Positive Afrofuturism

My blog post this week can be found here as a comment on Garrett's post last week about Star Trek!

Afrofuturism in Pop Culture

As I browsed the internet for pop culture examples of Afrofuturism, I stumbled upon Taneka Word, an artist and writer.  This link connects to one of her art exhibits with paintings she has for sale:

http://www.tanekeyaword.com/donne-di-lusso

She also has a very interesting opinion piece on "Watch the Throne," the album art for Jay-Zs new album.

http://www.tanekeyaword.com/the-scholar

I didn't want to put her paintings on my blog to make sure I'm not violating copyright laws, but I really encourage you to explore her website, there is some interesting stuff on there!

Layered Question: Age

Layered Question for Adulthood Rites

What are the ages and stages of life Akin goes through during Adulthood Rites?  How are the stages of development Akin goes through similar and different to those that children, adolescents, and adults go through in various cultures today?  Age and maturity levels are heavily deconstructed throughout Adulthood Rites.  How does this story compare with societies today, and is age something that can actually be deconstructed in our parent/child society?   

Mind Over Matter

“The organisms were not intelligent. They could not tell him how to keep himself alive, free, and able to find new hosts. But they became intensely uncomfortable if he did not, and their discomfort was his discomfort. He might interpret what they made him feel as pleasure when he did what was necessary, desirable, essential: or as pain when he tried to do what was terrifying, self-destructive, impossible. But what he was actually feeling were secondhand advance-retreat responses of millions of tiny symbionts.”

            The relationship between physical drives and mental control is brought up repeatedly throughout Clay’s Ark.   The extraterrestrials, which are never named, use pleasure and pain as their only control mechanisms.  The lengths the people infected will go to end pain or gain pleasure are almost limitless.  Each character struggles with nearly uncontrollable drives to spread the organisms further.  They are enslaved by the microscopic organisms, yet seem to be able to live with this enslavement as long as they feel they maintain some control.  Early in the story, Eli struggles with not raping a woman, “He stood where he was, perspiring heavily in the cold night air and struggling to remember that he had resolved to be a human plus, not a human minus. He was not an animal, not a rapist, not a murderer” (469).   As long as Eli gives in a little bit to his captors, he is able to maintain control.  If he deprives them long enough though, animalistic instincts will take over.  “He had an unconscious will to survive that transcended any conscious desire, any guilt, any duty to those who had once been his fellow humans” (470).   Later in the story, they maintain their partial humanity by allowing the strong desire to spread the organisms with consensual sex instead of rape whenever possible.  In this way, they  live in community, raise and love their children, and help each other out.  In contrast, the car family, though not yet infected, seems even less human than Eli’s community.  They rape and kill whenever they feel like it.   Though they theoretically could control themselves with no subconscious drives, they chose to give in to their depraved minds, imprisoning and abusing other human beings.  Constantly throughout the story, those in Eli’s group say “we are not rapists,” almost as if they need to repeat it aloud over and over in order to make it true.  The statement only goes so far though.  True, they never rape, but they do force people to become part of their community by taking them in and imprisoning them until they submit.  Their minds are overtaken so their desires become biological rather than a mental choice.  Clay’s Ark questions and blurs the binary of the mind and the body, the physical and the mental.  “Mind over matter” is a popular phrase used in sports, pain, and other areas of life.  In Clay’s Ark, biology (“matter”) sometimes simply consumes the individual.  At one point, a rabbit runs across Blake’s path, “A jack rabbit leaped into his path, and without thinking, he leaped after it, caught it, snapped its neck” (593).   In this case, the physical overtook the mental because the physical had not been satisfied quickly enough with food.  Various other examples occur throughout the story, and the only way “mind over matter” is controlled is through partially giving in to the alien organisms; a deconstruction of the binary.

            I have a two-part question:

Have Eli’s people found “freedom” in giving in to the extraterrestrials controlling them just enough to maintain some mental/physical control?  What is significant about the way sex is used as a form of determining “humanity” (consensual versus rape), and is forcing non-infected people to join them just another form of rape?  

Race in Mind of My Mind

The following passage is from p. 334 of Mind of My Mind by Octavia Butler:

Mary: “God! You’re white so much of the time, I never thought you might have been born black.”

Doro: “It doesn’t matter”

Mary: “What do you mean, ‘It doesn’t matter’? It matters to me.”

Doro: “It doesn’t matter because I haven’t been any color at all for about four thousand years. Or you  could say I’ve been every color. But either way, I don’t have anything more in common with black people - Nubian or otherwise- than I do with whites or Asians”

Mary: “You mean you don’t want to admit you have anything in common with us. But if you were born black, you are black. Still black, no matter what color you take on.”

Doro: He crooked his mouth a little in something that wasn’t quite a smile. “You can believe that if it makes you feel better.”

Mary: “It’s true!” He shrugged “Well, what race do you think you are?”

Doro: “None that I have a name for.”

Mary: “That doesn’t make any sense.”

Doro: “It does when you think about it. I’m not black or white or yellow, because I’m not human, Mary.”

            Race comes up at various times throughout Mind of My Mind, but I continually have difficulty keeping track of who is what race.  More racial questions seem to be asked than answered.  Doro especially constantly changing bodies complicates the races.  Mary uses her race defensively at the beginning of Mind of My Mind.  When she is introduced to her husband, she almost instantly demands if her race matters to him (p. 289).   Mary says she never thought Doro would have been born black because of his white exterior and behavior.  Doro replies that race does not matter, yet he chooses to be white most of the time.  His whiteness possibly makes life easier for him as he runs around the world manipulating people.  Mary accuses him of wanting to turn on his black heritage, but he claims that is not the case.  Doro and Mary approach race from very different standpoints.  Mary clings to her blackness and becomes defensive before it is even brought up.  Doro has supposedly put race behind him even though he chooses to remain white a significant part of the time.             

Interestingly, despite their disagreements on race, both Mary and Doro end up acting as a type of slave owner throughout the story.  Mary controls people’s minds and therefore actions, and Doro controls people’s actions and overtakes their bodies.  Butler seems to be breaking down the binary of race by changing the binary to human and non-human.  Later in the story Mary does things that nearly seem non-human.  Could it be possible that race is based on behavior more than skin color, or must it always come down to skin color?  Throughout Mind of My Mind, bodies frequently do not matter; Doro switches between bodies with no problem and Emma changes her figure from young to old at will.  If bodies do not matter, the internal soul/spirit or whatever it is called should be what really matters.   Or is it?  Mary draws strength from connecting with and controlling the minds of many other people.  She can not only read their thoughts but consume who they are as a person.  Once she learns to control it, all her battles are internal and mental.  She can force others to lose control of their minds and submit to her completely. If she wanted, she could make people act any race she desired.  Still, she sees race as an important issue when she says, “What do you mean, it doesn’t matter’? It matters to me!” 

Mind of My Mind definitely raises many interesting questions about race and the cultural construction of racial binaries.  I am looking forward to class discussion to see what kind of conclusions everyone has drawn from these texts.  Nothing seemed too definitive to me, but I continued to raise more and more questions as I read as far as mind control, body control, slavery, race, and even human and non-human behavior.

Question:

Who is right, Mary or Doro?  Is race something that is skin-deep, or are the issues deeper than that?  Has the binary in Mind of My Mind been changed from a color issue to a human-non human issue (the way in which one behaves)?

Afrofuturism

            As we talked about in class, the science fiction genre contains a large variety of sub-genres, but usually revolves around some kind of change in our familiar environment that must be dealt with.  In class we talked about science fiction needing to be able to respond to the “hard questions” about reality.   In science fiction the character or society is frequently forced into a situation they are not prepared to respond to because something does not follow “standard” human moral or scientific law.   In his essay “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” Eshun writes “Black existence and science fiction are one and the same” (298).  He further writes, “Most science fiction tales dramatically deal with how the individual is going to contend with these alienating, dislocating societies and circumstances that pretty much sums up the mass experiences of black people in the postslavery twentieth century” (298).  The truth is, many minority groups daily have lived out and still live out a type of “science fiction” where they face alienation and dislocation.  They must respond to circumstances not encountered by the majority.

            Throughout “Deep End” by Nisi Shawl, the main character Wayna spends her time floating through a space ship in a body not her own.  The ship brings the prisoners to a new planet where they will serve as glorified “mammies.”  The story reminded me of a journey of a slave to America on a slave ship.  The prisoners are fed just enough food to survive, given little information about where they are and where they are going, and are expected to obey command without question.   The extraterrestrial circumstances Wayna encounters chillingly reflect the circumstances encountered by slaves brought to America.  I took a slave narrative class from Dr. Rivera last year and we read this short story as a slave narrative.  It made sense to me as a type of neo-slave narrative but I’ve never thought about science fiction as black existence and science fiction being “one and the same.”  Eshun’s ideas have given me a new perspective on “Deep End” and a lot of other science fiction texts.     

            I very much like the science fiction genre, specifically dystopian novels and science fiction movies.  While reading Eshun’s article and “Deep End,”  several movies were brought to my mind that I really enjoyed.  We talked about The Matrix in class, but that movie along with Planet of the Apes and District 9 are all movies I thought could connect with Afrofuturism.  It has been a while since I have seen these three movies but if I see any of them in the near future I will definitely watch for themes brought up by Eshun and Shawl.  If anyone has thoughts about these or other science fiction movies and their connection with Afrofuturism, I would love to hear them! 

            How does the option of download at the end of “Deep End” (Wayna’s decision to download and Thad and Doe’s decision not to download) connect with slavery and freedom, especially if it is read as a slave narrative?  What other popular science fiction books and films can be connected with Afrofuturism and possibly be read as a neo-slave narrative?

English 423

For the next ten weeks I will be posting weekly some thoughts and ideas about texts I am reading in English 423 at Western Washington University.  Enjoy!