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.
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.