October 2019 – Black Science Fiction

A logarithmic map of the known universe.

The Matilda of Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghost is a generation ship. Sent out into the depths of space in one final, desperate hope for humankind, she and her crew have been traveling for approximately three hundred years ship-time. Though this novel is set in a relatively distant futurity, it seems that some aspects of life have never quite changed at all, and in some cases, have devolved back into the darkest and most despicable parts of human civilization’s past.

In An Unkindness of Ghosts, the word ‘slavery’ is never used. It is intentionally left unspoken, and it is left to the reader to realize through slow and painful revelations carefully spaced throughout the novel that what has happened on the Matilda is, indeed, the subjugation and enslavement of those with darker skin, or those who have descended from the people of the African diaspora, when such a term would have been meaningful to the inhabitants of the ship. Terms as fundamental as ‘Earth’ have fallen out of the vocabulary of the passengers of Matilda. They have lost all sense of their heritage, even something as basic and as vital as their homeworld, which is now remembered only as The Great Lifehouse.

“History wanted to be remembered,” Aster notes early on in the novel. “Evidence hated having to live in dark, hidden places and devoted itself to resurfacing. Truth was messy. The natural order of an entropic universe was to tend towards it.” (59) These lines belie the fact that history on the Matilda has, indeed, been largely forgotten. They also foreshadow Aster’s gradual recovery of the truth her mother had given her life to find, and her return to Earth.

This novel left me with more questions than answers, and it broke my heart, but it was a necessary novel, one that I recommend to everyone despite the difficulty of reading about overseers and blackouts that hurt only the subjugated classes and decks of the ship, as well as executions and the tragic, beautiful ending, where Aster returns to Earth. She “didn’t know what tragedy had befallen this place, but time seemed to have erased it. Though 325 years had passed on the Matilda, a thousand had passed here.” (348)

An Unkindness of Ghosts makes a powerful statement about the capacity of humankind for brutality and the cruelty people are capable of in a world (or a ship) that relies on systemic oppression and slavery in order to keep the upper classes fed and enable them to live a leisurely lifestyle. Slavery illuminates one of the darkest aspects of our species – precisely because it robs other human beings of agency and freedom, and seeks to destroy and negate their very humanity itself.

In drawing on the past to inform a vision of the future, An Unkindness of Ghosts paints a bleak picture, featuring the very worst humankind has to offer, as well as the enduring strength of subjugated peoples, and their resiliency in the face of the harshest of circumstances. It is a portrait that encompasses the past and the future and depicts the best and worst of human civilization.

Sofia Samatar, in “Toward a Planetary History of Afrofuturism,” highlights the complex web of interactions between the past, the present, and the future. She states that “Afrofuturism, as seen through the data thief, is always about all times: past, present, and future. The excavation of the past is essential, for it is from those historical fragments that the data thief or bricoleur constructs visions of what is to come.” The concept of the data thief originates from The Last Angel of History (John Akomfrah and Edward George), and involves a data ‘thief’ who must stay away from the virus known as History – with a capital H denoting that it is a product of the dominant narrative, and does not necessarily factor in the histories and narratives of those outside the domain of the group of people writing the history books.

Thus, it is all times that Afrofuturist literature concerns itself with – though the name might imply otherwise. Afrofuturism does not simply devote itself to the realm of the future. Quite to the contrary, Afrofuturism is deeply rooted in both the present and the past. Elements of each are carefully selected to make a deliberate point through the medium of artwork, literature, music, or any other forms of artistic expression. In An Unkindness of Ghosts, elements are taken from life in the antebellum South and paired with futuristic technology. The dissonance this juxtaposition creates is vital to understanding the purpose and message of the novel, which warns of the perils of class divisions along racial lines through the metaphor of the hierarchy of decks upon the Matilda.

You are here. Our ancestors have all lived and died upon this world. It is the home of humankind, one so often taken for granted. It is rarely put in its proper perspective – that it is one planet, orbiting a single star in one of 200 billion galaxies. The universe is a vast and lonely place, and in reflecting upon this simple, elegant fact, one realizes that our differences are insignificant on a cosmic scale. To paraphrase Marcus Aurelius, we must watch the courses of the stars as if we revolve with them.

If one ponders for a while, the realization that Earth is the ultimate generation ship comes to mind – here is where all human life evolved, where all of us, no matter our color, class, race, gender, sexuality, gender identity, or ethnic background, have lived. Only a very few of us have ever ventured out into the shallows of the cosmic waters, either through brief jaunts to the moon and back, or travels to space stations. To quote Carl Sagan, “Earth is where we make our stand” – for now, at least. In the universe presented by An Unkindness of Ghosts, the only home we’ve ever known was abandoned for the great unknown because of dire conditions, such as those we face now through anthropogenic global warming. Generation upon generation of humankind have lived and died here, yet it is only recently we have begun to impact the global environment in such ruinous ways. The planet Earth is, for now, all we have, and it is our duty to be kinder to it – and to each other, lest the mistakes of history become the perils of the future.

I will leave you with a short video that maps the visible universe, beginning at a mountain range on Earth and zooming out to the edges of the known universe.

Loyiso Mkize is the South African artist who created the oil painting above. In an interview with Design Indaba, he said that his work often addresses gender. “I was talking about love, I was talking about war, I was talking about beauty, divinity, I was talking about miseducation, I was talking about the dynamics between African men and women, about that relationship that the male principle has with the female principle in the African context,” he said in response to a question about power struggles between genders.

In the artist’s own words, “his life’s work embodies the message(s) of self-awareness, acknowledgment, strength, and radical presence.”

Our world is governed by a web of overlapping, interconnected social constructs, many of which are left unspoken and are instead perpetuated by the slow, inexorable molding of our selves through our parents/caregivers and our peers and our elders. Gender is one such social construct. Many people believe that gender is black and white – or rather, pink and blue. A growing number of people have come to understand that gender is indeed a spectrum.

This revelation is not a new one by any standards. Having additional gender identities beyond the binary of male and female is not uncommon in the history of humankind. A number of indigenous populations in the Americas have been known to respect the gender of two-spirited people. The Lakota call them Winkte, the Zuni call them Lhamana. The Mohave have four genders, male, female, Alyha and Hwame. The Navajo call two-spirit individuals Nádleeh. Examples of more than two genders being woven into the cultural fabric of a society are found across the entire world, on every continent with the exception of Antarctica.

However, the Western world has historically recognized only two genders – male and female. The difference between the sexes seemed biologically self-evident, and intersex babies were promptly assigned a role inside the gender binary. This state of affairs is slowly improving for those who fall elsewhere on the gender spectrum. The studies of anthropologists can confirm gender is, in fact, a spectrum. It is not merely pink and blue – it is all the colors of the rainbow.

Another of Mkize’s works which addresses the relationship between femininity and power.

In the artist’s words, found on the biographical page of his website, Mkize hopes his work “carries with it an intention to communicate ideas that he finds most important in his life, the most prominent of which is preserving the African identity.”

Gender as a social construct is one of the major themes that An Unkindness of Ghosts addresses. From the first page, a gender-neutral child, Flick, who is referred to with they/them pronouns is introduced. One of the primary power struggles in the novel is between the Surgeon, Theo, and the Sovereign, Lieutenant. Lieutenant often tells Theo that if the Surgeon is the ship’s Mother, and surely he is their Father. “It’s time you stop being a woman about these things,” (247) he says in one of the pivotal scenes, once the tension has reached a breaking point on the ship.

Towards the end of the novel, Theo confesses that he does not feel like a man, and Aster replies, “Aye. You gender-malcontent. You otherling… Me too. I am a boy and a girl and a witch all wrapped into one very strange, flimsy, indecisive body.” (308) This line sums up her experience grappling with gender, and assures Theo that he is not alone in feeling discontented with the gender identities sanctioned by their leaders.

On the Matilda, the concept of gender is continually reinforced by the Sovereign and the hierarchy he maintains on the ship. On certain decks, like the one Flick originated from, children are assigned gender-neutral pronouns and identities. Aster “was used to the style of her own deck where all children were referred to with feminine pronouns. Here, it was they.” (10) This refusal to bow to the gender norms of the ship and instead take a different approach to the gender binary is, I believe, a form of subtle rebellion, among many other instances and forms of dissent undertaken by the enslaved lower decks of the Matilda, containing only those with darker skin and savage guards that keep them subjugated, afraid, and disempowered.

Gender is one aspect of our identities as humans living within a society. In many ways, social norms shape and inform who we are. We have a limited amount of power and agency over how others perceive us. Their perceptions constitute a significant part of who we are, and how we self-identify. The concept of interpellation suggests that we internalize society’s ideologies and norms about who we should be, and that this, in turn, informs who we think we are. This continuing dialogue between our self-identity and the way others identify us shapes and molds our identity. No human is an island, or so the saying goes, and our place and purpose in the web of society are determined by a variety of complexities, identity among them.

This is the light spectrum. Visible light is shown to be a tiny portion of the entirety of the spectrum. Gender is also a spectrum. The binary of ‘male’ and ‘female’ at the exclusion of all other identities is very limiting, as it is a small portion of the entire spectrum of genders, in all their beauty.

An Unkindness of Ghosts addresses this aspect of society not merely for the richness it adds to the text, but also as a commentary on our own society. The cogs of society are often slow-turning. Changes in social norms rarely happen overnight. It is the duty of the writer and the literary scholar to shine a light on these matters, so that forward motion may be achieved. An Unkindness of Ghosts illuminates many such pressing topics, including that of gender-identity, gender-queerness, and transgender people. It makes a statement on the damages incurred when a gender binary is rigidly fixed in any given society, and in turn, implies that the implementation of a gender spectrum can be deeply healing to those who feel trapped by the gender binary.

Month: October 2019

The Silent Spaces Between the Stars