Author: sfrarev

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Afrofuturist Women of the Water : Mami Wata, Sirens, Predators, Deities, Metamorphosis, and Survival

Gina Wisker

Women of the water play several roles in African-originated mythology and folklore, and latterly in Afrofuturism. They draw their energies from the beautiful seductive female water deity Mami Wata, who brings possibilities of wealth and longevity to those who engage with her, offering her gifts (although sometimes she responds with the opposite of positive experiences). They also draw their mixed energies from mermaids who, like the sirens of Greek mythology, appear in international folklore as dangerously seductive creatures born perhaps of the imagination, loneliness, and desperation of those long at sea.

These women of the water also have other roles in African and African American women’s horror, the contemporary Gothic, and in Afrofuturism, which recalls and recreates magical histories, sometimes as a warning and sometimes to recuperate the damaged negative past, turning stories of enslavement into ones of agency and freedom.

While Tananarive Due notes, “I needed to address my fear that I would not be respected if I wrote about the supernatural” (2002), it is arguably through the supernatural and fantasy that we can interpret behaviours and events, and only then imagine otherwise.

Afrofuturism

In the “outro” to Octavia’s Brood (Brown and Imarisha, 2015), Adrienne Maree Brown outlines a dynamic, forward-looking message of statutes or tools: one recognizing the power of science fiction, the other of agency in working to take forward different representations and actualized modes of being. They characterize afrofuturist work as challenging, visionary fiction, which:

explores current social issues through the lens of sci-fi; is conscious of identity and intersecting identities; centers those who have been marginalised; is aware of power inequalities; is realistic and hard but hopeful; shows change from the bottom up rather than the top down; highlights that change is collective; and is not neutral – its purpose is social change and societal transformation. The stories we tell can either reflect the society we are part of or transform it. If we want to bring new worlds into existence, then we need to challenge the narratives that uphold power dynamics and patterns. We call upon science fiction, fantasy, horror, magical realism, myth, and everything in between as we create and teach visionary fiction. (Brown and Imarisha, 2015, 279)

Others argue for the power of science fiction and Afrofuturism in creating alternative histories and futures (Bould, 2014, 2015; Csicsery-Ronay, 2012). Their emphasis is on values, imaginative expression, and action, stressing the social justice work that these related forms of writing should engage with. The figure of Mami Wata and those of merpeople are used to explore historical, lingering and contemporary social issues as both a warning or an imaginative celebratory way forward.

Mami Wata

Mami Wata (‘mother water’) the water spirit, is seductive, rewarding, worshipped, and dangerous. At once beautiful, protective, seductive and dangerous, Mami Wata is celebrated throughout much of Africa and the African Atlantic and is believed to have overseas origins in both European-originated mermaids and Hindu gods. She “is often portrayed as a mermaid, a snake charmer or a combination of both …She is not only sexy, jealous and beguiling but exists in the plural as part of a school of African water spirits” (“Who is Mami Wata?”).

Wikipedia elaborates on her seductive activities abducting travellers, who then benefit financially and through enhancements to their looks through their interaction with her. Because of this, they and others return and leave her capital goods. She is persuasive and possibly ruthless, and seems to have much of the illusory promise accorded to mermaids as traditions tell “of the spirit abducting her followers or random people whilst they are swimming or boating. She brings them to her paradisiacal realm, which may be underwater, in the spirit world, or both. She might keep them there if she allows them to leave, they return home wealthier, and in dry clothing. These returnees often grow wealthier, more attractive, and more easygoing after the encounter” (Wikipedia).

There are many stories of river travellers coming across her grooming herself (like mermaids combing their hair) while admiring herself in a mirror. She will usually dive into the water, leave her possessions behind to be stolen by the traveller, then appear to the thief in his dreams demanding the return of her goods. She next demands he be sexually faithful to her and, if he agrees, he obtains riches. She has groups of worshippers but also prefers to interact with individuals, and has priests and mediums dedicated to her in Africa, the Americas, and in the Caribbean. Mami Wata is a powerful, lovely woman who seeks beautiful gifts “of delicious food and drink, alcohol, fragrant objects (such as pomade, powder, incense, and soap), and expensive goods like jewellery” (Wikipedia). Nowadays, she likes designer jewelry and Coca Cola. The picture painted is of a manipulative goddess who rewards her followers with money and looks. Finally, we are told she wants her followers to be healthy, wealthy, and her men faithful.

However, she’s not represented as only seductive; she is also seen as dangerous and is blamed for all sorts of misfortune. In Cameroon, for example, Mami Wata is blamed for causing a strong undertow that kills swimmers. This will become important when we look at Tananarive Due’s “The Lake” (2013). Mami Wata is a complex figure to read, at once beautiful and rewarding but also controlling, dangerous and mean. The figures of merpeople who appear in and carry the imaginative dark or liberating messages of several fantastic texts by African American women writers can be seen to grow from this powerful, energetic figure of Mami Wata as it is based in West African lore. However, while Mami Wata appears as seductive, dangerous, materialistic, just as traditionally are sirens and mermaids, and is developed in this fashion by some African American women’s work, Afrofuturist writing takes both Mami Wata and the mermaid into new waters, rewriting negative histories, and reconfiguring both as powerful figures of female freedom.

Mami Wata appears in a range of African and African American writing, so in Nnedi Okorafor‘s 2014 speculative fiction novel, Lagoon, an alien spaceship appears beneath the waters of Lagos Lagoon and the new arrivals cause transformations in the natural and human world. When the first alien ambassador sets foot on Bar Beach in human female form, then disappears into the sea, a local boy compares her to Mami Wata. Later, an antagonist interprets another alien in female form as Mami Wata and surrenders to her seduction, accompanying her into the sea to be transformed.

Mami Wata also appears in Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Warrior (2017).

She has been understood also as La Sirène, a Haitian siren figure like the ancient Greek sirens who tried to lure Odysseus onto the rocks to perish. Water dominates Haitian life, and there are many religious beliefs based on it. In Haitian lore, the Lord of the Water is Agwé (see Hopkinson’s Agway the merchild, in The New Moon’s Arms, 2007) and his consort is la Sirène, portrayed as a beautiful woman with a fish’s tail, holding a mirror that acts as a portal between our mundane world and the mystical realm. Because she lives at the border (between the ordinary and the magical, between the world of land and the world of the ocean), la Sirène is the keeper of occult wisdom. She has a beautiful voice, is known as the Queen of the Choir, and owns a golden trumpet (anyone discovering it will live a life of wealth). While her image brings good luck particularly for sailors, and is frequently used on homes, on ships, and at lottery drawings, she is also demanding, and if people don’t worship her reverently or they fail to pay their debts, she uses her physical and vocal beauty to lure them to an early grave. She is also reported to kidnap babies to raise them in her underwater lair.

La Sirène, whose number is 7 and whose bird is the dove, is a great ally and a terrifying enemy worshipped in Vodou ceremonies. She sounds as materialistic as Mami Wata, as her favourite offerings are cigarettes, seashells, desserts, and perfume. As a figure, la Sirène goes beyond mere reportings of mermaids, deepening the lore behind them and standing out as one of the most comprehensive and well recorded images of a mermaid. Annie in Tananarive Due’s short story “The Lake” (2013), herself half French, resembles Mami Wata and also the legendary Haitian figure of la Sirène.

Mermaids, or more generally merpeople, are variously represented as the Other, alluring because different, free and powerful, of the water but also meant to be trapped, kept as trophies, deprived of freedom, kept for the use of others and displayed like sea creatures in some form of artificial ocean. This model of dichotomous representation lies behind the tales of their dangerous allure, their containment as objects for observation, and finally their metaphorical use as figures of transformation and empowerment, an imaginative movement forward through rewriting a negative past and creating a free, transformed future. They are fascinating and diverse in themselves but are also used by writers to engage with issues of rewriting troubled histories of enslavement and dehumanization, so while some tales are more interested in the seductive side of Mami Wata or mermaids, others combine this with both exposure of the dark past and of slavery, imprisonment, and then move on to express the vitality and power of escape, self- actualization, rewriting the damaged past, speculating for a positive future through Afrofuturism.

The Water Phoenix Bola Ogun

Mermaids, Mami Wata, and la Sirène are linked with transformations (not always for the best) and latterly with Afrofuturism’s rich focus on rewriting the damaged past, imagining a positive diverse future through escape into alternative modes of being. In “The Water Phoenix,” being imprisoned for others’ entertainment almost costs the mermaid her life. The film “The Water Phoenix” ( 2017 ), written, directed and starring herself as this dazzling sea creature, is a triumph for Bola Ogun, who expressed great frustration on trying to get films made as a marginalized person, as herself—a first generation Nigerian-American filmmaker. She turned to crowdfunding to get some of the funds needed for this short film to be completed and uploaded to Vimeo (by 2019), where in 2019 she reported 750,000 views. The synopsis begins: “When an imprisoned mermaid is betrayed by her caretaker, she must find a way to escape the aquarium alone.” It is actually her lover, rather than caretaker, who not only betrays her, but sells her out to an unscrupulous oceanarium owner. But it is ultimately a tale of escape and empowerment as are those by Nalo Hopkinson, which follow.

Tananarive Due and Nalo Hopkinson

Both Tananarive Due and Nalo Hopkinson reinvigorate these powerful, sometimes alluring and freeing but sometimes dangerous female water figures, Mami Wata, La Sirene, merpeople and mermaids in their work. Tananarive Due,named after the French for Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, wasborn in Tallahassee, Florida, the oldest of three daughters of civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due and civil rights lawyer John D. Due, Jr. Due gained a B.S. in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and an M.A. in English literature, focusing on on Nigerian literature at the University of Leeds, UK.

In Tananarive Due’s Ghost Summer (2013), in the haunted and magical context of Gracetown, Florida, all are warned to stay away from the lake in summer since in its waters lurks a dark energy, a legacy from the town’s history of slavery. All the tales center around the lake, but two in particular focus on dangerous water creatures/people. In “Free Jim’s Mine,” for example, a collusive freed slave mine owner transforms into a terrifying underground river creature to try and prevent the escape of his two young enslaved relatives. In “The Lake,” Tananarive Due lets loose her predatory mermaid. Annie seems to transform into Mami Wata.

Gracetown, the small town in Ghost Summer (2015), perhaps (ironically) named after Elvis’s home or Paul Simon’s song, is a central location charged with the ghosts of slavery, plantation brutality, localized pain, and death, all of which act as a microcosm for a broader cultural history of inequality, brutality, and suffering, both publicly and privately suppressed. Water is central to Ghost Summer and Gracetown, with its dark histories and its dubious transformative powers. Summer visitors are told to stay away from the lake, but it invades their day and night lives. The water is alive , stirring uneasily with its deadly past. Most of the community histories are those of slavery and its legacies (Wisker, 2019). The traumatic past of the town leaks out from the lake, out from the earth, burrowing through lost tunnels and up the mineshaft of Free Jim’s mine, taking the form of demonic creatures, bodily invasion, or re-enacting historical slave escapes played out in ghostly sight and sound. The geography of a haunted past infuses the lives of those who live there and all who visit family in the summer, at the most dangerous time.

This is a collection of ghost stories and, in Democracy’s Discontent (1996), Michael J. Sandel emphasises the social justice function of ghost stories, commenting on the power of storying our condition that, “Political community depends on the narratives by which people make sense of their condition, and interpret the common life they share” (350). Ghost stories return the undead in order to expose and preferably right historic, suppressed wrongs. Those wrongs of an enslaved past are central to Ghost Summer. Gracetown’s lands, barns, houses and especially its constantly disturbed and disturbing lake are variously upset by property development and unthinking visitors. Also disturbed are complacencies and suppressed histories, revealing dark secrets, exposing historical cover ups, and enabling the marginalised and silent to have a voice. The hidden, violent past is exposed in these stories, which are largely set in the 21st century, with some during slavery (“Free Jim’s Mine”) that are engaged, political, driven by social justice and the unquiet brutal past of slavery. This small town is in the middle of a drained swamp, where boundaries exist between land now owned by African Americans and that owned by the McCormacks, the descendants of Scottish slave owners who, themselves immigrants, benefitted historically from forcibly imported, transported slaves. Both lake and swamp invade and trouble the lives of generations of children and adults. Swamp leeches invade babies who become suddenly well-behaved, bodies of escaping slaves are dug up on farmland. The older generation keep the secrets:

 ‘I wasn’t going to say anything to you kids – but there’s bodies buried over on that land across the street, out beyond Tobacco Road. McCormack’s land…. the university folks say they were black.’

It was the coolest thing Grandma had ever said. (67)

Children and pre-teens spending family holiday summers round the lake in Gracetown become sensitive to the past. They sense and somehow invite back those neighbours and relatives, children long dead, enabling their stories to be disinterred.

Free Jim’s Mine

One tale concerns two young escaped slaves, who hide overnight in Jim, a relative’s, mine, but in the dark night waters of the mine, this historically collusive relative transforms into a monstrous frog to try and hunt them down. Jim warns the runaways of their unlikely success:

“It always goes wrong, girl,” Uncle Jim said. “Don’t get it into your heads that you’ll both make it up to North Carolina – and then what? Philadelphia? You’re fools if you think this ends well. You never should’ve come. Think of the last words you want to say to each other, and be sure to say ‘em quick. You won’t both survive the night.” (P.140) Of course he knows the reason why but at least warns them about the water creature which will find and finish them off “As a boy,” he said quietly, “I heard stories about Walasi. A giant frog. My mother told me, her mother told her, her mother’s mother, through time. To the beginning.” (142)

At night, the two young people have no choice other than to hide in the flooded mine, but as it gets later, they are not alone.

Ripples fluttered in the lamplight. Then a frothy splashing showered them. Lottie screamed, but did not close her eyes. She wanted to see the thing. A silhouette sharpened in the water, like giant fingers stretching or a black claw. Her hands flew to cover her eyes, but she forced her fingers open to peek through. The creature churned the water, tossing its massive body. A shiny bulging black eye as large as her open palm broke the water’s plane, nestled by brown-green skin. Lottie screamed.

The creature flipped, its eye gone. (143)

They lash out at the massive creature and survive the night, however, and when Free Jim reappears in the morning and reaches for Lottie, “his two gold rings flared like droplets from the sun. His pinkie finger, a bloodied crust, was freshly sliced away” (146). Jim is clearly free because of his collusion with those who would recapture escaped slaves, and perhaps his transformation into the violent, disgusting Walasi is a curse upon him for that collusion. Whatever the real story, the two survive the water creature’s attack and continue their escape.

“The Lake” is a Mami Wata Tale

Abbie, the lithe, attractive teacher with an unexplained dark past takes a job in Gracetown. The other staff question her about her origins but she is reticent, aware this is an intrusive exploration both about being Black and her speaking French (she has Haitian origins). But also we begin to consider, perhaps, that there are problematic stories in her background. The visiting children and everybody in Gracetown knows that it is dangerous to swim in the lake, but no one mentions why. Although warned about swimming in the lake, Abbie takes to it like a fish to water, initially barely noticing how she can stay under for longer, how her feet are becoming webbed as her body becomes stronger and more muscular. She spends longer and longer in the water after work, and while questioning her adaptation to her new habitat, primarily feels empowered, pleased, and invested.

She did not hesitate. She did not wade. She dove like an eel, swimming with an eel’s ease. Am I truly awake, or is this a dream?

Her eyes adjusted to the lack of light, bringing instant focus. She had never seen the true murky depths of her lake, so much like the swamp of her dreams. Were they one and the same? Her ribs’ itching turned to a welcome massage, and she felt long slits yawn open across her skin, beneath each rib. Warm water flooded her, nursing her; her nose, throat and mouth were a useless, distant memory. Why hadn’t it ever occurred to her to breathe the water before? (20-21)

As Abbie adapts, she is responding to a drive within her, a recognition of a different self, a different place where she came from, a place where she is one with the water. As she transforms into a creature part human part mercreature, part Sirene or Mami Wata, so she frees up her instincts to hunt as well as to seduce. An alligator is her first prey: “An alligator’s curiosity brought the beast close enough to study her, but it recognized its mistake and tried to thrash away. But too late” (20-21).

Her friendly relationships with her teenage boy students who come over to help with rebuilding the house become more inappropriate, sinister, yet not quite fully seductive until they become her prey. While the boys fix things Abbie takes another lake swim, allowing free rein to her developing watery self, freeing it from the moral restraints of the land world, becoming something else:

As the water massaged her gills, Abbie released her thoughts and concerns about the frivolous world  beyond the water. She needed to feed, that was all. She planned to leave the boys to their bickering and swim farther out, where the fish were hiding.

But something large and pale caught her eye above her.

Jack, she realized dimly. Jack had changed his mind, swimming near the surface, his ample belly like a full moon, jiggling with his breaststroke.

That was the first moment Abbie felt a surge of fear, because she finally understood what she’d been up to – what her new body had been preparing her for. Her feet betrayed her, their webs giving her speed as she propelled towards her giant meal. Water slid across her scales. (27)

Abbie might realize her metamorphosis into her true self, but she is powerless and probably unwilling to stop the trajectory as it brings her directly to her next meal, Jack. Ghosts, frogs, invasive swamp leeches, and transformed human/water creatures with anti-social appetites have something to tell the people in Gracetown, which is a liminal space, a crossroads of time, lives, and spaces. The histories of brutal erasure of Indigenous and African American children at its core are now more widely known (McGreevy, 2021; Eligon, 2019) and have entered Tananarive Due’s own family history:

This story and the previous one, “Summer”, are a kind of odd prophecy: In 2013, I received a call from the Florida Attorney General’s office informing me that my late mother, Patricia Stephens Due, had an uncle, Robert Stephens, who was probably among dozens of children buried on the grounds of the Dozier School for Boys, a reform school in Marianna, Florida, where boys were tortured and killed for generations. I had never heard of the Dozier School, buried children, Robert Stephens, my great-uncle who died there in 1937, aged fifteen. (127)

African American Gothic shocks and upsets any sense of settled history, of shared reality, exposing the deeply disturbing psychological insecurity of all that seems comfortably real. But while much of this revelation is disturbing, it is also potentially the start of a new healthy way forward. This rewriting, re-understanding, and reinterpreting is also part of a forward movement and a characteristic of Afrofuturism (Hopkinson and Mehan, 2004; Lavender and Yaszek, 2020; Delaney; Hopkinson and Mehan, 2004), that rewriting of the past and speculation into a positive future.

In Afrofuturism, history is reconceptualized, rewritten from a positive African American perspective and positive futures imagined (Wisker Contemporary Women’s Ghost Stories: Spectres, Revenants and Ghostly Returns, 2022).

Nalo Hopkinson

Mami Wata also appears in Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads (2003), while in her Afrofuturist The New Moon’s Arms (2007), merpeople are part of a life-affirming celebratory metamorphosis, a positive re-telling of the horrific brutal drowning of transported enslaved people thrown overboard to die because they were sick or considered worthless, from the slave ship the Zhong, bound from Africa to the Caribbean. In this latter novel, middle- aged Chastity’s/Calamity’s reignited self-worth is aligned with her returned magical powers. Afrofuturism in this tale reclaims a magical positive reading as it also reaffirms a positive version of women’s vital self worth: “you can’t find something if you don’t know you’ve lost it” (Hopkinson, The New Moon’s Arms, 115). Nalo Hopkinson’s Afrofuturist, speculative fictions explore experiences and worldviews as divisive, dangerous reminders of a troubled past, and simultaneously they also conjure up culturally intertwined, positive new futures. In The New Moon’s Arms, Torontonian/Trinidadian/Jamaican Hopkinson uses strategies of the postcolonial/African diasporan literary Gothic and speculative fiction to explore some of the tensions and potential riches of the liminal spaces of identity, aging, and cultural hybridity.All of these comments highlight the role that writing has to speak truth to power, and offer ways forward. Speculative fictions–and particularly Afrofuturism–enable the critique, expose the illegitimate, biased representations, and construct and celebrate alternative voices and ways forward.

The novel opens on middle-aged Calamity’s father’s funeral—a fellow mourner bursts her drawers, a brooch falls, it is reclaimed as Calamity’s. The carnivalesque, bawdy comic causes a breach of order in the everyday and a breach in a constrained narrative. The moment is a liminal space, one of loss that also opens up the opportunity of a new energy, and most of all, the power of finding what was lost, re-thinking, reclaiming and revitalizing what was suppressed, and moving forward. This is a carnival version of the spirit of Afrofuturism–reclamation, new understandings, new life and vision, reimagining the past and the future.

Marvellously energetic and creative, The New Moon’s Arms focuses on Calamity and the fictional Caribbean island of Dolorosse. Calamity, who befriends a merchild when herself a child, now rescues a boy from the sea, understanding his name to be Agway (for Agwe the Haitian sea god), and cares for him until he is healthy and ready to return to his parents. Not everyone knows, but Calamity knows that around the coast of Dolorosse are a community of merpeople and, as the island struggles with toxic waste in the waters, the overbuilding of hotels reducing the bat population, the sea and seabird damage for the desalination plant so they are threatened but also a part of a potential recuperation, parallel to Calamity’s own recovery of her historical magical powers as a ‘finder’ and the magical return of her father’s orchard–this is a rich novel of damaged histories and transformed lives, reimagined positive futures for Calamity for the merpeople, and for the island itself.

The foundational source of the potential for a positive transformed future lies in remaining, rewriting, and re-understanding the past, and here Hopkinson (like Rivers Solomon after her), reimagines and reclaims a terrible dark and real moment in African American and Caribbean history. Historically, the transported slaves on the Zhong (1781), were brutalized, dehumanized, and thrown overboard (captains could claim compensation for those drowned at sea; the sick or damaged were, in monetary terms, considered worthless). During their crossing, instead of being brutalized further, the slaves on Hopkinson’s imagined ship chose instead to jump in the sea, swimming free, transforming, seizing agency, and becoming merpeople. The merpeople represent a creative transformational response to an intolerable death. Their origins lie with those who escaped from the Zhong, morphing into hybrid survivors flourishing in the new medium of water:

The sailors would remove the dead and dying. The more that died the more space for the remaining. The dada-hair lady was heartsick at the relief she felt when another body was removed. The Igbo sailor described how they threw the dead bodies over the side, how large fish with sharp teeth were following the ship now, waiting for their next meal.

The young woman takes power: “We are leaving now!” she shouted in Igbo.

The people’s arms flattened out into flexible flippers. The shackles lipped off their wrists. The two women who had been chained to her flopped away, free, but the dada-hair lady remained unchanged and shackled. The little boy in her arms was transforming, though. He lifted one hand and spread his fingers to investigate the webbing that now extended between them. Some of the people who had been forced back into the holds were making their way out, now that their shackles had slid off. The hips was so far tilted that they didn’t have to climb; just clamber up the shallow incline that led to the hatch. The people’s bodies grew thick and fat. Legs melted together. The little boy chuckled, a sound she’d not heard from him before this. The chuckle became a high-pitched call. The people’s faces swelled and transformed: round heads with snouts. Big liquid eyes. (316)

Afrofuturism, as creative story-telling, has the power both to reimagine the damaged past positively, reclaiming power in doing so, and positively will the transformed future into being. Nalo Hopkinson’s merpeople, descendants of the self-freed slaves, are part of the new magically enriched future on Dolorosse, where not only does the magical orchard return along with Calamity’s powers as a finder, but there will be a united response against the damage done to creatures, water, and people to move towards a positively transformed future.

The Deep by Rivers Solomon (2018)

In The Deep, brutally jettisoned slaves also transform into a form of merpeople: water-breathing descendants of African slave women tossed overboard who have built their own underwater society. While this is a short novel, it is a highly creative piece made up of different inputs and responses, some building over others or misheard – so that without indication of a single owner, it becomes a co-owned piece, developing creative voices in different forms. As a result, The Deep emerges as a joint creative enterprise between a network of people, some acknowledged at the end. It grew from the practice of ‘artistic telephone’ insofar as the way phrases are transformed when shared over time and space–a series of new interactions of telling of The Deep. These tellings were started as a game by the Detroit techno-electro duo of Drexciya-James Stenson and Gerald Donald, with their mainly instrumental music and many collaborators, from ‘the Underground Resistance’ and ‘the Aquanauts’ taking from the original mythology behind the world of the music and of the text. They further developed the spare elliptical world-building tactics of the story from Drexciya and first made Splendor and Misery, a 2016 concept album in which the ‘The Deep’ was defined as a song. Next, three people then wrote The Deep, avoiding first-person pronouns, and Rivers Solomon then continued the work, developing:

their misheard whisper to the chain, filling out our song’s narrative with their particular concerns, politics, infatuations, and passions.’ Rivers fixed on the refrain ‘y’all remember’ to avoid ’I’ and created Yetu which focused the tale ‘the immediate and visceral aim inherent in passing down past trauma’ (The Deep p 160-161) There is also more music focusing on merpeople. (Drexciya)

Conclusion

These African American stories are ghost stories, some horror, all Afrofuturism, each a fluid blend of genres. Each takes from and evolves from tales of mythical historical water goddesses, sirens, mermaids, and merpeople, to expose terrible histories, inherited selfish cruelties and deadly threats, and, in some instances, to dig back into a reimagined history in order to push forward, rewriting tales and histories of dehumanisation and death as positive, as escape, transformation, re-empowerment, and imagining forward into celebration of rich active diverse lives. In these contemporary tales, the figures of mermaids, mercreatures, and of Mami Wata, the African water deity, are reconfigured and revitalised to rewrite negative histories; explore potential, individual, community and sexual freedoms; and freedom from the terrible deadly oppressions of an enslaved past and, through the energies of Afrofuturism, create a magical, agentic, positive future.

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Solomon, Rivers. The Deep. Hodder, 2020.

Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. Yale University Press, 1979.

—. “Estrangement and Cognition.” Strange Horizons, no. 24, November 2014, http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/estrangement-and-cognition/.

Thrasher, Steven W. “Afrofuturism: Reimagining Science and the Future from a Black Perspective.” 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/dec/07/afrofuturism-black-identity-future-science-technology

“Who is Mami Wata?” https://africa.si.edu/exhibits/mamiwata/intro.html.

Wikipedia. “Mami Wata.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mami_Wata.

Wisker, Gina. Key Concepts in Postcolonial Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

—. “Middle Age, Mer People and the Middle Passage: Nalo Hopkinson’ Afrofuturist Journeying in The New Moon’s Arms.” Afrofuturism in Time and Space, edited by Isaiah Lavender III and Lisa Yascek, Ohio State UP, 2018.

—. “Ghost Summer.” Horror a Companion, edited by Simon Bacon.Peter Lang, 2019.

—. “Crossing Liminal Spaces: Teaching the Postcolonial Gothic.” Pedagogy, vol. 7, no. 3, 2007, pp. 401-425

—. Contemporary Women’s Ghost Stories: Spectres Revenants and Ghostly Returns. Palgrave, 2021.

Womack, Ytasha L. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-fi and Fantasy Culture. Lawrence Hill Books, 2013.

Yascek, Lisa and Isiah Lavender III. Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century. New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality. Ohio State UP, 2020.

Gina Wisker is a full professor who researches, writes and teaches contemporary and postcolonial Gothic and fantastic literature, mostly by women, and also researches higher education, doctoral studies and supervision. She teaches ‘Realism and Fantasy’ for the Open University while at the University of Bath, she supervises  doctoral students, and at the University of the Arctic, Tromso works with supervisors. She is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Brighton, where she was Professor of Higher Education & Contemporary Literature and Head of the Centre for Learning & Teaching, and had a similar role previously at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. She has published 26 books (some edited) and 140 + articles, including: Key Concepts in Postcolonial Literature (2007); Horror Fiction: An Introduction (2005); Margaret Atwood, an Introduction to Critical Views of Her Fiction (2012); Contemporary Women’s Gothic Fiction (2016); Contemporary Women’s Ghost Stories: Spectres, Revenants and Returns( 2022); The Postgraduate Research Handbook (2001; 2^nd ed. 2007); The Good Supervisor (2005, 2012); Getting Published (2015); and The Undergraduate Research Handbook (2^nd ed, 2018). She is a National Teaching Fellow, Principal Fellow of the HEA, SFEDA, FRSA and FEA. She was chair of the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association and is one of an editor trio for Palgrave’s Contemporary Women’s Writing series, and on the editorial board for Palgrave’s Gothic series, and Anthem’s Gothic series. She coedits the online dark fantasy journal Dissections (since 2006) and Spokes poetry magazine (since the 1990s). She hosts the ‘words and worlds’ readings for ICFA.

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Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon: Queer Ecogothic Africanfuturism

Luke Chwala

Africanfuturism: A Model for Change

Around and below him the clear ocean waters roiled with strange, impossible sea life. What looked like a giant bright-red-and-white flat snake undulated by not three feet below. ‘What have you done to the ocean?’ Agu asked the manatee. Were the monsters attacking the oil rig and the supply vessel, too? These were Ayodele’s people and earthly allies? Ayodele was not only a shape-shifter, she was a liar. She hadn’t come in peace at all. He heard the sea cow’s response in his head, like a child’s voice through a mobile phone. ‘You will see,’ it said. (100)

The passage above is from Chapter 21, “The Sea Cow,” of Nnedi Okorafor’s 2014 novel, Lagoon. It is a short half-page chapter that utilizes the gothic trope of the monster to draw attention to an issue plaguing the Anthropocene. Agu asks why monsters are attacking an oil rig and supply vessel, an indication of the pollution threatening the Atlantic Ocean’s ecosystems off the coast of Lagos, the Gulf of Guinea. ‘Lagos’ is Portuguese for lagoon and refers to the body of water that flows into the ocean in the Nigerian capital city’s harbor. While Lagos’s lagoon is a habitat for a plethora of aquatic organisms, it has an infamous history of being polluted by urban and industrial waste. Pollution is at the root of the conflict of the novel. Extraterrestrials that appear monstrous to Lagosians have in part come to remedy this pollution. The so-called monsters in Lagoon appear as queer hybrids and sometimes shapeshifters, lifeforms produced via alien sea life evolutions, and sometimes mythological beings that manifest themselves in and interact with the material world. Led by the shapeshifting alien peacekeeper, Ayodele, who calls herself a space ambassador, a marine biologist (Adaora), Nigerian soldier (Agu), and a Ghanaian hip-hop artist (Anthony) collaborate to awaken the humans of Lagos to their monstrous treatment of one another, other lifeforms, ecosystems, and their endangerment of the Earth. These extraterrestrials seek symbiosis with Earth’s lifeforms to correct humanity’s unsustainable ways of living and being. This imagined future thus demands significant adaptation and change for sustainability, a society cognizant and respectful of biodiversity, and the dismantlement of distinctions and boundaries. Importantly, this futurity is steeped in Nigerian culture, history, mythology, and point-of-view. Lagoon is part of a genre Okorafor calls Africanfuturism, a term coined in her 2019 blog, Africanfuturism Defined. There, Okorafor writes,

Africanfuturism is similar to ‘Afrofuturism’ in the way that blacks on the continent and in the Black Diaspora are all connected by blood, spirit, history and future. The difference is that Africanfuturism is specifically and more directly rooted in African culture, history, mythology and point-of-view as it then branches into the Black Diaspora, and it does not privilege or center the West. Africanfuturism is concerned with visions of the future, is interested in technology, leaves the earth, skews optimistic, is centered on and predominantly written by people of African descent (black people) and it is rooted first and foremost in Africa (qtd. in Talabi).

Okorafor’s Africanfuturism puts Nigeria’s capital Lagos front and center as the setting for a story that challenges readers to ponder fears about both difference and the future, a future escalating towards unsustainable ecologies. Through an examination of the way that the novel utilizes a queer ecological framework, I argue that Okorafor’s Lagoon can be read as an ecogothic text in the way that it utilizes the monstrous, the uncanny, and the supernatural to resolve pressing environmental crises. Lagoon offers a rich commentary on queer agency, Gothic ecologies, and Africanfuturism—what I call queer ecogothic Africanfuturism. Before turning to my critique, I will first provide a brief overview of the queer Gothic, the ecogothic, and queer ecology. The intention is to clarify how these theoretical frameworks inform my analysis of queer ecogothic Africanfuturism.

Queer (Gothic) Ecologies

In Queer Gothic (2006), George E. Haggerty reminds readers that the Gothic “offers a historical mode of queer theory and politics: transgressive, sexually coded, and resistant to dominant ideology” (2). The Gothic is political. The Gothic is often queer. Gothic tropes have been used to explore fears and anxieties not only about queer difference but also ecologies and Nature. Though there are literal queer characters in Lagoon, ‘queer’ also acts as a metaphor for the monstrous Other. The Gothic trope of the monster (and monstrosity itself) has a long history with not only human and nonhuman ecologies, but also with queerness and queer identity in the ways that the monster and monstrousness work through fears and anxieties. Okorafor’s protagonists’ supernatural powers are in part queered as the novel’s plot evolves to resolve its conflict. Alien lifeforms are also queered as both Other and hybrid lifeforms that Lagosians perceive as a threat. The novel moreover literally showcases queer characters being subjected to hate and violence, such as the eventually murdered cross-dressing character, Jacobs, as well as other members of the LGBT student group called The Black Nexus. Many of the fears and anxieties permeating Lagos are rooted in what is different, what is unusual, and what is queer, and this perspective offers rich possibilities for a queer Gothic critique of the novel.

Additionally, Lagoon can be read through an ecogothic lens because of the ways it mitigates anxieties about sustainability. Andrew Smith and William Hughes posit in their introduction to Ecogothic (2013) that the Gothic appears to be a form well placed to provide a culturally significant point of contact between literary criticism, ecocritical theory, and political processes because of the Gothic’s ability to capture and reveal human anxieties (8). Writing about ecofeminism in this volume, Emily Carr argues that “women’s Gothic fiction has undermined fictions of the human and nonhuman, the natural and unnatural by creating worlds in which the everyday is collapsed with the nightmarish” (qtd. in Smith and Hughes 12). Carr posits that in much Gothic fiction written by women, “distortion, dislocation and disruption become the norm, and [in] the domestic and grotesque, the alluring and terrible coexist” (qtd. in Smith and Hughes 12). Okorafor’s Lagoon uses an alien invasion plot to not only undermine fictions about the human and nonhuman (via the monstrous) and the natural and unnatural (via the concept of queerness) by collapsing the everyday with the nightmarish, for instance, in the ways that the novel uses the Gothic motifs of terror and horror to showcase corruption, violence, patriarchal hypermasculinity, and the exploitation of resources as problems plaguing Lagos, but the extraterrestrials also importantly come to Lagos to offer the Earth solutions to these problems that are reminiscent of queer ecologies, namely to embrace difference through coalition, symbiosis, transformation, change, and adaptation.

Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands (2016) notes that queer ecology aims to “reimagine evolutionary processes, ecological interactions, and environmental politics in light of queer theory” to highlight “the complexity of contemporary biopolitics” by drawing “important connections between the material and cultural dimensions of environmental issues” and insisting “on an articulatory practice in which sex and nature are understood in light of multiple trajectories of power and matter.” Put simply, queer ecology asks us to abandon biophobia and embrace biophilia, or what Edward O. Wilson defines as “the urge to affiliate with other forms of life” (85) in order to understand interconnections that include but are not exclusionary to sexual, gender, and racial diversity. In sum, queer ecology insists that life is sociobiopolitical and further emphasizes that coalitions are urgent for sustainability. Queer ecology offers a unique lens through which one can examine the Gothic in Okorafor’s Lagoon. For example, though most humans in Lagoon see the alien invaders as monsters, and, in turn, fear and persecute them for their queerness, it is the aliens who offer humanity sustainable ecologies. By embracing difference and respecting interconnectivity, the novel’s aliens posit that humans can best learn to empathize with and sustain life. A framework of queer ecologies might then examine symbiotic relationships through the ways that biodiverse lifeforms realize interdependent, empathetic coalitions based upon affinity, adaptation, and collaboration to sustain ecosystems. Okorafor’s Lagoon, I posit, showcases solutions invested in both an ecogothic and queer ecological framework that work in tandem. The monstrous, the uncanny, and the supernatural, for instance, act as plot devices that resolve the novel’s conflict of unsustainability as the novel features extraterrestrials that offer coalitions, symbiosis, transformation, adaptation, and change as solutions. Lagoon is a novel that leads readers to ponder a need for sustainable ecologies, and it does so with Gothic tropes often used to examine queerness (the monstrous, the uncanny, and the supernatural). It is to these Gothic tropes I now turn.

Gothic Monsters, Symbiotic Becomings

“Here there be Monsters.”

This phrase appears twice in Okorafor’s Lagoon, first in Chapter 44, narrated by Udide Okwanka, the giant spider trickster narrator aka master weaver of tales from Igbo folklore, and secondly as the title of Chapter 48, a chapter that showcases a giant alien-swordfish hybrid, among other sea creatures attacking a boat envoy of superhuman ambassadors to the Nigerian President and the alien ambassador Ayodele, as they attempt to meet the alien Elders on the waters (228-229, 241-247). In the first instance, the monsters referred to are sea creatures, alien hybrids, and the humans who perpetuate mayhem above ground and out of the sea. In the second instance, the monsters referred to are solely the angry antagonists of the sea (the creatures of the sea that have endured human toxins and mistreatment). Extraterrestrials are an obvious form of the monster showcased in the novel. However, Nigerian folklore and mythical entities (often read as monstrous, queer figures) also surface to remedy the novel’s conflict, a conflict that has influenced Earth’s unsustainable ecologies. Unique among Okorafor’s monsters are the Road Monster that calls itself the Bone Collector, a sentient stretch of the Lagos-Benin highway that attacks humans; the subterranean Igbo spider narrator, Udide Okwanka; and the Yoruba trickster god of language and the crossroads, Legba, who is recast as a technological 419 internet scammer expert (but also features as the spirit form of Papa Legba from Nigerian folklore). The novel’s four protagonists are also cast as monstrous in that they are supernatural and/or have superhuman abilities not unlike those that characterize Marvel’s X-Men. Ayodele shapeshifts from Nigerian human forms to a monkey, a sea creature, and a miasma, gas, or mist, which is in the end inhaled by the inhabitants of Lagos. The marine biologist, Adaora, who Lagosians often refer to as a “marine witch,” can create a shield around herself and breath under water through gills that form as needed. The Nigerian soldier, Agu, has superhuman strength that can result in an incredible force that can kill upon impact. The Ghanaian hip-hop artist, Anthony, has a voice that can project deadly vibrations and sounds (a gift referred to in the novel as The Rhythm). These attributes are used to save Lagos from itself and to realize symbiosis with Ayodele’s alien species.

The novel moreover alludes to several staple Gothic monsters that include witches, zombies, ghosts, vampires, bats, spiders, and sea creatures, some of which are alien hybrid shapeshifters much like the protagonist Ayodele herself. There are clearly Gothic tropes at play in Lagoon, many of which one can argue are queered attributes, but the important takeaway from Okorafor’s use of monstrous tropes is that they are used to remedy an ecological crisis and other human monstrosities such as murder, rape, theft, corruption, and further violent acts that are often committed by religious leaders through acts of homophobia or transphobia. Adaora, Agu, Anthony, and, eventually, Nigeria’s president, form a coalition with Ayodele and her alien species. Together, they offer symbiosis and change.

The uncanny is also utilized to draw attention to queered characters that promote adaptation, symbiosis, and change. The Gothic has a long history with the uncanny. There are several uncanny tropes in the novel varying from the alien invasion trope to human/nonhuman/alien hybrids to shapeshifting lifeforms and animated objects. These tropes evoke a sense of the uncanny while at the same time serving as plot devices that move the story towards the Ecocene. Perhaps the most obvious example is that of Ayodele herself. Adaora notes a physical resemblance between herself and Ayodele, and Adaora’s character and identity also bears a striking resemblance to Ayodele. Furthermore, though Ayodele appears in human form as a Nigerian woman, her physical attributes are strangely reminiscent of a spider. In some ways, Adaora and Ayodele are like doppelgangers because of the ways they bear a similar phenotype, possess supernatural powers, and are chastised by Lagosians as demons and/or witches. Ayodele comes as an ambassador for the extraterrestrials that seek to resolve Earth’s existential crises set in motion by humanity’s violent and unsustainable ways of life, but Lagosians believe these aliens have invaded Earth because they seek harm. This could not be further from the truth.

These extraterrestrials have been watching the Earth and humans for quite some time, living as hybrid creatures beneath the sea and perhaps even producing the shapeshifting lifeforms that the novel showcases in its protagonists, Adaora, Agu, and Anthony. Indeed, Adaora, Agu, and Anthony do not realize their full supernatural abilities until after initial contact, and several characters emerge only as a result of the conflict that these extraterrestrials seek to resolve—that is, the conflict produced by the Anthropocene. At one point, Adaora, Agu, and Anthony are transformed underwater into animal-human hybrids in transit to take the Nigerian President to The Elders (the alien leaders sent to resolve Earth’s conflict). These transformed selves are both uncanny and queer, yet are used to realize peace and symbiosis. Moreover, the Bone Collector (constructed of a highway), Udide Okwanka (who resembles a spider), and Legba are uncanny figures whose purpose is to tell the novel’s story and see the realization of its plot. The novel insinuates that though the Bone Collector, Udide Okwanka, and Legba have always been watching over Lagos unseen, their purpose has always been for this very moment (to resolve the novel’s conflict of the unsustainable present). While these uncanny (often supernatural) characters in the novel are feared as monsters, they actually stand in as metaphors for the real monstrosities perpetuated by human beings, as humans rampage, murder, persecute one another, and pollute the sea with toxins.

The supernatural is utilized to showcase transformation, but also enables the novel’s resolution. Queer agency, coalitions, biodiversity, symbiosis, transformation, change, and adaptation are all aspects of queer ecology that are realized through the supernatural. While Ayodele is frequently admonished for her supernatural abilities and often labeled a witch or demon, she consistently reinforces and promotes adaptation as well as the aliens’ purpose as change. When Father Oke, a character who routinely uses Christianity to persecute anyone outside of what he perceives as normative, asks Ayodele if she is a witch, she responds, “I am not a witch; I am alien to your planet; I am an alien. . . . We change. With our bodies, and we change everything around us” (46). The mantras “I am change” and “We are change” are often-repeated phrases in the novel, and these phrases are both literal and metaphoric. Ayodele’s shapeshifting is a literal form of her change, as when she transforms into objects and lifeforms. She says, “We take in matter . . . What we can find. Dust, stone, metal, elements. We alter whatever substance we find to suit us” (38). However, what her species promotes most is overarching change. When Agu asks Ayodele if it is a coincidence that all four protagonists that have been brought together have names that begin with the letter “A,” she indicates that it is not a coincidence, stating, “We are change. . . . The sentiments were already there. I know nothing about those other things” (39). As the novel progresses and Ayodele is endlessly targeted for her queered essence and supernatural abilities, this essence and these abilities are what enable her and the other protagonists to promote transformation of Earth from an age of the Anthropocene to the Ecocene via an alien-human coalition that will value biodiversity. Endangered ecosystems are to be respected. Extinct animals will live once again. Alien-human and alien-nonhuman hybrids will remain. The fossil fuel-driven society that has contributed to much of Lagos’s pollution (and that of the entire Earth) will cease to exist. The extraterrestrials will provide Earth with a new technology to remedy its existential crises. The world must become symbiotic.

Conclusion

Okorafor’s Lagoon utilizes the monstrous, the uncanny, and the supernatural to critique the queer, the human and nonhuman, and the natural and unnatural through the ways that it collapses the everyday with the nightmarish to capture and reveal human anxieties about difference, hierarchy, and sustainability. In these ways, Lagoon is not only quite Gothic but also traverses the queer ecogothic. Okorafor’s novel juxtaposes queered Nigerian humans and aliens, scientific thought and Christian evangelism, and the Capitalocene and Ecocene in a postcolonial Nigeria brimming with a laundry list of Gothic elements, including power, corruption, patriarchal hypermasculinity, religious violence, terror and horror, the monstrous, the uncanny, and the supernatural, in order to bring to the forefront and remedy postcolonial and ecological crises. Aliens have often been utilized as metaphors for difference, for instance in tales of reverse colonization or as queered characters that challenge humans to change. Yet, Okorafor’s tale utilizes Gothic tropes in a unique way, both to showcase the dangerous future into which humans stray and to offer a solution—symbiosis. Symbiosis is an instrumental tenet of queer ecology. Queer ecologies offer a framework for queering the ecogothic that enable the resolution of issues plaguing the Anthropocene as humans collectively turn toward the Ecocene. Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon utilizes a queer Gothic ecology to showcase an Africanfuturism that moves towards an investment in the Ecocene. Lagoon shows how Gothic elements such as the uncanny, the supernatural, and the monstrous can be utilized to imagine positive change. Importantly, Okorafor’s Ecocene envisions a coalitional future of biodiverse, symbiotic becomings that are invested in African culture, history, mythology, and point-of-view. Here African identity empowers queer agency, which in turn enriches Gothic ecologies. Queer Ecogothic Africanfuturism promotes Ayodele’s mantra, “I am change.” To move towards the Ecocene, humans must not fear but embrace fluidity, queerness, transformation, and adaptation.

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WORKS CITED

Carr, Emily. “The riddle was the angel in the house: towards an American ecofeminist Gothic.” Ecogothic, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes, Manchester UP, 2013, 160-176.

Haggerty, George E. Queer Gothic. U of Illinois P, 2006.

Okorafor, Nnedi. Lagoon. Saga Press, 2014.

Sandilands, Catriona. “Queer Ecology.” Keywords for Environmental Studies, edited by Joni Adamson, William A. Gleason, and David N. Pellow, NYU Press, 2016.

Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes. “Introduction: defining the ecoGothic.” Ecogothic, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes, Manchester, UP, 2013, 1-14.

Talabi, Wole. Introduction. Africanfuturism: An Anthology, edited by Wole Talabi, Brittle Paper, 2020.

Wilson, Edward O. Biophilia. Harvard UP, 1984.

Dr. Luke Chwala is Assistant Professor of Humanities and Culture at Union Institute and University in the PhD Interdisciplinary Studies program. He specializes in nineteenth-century British literature and culture, as well as decolonial and transatlantic queer studies from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century. He has a PhD in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, an MA in English from the City University of New York, Brooklyn College, and an MA in Public Communications from Fordham University. His most recent work proposes what he has coined as decolonial queer ecologies as a reparative reading strategy of colonial-themed transatlantic Gothic and speculative fiction. He has published work in queer, postcolonial, race, and Gothic studies, including eTropic and the Victorian Review. He is co-editor of the University of Wales Press new series, Queer and Trans Intersections.

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Not Another Cog in the Biopolitical Machine: K. Ceres Wright and Afrofuturist Cyberfunk

Graham J. Murphy

The cyberpunk movement has a well-documented history [1] that I’ll gloss over as an introduction to this paper. First, although there are plenty of literary precursors to the movement’s emergence in the early-1980s, including (but not limited to) Samuel Delany, Harlan Ellison, J. G. Ballard, John Brunner, James Tiptree, Jr., Joanna Russ, Philip K. Dick, and Thomas Pynchon, cyberpunk’s oft-cited core is the quintet of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, Lewis Shiner, and John Shirley. Thanks in part to such editors as Ellen Datlow, Gardner Dozois, and Stephen Brown, these newcomers’ writings brought them into one another’s orbit and the impact of their fictional output was quickly irrefutable, particularly after Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) became the first novel to win the Philip K. Dick Award (1984), Hugo Award (1985), and Nebula Award (1985) for Best Novel. Print-based cyberpunk soon expanded its roster, chiefly thanks to the marketing savviness of Bruce Sterling and his edited collection Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986). Meanwhile, cyberpunk’s dominant visual splendor—i.e., the simultaneously sprawling but also vertical cities; the overlay of virtual and ‘real’ worlds; the proliferation of cyborgs, virtual entities, and artificial intelligences; etc. [2]—was codified by a trifecta of Hollywood films: TRON (dir. Steven Lisberger, 1982), Blade Runner (dir. Ridley Scott, 1982), and Videodrome (dir. David Cronenberg, 1983). In his coverage of Blade Runner, Scott Bukatman remarked that “cyberpunk provided the image of the future in the 1980s […] the aesthetic of cyberpunk was almost defined by Blade Runner (58:50), although Scott admits he inherited this aesthetic in part from the visual stylings of French cartoonist Jean “Moebius” Giraud, particularly his illustrations for Dan O’Bannon’s “The Long Tomorrow” published in Métal Hurlant #7 and #8 (1976) before being republished in English in Heavy Metal #4 and #5 (1977). [3] Finally, Brian Ruh writes that “Japanese elements permeate many of this mode’s foundational texts, and Japan continues to produce many important cyberpunk examples that push the ideas and concepts central to this mode, particularly as the synthesis of human and machine so central to cyberpunk’s core becomes more and more a part of our quotidian realities” (401). It is this quotidian reality—i.e., a reality (or realities) that many (including myself) have argued looks increasingly cyberpunk-ish—that fuels not only the ongoing engagement with cyberpunk motifs by successive waves of (literary, cinematic, acoustic, and so forth) artists but the adaptation and evolution of these motifs to suit contemporary conditions. It is within these cyberpunk currents that we can locate sf newcomer K. Ceres Wright.

As per her online bio, Wright “received her master’s degree in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University and her published cyberpunk novel, Cog [2013], was her thesis for the program” (“About”). In addition to Cog, she has written a handful of short stories for various anthologies and she recently founded the Diverse Writers and Artists of Speculative Fiction (DWASF), an educational group appealing to “underrepresented creatives in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and all of their related subgenres.” She is currently the organization’s president. Finally, as she has remarked to the Midwest Black Speculative Fiction Alliance, cyberpunk has been foundational to her craft: she first encountered Gibson’s Neuromancer in the early 2000s, and Cog was a deliberate attempt to write in a Gibsonian vein, although she is by no means merely copying Gibson’s work, either then or now (“Interview”).

Let me circle back to why I’m focusing on Wright, and it has to do with what Isiah Lavender III has written about Steven Barnes, whose contributions to cyberpunk have “gone largely overlooked, in part because of the mode’s monochromatism” (14). Specifically, writing on Barnes’s Streetlethal (1983), Lavender positions Barnes as “the only Black cyberpunk writer working in the heyday of [cyberpunk’s] first iteration” (14). More to the point, however, Barnes’s work foreshadowed “Afrocyberpunk or cyberfunk, recent divergences made by black writers from cyberpunk’s norms” (Lavender, “Critical” 308). Wright epitomizes these recent divergences in her Afrofuturist cyberpunk, although I’ll come back to that term in a minute. In the meantime, consider her short story “Talismaner” (2021) which is set on the planet Yemaya, named after the Ocean Mother Goddess in Santería, an Afro-Caribbean religion practiced around the world whose roots stretch to the Yoruba religion (Snider). The story follows Tala, who is scrabbling to pull herself and her family out of the slums of Waneta, and in so doing she turns to techno-biological implants so she can become a shamhack, someone who can hack  into the planet’s atmospheric waves and siphon energy, albeit illegally and with inconsistent reliability. After her implants, however, Tala learns she is a Talismaner, a once-in-a-lifetime shamhack who can not only draw forth energy but pull objects through energy conduits and even move people through space. Of course, her abilities draw the attention of the powerful socio-economic elites, and although Tala’s life is threatened, she also portends a brighter future because she can make meaningful change for those disenfranchised by the current socio-economic cleavages that define Yemaya’s social fabric.

Meanwhile, in Wright’s story “Mission: Surreality,” the protagonist is Concordat, an information broker, street hustler, and nascent rebel who lives in the City, a sprawling urban city made of “20 million souls, 1500 different species all crammed together in plascrete and biosteel” (Davis, “Welcome”). Tellingly, every person in the City is implanted with the Tell, a series of subdermal techno-organic implants that allow Cityzens to access a cyberspatial network called the Wave; unfortunately, the Tell also allows Watchers to monitor Cityzens to ensure compliance with the City’s rules. When a Cityzen named Shai Gea learns how to synthesize something called Ooze that will purge all traces of the Tell from a person’s body, Concordat is tasked with brokering the funding that will allow Gea to start mass production and distribution. And, as might be expected, Concordant’s actions in this enterprise bring her to the attention of Watchers that threaten to derail the entire venture.

“Mission: Surreality” was first published in The City: A Cyberfunk Anthology, edited by Milton J. Davis and published in 2015, followed by a soundtrack made available on Spotify in 2019; “Talismaner,” meanwhile, was published in 2021 in Davis’s edited anthology Cyberfunk!. The promotional material for cyberfunk describes it as “a vision of the future with an Afrocentric flavor. It is the Singularity without the Eurocentric foundation. It’s Blade Runner with sunlight, Neuromancer with melanin, cybernetics with rhythm” (Cover). And, if you recall from a few paragraphs ago, Afrocyberpunk or cyberfunk are “recent divergences made by black writers from cyberpunk’s norms” (Lavender, “Critical” 308). In fact, Wright observes that contemporary cyberpunk trends “toward settings in the far future, on distant planets, where the landscape is not quite as bleak, where corporations do not dominate every aspect of life, and where characters have sunny dispositions” (“Cyberpunk”). Although Wright never uses the term cyberfunk in this description, her Afrofuturist cyberpunk is perhaps better described as cyberfunk: a modern articulation of cyberpunk that finds “old beliefs […] juxtaposed against futuristic inventions” (Wright, “Cyberpunk”).

Cyberfunk is a very provocative term because there is a play of contrary dispositions: first, cyber is a reference to the intimate feedback loops involved in information processing, but it also evokes what has been called cyber-capitalism, [4] which “does not signal a utopian postindustrial, post-Fordist world characterized by creativity and global cooperation. Such neoliberal notions […] simply mask the exploitative nature of the labor that underlies cyber-capitalism as with all capitalist formations” (English and Kim 223). Similarly, funk calls to mind the Afrofuturist soundscapes of, among others, Sun Ra, who, as per Ytasha L. Womack, “believed that music and technology could heal and transform the world” (53). At the same time, in the common vernacular, funk is a state of unhappiness, depression, or outright despair. We can therefore see in the term cyberfunk both a cybernetically infused transformative potential organized around a communal identity and a cybernetically infused despair organized arising from the failures of a utopian postindustrial, post-Fordist world. Wright’s cyberfunk expertly navigates this complicated terrain.  

Consider Wright’s short story “Of Sound Mind and Body” (2017). The story follows Dara Martin, a woman who, thanks to an experimental treatment, can transform herself on a cellular level at will, although not without a fair amount of gradually intensifying pain. Dara is an undercover agent with Homeland Intelligence, and in her disguise as Chyou Sòng she has spent the past five months trying to learn what China’s Minister of Commerce Enlai Chin is planning regarding upcoming trade talks, a mission that has had her flirting and now going on a date with Yuan Chin, the Minister’s brother. She also crosses paths with the suspicious Githinji Diallo, and Dara’s research into this character’s personal history is where Wright provides a very brief overview of “Little Africa,” a very real community in the heart of the city of Guangzhou that is heavily populated by African and African-Chinese immigrants and citizens. Relaying her suspicions about Githinji to her handler, deputy station chief Rona Huang, Dara learns Githinji is also an agent, although he has a separate (and secretive) mission: he is an assassin, and after killing the Minister of Commerce following Dara’s successful extraction of trade information, Githinji turns his sights on Dara who, unfortunately, drowns while trying to escape. The story ends with Rona talking to Jim Roberts, Counselor at the US embassy, who is seemingly unaware that Rona had ordered Githinji to kill Dara after the successful completion of her mission. Rona reveals to Jim “there’s a new program the [US] government’s overseeing. Downloadable consciousness. We may be able to transfer her personality and memory to another body and start over.”

These ideas of recordable experiences, transferable consciousness, and/or the swapping of bodies, coupled with the exploitation of labor that underlies cyber-capitalism, are consistent throughout Wright’s cyberfunk. For example, “A Change of Plans” (2020) is set in Addis Ababa, circa 2070, and it follows Dani, a streetwise girl who is living as an information broker to the criminal class, a life very reminiscent of Concordant from “Mission: Surreality.” Dani discovers illicit technological chips are making their way out of Kaliti Prison. Much like the Tell from “Mission: Surreality” that allows Watchers in the City to monitor Cityzens, the chips in “A Change of Plans” not only enable surveillance but also moderate behaviour which, in turn, fuels a black market: “The guards torture the prisoners and record their brain scans throughout. Then they transfer those memories and reactions to a chip and sell them to people who buy kink robots and want an authentic experience.” Unlike Dara’s experience in “Of Sound Mind and Body,” however, Dani can extricate herself from her trouble, all while reconnecting with her estranged mother and carving off a more hopeful future for herself, including joining and contributing to a women’s monastery that gives assistance to a local children’s home.

The idea of exploiting the laboring class and generating profits from society’s dispossessed and/or most vulnerable informs Wright’s debut novel, Cog. Published before the aforementioned short stories, Cog is arguably the cog that turns the gears on these later stories because many of the motifs and conceptual issues in the short fiction are already nascent in this novel. The novel’s chief antagonist (even if his role in the events isn’t revealed until later) is William ‘Wills’ Ryder, the heir apparent to Geren Ryder’s American Hologram corporate empire, at least until the arrival of a previously unknown older brother, Perim Nestor, complicates the family dynamics. One of Wills’s R&D projects is consciousness transference as well as using a downloaded personality to achieve brain wave parity with a subject to effectively control their mind, albeit on a more subconscious level. And, as part of the beta trials, Wills is investigating the development of clone bodies to achieve consciousness transference, though in the meantime, his most viable candidates are medically fragile comatose patients who effectively have no use for their bodies anymore.

Given the brevity of this paper, I can only gesture towards where this nascent article is heading once it turns into a full-fledged piece, and it has to do with the transhuman condition and what Sherryl Vint calls the biopolitics of epivitality. In Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First Century Speculative Fiction, Vint explains that the biopolitical implications and ramifications of biotechnological advances in the 21st century have created the condition of epivitality; specifically, “neoliberalism and biotechnology demands new ways of thinking about the ongoing reinvention of the idea of life and the living” (2). In other words, biotechnological advances mean that the flow of “capital becomes interested in humans less for their capacity to provide labour-power and more for their capacity as biological entities” (5). For example, consider the end of the story “Of Sound Mind and Body”: Dara Martin, the undercover agent, is dead but her handler, Rona, tells Jim Roberts, the counselor at the US embassy, that the promising new program of consciousness transference will likely allow Homeland Intelligence to effectively resurrect Dara. When Jim asks Rona if resurrection in a new body is what Dara would have wanted, Rona coldly responds: “Doesn’t matter what she wants. She signed a contract. Her body parts are ours.” Dara’s worth according to the age of epivitality is in her role as what Vint calls the immortal vessel, the technological advances organized around “the fetish of preserving and valuing life beyond any limits” that, in turn, is “part of the ongoing reinvention of ‘life itself, enabling a view of living as something that might be engineered, created in the lab” (26). While Dara’s labor is valued while she is alive, her true worth is quite literally in her role as a biological organism. Thus, in this biopolitical age of epivitality, “Of Sound Mind and Body” painfully shows that life is reconfigured “as merely a resource for capital accumulation, as easily liquidated as any other asset” (29); in other words, what is valuable is the human body, not the human body.

Similarly, consider the suffering prisoners in “A Change of Plans” or, for that matter, the comatose patients in Cog who are the vessels for Wills Ryder’s experiments in transferable consciousness. These figures align with what Vint calls the living tool of biopolitics. They throw into sharp relief “the real subsumption of life by capital” by revealing “ways that the gap between organism and thing has decreased, perhaps even collapsed” (47). While Vint turns to the association between robot and slave in science fiction as emblematic of the living tool, the conditions of prisoner and comatose patient aren’t far off the mark: their value is as nothing more than an object or raw material in service to the needs of capital. The prisoners in the story help fuel an illicit sex kink trade for wealthy clients while the comatose patients offer the uber-wealthy the opportunity to live in the form of the transhumanist posthuman. In both cases, the reduction of the human to object-status fuels neoliberal profits and economic exploitation.

In closing, Wright is heavily invested in Afrofuturist practices and politics and her cyberfunk is deeply problematic, at least if we understand problematic as, to quote Carl Freedman, providing “critical traction to a conceptual framework within which further research and analysis can be conducted.” As I’ve gestured in this conference paper that will most certainly require later development, Wright’s cyberfunk engages with a conceptual framework that is our biopolitical age of epivitality, an age fostered out here in our quotidian reality saturated by the techno- and biological transformations we see currently taking place all around us. In focusing on those who are the exploited, the disenfranchised, the medically vulnerable, and so forth, Wright demonstrates in her cyberfunk fiction that in this age of epivitality our worth is increasingly shifting from the labour we exert in service of neoliberalism to the body we sacrifice to the neoliberal machinery. And, in drawing our attention to these fraught conditions, Wright’s cyberfunk stresses the importance of fighting to make sure there is more to living than simply as cogs in the biopolitical machine.

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NOTES

[1] See Murphy’s “Cyberpunk and Post-Cyberpunk” for a detailed overview of the movement.

[2] See Schmeink’s “Afterthoughts” for details.

[3] For details about Moebius’s influence upon cyberpunk, see Labarre.

[4] See Tumino for an early exploration of cyber-capitalism.

WORKS CITED

Bukatman, Scott. Blade Runner. 2nd ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Cover copy. Cyberfunk!, edited by Milton J. Davis, Kobo ed., Mvmedia, LLC, 2021.

Davis, Milton J. “Welcome to the City.” The City: A Cyberpunk Anthology, edited by Milton J.

Davis, Kobo ed., ‎Mvmedia, LLC, 2015.

English, Daylanne K. and Alvin Kim. “Now We Want Our Funk Cut: Janelle Monáe Neo-Afrofuturism.” American Studies, vol. 52, no. 4, 2013, pp. 217-30.

Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Wesleyan UP, 2000.

Murphy, Graham J. “Cyberpunk and Post-Cyberpunk.” The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, edited by Eric Carl Link and Gerry Canavan, Cambridge, UP, 2019, pp. 519-36.

Labarre, Nicolas. “Moebius [Jean Giraud].” Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture, edited by Anna McFarlane, Graham J. Murphy, and Lars Schmeink, Routledge, 2022, pp. 118-22.

Lavender III, Isiah. “Critical Race Theory.” The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture, edited by Anna McFarlane, Graham J. Murphy, and Lars Schmeink, Routledge, 2020, pp. 308-16.

—. “Steven Barnes.” Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture, edited by Anna McFarlane, Graham J. Murphy, and Lars Schmeink, Routledge, 2022, pp. 14-18.

Ruh, Brian. “Japan as Cyberpunk Exoticism.” The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture, edited by Anna McFarlane, Graham J. Murphy, and Lars Schmeink, Routledge, 2020, pp. 401-07.

Schmeink, Lars. “Afterthoughts: Cyberpunk’s Engagements in Countervisuality.” Cyberpunk and Visual Culture, edited by Graham J. Murphy and Lars Schmeink, Routledge, 2018, pp. 276-87.

Snider, Amber C. “The History of Yemaya, Santeria’s Queenly Ocean Goddess Mermaid.” Teen Vogue, 8 July 2019, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/the-history-of-yemaya-goddess-mermaid.

Tumino, Stephen. Cultural Theory After the Contemporary. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Vint, Sherryl. Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction. Cambridge UP, 2021.

Womack, Ytasha L. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Lawrence Hill, 2013.

Wright, K. Ceres. “About.” K. Ceres Wright Blog, http://kceres.net/about/. Accessed 23 June 2023.

—. “A Change of Plans.” Chosen Realities, no. 1, Summer 2020, Kindle ed., Diverse Writers and Authors of Speculative Fiction.

—. Cog. Dog Star, 2013.

—. “Cyberpunk Remastered: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Postmodernism.” Many Genres, One Craft: Lessons in Writing Popular Fiction, edited by Michael A. Arnzen and Heidi Ruby Miller, Kindle ed., Headline, 2012.

—. Interview by Midwest Black Speculative Fiction Alliance. 19 Dec. 2017, https://midwestbsfa.wordpress.com/2017/12/19/interview-with-k-ceres-wright-this-months-blackscifibookclub-author/. Accessed 23 June 2023. 

—. “Mission: Surreality.” The City: A Cyberpunk Anthology, edited by Milton J. Davis, Kobo ed., ‎ Mvmedia, LLC, 2015.

—. “Of Sound Mind and Body.” Sycorax’s Daughters, edited by Kinitra Brooks and Linda D. Addison, Kobo ed., Cedar Grove, 2017.

—. “Talismaner.” Cyberfunk!, edited by Milton J. Davis, Kobo ed., Mvmedia, LLC, 2021.

Graham J. Murphy is a Professor with the School of English and Liberal Studies at Seneca Polytechnic (Toronto). His publications include co-editing Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture (2022), The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture (2020), Cyberpunk and Visual Culture (2018), and Beyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives (2010), as well as authoring such recent book chapters as “Feminist-Queer Cyberpunk: Hacking Cyberpunk’s Hetero-Masculinism” for The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction (2023) and “Cyberpunk and Post-Cyberpunk” for The Cambridge History of Science Fiction (2019). While he is working on a variety of ongoing projects, his most imminent release is the book chapter “Indigenous Young Adult Dystopias” for the forthcoming The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms.

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