [The Lost Papers]” (337). The Nuru critique of the Okeke “mad
scientists,” then, represents another form of intellectual colonialism, which the Okeke themselves
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have internalized and accepted. Onyesonwu, uniquely, sees through this, calling those who
accept this reading as “a sad miserable unthinking lot” (337).
In order to rewrite the Great Book, Onyesonwu must confront Daib, whose virulent
ideology and figurative and literal rape of the Okeke embodies the racist and colonialist
corruption of the Great Book. In the confrontation, we learn that Onyesonwu’s gender is key to
her ability to resist; had she been a boy, we are told, she would still be a powerful sorcerer, but if
gender-linked to her father rather than her mother, she would be an oppressor, not a liberator.
Daib laments this, telling Onyesonwu of her mother, “She should have given me a great, great
son. Why are you a girl?” (365).
Onyesonwu is unable to answer Daib, but when her voice falters, her partner, Mwita,
speaks up for her. Mwita, like Onyesonwu, is a mixed-race Ewu, and like her he possesses
considerable magical powers. Yet unlike Onyesonwu, his now deceased parents were a loving
couple, defying cultural anti-miscegenation taboos and exploding the colonialist binary of Nuru
as ruler/rapist and Okeke as ruled/victim; in this sense, he embodies a postcolonial hybridity.
Thus, despite his gender, Mwita is free from the hatred that would have infected the male
Onyesonwu. Mwita was born in Nuru lands, and, when his magical powers first manifest, he
becomes an apprentice to Daib, but eventually rejects both Daib’s and the Nuru’s hegemony,
moving east and settling in Okeke lands. There, Mwita aligns himself with Onyesonwu as her
companion and, eventually, her lover.
If we remember Nalo Hopkinson’s call for postcolonial speculative fiction writers to be
critics and tricksters, then we can recognize Onyesonwu as the critic and Mwita as the trickster.
Mwita first becomes a trickster by throwing a wrench into Onyesonwu’s good/evil binary
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understanding of the Okeke/Nuru conflict through the facts of his own embodied existence.
While Mwita is an Ewu like Onyesonwu, he reveals to her that his Nuru father did not rape his
Okeke mother. Instead, he fell in love with her. Initially, this revelation is inconceivable to
Onyesonwu, as her cultural framework cannot conceive the possibility of Okeke/Nuru love. To
the Okeke and to Onyesonwu, Ewu means rape. She first responds to this story by saying, “This
is not something to joke about” (59). Again, here, we can see the emergence of a Speculative
Blackness within Okorafor’s work as she takes a form of non-heteronormativity (interracial sex)
associated with oppression and recasts it as a source of resistance; through falling in love and
attempting to raise Mwita in an anti-racist context, Mwita’s parents refused racist narratives of
Nuru and Okeke as fundamental others. Of course, these attempts prove unsuccessful, as they are
brutally murdered. Still, Mwita’s life and his influence on Onyesonwu’s liberatory project bear
out the counterhegemonic potential of their non-heteronormative sexuality within the novel’s
racialized frame. Mwita’s lived experience challenges Onyesonwu’s narrative of sexual contact
between Okeke and Nuru as fundamentally oppressive in a way that ultimately informs her own
notions of resistance against Nuru oppression.
This trickster role is essential to the novel’s counterhegemonic project. While
Onyesonwu’s fearless critical attacks on Daib’s imperialist and racist ideology are necessary as
well, without Mwita’s trickster influence, her ideological stance might become as calcified and
dogmatic as Daib’s. Mwita himself recognizes this in Onyesonwu and tells her, “You scare
me . . . You resemble your mother mostly . . . But I see it in the eyes now. You have his
eyes” (184). Mwita’s trickster status is cemented here as he conflates the novel’s hero with its
villain, identifying both as seeing the world through the same eyes. Mwita as trickster muddies
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the novel’s moral waters, leaving its narrative far messier than it would be if the conflict was
simply Onyesonwu versus Daib. This, in the end, is what separates Onyesonwu from Daib–what
holds her back from seeing the world through her father’s eyes as Mwita fears. Daib, like
Onyesonwu, is an expert critic, diagnosing what he sees as the Okeke’s ills with a twisted
precision and clarity. He has no trickster complement to hold him back from the dangers of
moral surety.
When Onyesonwu falters in the key moment of her confrontation with Daib, Mwita
reveals to Daib the truth of the prophecy and the imminence of liberation. Onyesonwu is born a
girl, Mwita answers Daib, “because it is written” (365). That Mwita says “it is written” is key;
only a written prophecy is sufficient to withstand the destructive power of Daib and the racist
corruption of the Great Book that he represents. Here, we see that the text has posed Dubey’s
question of whether the modern print legacy has the utopian potential to counter the dystopian
conditions of postmodern cities (15), and answered simultaneously in the negative and in the
positive. No, because the print legacy in the form of the Great Book has encouraged, if not
caused, horrible ethnic violence and genocide. Yes, because through the hybrid (in both the
physical and cultural senses of the word) forms of Onyesonwu and Mwita, the print legacy
transforms from oppression into resistance. Print is simultaneously the product and tool of the
colonial oppressor and a potentially revolutionary tool in the postcolonial struggle against the
oppressor. The written word itself has a hybrid identity here. When wedded to fundamentalist
nationalisms or imperialisms, the written word is dangerous as it reifies and systematizes
hierarchal thinking and helps to translate that thinking into mass violence. Yet Onyesonwu and
Mwita’s multi-racial identity, which situates them as products of both Nuru and Okeke but also
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as not fully accepted or integrated into either society, problematizes their relationship to the
fundamentalist nationalism of their father/former mentor and negates the possibility of their
being subsumed into his rhetoric. In their hands, the written word’s postcolonial liberatory
potential is finally revealed. The Ewu couple, created by and within the terms of the conflict they
seek to end and pushed to the margins of society by the very nature of that creation, become an
embodied counter-discourse to the hegemonic discourse that has literally and figuratively
produced them. Again, the written word and the print legacy both are and are not sufficient; the
prophecy must be a written one to allow for the possibility of resistance, but for that resistance to
manifest, the counter-discourse the prophecy produces must be embodied.
Similarly, the “rewriting” of the Great Book proves to be more complex than simply
putting new words on the page. Onyesonwu does not write anything, but instead bridges the gap
between print and oral tradition that Dubey sees as unbridgeable. When Onyesonwu finally
defeats Daib and reaches the book, it stops being the Great Book, written in capital letters and
spoken of with transcendent awe or bitter resentment. Instead, it becomes a physical object, “that
book,” written in lowercase, and its physical traits are the first thing Onyesonwu describes: “the
cover was thin but tough, made of a durable material I couldn’t name” (376). Yet it still remains
unknown and unknowable, and also threatening: the cover’s unidentifiable material is later
described as “rough, like sandpaper” (376), and its pages are hot to the touch.
Finally, in a seeming rejection of the print legacy, Onyesonwu “rewrites” the book by
first denouncing its hatred, and
[t]hen I began to sing. I sang the song that I had made up when I was four years
old and living with my mother in the desert. During the happiest time in my life. I
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had sung this song to the desert when it was content, at peace, settled. I sang it
now to the mysterious book on my lap. (376)
Onyesonwu finds The Great Book is written in a script she cannot understand, reflecting the
impossibility of rationally comprehending the fundamentalism and hatred that it contains.
Instead, the rewriting comes through music and through the invocation of idyllic memory, past,
and family. This does not extend to the present moment of resistance, however. As Onyesonwu
inspects the book, the symbols she bears on her right hand, etched there in a dream by her
father’s thumbnail and containing his hate, thus implicating her in the system she resists, begin to
throb:
My hand grew hot and I saw the symbols on my right hand split. The duplicates
dribbled down into the book where they settled between the other symbols into a
script that I still couldn’t read. I could feel the book sucking from me, as a child
does from its mother’s breast....As I watched, the book grew dimmer and dimmer.
But not so dim I could not see it. (377)
Ultimately, the “rewriting” of The Great Book is an experiential, not literary, act, yet this serves
as a complication, not a rejection, of print culture as a form of postcolonial resistance. The words
on the page have meaning but cannot be read by Onyesonwu and remain unseen by the reader.
They fade but do not vanish; the rewriting is created out of Onyesonwu’s body, but the rewritten
book is clearly marked as separate from the body. The Great Book is at once located inside and
outside of Onyesonwu as the person who produces it yet cannot ever know it. The Great Book,
always, holds a double nature in Who Fears Death: it is beautiful and horrible, liberatory and
oppressive, familiar and unknowable, embodied and othered, containing both print and oral
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tradition, reading and listening. Thus, Who Fears Death rejects and dispels the print/oral
tradition binary that Dubey reads into postmodern black fiction; this newly rewritten Great Book,
and the liberation it brings, embodies both print and orality.
Trickster: The Threat and Promise of a Speculative Postcolonialism
Through The Shadow Speaker and Who Fears Death, Okorafor gives us her winged dogs
of fully realized postcolonialism (in the case of The Shadow Speaker) and successful struggle for
such postcolonialism (in the case of Who Fears Death). In both cases, it is the novels’
Speculative form that makes this work possible. Through the novels, we can see that to create a
postcolonialism that is postcolonial–or, indeed, any sort of truly meaningful liberatory project–is
messy and requires one to abandon all that is comfortable and familiar. Neocolonialism,
imperialism, and racism are such pervasive forces in our world, shaped as it is by colonialism. As
a result, such radical change is required to uproot colonialism’s legacies that all existing
conventions and social orders must be disrupted. This may well be a frightening prospect even
for those who are oppressed under the current postcolonial/neocolonial order. Even if the current
social order brings oppression, it also brings the comfort and safety of the conservative. Yet
through these narratives, Okorafor is able to imagine and create a truly independent, truly
postcolonial West Africa, free of western hegemonic bonds in ways that are simply not possible
outside the genre. In doing so, she not only elucidates the possibilities of a speculative
postcolonialism, but also illustrates the power of the form for the oppressed, including racial
minority groups such as African Americans as well as postcolonial peoples.
Hopkinson’s call for the postcolonial Speculative Fiction writer to be both critic and
trickster runs through Okorafor’s work. In The Shadow Speaker, Jaa’s tricksterism allows her to
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thumb her nose at all social convention, conservative and putatively radical, and this is what
makes her a revolutionary. It is Jaa’s trickster-style playful rejection of and signifying on all
convention and expectation which reveals her as a Fanonian revolutionary and not merely a
Speculative version of the stereotypically brutal African warlord. In Who Fears Death, the critic/
trickster dynamic plays out through Onyesonwu and Mwita. When Onyesonwu’s relentless
criticism of the oppressive social order becomes ideologically dogmatic and thus starts to
represent the very order she opposes, Mwita’s complicating trickster narrative intervenes and
forces Onyesonwu to question every assumption. In both cases, this trickster element allows the
novel’s discourse to become counterhegemonic--to be liberatory rather than replacing one
hegemonic narrative with another.
Indeed, what makes Okorafor’s novels useful is that her postcolonial, post-apocalyptic
Africa is a messy, often ambiguous place, and that messiness comes directly from the trickster
element. These tricksters bake moral and narrative complexity into the novels’ structure,
transforming the genre from a traditional, flattened-out fantasy discourse of good and evil into
something that explores not only the oppressor’s evil acts but also the ways in which the
oppressed become complicit in their own subjugation even when they try to resist. They “fuck
with [us]” as Hopkinson calls for, complicating our easy progressive assumptions of “good guys”
and “bad guys” and exposing the dangers of such simplistic formulations and the moral surety
they engender. We need these kinds of complex models in order to deal with the equally complex
workings of race and postcolonialism.
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CHAPTER FIVE
THE COLLAR AND THE SWORD: QUEER RESISTANCE IN SAMUEL R.
DELANY'S TALES OF NEVÈRŸON
Samuel R. Delany's Tales of Nevèrÿon [1979], the first volume of the four-part Return to
Nevèrÿon series, refigures the paraliterary genre of sword-and-sorcery into something strikingly
new, at once decidedly postmodern and overtly queer. In Delany's hands, as Robert Reid-Pharr
points out, "the adolescent, (hetero)sexually unrestrained, sword-and-sorcery hero is replaced by
Delany's adult, homosexual character Gorgik" (350), and Gorgik’s sexuality is defined, through
the practice of BDSM, by restraint. Gorgik earns the appellation "The Liberator" but is almost
never seen actually liberating anyone, except for one scene I will argue must be read as both
comic and ironic. The traditional role of the violent, aggressive, villain-slaying hero is given over
to a woman named "Raven," a warrior from a female-dominated culture bordering Nevèrÿon, the
nation where the series is set. What's more, while resistance to slavery, oligarchy, and hegemony
are among the book's central preoccupations, Delany consistently and aggressively challenges
our familiar understandings of what resistance looks like and what it can accomplish. He forces
us to consider new narratives of resistance more suitable to our current, postmodern era.
Tales of Nevèrÿon practically begs for critical interpretation. The book opens with dual
epigraphs from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Edward Said and is given a fictitious, mockacademic Preface and Appendix written pseudonymously by Delany himself. The Preface and
Appendix critique and contest Delany’s own work and authorial agency. The novel itself features
several extended passages where ostensibly "primitive" characters engage in overt academic
discourse. Yet for all this, relatively little critical work has been done on the book or the series it
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launched. In part, this may be due to Black Speculative Fiction’s position as a critically neglected
sub-genre within the traditionally critically neglected genre of Speculative Fiction itself. Yet even
as critical interest in Black Speculative Fiction has grown in recent years, Tales of Nevèrÿon’s
relative critical neglect has continued. Most critics interested in Delany have instead focused on
his mammoth novel/labyrinth Dhalgren, or, if not, his novels Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of
Sand or Trouble on Triton21. Critics who have delved into Nevèrÿon have mostly focused on
Gorgik the Liberator, particularly his dual role as anti-slavery crusader and performer of slavery's
forms within the sexualized space of BDSM. Other topics of critical interest have included and
the relationship the series poses between queer sexuality, the eroticization of class and power
relations, and emergent capitalism. However, little or no critical attention has been paid to the
novel’s treatment of resistance, or its linkage of resistance to queerness, although these issues lie
at the center of the novel’s narrative.
In Tales of Nevèrÿon’s discource of queered resistance, patriarchy and matriarchy are
central concepts. While the two concepts contrast each other, they are not used as the mirrorimage opposites that their linguistic symmetry might imply. For one thing, in Nevèrÿon, as in the
real world, a tremendous power dissymmetry exists between patriarchal power and matriarchal
power. In Nevèrÿon proper, patriarchy reigns supreme. That is to say, unquestioned and
unexamined male ideological, political, and military power dominate. This is so despite
Nevèrÿon being nominally ruled by a woman, the so-called Child Empress Ynelgo. Indeed,
Ynelgo’s rule confirms, rather than challenges, the dominance of patriarchy in Nevèrÿon.
21
Additionally, several of Delany's nonfiction works, particularly Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
and The Motion of Light on Water, have become very important texts in the fields of Queer Theory and
Cultural Studies.
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Patriarchy here refers not to literal male leadership of the state, but to the male domination of
power structures and social ideology, so entrenched that it can survive unscathed even when a
woman ruler comes to power. Matriarchy, by contrast, represents not the reversal of patriarchy,
substituting female domination for male domination, but, rather a form of resistance to
patriarchy’s ideological domination. In Nevèrÿon, patriarchal power is hegemonic, so entrenched
that any other social structure is essentially unthinkable. Matriarchy, embodied by Raven, means
introducing the ideological possibility that some other social structure can, and should, exist. In a
society where patriarchy is hegemonic, this sort of ideological matriarchy becomes
revolutionary.
Gorgik the Liberator: Exploring and Problematizing BDSM as a Space of Queer
Resistance
Gorgik is an important, though not the only, key to reading and interpreting Tales of
Nevèrÿon's narrative of resistance. Gorgik, as the Liberator, is cast in the role of the musclebound sword-and-sorcery hero. However, his enactment of that trope is complicated from
literally the first line of the novel (excluding the metatextual Preface), which tells us that his
mother "from time to time claimed eastern connections with one of the great families of
fisherwomen in the Ulvayn Islands" (27). Thus, Gorgik is connected not to a masculine warrior
tradition but to a matriarchal matrilineal line. His father is subsequently mentioned as a former
sailor and later as an employee of an importer in the port city of Kolhari. However, Gorgik is
first and foremost defined through the matrilineal line and is connected to the motherland of the
Ulvayn Islands, later established in the book as a matriarchal space whose female agency
threatens the aggressively patriarchal Nevèrÿon. It is the Islands’ tradition of fisherwomen that
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establishes them as a potentially matriarchal space. In fact, fisherwomen represent a minority in
the profession, being far outnumbered by fishermen. This shows us how all-pervasive and
hegemonic Nevèrÿonian patriarchy truly is. For women to have established even a small foothold
in an otherwise male-dominated industry is enough to mark the Ulvayn Islands apart as deviant
and even threatening to Nevèrÿon’s “natural” patriarchal order.
Despite all the matrilineal power her connection to the Ulvayn Islands implies, Gorgik's
mother hardly appears in the book. What’s more, she remains largely voiceless when she does
appear. Her ties to the Ulvayn Islands are undermined by the realities of her life in patriarchal
Nevèrÿon and marriage to a man whose two professions represent the very capitalism whose
introduction to the Islands complicates and eventually destroys their matriarchal status. What's
more, the connection itself is rendered extremely tenuous; she is not from the Ulvayn Islands, nor
is she, as presented to the reader, actually connected to them; instead, she merely "claims" a
connection, and not even consistently, but only "from time to time." Ultimately, whatever female
agency she represents is clearly part of the old order whose end is one of the series' central
preoccupations. Just eleven pages into the first of five stories that make up Tales of Nevèrÿon,
Gorgik's father is dead, murdered in a coup d'etat, and his mother traumatized. She is finally and
completely silenced by the unfolding violence, which targets the family's men: "While in
another room his mother's sobbing turned suddenly to a scream, then abruptly ceased, Gorgik
was dragged naked into the chilly street" (37). While her claims of Ulvayn Island connections
represent a nostalgia for a now dispersed matriarchal past, they cannot protect either mother or
family. Her husband is dead, her son, after being dragged off, spends five years as a slave in an
obsidian mine, and she herself is silenced by the humiliating spectacle. She is rendered powerless
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as the young Gorgik is not only captured but naked, exposed, and stripped of the power the
family’s middle class/merchant status once promised him. While Gorgik's mother does not die
"on screen," this silence marks her last appearance in the novel.
Despite her seeming powerlessness, Jes Battis identifies Gorgik's unnamed mother as the
first of three "powerful women" (480) who frame both Gorgik's life and the opening of the book,
along with the so-called Child Empress Ynelgo and the Vizerine Myrgot. It is Ynelgo whose rise
to power leads to Gorgik's enslavement and, paradoxically, finally destroys the connections to
old-order matriarchy his mother embodies. Indeed, Ynelgo, infantilized by her title of "Child
Empress," is herself relatively powerless within her own High Court of Eagles. While enslaved
in the High Court, Gorgik inadvertently stumbles upon an elite social gathering, where he speaks
to Ynelgo and earns her favor. Yet doing so places him in danger and forces him to leave the
High Court. We learn subsequently that Ynelgo's favor earns him the wrath of Krodar, the
military general whose "soldiers put the Empress on the throne" (59) and who "holds all the
power of the Empire in his hands" (59). Ostensibly female leadership does nothing to dismantle
Nevèrÿon's firmly entrenched patriarchy, and that patriarchy is actively hostile to the queer
sexuality that Gorgik comes to embody.
While it is Ynelgo's coup that leads to Gorgik's enslavement in the brutal obsidian mines,
it is the Vizerine who, according to Battis, "frees [Gorgik] (or admits him into a different and
more specific kind of servitude, that of being an economic actor within Nevèrÿon itself)” (180).
The slavery Gorgik encounters in the mines resembles, in several ways, the historically familiar
antebellum American slavery, as it takes the form of backbreaking physical labor, enforced by
harsh corporal discipline. Additionally, Nevèrÿonian slavery exploits the land and shores up the
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economy of an imperial government dominated by a small, privileged elite. Yet Nevèrÿon's
slavery is also quite different from our familiar conceptions of slavery in that Delany uncouples
slavery from both race and reproduction22. In Nevèrÿon, the politically ascendent majority
population is brown skinned, and it is the marginalized "barbarians" who have light skin, blond
hair, and blue eyes, and who make up the majority of slaves. Despite this uncoupling of race and
slavery, Nevèrÿon hardly constitutes a fantasy of postracial or "color-blind" society; it is, in fact,
a deeply racialized place. Sylvia Kelso lays out the complex nature of race here, pointing out, in
succession, that in Nevèrÿon "the fixed black/white racial dichotomy of historical American
slavery...dissolves" (293) and yet "whites are barbaric even when free" (293). However, more
than simple reversal or dissolution of racial binaries is at play here. Instead, race in Nevèrÿon is
complicated in a way that speaks to the complexities of race in postmodern America. Both
Nevèrÿon and America are places where the black/white racial binary has been complicated and
yet also where it remains pervasive. If the black/white binary were simply reversed, we would
expect Nevèrÿon's slaves to all be white, but this is not the case. The Black/white binary is
contested and complicated, but never dispelled or fully reversed. Gorgik himself is dark-skinned
and, notwithstanding imagined connections to the Ulvayn Islands, ethnically Nevèrÿonian23, but
that does not keep him from the mines. Slavery in Nevèrÿon is also not necessarily inherited, as
we see with Gorgik, who is born a merchant's son but finds himself, in his teenage years, in
22
Despite this uncoupling, the text does subtly tie slavery to Blackness, both in that the most important
enslaved character, and subsequent "liberator" is, unlike most slaves, dark skinned, and in that his initial
enslavement places him an obsidian mine, where both the work environment and the product are the
blackest of black. The mine itself, as a space of slavery, also associates slavery with implicit queerness,
suggesting a rectum.
23
"Nevèrÿonian" is my own coinage here, for the purposes of convenience; the text itself names
Nevèrÿon's ethnic minorities as "barbarians," but never attaches a demonym to the dominant group itself;
their identity, like whiteness in America, is invisible and assumed.
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(literally) slavery's darkest depths. When the Vizerine "saves" Gorgik from the mines, where
labor has left him looking "not a day more than fifteen years above his actual age" (37), she does
so not to “liberate” him. She keeps him on as her personal slave, but she does change the
conditions of his slavery. Gone is the physical labor, replaced with sexual services that cannot
ultimately satisfy the Vizerine, for whom "boredom was [the] problem and lust only its
emblem" (40). The Vizerine becomes the first (only?) woman Gorgik has ever "had" (41), that
phrasing representing a brutally ironic reversal of the actual ownership involved. In many ways,
it is this exchange that creates the terms of the rest of Gorgik's life, both in terms of his liberatory
project and his queer sexuality. While Gorgik later embraces sex with other men rather than
women like the Vizerine, he is never able to shed the associations the Vizerine forms in him
between sex, slavery, the collar, and exchange. In Nevèrÿon, the primary cultural marker of
slavery is a metal collar, worn around the neck. Once put on, the collar cannot be easily removed
by its wearer, making escape from slavery difficult if not impossible. While Delany uncouples
slavery from race, the collar serves as an immediate, universally recognized, physical marker that
any escaped slave is just that, and thus must be captured. In this way, the collar essentially
replaces Black skin as an indissoluble signifier of enslavement. When the Vizerine first summons
Gorgik, he is collared:
His dark face crinkled around its scar. With his free hand he rubbed his great
neck, the skin stretched between thick thumb and horny forefinger cracked and
gray…Suddenly he went scrabbling in the straw beside him and a moment later
turned back with the metal collar, hinged open, a semi-circle of it in each hand....
Then he bent forward, raised the collar, and clacked it closed. (40)
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While Gorgik has escaped the obsidian mine, he is hardly free. Here, he is physicalized (the
emphasis on the size of his arm and thumb, the damage to his fingers) and racialized in a way
that makes more sense in real world than Nevèrÿonian terms, with his "dark" face tied to being
scarred. What’s more, his sexual summoning is tied in inextricably with the slavery signified by
the collar. That Gorgik himself puts on the collar indicates both some degree of agency and,
especially as he bends forward subserviently while putting it on, that he is implicated as
complicit in his own enslavement. What's more, Gorgik is summoned in response to the
Vizerine's request that her servants "bring me back the foulest, filthiest, wretchedest pit slave
from the deepest darkest hole. I wish to slake my passion in some vile, low way" (38). While this
new form of slavery may be less physically demanding than the mines, it is also demeans Gorgik
far more personally than his previous, fairly anonymous labor, and that humiliation is tied to both
blackness and queerness ("deepest darkest hole”).
This linkage of the collar to sex, and thus slavery to sex, becomes the primary marker of
both Gorgik's sexuality and his liberation methods throughout the remainder of the novel. Even
after he himself is free, Gorgik continues to wear the collar. Worn in freedom, the collar takes on
a double significance, becoming "a sign of solidarity with those still in slavery and as an insignia
of his sexuality, expressed principally with other men in master-slave fantasies" (Jackson, Jr.
114). The collar comes to represent Gorgik's commitment to destroying slavery, as he swears he
will never remove it until all of Nevèrÿon's slaves are free. Simultaneously, it represents the
impossibility of his ever existing outside of the constraints of a system that has defined his
biography, his psychology, and his sexuality. As Battis observes, “[b]y sexualizing the collar, the
signifier for slavery, and projecting it as a phallic extension of his own body, Gorgik tries to
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construct an erotic field in which ‘very strange parts,’ in effect his whole body, can produce
pleasure” (480). The collar’s sexual function is complex. In terms of Gorgik's own sexuality, the
collar becomes a sexual fetish, a necessary symbol of an BDSM space in which Gorgik, now
ostensibly free, still feels compelled to enact and play out the slave/master dynamic. Here,
Delany clearly draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of power and power exchange as sources of
sexual pleasure. For Gorgik as for Foucalt, power and pleasure “do not cancel or turn back
against one another; they seek out, overlap, and reinforce one another” (48). That is to say, for
Gorgik, the pleasures of taking the dominant and submissive positions of BDSM reinforces his
own freedom from slavery. Even as the collar serves as a marker of slavery’s stubborn
ideological persistence, it is simultaneously liberatory, allowing Gorgik to transform slavery’s
signifiers into sources of pleasure and thus agency. Perhaps more clearly than in any of the four
other novels I have analyzed, we can see Speculative Blackness’s possibilities articulated here.
Gorgik, whose queer sexuality, dark skin, and former slavery are linked together in ways that
make more sense within the real world’s racial framework than Nevèrÿon’s fictional racial
arrangements, quite explicitly takes on forms of sexuality that have been problematized and
linked to racialized oppression and signifies on them, refashioning them as sources of resistance.
However, the collar and the master/slave dynamic are not only kinks for Gorgik, but
requirements for sex. As Gorgik himself puts it, "if one of us does not wear [the collar], I will not
be able to....do anything" (154). Most criticism has treated BDSM within the book only as a site
of agency, as a "sign of slavery 'conquered' but also of liberated transgressive sexuality" (Kelso
294), and as illustrating "the integral connections between subjectivity and sexual desires and
acts" (Johnston 53). The one exception to this is Robert Fox, who describes the book's depiction
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of BDSM as "thoroughly repulsive....a psychosexual parody of a relationship....under conditions
of the most overt compulsion" (52). Yet as Reid-Pharr points out, within the confines of collaras-necessary-fetish Gorgik's sexuality is "anything but unrestrained" (350), and certainly this
complicates any simplistic notion of BDSM as unproblematic agency for marginalized peoples.
Delany himself points out that BDSM can articulate a critique of the power structures it mirrors
and metaphorically recreates. Delany argues, in a discussion of the Return to Nevèrÿon series,
"[BDSM] carries, reveals, and reproduces the law's own hidden and embarrassing truth" (Silent
Interviews 140). However, the question of whether it can move beyond critique and into
transformation is far muddier, as Delany subsequently shows.
Gorgik's practice of BDSM first enters the series in Tales of Nevèrÿon's third story, "The
Tale of Small Sarg," and is taken up again in the fifth and final story, "The Tale of Dragons and
Dreamers." The "Small Sarg" of the former tale is himself a slave and barbarian who is
purchased by Gorgik for the same dual purpose that the collar itself holds. That is, Gorgik buys
Sarg both to liberate him from slavery and to have sex within the representational confines of
BDSM's master/slave dynamic. This constructs their relationship as deeply ambivalent, both
liberatory and problematic. Jane Branham Weedman points out that the two men are "bound
together by affection and by the mutual goal of abolishing slavery" (39), and this is true, but the
key term is, truly, "bound." By buying Small Sarg from a slave trader, Gorgik both liberates him
from slavery and simultaneously supports the economies of slavery. If slaves are freed through
purchase, that purchase only expands the slave traders' markets. In a society where anyone can
be enslaved regardless of race and geographical origin, any purchased slave is fungible; he or she
can be easily replaced by a nearly unlimited supply of potential new slaves. By buying Small
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Sarg, Gorgik simply guarantees that some new barbarian or Nevèrÿonian will be enslaved to take
his place. Thus, Gorgik's "liberation" is, in an important sense, actually a perpetuation of the
slavery he claims to fight against.
What's more, Small Sarg's powerlessness under Gorgik, at least initially, mirrors and
reproduces his powerlessness as a slave. After purchasing Small Sarg, Gorgik unchains the boy,
but he refuses to remove the collar. Instead, Gorgik announces they will have sex, and thus one
of them must be collared. Small Sarg asks Gorgik to remove his collar, thus completing his
liberation: "You take this off...please....Because, if I wear this, I don't know if I can do
anything" (154). Gorgik, however, refuses, citing the fetish role the collar plays in his sexuality.
He tells Small Sarg, "Right now, I do not feel like wearing it" (154) and that he will not be able
to perform sexually without the collar being involved. In this moment, the restraint and control
of BDSM transcends play or performance; truly, Gorgik is giving Small Sarg no real choice in
the matter, at once "freeing" him and still treating him like a slave. We are given every indication
that Small Sarg is a willing participant, but the exchange (both monetary and sexual) remains
deeply problematic in terms of thinking about BDSM as a site and source of liberation for the
marginalized. Since Small Sarg cannot here say "no," he also cannot truly or meaningfully say
"yes."
After exploring other characters and issues in the fourth tale, Delany returns to Gorgik
and Small Sarg in the book's final story, "The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers." It is here where
Delany comes closest to reproducing a conventional sword-and-sorcery tale, as it involves action
and battle, with swords wielded, warriors slain, and righteous prisoners freed. Curiously, though
Gorgik’s identity is defined by his liberation of slaves, this scene marks the only point in the
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entire series where anyone is actually liberated. Yet even here, Delany undermines and critiques
the conventionally heroic forms of sword-and-sorcery. Gorgik's involvement in the liberation is
marginal, as he is imprisoned and tortured by the sadistic Suzerine, whose title echoes the
Vizerine, while the bulk of the action occurs. What's more, within the scene the "liberated"
slaves themselves directly undermine and critique the entire notion of "liberating" slaves, and
the scene itself becomes absurd and must be read as both comic and ironic.
In the “liberation” scene, Small Sarg again wears the collar. This time, the collar serves
not as fetish object but as a disguise. Small Sarg enters the Suzerine's castle by fooling his guards
into thinking he is a lost slave trying to return home. Here, the liberatory potential of BDSM is
far clearer than in "The Tale of Small Sarg." Once inside the castle, Small Sarg runs about,
slaying guards and freeing slaves, repeating to them, over and over, "You are free...!" (224). Yet
the ellipses following "free" suggest a question mark rather than exclamation mark. Indeed, a
question mark is supplied in response from the now "freed" slaves, who react with confusion and
concern rather than elation. Small Sarg, confused by the response, asks them, "What do you
think, I'm some berserk madman, a slave gone off my head with the pressure of the iron at my
neck?....I've fought my way here, freed the laborers below you; you have only to go now
yourselves" (224-225). He then repeats, "You're free, do you understand?" (225). The slave, a
cook, unexpectedly launches into discourse that questions conventional narratives of slave
liberation:
Freedom is not so simple a thing as that. Even if you're telling the truth, just what
do you propose we're free to do?…We’ll be taken by slavers before dawn
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tomorrow, more than likely. Do you want us to get lost in the swamps to the
south?…Put down your sword–just for a minute–and be reasonable.' (225)
Here, Delany reveals the liberatory potential of BDSM–the collar as fetish item becomes a
disguise that allows Small Sarg to reenter the space of slavery and attack and destroy the slave
masters and their enforcers–and then immediately complicates it. Small Sarg, in his simplistic
narrative of liberation through battle, has failed to take into account the systemic and structural
components of slavery, thinking that, simply by uncollaring slaves and letting them run, he can
destroy slavery itself. The cook, however, knows that such an approach is hopelessly inadequate.
After a few moments of freedom charged with fear and danger, they will likely become slaves
again. There is no possibility of a life "outside" of slavery within a slave society such as
Nevèrÿon. As Small Sarg proceeds through the castle, the critique continues through another
"liberated" slave, and it becomes so sophisticated and complex as to become absurd:
Did you know that our collars are much heavier than yours?…What you are doing
is killing free men and making the lives of slaves more miserable than, of
necessity, they already are. If slavery is like a disease and a rash on the flesh of
Nevèrÿon....your own actions turn an ugly eruption into a fatal infection…The
Child Empress herself has many times declared that she is opposed to the
institution of indenture, and the natural drift of our nation is away from slave
labor anyway…Have you considered: your efforts may even be prolonging the
institution you would abolish. (227-228)
Small Sarg, however, hardly listens to the slave's critique. The above-quoted passage is regularly
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based narrative of liberation; for example, "Running, Small Sarg thought, rushing, fleeing,
dashing" (228). After leaving the erudite slave behind, Sarg thinks to himself, "Now I am free to
free my master!" (230), simultaneously reproducing the language of now-problematized
liberation and of the slavery he fights against. "Free" and "master" are paired, and both are
rendered ambivalent. When Small Sarg finally reaches the castle's dungeons and sees Gorgik and
his torturer, his first question to the torturer is, "are you slave or free?" (234). Small Sarg kills the
torturer, who, unlike Gorgik, is racially linked to Small Sarg, with "sharp features and gold skin
[that] spoke as pure a southern origin as Sarg's own" (235). Once again, Sarg repeats his familiar
line, "You're free...!" (235) for the final time, this time to Gorgik, but this time adds one more
word: "Master...!" (235). While existing criticism has spoken to the complexities of the scene of
“liberation," none has commented on the humor and irony contained in this moment. Small Sarg,
whose simplistic narrative of slave liberation has been repeatedly contested, arrives in the
dungeon, again makes his declaration of freedom. Then, immediately, he pairs the language of
liberation with the language of slavery. Even the slave liberator Sarg is, in the end, contained
within the language and the psychology of Nevèrÿon's hegemonic slave society. He seeks to end
slavery but, even in the moment of "liberation," cannot even imagine a life free from the
language and symbolism of slavery.
Raven: Radical Feminism's Illegibility in Patriarchal Space
Criticism on Gorgik's female analogue, the foreign, matriarchal warrior Raven, barely
exists. Reid-Pharr identifies Raven as Gorgik's "female counterpart" (351). After showing that
Gorgik, restrained and tortured during the one scene of liberation, is never "actually seen
wielding a weapon, slaying a dragon, or rescuing a damsel in distress" (351), Reid-Pharr explains
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that "this last honor is reserved for Raven" (351). Kathleen L. Spencer characterizes Raven as
offering "a 'savage' reversal of our own patriarchy" (qtd. in Kelso 298). Finally, Kelso describes
her as a "true Amazon" (298) and representative of a foreign matriarchy that reads as
"uncongenial" (298) to the patriarchal Nevèrÿonians and remarks that her "culture remains an
absence, outside the narrative" (298). Yet aside from these few stray observations, Raven's role in
the book has been almost entirely ignored by critics. Even Battis, who focuses explicitly on
queerness, does not mention her at all except as part of a list of characters in the series who
engage in queer relationships. This substantial omission of Raven from existing criticism is
stunning. Indeed, in order to meaningfully trace the novel’s multifaceted critique of familiar
narratives of resistance, Raven must be grappled with. Through reading Raven, we can see how
old narratives of resistance can be transformed into a new and more complex understanding of
resistance's role in racialized society.
Raven’s outsider status as a matriarchal woman warrior from the Western Crevasse,
located outside of Nevèrÿon, is foregrounded in her physical presentation. She wears a mask
whose purpose is not to hide her identity but to create it, and she wields a twin-bladed sword.
The sword reverses the usual psychoanalytic reading of sword as phallic symbol and makes it
into a vaginal symbol, its two blades separated by a narrow slit. In the Western Crevasse, its
name itself suggesting female genitalia, gender roles are reversed, with women serving as both
rulers and fighters, and men infantilized, seen as frivolous, and celebrated only for physical
beauty. Within patriarchal Nevèrÿon, which Raven regularly refers to as a "strange and terrible
land" (173), this reversal is both menacing and incomprehensible. Before Raven’s first
appearance in the novel, the character Norema recalls a story from her youth when a mysterious
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ship appears in her home in the Ulvayn Islands, then undergoing their own transition from what
Delany describes as a barter-based matriarchy to monetary patriarchy24. This ship is mysteriously
staffed by a crew of women, save for a single man, who the islanders mistakenly read as its
captain. While some of the island's girls wish to sail off with the crew, the town's adult
establishment is horrified by the ship and cast aspersions on the morality of its captain (slaver?
pimp?) and its female crew (prostitutes? promiscuous?). Norema is drawn to the ship, but to her
parents, its threat is self-evident. Her mother explains: "A boatload of women, half of them girls
hardly older than you, with a strange man for captain, combing the port for more girls to take off
from our island....Girl, when you look at that scarlet hulk…can’t you just feel how strange,
unnatural, and dangerous it is?" (129-130). Finally, the ship so threatens the island's patriarchal
thinking that it must be destroyed, and the islanders burn it in the dock, killing the entire crew.
Shortly thereafter, the horrific murder is reduced to a child's game, and one defined by the
heteronormative constraints the ship once threatened, as shown when Norema sees three children
reenacting the ship's destruction:
'Let's play red ship!'
'I'll be the captain!'
24
Delany explicitly associates the introduction of monetary exchange with the disempowerment of women
through the character of Old Venn, whose life straddles the transition from barter to monetary exchange.
To the younger Norema, Venn is initially illegible and dismissed as “perfectly crazy” (84). Venn, however,
schools Norema, explaining to her that “Before money came, a woman [in the Ulvayn Islands] with
strength, skills, or goods could exchange them directly with another woman for whatever she needed.
She who did the most work and did it the best was the most powerful woman. Now, the same woman had
to go to someone with money, frequently a man, exchange her goods for money, and then exchange the
money for what she needed. But if there was no money available, all her strength and skills and goods
gave her no power at all” (93) That is, with the introduction of monetary exchange, women’s work is
devalued when when the formal economy is controlled by men. Women’s work often occurs in the
informal economy, which is displaced by formalized monetary exchange, and and thus women are
disempowered. Venn’s speech to Norema, which makes up the bulk of the book’s second story, “The Tale
of Old Venn,” sets Norema on the path that ultimately leads her to Raven and the aggressive matriarchy
she represents.
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'You can't be the captain. You're a girl!'
'Are we going to sneak up on it and burn it?'
'Yeah!'
'All right. You be the captain. We'll sneak up and we'll burn you!
'No, come on. You can't do that, either. Didn't you see? Only men go out to do
that.'....
'That's what the game is all about.' (132; emphasis mine)
Whereas the actual red ship once threatened the island's emergent patriarchy and
heteronormativity, the game serves to reify and solidify those very things. Only boys can play the
role of the threatening other and the violent, hegemonic response that reinscribes patriarchy
through violence. The only role that women can play in this game and the patriarchal reality it
reifies, is that of victim, passively sitting on the ship and waiting to be burned alive. The entire
story, from the ship's arrival to its destruction to its reduction to a child's game, plays out as a
series of culturally myopic perverse misrecognitions. All these misrecognitions serve to illustrate
the ways in which a radical, matriarchal feminism, as represented by Raven, is simply illegible
within a strictly patriarchal space such as Nevèrÿon. Raven, more so than Gorgik, is a potential
revolutionary in Nevèrÿon because she, a daughter of the Western Crevasse, operates outside of
Nevèrÿon's hegemonic power structures of masculinity and patriarchy.
Raven, upon her emergence into the book's narrative, recasts our entire understanding of
the ship and its significance. Not only is the captain not a slaver and the women not prostitutes,
the captain is not a captain at all. The ship, it comes out, comes from the Western Crevasse,
where its all-women-but-one crew is commonplace. At the end of the book's final story, "The
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Tale of Dragons and Dreamers," Norema and Raven have joined with Gorgik and Small Sarg.
Both Gorgik and Norema recall seeing such ships in the past, and both remember fearing them.
Gorgik says, "The captain was always a man; and we assumed, I suppose, that he must be a very
evil person to have so many women within his power" (243). Raven is initially baffled by the
description, dismissing the possibility of one of her people's ships being captained by a man,
finally realizes that her friends, constrained by patriarchy's ideological blinders, have misread the
ship's entire power structure:
Oh, yes, my silly heathen woman, of course there is a man on the boat…But he's
certainly not the captain. Believe me, my friend, even though I have seen men
fulfill it, captain is a woman's job….[H]e is more like a talisman, or a good-luck
piece the women take with them, than a working sailor–much less an officer…
Indeed, do you know the wooden women who are so frequently carved on the
prow of your man-sailored ships? Well, he fulfills a part among our sailors much
as that wooden woman does among yours. (244)
The lone man's fancy clothing and arrogant swagger, read by both Norema and Gorgik as the
markers of command, are now recast as vain preening; the man appears regal not because he has
power, but because it is his job to look good. But once again, this "reversal" is really not quite a
reversal at all. The analogue in patriarchal Nevèrÿon (and the patriarchal real world) Raven poses
is a "wooden woman," not an actual, living woman. In this sense, the man is objectified, but
arguably, this is preferable to the "woman" on the Nevèrÿonian ship, which is literally an object,
with real women excluded entirely. What's more, the man is seemingly universally read within
Nevèrÿon as the captain and fitted into a patriarchal narrative of male sexual domination over
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women; for Nevèrÿonians to read the ship's arrangement correctly is simply unthinkable. A
wooden woman, on the other hand, could never be mistaken for an authority figure, showing us
that matriarchy is capable of reading patriarchy critically while patriarchy, being hegemonic, is
blind to matriarchy’s possibilities.
Similarly, to Raven, Nevèrÿon's social order is bizarre and misguided, but she is able to
comprehend it and read its social dynamics not only correctly but insightfully and critically.
Raven is caustic in her analysis of Nevèrÿon, and she is certainly no cultural relativist. She
clearly believes herself and her culture to be superior, as shown when she responds to Norema's
charge that her conduct and frank sexual talk is barbaric: "But you are the barbarian....At any
rate, there is no civilization where the men cannot grow their nails. I am the civilized one" (205).
In a sense, Raven's matriarchal narrative here is hegemonic: hers is the correct perspective, and
Nevèrÿon's is simply wrong. Yet in stark contrast to Norema's mother, who displays elemental
horror at the possibilities the red ship represents by violating patriarchy's restrictive sexual
standards, Raven articulates her critique of patriarchy not through a call to limit men's
possibilities, but by expanding them. Her critique in this moment is not of how patriarchy
oppresses women, but of how it constrains men to the narrow performance of hegemonic
masculinity; they cannot grow their nails long, and this limit precludes the achievement of
Raven's matriarchal standard of "civilization."
Raven first appears in Tales of Nevèrÿon in "The Tale of Potters and Dragons," a travel
narrative in which she, Norema, and several other characters travel to meet with the mysterious
Lord Aldamir. The Lord lives in the Garth Peninsula in Nevèrÿon's far south, at the edge of
"barbarian" lands and in the shadows of the menacing Vygernangx monastery. While Norema
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and the other passengers are making the voyage to open up commerce, Raven's initially unstated
purpose is to assassinate Lord Aldamir. Raven is initially seen through the eyes of Bayle, a lowly
potter's assistant, who, like the islanders viewing the red ship with suspicious eyes, interprets her
through a patriarchal lens:
The dark woman with the rag mask and the light eyes climbed a few steps up a
ladder to some storage cabinet high in the wall, turned, and sat. She looked like
some black cousin to the worst waterfront ruffian in the Spur. Her smile, like her
eyes, was preternaturally bright as she looked down at the cozily appointed
cabin...This Raven, thought Bayle, has neither the air of a Kolhari woman, who
expects to be served before men, nor the air of a provincial woman who expects to
be served after. (173)
Clearly, Raven’s matriarchal version of femininity is illegible to Bayle. He attempts to read her
through the lenses of femininity he can comprehend, as being either a dainty upper class lady or
a quietly subservient working class woman. Both fail utterly to explain or contain Raven’s
power. While Bayle shows none of the violent menace that killed the women of the red ship
years earlier, his gaze is othering. He emphasizes her racial features ("preternaturally" bright
eyes and a dark complexion that remains associated here, despite brown skin being normative in
Nevèrÿon, with criminality) and suggests she does not belong on the ship at all. That the second
feature he notices about Raven (after her darkness) is her mask, which he dismisses as a "rag"
and later as "ominous" (176) is significant. Indeed, Raven's curious mask is regularly noted
throughout the tale. Along with her unusual sword, the mask comes to define her outsider
identity within Nevèrÿon, much as the collar comes to define Gorgik as both liberator and queer.
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The mask makes explicit the impossibility of the patriarchal Nevèrÿonians comprehending
Raven; while she can see them through it, it serves as a blindfold for the Nevèrÿonians. They
cannot see her or the counterhegemonic matriarchy she represents.
Also significant is Raven's sword, which is double bladed. In a reversal of the
psychoanalytic reading of sword as phallic symbol, Raven’s sword explicitly becomes, instead, a
vaginal symbol. As such, it is far stronger than a typical, phallic sword as a result, as seen when
Raven is asked why her sword is double bladed, and told it "looks funny" (206):
'Usually, in this strange and terrible land, all you see are single blades. But that's
puny, a man's weapon…It’s sharp on the outside here and sharp on the outside
there. That means it can cut either left or right…And it also has a slit down the
center–just like the line between the folds of your vagina. And the inside edges
are just as sharp as the outside edges, all the way down and around the fork. So if
something gets between them that you don't like, you can–" Here Raven jammed
the blade straight up in the moonlight–'cut it off!' (206)
Here, the phallic is weak, and the vaginal is strong; the vagina is given the power of castration,
reversing the Freudian narrative of woman as castrated man. Implicitly, too, the vaginal sword
empowers women against men's sexual violence, as the vagina-like slit can cut off anything that
manages to get between it unbidden. In another reversal of the Freudian phallic narrative,
women's penis envy is replaced, through the vaginal sword, with male vagina envy. When sailors
spot Raven and realize she is one of the fabled women of the Western Crevasse, they crouch
behind her in the ship's shadows and reach for her hip, trying to steal the sword. Raven quickly
spins away, draws the blade, and laughs in the sailor's faces. They respond with both fear and
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wonder, whispering, "See there! I told you, I told you! Look at it!" (176). Raven dismisses their
desire to possess her sword, declaring, "Watch out, men! You are not so pretty that you can
handle a woman's blade!....You men would take everything away from a woman…But you won't
have this. See it, and know that it will never be yours" (176).
Defeated in their attempt to steal the sword, the men instead beg Raven to tell her "the
story" (176), not initially specifying what story they mean. Which one, apparently, is
contextually clear to them, as the story they ask for has attained legendary status in Nevèrÿon.
Raven again rebuffs them and rhetorically ties the demand with their vaginal envy, saying, "it is
not your sword, and it is not your story" (176). She relents and agrees to tell the story only when
she decides she will tell it to Norema, and that the male sailors' presence is superfluous. The
story turns out to be the Western Crevasse’s creation myth, which signifies on the story of
Genesis, particularly Eve’s role as the cause of humanity’s fall. In the myth, the creator god (not
goddess), who has a womb and is given the female pronoun, initially creates ten great female
deities and ten lesser male deities, as well as all the plants and animals, before finishing by
making woman in her own image. The first woman, Jevim, asks god for companionship, which
god creates in the form of Eif’h, suggesting Eve. Eif'h, however, rebels against god by praising
only that which is grand, such as the sun and the stars, where creation is "manifested in its purest
form" (180), but not any "impure thing, no obstreperous plurality, no false unity" (180). God
punishes Eif'h brutally:
[God] struck Eif'h across the loins; and across the breasts; and across the face…
And where god beat her on the throat, her voice roughened and went deep; and
where god beat her about the breasts, the very flesh and organs were torn away so
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that she could no longer suckle her daughters; and where god beat her about the
groin, her womb was broken and collapsed on itself, and rags of flesh fell,
dangling, from her loins, so that when they healed, her womb was forever sealed
and useless (182)
Like Eve, Eif'h is punished for an original sin against God. Eve's sin is associated with feminity
(rejection of masculine power and temptation of men in the form of Adam) and her punishment
is feminized (the pain of childbirth). In stark contrast, Eif'h sin is masculinized (arrogant
individualism and limiting what is praiseworthy to what is grandiose) and maleness is, itself, her
punishment. The Freudian vision of woman as castrated man is replaced by a conception of
maleness itself as a wound and a lack. Femaleness, by contrast, is normative, a reversal of
Nevèrÿon’s social order.
Raven’s invocation of the myth in this moment, having just defeated a group of men in
their attempt to steal the symbol of her queered feminine power, serves as another sort of assault
on Nevèrÿon’s patriarchy. Raven disrupts the hegemonic power of their patriarchal narratives of
male power, female subservience, and both rhetoric and violence as tools for the enforcement of
male dominance. Effortlessly, Raven disrupts all these things and leaves the men silenced.
The Possibilities of Queer Resistance
Through both Gorgik the Liberator and the masked Raven, Tales of Nevèrÿon radically
critiques and reshapes our understanding of what resistance means and what it can accomplish.
Through Gorgik, the lines between slavery and freedom are blurred. Queer sexuality serves as
both a site of agency and a marker of how one's own enmeshment in an unjust society confines
and limits the scope of that agency. Even the most ardent opponents of slavery must forever play
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out the roles that slavery has cast for them. Those roles can be critiqued by reappropriating their
terms, but there is never a possibility of living completely outside of those roles and terms. With
Raven's passage through the book and through Nevèrÿon, we see the possibilities and powers of
a radical matriarchal critique of patriarchy, which reverses patriarchy's binaries without
necessarily simply inverting patriarchy's oppressions. We also see the impossibility of patriarchy
even comprehending, let alone incorporating, such radical critique. Instead, we see, patriarchal
power structures will recoil from such a critique and attempt to destroy it in the most brutal
manner possible. Yet for all the ways in which Tales of Nevèrÿon complicates the possibilities of
resistance, it does not entirely dash our hopes. By the end of "The Tale of Dragons and
Dreamers," the book's final tale, Gorgik and Small Sarg have united with Raven and Norema.
Both pairs have become queer couples, transgressing taboos concerning both same-sex and
interracial pairings, and together new possibilities of resistance emerge for all four. Numerous
factors, including nationality, gender, and personal history, yet they are drawn together through
their distinct but shared experiences of queerness. They represent, in the words of Cathy J.
Cohen, "all those who stand on the outside of the dominant constructed norm of state-sanctioned
white middle- and upper-class heterosexuality" (25), and as such their identification with one
another is a potentially revolutionary act. The queer alliance they form, by its very existence,
stands against and threatens Nevèrÿon’s hegemonic patriarchy. If, as previously argued,
matriarchy represents the ideological possibility that arrangements other than strict patriarchy are
possible, then the four of them form a sort of queer matriarchal assemblage.
It is only when the four come together in this queer alliance that the truth of the red ship
can be revealed. When Raven explains the truth about the "captain," a dragon flies across the sky.
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In Nevèrÿon, dragons are not majestic or powerful creatures; rather, they are powerless and
fragile, the purposeless pets and playthings of Nevèrÿon's elite. They can only fly for a short
while, and only if they take off from a cliff edge, as they cannot ascend. If they land on the
ground, they will never be able to fly again, and that is what appears to happen to the dragon
they spot. The dragon, Gorgik realizes, must have flown from the Suzerine's castle, which he and
Small Sarg have just attacked and ransacked, "and once she lands, in this swampy morass, she
won't be able to regain flight. Her wings will tear in the brambles and she will never fly
again" (245). The image, which closes the book, is a melancholic one. However, it also serves as
a hopeful portent for the four in their resistance. The dragon, already reduced from its usual
sword-and-sorcery status as an unstoppable force, to a symbol in Nevèrÿon of impotence and the
frivolity of the nobility, is further brought down to ground level. Indeed, it lands in the same
swamp land that Gorgik, Small Sarg, Raven, and Norema inhabit. The nobility, it seems, are
falling, and along with them may well come the slavery, patriarchy, and oppression that they
represent. If Gorgik, Small Sarg, Raven, and Norema represent the new, coming order, it is clear
they will bring radical change to Nevèrÿon. The four of them represent the transgression of racial
boundaries, matriarchy, and, above all, a politicized queerness. All these things threaten
Nevèrÿon as a racially stratified patriarchal slave society. By joining together they represent a far
more substantial threat to existing hegemonic powers than Gorgik ever did while fighting alone
or with Small Sarg.
Together, this queer alliance opens up new possibilities for resistance. Gorgik, who casts
himself as the “liberator,” and Small Sarg remain invested in the forms and symbols of slavery
through their sexuality and their expression. Raven, as an outsider, can critique Nevèrÿon more
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radically than Gorgik. Gorgik views resistance in essentially binary terms–you can support
slavery or you can fight against it–even as the novel and its characters persuasively challenge
such a simplistic binary narrative. Whereas Gorgik’s resistance is both fueled and constrained by
his inability to think outside of slavery’s terms even as he fights against it, Raven effortlessly
brushes aside Nevèrÿonian ideology and social conventions. Yet Raven herself is invested in her
own culture’s binaries and ideological constraints, which maintain the male/female binary while
flipping its value. However, because we see her in Nevèrÿon’s patriarchal space, Raven’s
aggressive matriarchy becomes itself a form of resistance, exposing the lie of Nevèrÿon’s
assumption of patriarchy as “natural” and eternal. Together, Gorgik, Raven, and their
companions represent the possibility of resistance that transcends the individual limitations of
both, invested through Gorgik in attacking structural oppression (in the form of slavery) and
through Raven in attacking patriarchy’s ideological domination.
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CHAPTER SIX
CONCLUSION: BEAUTY, DEFIANCE, AND RESISTANCE
In his essay “Ethnoscapes: Environment and Language in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo,
Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, and Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17,” Isiah Lavender III
intriguingly links African American experience (and wider diasporic African experience in the
Americas) to the Speculative, first by positing that Afrofuturism shows us “that all black cultural
production in the New World is sf” (187) and then elaborating this by arguing:
The mixing of the physical and the metaphysical to confirm white identity by
denying black identity is an exercise in and of power, a shaping of reality that
Africans in the New World had no choice but to accept. Therefore black
experience in America is defined by alienation: “Black people live the
estrangement that science fiction writers imagine.” As John Pfeiffer noted of sf
and African-American literature over thirty years ago, both “could supply or
reflect the altered content and perspective that social transformation requires.
Science fiction sometimes does; Black American writing almost always
has.” (187)
This reading of black experience as fundamentally Speculative can be extended not only to
African Americans but to Afro Caribbeans and other members of the African diaspora, who share
similar historical experiences of dislocation, isolation, and alienation. Arguably, we might even
apply it to sub-Saharan Africa itself through the experience of colonialism. While Africans
themselves were not dislocated across the Atlantic by the slave trade, their historical colonization
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and the ongoing neocolonial situation arguably produces a similar alienation and isolation even
as they remain in their ancestral lands.
What’s more, within this context the current rise in production of Speculative Fiction and
Afrofuturism makes sense, as does the genre’s recent rise in popularity and critical attention. The
question, instead, becomes why this took so long, why Speculative Fiction remained for so long
a purportedly white (and straight, and male, and middle class) genre, and one associated with
various forms of racism rather than the launching pad for counterhegemonic discourse that
writers such as Butler, Whitehead, Okorafor, and Delany have turned it into. The answer to this
question, I believe, lies in how particular cultural moments connect to resistance politics.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, important African American writers and
cultural critics such as Du Bois, Griggs, Chesnutt, and Schuyler recognized the potential of
Speculative Fiction to articulate narratives of resistance and to form cultural critiques that would
be harder for wide audiences to swallow within the narrower confines of realistic fiction. Yet
these efforts did not take root. First, they did not take root in the sense that many of the works are
largely forgotten, even in the case of Du Bois, whose science fiction is little known even as the
historical import of his nonfiction remains recognized. Or, if the works are not forgotten, as with
Chesnutt, they have not been considered as Speculative Fiction until recently. Second, they did
not take root in that they did not produce a recognized or widespread black subgenre of
Speculative Fiction. Even the works of Delany and Butler, which brilliantly articulate Black
Speculative Fiction’s counterhegemonic possibilities and begin to explore the identity I have
described as Speculative Blackness, and which were quickly recognized and celebrated, did not
immediately inspire what we now know as Black Speculative Fiction. For a genre to form and be
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critically and popularly recognized, the wider society had to reach a point where it could be
receptive to the genre’s complex messages of resistance and identity, something which has begun
to happen only in the past decade. In a context of Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, or even
the immediate post-Civil Rights era, the complexly postmodern cultural critique and queering of
identities pioneered by Delany and Butler and carried on by their literary descendants had little
chance of gaining widespread or mainstream attention or acceptance. Speculative Fiction is
perfectly positioned, on the other hand, for our current moment where popular discourses of
postracialism and colorblindness coexist with and serve to obscure the ongoing realities of mass
incarceration, deep rooted structural inequalities in schools, health care, and virtually every other
major social institution, as well as the seemingly endless parade of young black men and women,
such as Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Renisha McBride, and Jordan Davis, being murdered by
police officers or vigilantes and those murders being cosigned by the criminal justice system.
The way in which Delany, for example, seemingly uncouples race from slavery and reverses the
values of blackness and whiteness, and yet simultaneously and persistently reinforces ties
between blackness and slavery, makes perfect sense in the context of a country which will elect a
black President and simultaneously attack that President on clearly racialized grounds–even
though Delany’s novel was written decades before the Obama administration was even a
possibility.
If the resistance politics and cultural critique Black Speculative Fiction produces are
uniquely suited towards our current historical moment, the question then becomes what we do
with this critique; how, so to speak, we move it beyond the page and apply it to lived reality.
Another recent Black Speculative Fiction novel, The Salt Roads [2003] by the Caribbean
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Canadian writer Nalo Hopkinson can help us to think our way through this question. In the
novel, Hopkinson adapts the traditions of Vodou to link together three very different stories of
black women in the African diaspora. Through the travels of the lwa Ezili, Hopkinson links
together stories set in Saint Domingue (pre-revolutionary Haiti), nineteenth century Paris, and
fourth century Alexandria, Egypt.
In the novel's Saint Domingue section, Hopkinson weaves a Speculative retelling of the
historical Makandal Rebellion, an unsuccessful slave revolt prior to the successful slave revolt
which became the Haitian Revolution. A dialectic develops between two of the novel’s major
characters, Mer and Makandal, pitting survival that comes with complicity against violent
resistance that comes with massive bloodshed. Playing out and complicating that dialectic is one
of the novel’s central preoccupations. Mer, an older healer and midwife born in Dahomey and
enslaved for over a decade, serves as the section's primary narrator. While Mer works to ease the
suffering of her fellow slaves, called the Ginen, she fears rebellion and Makandal accuses her of
"help[ing] them learn to be good slaves" (67). While Hopkinson predisposes the reader to side
with Mer over Makandal by always showing him to the reader through Mer’s critical eye, she
also complicates that by showing the reader the extent to which Makandal’s critique of her is
insightful. As Makandal’s rebellion grows, the reader sees Mer counseling Mathieu, a Muslim
slave newly arrived from West Africa. After telling Mathieu to accept his new, French name over
his original African name (Mamadou), Mer comforts him and, ultimately, convinces him to eat
the pork he has been refusing in the name of survival, essentially ending the one form of
resistance against slavery that has been possible for him. In this sense, we see, Makandal is right:
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Mer, with her instincts as a healer guiding her to value survival over all else, is quite actively
teaching Mathieu to be a good slave, just as Makandal says.
Despite Mer’s reservations, Makandal’s slave revolt goes forward. Hopkinson
complicates Makandal, a major historical figure and a sort of national hero in Haiti, by depicting
him in the novel as a menacing shape shifter, obeah practitioner, and "son of a djinn" (9), thus
connecting his resistance to both Vodou and Islam, both far removed from the whitewashed proslavery Catholicism imposed on the slaves by their French masters. Makandal forms a plan to
poison all the white people of Saint Domingue, first through poisoning their food and then by
learning an ingenious technique to poison their sealed water barrels, imported from France
specifically to avoid the possibility of poisoning. Essentially, Makandal invents the hypodermic
needle, allowing him to inject poison into sealed barrels through the cork without the possibility
of being detected. Mer, under the guidance of Ezili, attempts to dissuade Makandal from
launching his rebellion, but is unsuccessful. Indeed, stopping the rebellion seems an impossible
task; anger is mounting and, even if Makandal's methods of resistance are flawed or doomed to
failure, violent rebellion is inevitable. As Mer phrases it, "A black wave of retribution was sent to
crash over Saint Dominuge, and its crest was François Makandal" (10). After months of covert
rebellions, the situation explodes when Makandal, possessed by the warlike lwa Ogu leads the
Ginen set fire to the great house. However, the rebellion quickly fails. Makandal is imprisoned,
his shape shifting abilities suppressed by a salt diet, and he is burned alive. After his death, Mer
regrets not supporting his rebellion. The reader, seeing the story through Mer's eyes, is taken on a
complex journey in attempting to interpret Makandal as villain, hero, or flawed would-be
revolutionary. Essentially, Hopkinson plays the trickster herself, presenting as important a figure
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in Haitian history as Makandal yet never allowing the reader to fully come to grips with him or
his revolutionary project.
At the heart of the novel's depiction of resistance to colonialism and slavery, particularly
in its Haiti section, is the lwa Ezili, Throughout the novel, Ezili inhabits the novel's three main
characters, including Mer, and her powers of resistance are closely connected to sexuality. By
connecting Mer to Ezili, Hopkinson against complicates the Mer/Makandal dialectic. Indeed,
Ezili becomes a far more successful figure of rebellion than Makandal. In the novel’s later
sections, as Ezili’s power and confidence grow, Hopkinson shows her inspiring successful acts of
resistance in women throughout the African diaspora, including, notably, Rosa Parks, in an effort
to “[heal] the Ginen story” (305). While both Makandal and Mer limit their effectiveness in
resisting white hegemony by seeing each other as always and only in opposition, Ezili stands
outside their dialectic, revealing its shortcomings through her actions.
Yet for all her activism, even Ezili feels helpless to combat the horrors of slavery in Saint
Domingue. After she is pulled from Mer's body and back into the body of Jeanne, one of the
novel's other main characters, Ezili laments what should could have accomplished had she
remained in Saint Domingue, saying, “I could have danced for them all, those Saint Domingue
people in that rich man's parlour, twirling my hips as Jeanne does. They would have asked me
their questions, and I would have told them my answers (124). Here, Ezili's resistance is
fundamentally tied to something both Mer and Makandal lack: the physicality and sexuality of
her dance, and its ability to connect to the dispossessed, colonized, and enslaved peoples of the
African Diaspora. When pulled away from the oppressed yet dynamic African community of
Saint Domingue and returned to the head of Jeanne, isolated and self-loathing in the otherwise
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lily-white Paris of the nineteenth century, Ezili screams and "sink[s] once more to the cage of
Jeanne's brain" (124).
Indeed, sexuality, and particularly queer sexuality, plays a key role for the three women
Ezili inhabits, including Mer. While widowed, the relationship she has always drawn her primary
strength from is with her assistant, fellow slave, friend, and lover Tipingee; the two are described
as having been "wives to each other, even when they had had husbands" (12). Yet Mer's
relationship with sexuality is fraught and conflicted, much like her relationship with Makandal
and his rebellion. The novel opens with Mer silently yet mercilessly judging Georgine, a young
slave woman who has been "married" as, at most, a young teenager (Mer describes Georgine as
"a third my thirty-something years" (36)) to a poor white laborer named Pierre. While Georgine's
agency in her so-called marriage is extremely limited at best, Mer tell us that she "knew
Georgine's type. Made her road by lying down...Silly wench, with her caramel skin” (2).
Additionally, having been born in Dahomey, Mer underwent female genital cutting, a tradition of
which she explicitly approves. In fact, when the reader learns of this as Georgine gives birth to
her first child, Mer connects her approval of genital cutting with her disapproval of Georgine's
sexuality:
Good, strong girl, Georgine. I didn't think she would be. And silent too, like a
grown woman should be. Like me back home, on the day they cut away my vulva
to make me an adult. She's just a whore, though. Opening her legs for the white
man. Coloured man's not good enough for her. (26)
Curiously absent from Mer's thoughts in the moment, however, are the fact that the "coloured"
man has never been good enough for her, either: only Tipingee is. While Mer is right to see the
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marriage between Georgine and Pierre as a sham and as an unequal transaction whose currency
is white privilege, she also internalizes the misogyny she has experienced both in the black
culture of Dahomey and the white-dominated culture of Saint Domingue. This leaves her unable
to see Georgine's lack of agency or the ways in which the "marriage" victimizes Georgine even
as, in certain ways, it elevates her social standing by connecting her to whiteness. Mer also
overlooks the ways in which Georgine, despite internalizing the racism of her masters and
husband, still struggles to articulate some sort of positive black identity rather than identifying
entirely with "the white man" as Mer accuses her. When her baby is born with extremely pale
skin and quickly dies, Georgine asks Mer if the baby would have grown darker had he lived.
While Georgine admits she "wouldn't want him to get black" (34), she also tells Mer that "If he
had got a little brown to him, not too much, maybe he would see me in his face that way, know
who's his mother" (34). Which is to say, Georgine is grappling with the same fundamental
conflict as Mer: she is struggling in impossible circumstances and against active, brutal
oppression, with her own internalized antipathy.
Similarly, Mer's analysis of Makandal and his rebellion is at once insightful and wrongheaded. In the build-up to the disastrous rebellion, it becomes clear that a cult of personality has
grown around Makandal, one which leads the Ginen to make poor decisions and lead themselves
to slaughter, and one which only Mer seems to be able to see through. To others, Makandal
simply and uncritically represents salvation; as one slave puts it, "Makandal is going to be the
savior of the Ginen, going to kick out the grands blans [white slaveowners], give us our own land
to work" (61). This despite Makandal's repeated cruelty in the novel, targeting and killing not
only the slaveowners but also fellow Ginen who challenge him or who he sees as threats. Yet
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Mer fails to appreciate the importance of the hope Makandal offers the otherwise hopeless and
brutalized Ginen through his promise of violent revolution. Rather than positively engaging with
Makandal's revolutionary project in an attempt to point it in a less dangerous or more effective
direction, Mer only privately condemns Makandal and publicly remains silent for fear of turning
the other Ginen against her, as they "[love] him too well" (61). It is precisely this type of silence
which makes Mer vulnerable to Makandal's critique that she serves the slavemasters by helping
the Ginen "learn to be good slaves" (67). Ultimately, he critique is not a fair one, despite what we
see with Mathieu; both Mer and Ezili, who inhabits her, are interested both in easing the day-today suffering of the Ginen and in somehow altering their condition as oppressed and enslaved.
Mer’s disagreement with Makandal stems not from her identification with the slavemasters but
from her (correct) belief that his revolution cannot succeed and will lead to considerable pain and
suffering among the Ginen. Yet by not engaging fully in the debate, Mer appears complicit in the
oppression Makandal fights against, and leaves the debate without a sober counterweight to
Makandal's fiery rhetoric. Both Mer and Makandal fall victim to this trap, seeing their interaction
only as a dialectic, as oppositional, rather than considering how Mer’s pragmatism turns to
complicity if not spurred on by Makandal’s fiery drive for freedom, or how Makandal’s
revolutionary fervor turns to sadistic cruelty if not tempered by Mer’s instincts as a healer.
When Makandal is led to be burned alive in front of the Ginen and promises to return to
them after death, Mer joins in the chorus calling out to him: "'Yes, Makandal!' we said. Even me,
I said it, though no sound came out. Let them shoot us all, all for speaking, but we replied to
Makandal" (348). Mer realizes the insufficiency of her response to Makandal only when it is too
late, not only for Makandal but for Mer herself; after a confrontation between the two, Makandal
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cuts out Mer's tongue, fearing she will reveal the plans his rebellion to the slavemasters out of
spite. Ironically, in so doing he forever enforces the very silence that too often lay between him
and Mer. Again, Hopkinson plays trickster here: Mer raises her voice only once she no longer has
one.
Yet while the story of Mer and Makandal leads to despair, the novel does point towards
the creation of new spaces for resistance through Ezili herself, who learns from the failures of
Mer and the other women she inhabits. Energized by strength and experience gained through her
struggles in the novel, Ezili takes on a new activism in the novel's final chapters, drawing
connections between the linked struggles of Diasporic African people, particularly those
connected to gender and sexual oppression:
They are me, these women. They are the ones who taught me to see; I taught me
to see. They, we, are the ones healing the Ginen story, fighting to destroy the
cancerous trade in shiploads of African bodies that ever demands to be fed more
sugar, more rum, more Nubian gold..."Je-Wouj," I name myself to my sisters,
myself. I hear me echoes, all our echoes, say it with me. I am Ezili Red-eye, the
termagant enraged, with the power of millennia of Ginen hopes, lives, loves. "We
can lance that chancre," we say. I can direct my own pulse now. I see how to do
it. I, we, rise, flow out of ebb, tread the wet roads of blood, of salt, break like
waves into our infinite selves, and dash into battle. (305)
Ezili ventures forth, first inhabiting and inspiring Rosa Parks in her act of defiance against
segregation, then leading Queen Nzingha of Matamba in her battle against Portuguese slavers,
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and, finally and most tellingly, helping to instigate the Stonewall Riots which helped to launch
the American gay rights movement:
The police arrest five women with men's bodies and one mannish woman. As they
try to leave with their prisoners, a Puerto Rican woman with a man's body throws
her high-heeled pump; the first missile of resistance. A tall, black drag queen
breaks his bonds and flies free. Another six-foot black vision in sequins and glitter
throws himself into the attack led by queers, faggots, transvestites, and street
youth, into the victory they will call Stonewall. Black Madonna, Sylvia Rivera,
and Marsha P. Johnson all teach us Ezilis more about beauty, defiance, and
resistance. (311)
The invocation of Stonewall most clearly reveals Hopkinson's trickster/critic agenda, and also
points us in the direction of considering how to apply Black Speculative Fiction’s rhetoric of
resistance to real world action. For all the rhetoric that exists about black homophobia, be it
African American, African, or Afro Caribbean, as exceptional, Hopkinson reminds us that it was
black and Caribbean trans women and drag queens who launched the modern North American
gay rights movement. What's more, she attributes this to Ezili, a central and iconic figure of the
black Caribbean's African heritage. In essence, she places the modern civil rights movement
within the larger context of centuries of Diasporic African counterhegemonic social action. This
is The Salt Roads' path forward: an intersectional social activism which is rooted in the Afro
Caribbean tradition but which refuses to draw any distinctions between race, gender, and
sexuality as spaces of oppression. As such, this also represents Hopkinson’s invocation of
speculative blackness.
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Indeed, The Salt Roads shows us that Black Speculative Fiction’s path to resistance is,
precisely, this new assemblage of speculative blackness itself. As in Tales of Nevèrÿon,
oppression in The Salt Roads flourishes when the oppressed divide themselves along dialectic
lines and fail to do the intersectional work of recognizing their own oppression in others and
others’ oppression in themselves, and oppression is challenged when assemblages of speculative
blackness are formed. This should not be mistaken for some utopian “we are all the same”
flattening of experience. Indeed, even as Ezili invokes “they are me” (311) in her solidarity with
the black women of the African diaspora, she recognizes and champions the diversity of their
experiences and struggles with and against oppression. This is what constructing speculative
blackness through the lens of assemblage theory accomplishes; since an assemblage is a moment
in time rather than a fixed or essential identity, it allows us to form a theoretical and mental
frame to link together seemingly divergent groups of oppressed people into new queer
assemblages that collapse rigid lines separating race from gender and from sexuality without
flattening those experiences or denying the unique powers and challenges of all three.
Each of the texts I have analyzed complicates the possibilities of black resistance.
Kindred reveals the depths to which racialized oppression forces complicity in oppression,
contests the possibilities of white allyship in anti-racist struggle, and shows how very little real
change can be brought about despite enormous effort and sacrifice. The Intuitionist
problematizes ideological foundations and reminds us of the problems of certainty in confronting
all sorts of challenges. Who Fears Death and The Shadow Speaker connect anti-racist struggles
to neocolonialism and propose that, to achieve a genuine postcolonialism, such radical change is
needed that apocalypse is the only suitable metaphor for achieving counterhegemonic aims. Tales
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of Nevèrÿon complicates simplistic narratives of liberation and shows us the ways in which
slavery mentally colonizes both enslaved and enslaver and influences our psychology, our
sexuality, and even our resistance. Finally, The Salt Roads reveals the problems of an
oppositional or dialectic approach to resistance through Mer and Makandal, whose dialectic
contributes to Makandal’s fall, Mer’s silencing, and the continuation of the Ginen’s oppression
and enslavement. Yet through reading all six novels through an intersectional lens and by
applying assemblage theory to the new conceptualization I am calling speculative blackness, we
can also begin to see a way forward. While people of color and oppressed people generally are
well-served to remain skeptical of allies, of ideological certainty, and of all sorts of simplistic
liberationist narratives, speculative blackness represents a framework for intersectional resistance
uniquely suited for our current historical moment in all of its complexities and uncertainties.
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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
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Joshua Burnett is a doctoral candidate in English at Florida State University, specializing
in African American Literature and Postcolonial Literature. he holds a BA in Liberal Arts from
Eugene Lang College (a division of The New School) and an MA in Creative Writing from the
University of Illinois at Chicago. He teaches Literature and First-Year Composition at Florida
State University. A version of Chapter Five, “The Collar and the Sword: Queer Resistance in
Samuel R. Delany’s Tales of Nevèrÿon, has been selected for inclusion in a forthcoming special
issue of African American Review. He was born in Berkeley, California, and now lives in
Tallahassee, Florida with his wife and his children Matthew, Lindsey, and William.
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