Stories for Chip (7 page)

*Mark Dery irks me (and I think Delany too) just a bit because he coined the neologism “Afrofuturism” after interviewing three astute black intellectuals (Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose) who establish some of the parameters for Afrofuturism. More than once, Delany indicts Dery's “interpretative idiocies” for lifting a book, in this case William Gibson's
Neuromancer
(1984), “out of its genre” (195), which indicates Dery's “historical misunderstanding about the history and tradition of science fiction” (202). Even more problematic for Delany, Dery uses “White writers for [his] science fiction template for thinking about the problems blacks have in America” (195). For me, Dery misappropriates the philosophical verve of Delany, Tate, and Rose by wrongfully taking credit for the term Afrofuturism. Delany, Tate, and Rose do the heavy intellectual lifting in the set of interviews, where they make trenchant observations about science fiction's relationship to black cultures and vice versa.

Unfortunately, Dery's limited definition has become the benchmark against which all other competing ideologies are measured. Dery states, “Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth century technoculture—and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future—might, for want of a better term, be called ‘Afro-futurism'” (180). Yet Afrofuturism is not just about technology and black uses of technology but is a way of viewing the world. That is to say, “our imaginings of the future are always complicated extensions of the past” (Nelson 35). Afrofuturism preserves “peoples of African descent, their ways and histories, [and ensures they] will not disappear in any credible future” (Kilgore 569). This sentiment is exactly why Delany believes that “if science fiction has any use at all, it is that among all its various and variegated future landscapes it gives us [black people] images
for
our futures” (
Starboard Wine
31).

A case in point: It is Delany who first links slavery with Afrofuturism in “Black to the Future,” not Dery. Slavery as the foundation of the US depended on the “systematic, conscientious, and massive destruction of African cultural remnants” according to Delany (Dery 191). (This parenthetical citation, Dery 191, is what vexes me so—some rich, white guy defrauding Delany's thoughtfulness, not to mention Tate's and Rose's, and defining my science fiction for me.) Delany gets it exactly right in identifying how the vestiges of the Atlantic slave trade have formed and reformed black cultures on both sides of the ocean, something readily apparent in science fiction written by blacks in the Americas and increasingly on the African continent. In this regard, Afrofuturism means speculative writing by black people in a global context. Consequently, hope becomes a core Afrofuturist concept embedded within the still-oppressive conditions that blacks face on a daily basis going all the way back to antebellum America.

Hope fuels the fundamental emotional drive that foments resistance, rebellion, and subversive writing by and for black people. Hope unsettles the white order of things. Hope also makes allies between the races. That's why I greatly admire the work of Mark Bould and Lisa Yaszek on Afrofuturism, among others.
⁵
To paraphrase Yaszek, there are three basic goals for Afrofuturism: tell good stories, recover lost black histories and their influence on contemporary black cultures, and think on exactly how such recovered pasts “might inspire” black future “visions” (2).

As I see it, Afrofuturism provides a set of race-inflected reading protocols designed to investigate the optimisms and anxieties framing the future imaginings of people of color. It's the first of the alternative futurisms related to race and ethnicity to emerge and disrupt the colorblind future envisioned by white writers, but not the last by any stretch of the imagination: Indigenous Futurism and Chicanafuturism have now gathered critical masses along with Asian American futurisms that refute yellow peril science fiction and techno-orientalism. Such a rich intellectual legacy belongs to the greatest Afrofuturist of all—Samuel R. Delany.

In truth, I have debated writing this penultimate section of my Delany encounters and re-encounters. This internal dispute centers on one question: “Who on Earth would want to hear about my favorite Delany novels?” Yet, the essay feels somehow incomplete without it. I think John Pfeiffer nailed my feeling for Delany's fiction nearly forty years ago with this declaration:

Delany's work is a rich lode awaiting discovery by the socially conscious general reader. It could not exist apart from a bonefelt knowledge of the past and present Black experience. It extrapolates this history, rather, and its vision is of encounters with the racisms of a post-revolutionary age, subtle to the point of being metaphysical, presaging a future in which certain sociological problems of the present, then solved, must be met once again on the level of the individual. (37)

If Pfeiffer didn't do it, then Jane B. Weedman did thirty-two years ago when she declared: “Delany uses the distancing technique to approach his white audience with the realities of black culture…as the product of his double-consciousness” (11). And if the essence was not captured by Weedman's incisive remarks, then Sandra Govan's did so thirty-years ago when she opined, “Delany parades black characters across the spectrum of his speculative fiction not simply to attest to black survival in the future, but to punctuate his social criticism of our present” (48). If Govan didn't, then Takayuki Tatsumi surely did articulate my feelings twenty-seven years ago when stating, “As a writer, [Delany] has certainly been concerned with genres of minority literatures, for instance, science fiction, science fiction criticism, feminist literature, sometimes pornography or gay literature, and of course black literature” (269). Or if these older pronouncements on Delany's magnitude fail to capture my sentiments, then Jeffery A. Tucker did so a mere five years ago by testifying that “In Delany's work, science fiction presents itself as a genre that is particularly suited to, even a necessity for, contemporary African American intellectual inquiry, with Delany as a specific and exemplary model who guides his readers through a variety of webs—epistemological and semiotic as well as electronic” (251).

It seems I have no words of my own. Delany is a living genius, rendering identity politics in all of its manifestations and vagaries. For me, his portrayals of race and racism make all the difference in science fiction. Others treasure his representations of gay identity and alternate sexualities, his descriptions of social and political class designations, his masterful use of critical theory. My own list of favorite Delany novels follows in reverse order, in true David Letterman style.

#5
The Einstein Intersection
(1967): Humans have left the Earth, and an alien race has settled down on the planet to live among the remnants of human culture. The story is told by Lo Lobey, a brown-skinned simian-like humanoid, who has the gift of music: he plays on his machete. The functional members of this alien society have titles such as Lo, La, and Le, denoting purity and normalcy among the race, whereas the unfunctional are caged, cared for, and killed when necessary. Lobey learns his music through old recordings of groups like the Beatles and by listening to his elders make connections between 60s pop culture and Greek myths such as Orpheus. The story centers on Lobey's search for his lost love La Friza through the debris of human culture as he encounters a giant bull underground, a feminine computer named Phaedra, killer flowers, dragon herders, and other functionals who are different such as Spider, Green-eye, Dove, and Kid Death. Delany suggests that we break away from entrapping myths through this absolutely brilliant race novel.

#4
Dhalgren
(1975): I enjoy the challenge of
Dhalgren
and understand it as an ironic commentary on segregation.
Dhalgren
forced me to take my time, reading in five- to ten-page spurts on a nearly daily basis in order to absorb its many textures. Kid, a half-Native American drifter-poet-criminal in search of his forgotten identity, enters the stricken imaginary Midwestern city of Bellona, a city where the fabric of reality unravels. Some nameless disaster impacts this city to the extent that entire city blocks burn one week and are unharmed a week later; time dilates and does strange things; two moons rise on some evenings, or a gigantic sun rises and sets. For Kid, Bellona “is a city of inner discordances and natural distortions” populated by youth gangs, rapists, and murderers, as well as gays, transvestites, and local celebrities, in addition to questionably sane individuals (14). While othering himself in the process, Kid finds no resolution in this broken city despite trying out many identities not his own. The novel culminates at its beginning and continues to challenge me.

#3
Trouble on Triton
(1976): The reformed Martian prostitute Bron Helstrom, immigrates to the Neptunian moon Triton in search of happiness as some kind of masculine ideal, as near as I can figure. Political and economic tensions escalate between the inner planets (Earth and Mars) and the solar system's outer moons, eventually leading to interplanetary war. Against such a backdrop, Bron does not find happiness, because of his self-absorption and the difficulty he has in forming meaningful relationships. He meets and falls in love with a theater woman known as the Spike, and loses her in his desire to possess her. Ultimately, he becomes a woman by undergoing sexual orientation reassignment and body modification in the hope of finding the male that he desperately wanted to be before the change. Bron as man or woman cannot be happy. This novel taught me a great deal more about identity politics beyond racial parameters.

#
2
Babel-17
(1966): Galaxy-famous “Oriental” poet Rydra Wong is enlisted by the military to decode an alien language known as Babel-17 and help fight the invasion of alien humans. She puts a spaceship crew together herself to decipher the language from the site of the next incident. From the start of the mission, things go wrong: her ship communications are sabotaged, she realizes that there is a traitor among her crew, an important military official is assassinated in her presence, her ship is tampered with again, and she and her crew are taken captive, then rescued by a space pirate working for the alliance. While participating in the fighting, Rydra teaches a murderer named the Butcher the concept of “I” in language. Somehow, Rydra's mind becomes linked with the Butcher's through Babel-17, whereupon Rydra figures out that the language of Babel-17 is a flawed weaponized language. The novel ends with the Alliance turning the tables on the Invaders with the corrected language. Delany conveys that racial antagonisms can be overcome through communication—either that or violence.

#1
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
(1984): While many fans and scholars consider
Dhalgren
as Delany's masterpiece, I deem
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
his magnum opus. I very much like the neo-slave narrative vibe of its opening sentence “‘Of course'…‘you will be a slave'” (3). The Radical Anxiety Termination technology that strips Korga of his identity to rid him of antisocial behavior and sexual deviance in conjunction with corporate slavery plain scares me. Rat Korga is the lone survivor of a cultural fugue event, a holocaust caused by socioeconomic collapse and competing political systems, that destroys his home world Rhyonon.Of course, the far-future setting, intergalactic empire, and love affair help me choose this novel as my favorite of favorites. Delany turns gendered language on its head with one simple change: every human being becomes “she” regardless of biology unless a person is the object of sexual desire and then becomes “he,” again irrespective of sex. Thus, he creates something profoundly alien about gender by defamiliarizing language. The love affair between Marq Dyeth, ambassador to alien worlds and industrial diplomat, and Rat Korga threatens to bring about a second planet-wide destruction on Dyeth's own home planet Velm. The novel involves identity politics in every conceivable way—race, gender, sex, class, and family—and strips from us all forms of intolerance. Now that's powerful artistry.

*I hope my continuing self-reflection on why I study race in science fiction demonstrates my commitment. As the only black Grand Master of science fiction, Delany's work inescapably infuses my own. Indeed, Delany's worlds are fully occupied by all kinds of minorities, especially people of color, and I quite simply love that.

End Notes

¹
See my introduction to
Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction
entitled “Coloring Science Fiction” (2014) and my essay “Black Grit: or, Why I Study Race and Racism in Science Fiction” (2014)
.

²
See Carl Freedman's
Critical Theory and Science Fiction
(2000) as well as
Conversations with Samuel R. Delany
(2009).

³
See Chapter VIII of Richard Wright's memoir
Black Boy
(1945), where he drops out of junior high after being named the valedictorian of his ninth grade class and refusing to read the speech provided for him by the school's principal.

⁴
See my review of
Dark Matter
, “A Century of Black SF,” in
Science Fiction Studies
28.2 (2001): 140-3.

⁵
See Bould's essay “The Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF” (2007) and Yaszek's essay “An Afrofuturist Reading of Ralph Ellison's
Invisible Man
” (2005).

Works Cited

Anderson, Sherwood.
Winesburg, Ohio
. 1919. New York: Dover, 1995. Print.