The Future of Us

The Future of Us An Anthology

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The Future of Us 3

Credits

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Before w e Begin...

Florence Okoye

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Forew ord

Natalie C Luw isha

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Be Like Kemba; The Creation of Reconnection; Soul Sista Chiedza from Planet 9

Quentin VerCetty

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Secret Insurrection: Blood bonds, M emory binds

Stephani M aari Booker

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African Customs and the Original M antra of Sustainability: Nature as the Sacred M other

Chiadikobi Nw aubani

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Spirit Walk

M ame Bougouma Diene

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Escape, No Option, No Return; Sun Ra w ith a Harriet Jesus Peace; Escape to Saturn

Stacey Robinson

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The Past, Present and Future in Critical Afrofuturisms

Jennifer Terry

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M emespring

Ifeoma M aduka

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Rooted in Stars; The First Interracial Kiss on Television; Black Hole Soul

Walidah Imarisha

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Nuri

Fatimah White

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Saving Face; Synthesis

Curtia Wright

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We Travel the Spacew ays: Afrofuturist Space Programs

Erik Steinskog

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Ghost in the Shell

Sammy Boras

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Urban Dystopia

Naomi M

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Doppelganger

Peter Kalu

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Cover by Ian Bobb.

Editors: Charlotte Bailey, Florence Okoye

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Before we Begin...

As alw ays, w e should begin w ith a note of appreciation. M any thanks to everyone w ho contributed to our very first anthology, ?The Future Of Us?. We intended this to be a collection of art, poetry, essays and short stories dedicated to show casing contemporary Afrofuturism and w e w ere really taken aback by the generosity of all the artists and academics and w riters w ho donated their w ork.

Thanks must also go to the various editors w ho have taken the time to read through the anthology, providing much needed feedback and suggestions. Extra special thanks to Charlotte Bailey from Laydeez Do Comics Birmingham, w ho w as a crucial part of this effort!

The theme for the anthology w as the future black experience and w e invited submissions of all media to help us explore this topic.

Whether looking at African history to inspire new ideas about humanity?s relationship w ith the environment, or analysing depictions of the black existence in popular culture, all the submissions touch on this central idea, combining humour w ith thoughtful intent.

Initially, w e intended the anthology as a companion piece to help support our conference w hich took place in October, 2015. Hosted by the w onderful space that is M adLab, the AfroFutures_UK 2015 conference w as a time of brilliant talks and presentations, challenging discussions and beautiful artw ork. With guest speakers from UK, the States, Denmark and France, the day time conference w as follow ed by an evening Afrofuturist Ball. It is thanks to 4

everyone?s hard w ork, w hether as volunteer, videographer, guest speaker or performer, that AfroFutures_UK turned out as the success it w as.

Now w e face forw ard to continue the w ork that has been begun w ith more conferences, exhibitions and educational w orkshops, ever looking for new w ays to encourage people to see afrofuturism in new w ays, especially as a perspective that can help us transform our communities.

We hope you enjoy the anthology and continue to support the w ork of the very talented folk w e?ve been privileged to feature in this collection.

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Foreword Afrofuturism; a term I heard in passing through the media and literature from the 90s. But w hat does it mean to me today, as a millennial black w oman? The answ ers became clear from the moment I arrived at the Afro Futures UK event.

Through the beautiful art, literature about the black experience today, and the w elcoming atmosphere, I began to realise that w e, as black people, have a vital role to play in our future experience. We need to step up and become the creators of that future. This is particularly critical in the STEAM sectors: Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and M athematics.

As a female structural engineer, I am one of the very few in my field, and through my career I am integral to our future structures, infrastructure and physical environment. What is more important is that I am visible to other young black and ethnic minority groups as an inspiration.

The AfroFutures_UK event to me means that black people must not just be a part of the future, but actively engage in creating it!

The hard w ork that Florence and the creators of AfroFutures_UK have done to bring together many talented individuals is outstanding.

And her w ork as a w oman in Tech is one of the many valuable skills she shares w ith the w orld.

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Quentin VerCetty is an aw ard w ining contemporary griot w ho know s no boundaries w hen it comes to his artistic expression. His w ork includes painting, illustration, mural w orks, photography, graphic design and spoken w ord poetry. His practices focuses on the effectiveness of activism and controlling the narrative of your ow n story. As a recent graduate of the Ontario College of Art Design University, his current body of w ork focuses on futuristic narratives that has to deal w ith space exploration, community building engagement and migration.

To learn more about Quentin and his w ork visit w w w .vercetty.format.com | w w w .vercetty.com

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Be Like Kemba Mix Media Painting on Wood Panel This piece of art is a ?sankofa?beckoning from a chronaut named Kemba. Kemba means ?A Gift from God?in Sw ahili, and she has traveled through time to remind her people w ho they are, w here they have come from and w hat they are capable of. On her back she carries her ancient Akan adinkra symbols each bearing profound reminders to help us grow closer to the greatness that w e came from.

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The Creation of Reconnection Digital Painting When it comes to AfriXan culture, the lines betw een prophecy, fantasy, mythology, science fiction and forgotten herstory become hard to distinguish. The state of AfriXan people globally is seen here as reflected in the spiritual state of the w oman w ho can be seen as the pillar and foundation of the nation. This painting w as inspired by Octavia Butler' s acclaimed book series ?Parables of a Sow er?and ?Parables of The Talent?. It brings into question w hat are w e doing and w hat are w e going to do in order to carry out our missions as "Earthseeds".

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Soul Sista Chiedza from Planet 9 Acrylic and Aerosol on Canvas There are certain people that w e meet in this w orld w hom w e instantly gravitate tow ards. Sometimes w e know w hy, and sometimes w e don' t. This painting w as attempt to capture the complexity of unexpressed emotions betw een tw o creative beings from different w orlds. Taking inspiration from impressionism, it depicts how w e w ould perceive each other in a w orld w here telepathic abilities give us synthetics capabilities to see synergy in color.

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Stephani M aari Booker of M inneapolis, M N, w rites prose and poetry for the page and for performance in w hich she w restles w ith her multiple marginalized identities: African American, lesbian, low er-class, nerdy and sexy. She holds an M FA from Hamline University of St. Paul, M N and is a contributing editor for the African American new spaper M innesota Spokesman-Recorder.

Journals that have published her creative w ork include Adrienne: A Poetry Journal of Queer Women, The Voices Project, Cactus Heart, Skin to Skin, phati' tude Literary M agazine and Pittsburgh Flash Fiction Gazette.

Anthologies and collections that feature her w ork include Jalada 02: Afrofuture(s) (2015); Queenies, Fades, Blunts: A Zine (The Lonely Londoners, 2014); Coming Together: Girl on Girl (EroticAnthology.com, 2013); 60 Seconds to Shine: 221 One-minute M onologues For Women (M onologue Audition Series, Volume 2) edited by John Capecci and Irene Ziegler Aston (Smith & Kraus Inc., 2006); and Longing, Lust, and Love: Black Lesbian Stories edited by Shonia L. Brow n (Nghosi Books, 2006).

She has also performed most recently for Queer Voices: An LGBT Reading Series at Intermedia Arts, the Annual Women?s Author Event presented by Quatrefoil Library and the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection at the University of M innesota, Pow er to the People Stage at 2014 Tw in Cities Pride, and "The Love Project" presented by Obsidian Arts at Pillsbury House Theatre in M inneapolis, M N. Another excerpt from the novel Secret Insurrection (w hich predates ?Blood bonds, M emory binds? in story order) w as published in the online anthology Jalada 02: Afrofuture(s).

For more information about Stephani' s w ork, go to w w w .goodreads.com/athenapm or follow her on Tw itter @blackathenapm.

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Secret Insurrection: Blood bonds, Memory binds A private commodities trading ship w as docked at one of the many massive artificial islands, anchored in Earth?s oceans, constructed as small space vessel ports. Before landing, the ship had notified the Terrestrial Port Authority of its arrival and the death of a crew member, the senior of one of the ship ow ner?s tw o clones. The tw o remaining crew members ? after being positively identified by retinal/iris and hand-print scans as ow ner Lydia Ehemw ah and her second clone, Lydia 3 ? stood aside as TPA officials boarded their ship and investigated the site w here the first clone died from an accidental fall, according to her original. The officials visually recorded the sleep chamber w here the death occurred and then retrieved the body from the cold storage chamber w here the ow ner and her clone placed it, putting it in a sterile preserving casket before removing it from the ship to be sent to the nearest Thantoservice Center, w here the body w ould get an autopsy scan and afterw ard be processed for disposal. Less than 24 hours later, the TPA notified the ow ner of the ship that the official inquiry w as completed and that she w as free to leave the port w ith her surviving clone to claim the remains of her deceased clone.

An air shuttle landed on a pad at the top of a 650-meter skyscraper, one of the many that made up M ichiganopolis, the mega-city that surrounded the southern shore of Lake M ichigan. The Lydias w ere tw o of the passengers w ho disembarked and took elevators to their apartment homes in the slim, silver tow er. Eventually, the Lydias arrived at the 150th floor and w alked to their new home.

The tw o w omen w ere silent w ith each other throughout the short journey from the port to the Thantoservice Center and then to the 12

skyscraper; they didn?t exchange a w ord until after entering the apartment. ?Ahhhhh! ? Lydia 3 loudly sighed as the door closed, and she turned to hug Lydia 2 tightly.

Lydia 2 w rapped one arm around her clone sister; the other arm held a w hite box that contained their original?s remains. ?You did good,? she said quietly. ?You didn?t say much, and you cried a lot. That?s w hat they w ould expect from a clone w hose sister is dead.? ?And you didn?t cry at all,? Lydia 3 said, pulling back a little to look Lydia 2 in the face. ?How could you hold back and be so calm through all this?? ?Originals don?t view clone deaths as a big deal,? Lydia 2 said. ?I couldn?t be carrying on crying like you w hen I?m supposed to be an original. As far as anybody else is concerned, I could just go order a clone baby to replace Lydia and move on.? ?Damn, that?s so cold! ? Lydia 3 let go of her clone sister and backed aw ay. ?I?m just saying that?s the w ay they think here,? Lydia 2 said. ?You know that. Besides, as an original, I had to keep myself together to get us past the port authority and get us here.? ?You?re not an original,? Lydia 3 corrected. ?That?s w hat I?m supposed to be though, right?? Lydia 2 shouted. ?That?s w hat I have to be from now on! ?

Lydia 3 stared back at her clone; then she dropped her head as the memories rushed through her mind: ?Lydia! What happened? Oh, never mind what happened. I?m going to get the medikit.?

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?Don?t bother.? ?What do you mean, ?don?t bother?? Lydia?s hurt!? ?She?s more than hurt! She?s dead!? ?Look, you w ere fine w ith Lydia taking us back to Earth, and now w e?re here,? Lydia 2 said. ?And as long as I don?t have to live as a clone anymore, I?m fine w ith staying here. But w e can alw ays go scatter Lydia?s remains in the Outlands and then just hop back on the ship and keep on traveling. What do you w ant to do??

Lydia 3 shook her head slow ly. ?We clones can?t own anything, remember? And we have to be in the custody of an original. So guess what? If we go to Earth, we get everything taken from us, and then they?ll give us to one of Lydia?s cousins or nieces or nephews, or whoever the hell is her closest relative. It doesn?t matter because we?ll have nothing, we?ll be stuck in Earther jurisdiction, and we?ll be treated like dirt!?

Lydia 2 took a step and placed her free hand on her clone sister?s shoulder. ?Look, w e don?t have to decide or do anything right now .

We have a lot of freedom now , and a w hole lot of credits on top of that to do w hatever w e w ant. Why don?t w e just get something to eat, sit dow n, and w atch some ?net? We can just stay in and then go to the Outlands w henever w e are ready.? ?I just w ant to go lie dow n,? Lydia 3 w hispered. ?There is a way we can take Lydia back to Earth and not have to lose everything.? ?O.K., but at least let me get us both something to eat, all right??

Lydia 2 said, w alking into the main room. She touched a spot on a bare-looking gray w all, and a draw er opened up. She placed the box w ith her original?s remains inside. After touching the front of the draw er, the draw er disappeared in the w all. ?To pass Lydia off as a clone, we would have to get past the eye scan 14

and the hand scan, and you know that?s impossible.? ?We can beat the scans. You forget that we?ve got over 100 million credits, and Fiesel Ta doesn?t just have volcanic mud baths and mineral baths for sale. They also have cosmetic procedures. They can change, or transplant, anything.? ?You want to transplant Lydia?s eyes and hands... into one of us??

Choking on a sob, Lydia 3 rushed to a bedroom and closed the door.

After a few days spent in the apartment, the Lydias took another air shuttle to the regional airport. The shuttle had 12 row s of four seats divided by an aisle that placed tw o seats on one side and tw o on the other. The shuttle w as a little less than half full, so the tw o w omen had a fair choice of seats.

There w as a mixture of originals and clones aboard the shuttle. They w ere easy to tell apart: Originals dressed as individuals, w earing everything from slacks and plain shirts to short skirts, to long-sleeved, ankle-length tunics, w ith accessories ranging from simple caps to elaborately w rapped headscarves, all in a variety of patterns and colors ranging from solid black to brassy metallics. The clones w ere allow ed to w ear only a form-fitting body suit, available in a limited assortment of solid colors but plain and un-accessorized, not even w ith pockets.

Lydia 3 immediately took a seat next to a w indow . Lydia 2 follow ed her clone sister to the seat next to her, but she did not sit dow n. ?I w ant this seat,? Lydia 2 said quietly but firmly. ?But I w ant a w indow seat,? Lydia 3 protested mildly. ?Why don?t you sit in the seat in front of me?? she proposed, nodding her head tow ard the back of that seat. ?Then w e?d both have w indow seats.?

Lydia 2 hardened her voice. ?Get up ? now ! ?

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Lydia 3 opened her mouth to snap back at Lydia 2, then she remembered that here in public, she w asn?t needling a clone sister ? she w as defying an original. She closed her mouth, sw allow ed hard, and then stood up. The tw o w omen changed places, Lydia 2 taking the w indow seat and Lydia 3 sitting next to her.

Lydia 2 took Lydia 3?s hand and squeezed it, not quite tightly enough to hurt. As she did this, Lydia 2?s eyes bore into her secret clone sister.

Lydia 3 low ered her head and sat back into the seat. Lydia 2 released Lydia 3?s hand and then turned her head to look out the w indow .

The Lydias w ere silent for the rest of the ride as the shuttle stopped at other skyscraper air pads to pick up more passengers. At one stop, Lydia 3 heard the pilot say, ?There?s only 11 seats available. Some of you w ill have to take the next shuttle.? Then the shuttle started filling up w ith a crow d of people. As the passengers entered, the clones aboard started rising from their seats and moving into the aisle.

Originals then took the clones?former seats.

Lydia 3 stood up and ceded her seat to a male original. As he sat dow n, Lydia 2 nodded to him and then resumed w atching the view from the w indow . As the man placed a ?net-view ing visor over his eyes and sat back in his seat, Lydia 3 ? standing in the aisle, pressed by the bodies of other clones ? stared at the sight of her clone sister w earing one of Lydia Ehemw ah?s body w raps, sitting w ith an original as all other clones stood.

Lydia 3 felt a squeezing pain in her gut. She w anted to go to the onboard lavatory to vomit, but she didn?t w ant to jostle her w ay through the crow d of clones to get there.

The regional airport, like all the airports, w as located at a mega-city by an ocean, in this case by the shore of the Atlantic, not far from the space port island w here the Lydias returned to Earth. As they w aited in a lobby to board their plane, Lydia 2 took Lydia 3?s hand firmly and w hispered, ?Keep your damn mouth shut.? Lydia 2 then reached into 16

a large shoulder bag she w as carrying and pulled out a ?net-view ing visor. ?Here, sit dow n, put these on and enjoy yourself ? quietly.?

Lydia 3 boarded the plane at a separate door from Lydia 2. The only clones allow ed in first class w ere the stew ards w ho served the passengers. Second class, w here Lydia w ould sit, had simple row s of seats divided by an aisle, but there w ere more seats per row and more row s than on a shuttle. Even w ith more seating, the clone passengers w ere crow ded together, ordered by a stew ard to fill every seat starting w ith the rear row w ith no empty seats betw een passengers, leaving the rear of the section filled and the front empty.

After Lydia 3 took a seat betw een tw o other passengers, she looked around. M any of the passengers, but not all, w ere equipped w ith ?net visors to help them pass the time on the long trip w ith one stop in Europe, one in Asia and then Australia. ?Australia has the greatest diversity of parrot species on Earth. They come in so many colors. They make New Guinea birds of paradise look dull. It will be nice to see them.? ?Yeah. We can go outside the cities and spend a lot of time in the Outlands with the credits we have now.? ?Uh-huh. We sure couldn?t do that before. We can have a fun and relaxing life back on Earth. We don?t have to work, and we can travel as much as we want. I don?t get why Lydia is losing her mind over going back.? ?You know she doesn?t like being around Earthers.? ?She doesn?t like being treated like a clone. Mama raised us together to be sisters, and everything I had, you both had. Most clones don?t get treated like that.?

"Hey! ? A man?s voice cried out from behind Lydia 3, interrupting the painful flashback. ?You?re bumping my knees! ?

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?Sorry,? the man next to Lydia 3 gulped out, then he pulled his seat up.

Lydia 3 rose up and looked around so she could see w ho w as behind her. A very thin, short, elderly w oman had a ?net visor on and w as as quiet and still as a sleeping baby.

Lydia 3 sighed, turned back around, sat in her seat, and pushed it back to its fully reclined position. After placing her ?net visor over her eyes and w rapping the attached ear pieces around her ears, Lydia 3 sat back and tapped one side of the visor to turn it on.

A menu appeared on the right side of her vision, listing options such as ?Saved Video,? ?Saved Sites and Stations,? ?Go to? ? and ?Recommended Sites & Stations.? A small red point of light, guided

by Lydia 3?s eye movements, acted as a selector for the menu options.

Lydia 3 moved the light to ?Saved Sites & Stations? and then blinked tw ice. The menu disappeared, and another took its place, listing a number of different entertainment and informational ?net sites and stations loaded from the memory of the computer at the apartment.

She selected ?Warrior Queen of the Sahara.? Her vision w as filled w ith a three-dimensional, photo-realistic panorama of a desert oasis w ith a castle in the background. Words in the foreground inquired, ?Watch Warrior Queen,? ?Be Warrior Queen? ?Be Another Character.?

Lydia 3 selected ?Watch Warrior Queen.? She didn?t feel like experiencing or acting out the movie from the hero?s or any character?s point of view , affecting the movie?s actions and outcomes.

With her selection, the movie began and she w as inside an ancient castle as an invisible eye w atching the birth of the baby w ho w ould grow up to be the great Queen Zenobia.

When the plane landed in London, Lydia 3 w as able to grab a w indow seat in the exchange of passengers leaving and entering.

The stop at the airport lasted for a few hours, and Lydia 3 took a break from w atching ?net to look out a w indow and see the busy goings-on outside.

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As she w atched the landings and takeoffs of planes and shuttles, the people and cargo riding trams on the tarmac, Lydia 3 remembered the one other time she had ridden a plane on Earth, w hen all three Lydias w ere teenagers. That trip took the Lydias and their mother first to London, w here they took an air shuttle to the Straits of Gibraltar.

They then entered the Saharan Outlands at the North African tow n of Tanjah. This w as the closest the four could come to the sub-Saharan home of their ancient ancestors, w ho long ago had immigrated from a land on the w est coast of Africa to North America. The sub-Sahara w as accessible only through expensive overland rides for hire across days of desert and the thick rainforest, depopulated for generations and by law inhabited only by Outland caretakers and rare visitors.

Going to Africa w as a lifelong dream of the Lydias?mother, and as she and the Lydias rode through the old city center of Tanjah in a land vehicle driven by a caretaker, she mused, ?At last, w e?re in our homeland.? ?I don?t live here,? Lydia 2 mumbled, her head dow n and her body curled up in her seat. ?Don?t think I w on?t slap you w hen w e get to our room,? M ama hissed at Lydia 2. Corporal punishment w as illegal everyw here for everyone, but hitting clones in private w as an everyday, unspoken practice.

Lydia 3 looked out the w indow s of the vehicle and marveled at the ancient buildings meticulously maintained by the caretakers, w ho lived in the tow n as people did in ages past ? no pow er, primitive technology such as fire ovens in w hich they cooked food, harvested from small fields and herds of sheep and goats. Outside the city center and the fields, the rest of the area w as given over to the lush, tropical-like M editerranean w ildness of palm trees and fragrant flow ers.

The Lydias and their mother all stayed in a single room in a brick building w ith glassless w indow s, a w ooden door and a dirt floor. The caretakers of the building treated the group w ell, serving them 19

handmade flatbread, vegetables and goat meat w ith dates on the side for dinner that evening.

With no electronic entertainment to access, and w ith no electric lighting in the tow n, M ama ordered the girls to go to bed: a full day of activities w ould begin w ith sunrise the next day. They all slept in small, w ooden beds, each draped w ith a net connected to the ceiling to protect the sleepers from biting insects. The tw o clones lay in beds next to each other; their mother and their original w ere in beds on the other side of the room. Unaccustomed to going to sleep so early, the clones held a conversation in w hispers. ?I learned about cave people at school,? Lydia 2 grumbled. ?Now M ama has us living like them.? ?Yeah, it?s so dirty here, just dirty! ? Lydia 3 responded. ?And dark!

Whoo! You can?t see anything, not even your hand in front of your face! I didn?t know it could get that dark.? ?Well, I guess that?s w hat it?s like w ithout any lights,? Lydia 2 said. She paused for a moment, and then said, ?At least in the Outlands, they treat everybody the same.? ?Yeah, w e all got to squat over a hole in the ground w hen w e have to go to the lavatory! ? Lydia 3 said w ith a snicker. ?I?m serious,? Lydia 2 said. ?I mean, there?s no separate anything here ? no separate rooms, no separate travel, the caretakers treat us all nice ? w e?re all the same here, all living like cave people together.?

She paused again and then added, ?I almost w ish I could live here.? ?What?? Lydia 3 said. ?I thought you hated it here.? ?I don?t like all of us in one room and not having a toilet,? Lydia 2 said. ?But I could give that up to live somew here w here everybody is treated the same.?

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Lydia 2 took a longer pause, and then she said, ?Although in a w ay, it?s still the same. They may treat everybody the same in the Outlands, but only originals are allow ed to live here.?

Lydia 3?s seat vibrated suddenly and strongly, jolting her out of her sleep. As the vibration w as an alert so sleepers and ?net visor w earers w ould know that the plane had landed, she quickly pulled off her visor, rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and rose up to join the passengers w ho w ere disembarking in Australia.

A day later, the Lydias and tw o indigenous caretakers w ere traveling from the temperate south of the continent, through its desert heart, to its tropical northern edge. The vehicle they rode in w as large, block-shaped and ruggedly built on the outside, equipped w ith gigantic, deep-tread tires. Inside the cabin of the vehicle, the travelers sat in cushioned seats that could sw ivel for a complete turn and recline almost horizontally for sleeping. The vehicle provided drinking w ater and a lavatory, and it w as w ell stocked w ith food and other provisions for the w eeklong journey.

Lydia 3 w as glad for the comfort of the land vehicle, even though living in close quarters w ith three other people w as a bit of a strain.

She w as not looking forw ard to the rough lodging at Kakadu, sacred land of the indigenous Australians, w here they w ould be sleeping outdoors and carrying a small portable lavatory to ensure that non-resident w aste w as not left on the land.

As on the shuttle flight, Lydia 2 barely spoke to Lydia 3 on this part of the journey. Lydia 2 sat in one of the front tw o seats behind the driver. Across from her sat the other caretaker, a w oman w ith deep brow n skin and shockingly w hite hair. The w oman had just the barest hint of lines around her eyes, Lydia 3 thought, but there w ere plenty of procedures available to eliminate the signs of aging. How ever, people w ho chose not to let their faces age didn?t let their hair age, so for Lydia 3 the w oman w as strange and intriguing to behold.

The w oman kept up a steady patter of narrative on indigenous 21

history and culture, as w ell as the more interesting sights on their journey to Kakadu. Lydia 2 w as silent though most of the w oman?s talk, but she looked attentive, turning her seat to face the w oman, looking out the w indow s and nodding w hen the w oman pointed at animals and notable natural landmarks such as rock formations.

Like the caretakers at Tanjah, the w oman and the male driver seemed folksy and friendly, treating both outsider guests equally w armly, even though neither of the Lydias said much to the caretakers or each other. Lydia 3 figured that Lydia 2 decided it w as unsafe to talk w ith her clone sister around anyone, even the simple-living caretakers of the Outlands.

For 10 to 12 hours a day, the driver took the vehicle across a long northbound ancient road that w as often overgrow n w ith vegetation and strew n w ith rocks. The vehicle?s large tires and sophisticated drive system could handle most obstacles, though once or tw ice he had to stop driving to get out of the vehicle and use some old-looking pow er tools Lydia 3 couldn?t identify to cut through branches or break up and move larger stones.

In the evenings, w hile the summer sun w as still in the sky, the driver w ould simply stop on the road ? there w ere no other vehicles that they had to w orry about blocking ? so he could have dinner w ith his companion and the passengers and then recline in his seat to sleep once the sun set.

Lydia 3 had a hard time sleeping w hen the vehicle w as still. During the day, the hum of the vehicle in motion and even the rocking movements as it rolled over rough terrain had the effect of lulling her to sleep. This w as an effect she didn?t w ant ? her eyes couldn?t get their fill of the w ild and varied Australian land and its w ildlife that often literally crossed the vehicle?s path: dingoes, w allabies, snakes, so many of the animals Lydia 3 had seen only in holo-videos.

There w as so much to see during the day, but blinding night enveloped the vehicle after the sun set. The caretakers automatically took sundow n as their signal to w ind dow n and sleep. There w ere no ?net view ers on board the vehicle, just an old audio communicator 22

device that the caretakers used to check in w ith some others about their trip progress and other new s. When the caretakers dimmed the lights at the front of the cabin, Lydia 2 w ould pull the ?net visor from her bag and put it on, pushing her seat back and dimming the light above her seat. Lydia 3 w as left to sit or lie aw ake, listening to the night sounds of the w ilderness, her mind shifting from fitful drow siness to startled w akefulness until the caretakers w oke w ith the sunrise, ate their first meal and then started up the vehicle. Lydia 2, still reclined w ith the ?net visor on her face, w ouldn?t stir until near the midmorning.

Halfw ay through the trip to the north, riding through desert lands scattered w ith low , dry bush during the late afternoon, the w oman caretaker noted, ?We?re gonna be bypassing the road to Ularu soon.? ?We?re passing by Ularu?? Lydia 3 asked, perking up from another unw anted nap. ?We?re not passing right by it,? the w oman replied w ith the tw angy speech she and the driver shared. ?About another 30 kilometers, w e?ll be at the turning point w here if you go w est there it is.?

The thought of seeing the great red rock at the center of the continent excited Lydia 3. ?Why don?t w e go there?? she proposed.

Lydia 2 asked the w oman, ?How far is Ularu from the main road?? ?Oh, about 250 kilometers,? she said.

Lydia 2 sighed. ?That?s about three hours, isn?t it?? ?Oh yeah,? the driver chimed in. ?And w e?d have a bit of a w alk to Ularu after that. No motorized vehicles allow ed w ithin the sacred land all around it.? ?Well, w e?re not going,? Lydia 2 said. ?This trip is long enough as it is w ithout a detour.?

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But it?s Ularu! Lydia 3 screamed in her head. Taking a breath, she said, ?We could go there on the w ay back from Kakadu, after w e do w hat w e need to do for Lydia.?

Lydia 2?s eyes narrow ed and her mouth shrunk into a tight frow n. ?Lydia, I said no.?

Lydia 3 huffed and sat back in her seat.

In a clearing ringed by eucalypts w ith perching red-tailed black cockatoos, the Lydias stood in the late afternoon sun. The caretakers had guided them to this place in Kakadu and then left them to w ait about 500 meters aw ay, close enough to reach the w omen quickly if needed but far aw ay enough to give them privacy.

The cockatoo chatter and the rustling of the tree leaves w ere the only sounds as the Lydias faced each other, standing about tw o paces apart. Lydia 2 held the bio-box ? the original?s remains ? in her hands. Lydia 3 took a deep breath, taking in this moment of solitude to reveal her emotions. Her tears follow ed, flow ing freely w ithout Lydia 2 trying to w ipe them aw ay.

Lydia 2 started to crumple the bio-box, squeezing it w ith her spread fingers. ?Stop! ? Lydia 3 cried out. ?Hold on! ? ?What?? Lydia 2 said, her head snapping up. ?I w ant to say goodbye... I w ant to say ? something! ? Lydia 3 gasped.

A quick sigh left Lydia 2?s lips. ?Then say something,? she answ ered.

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Lydia 3 blinked her w et eyes and sniffed. ?Don?t you w ant to say something?? she asked. ?Something for Lydia? Something for our sister! ? The last w ords came out in chokes, and then the tears flow ed fast, joined by sobs. ?You say something, Lydia,? Lydia 2 said quietly. ?You say something.?

Lydia 3 w iped her face w ith her hands and forearm and snorted hard.

With a big sw allow , she said, ?Lydia, I, I ? you w ere the best big sister... I, love you, forever... I, can?t believe I?m never, ever going to see you or talk to you or hear you talk or laugh or anything ever...?

She ran out of breath and had to pause. ?I miss you so much. I miss you. I love you.? Lydia 3 dropped her head and took rough breaths, exhausted in body and mind.

Lydia 2 resumed crushing the bio-box. Lydia 3 looked up. ?You?re not going to say anything?? Lydia 3 pled. ?No,? Lydia 2 said, continuing to compress the bio-box, creating a pow dery w hite cloud that emanated from her hands and dissipated in the air. Shaking the talc-light remains off her hands, she added, ?It?s not like Lydia can hear us. She?s dead. She?s gone.?

Lydia 3 felt slapped in the face w ith her clone sister?s bluntness. ?How could you be so cold?? she shouted. ?It?s like you don?t care! ? Lydia 3 looked at Lydia 2 ? her clone sister w as calm, composed and dry-eyed. ?You?re not even crying ? you haven?t cried at all! ? Lydia 3?s face got hot w ith the realization. ?You haven?t cried one tear since ? since Lydia ? I don?t even think you cried for her the day she got hurt! ? ?I don?t have to cry to be sad,? Lydia 2 replied. ?Or to prove to you that I?m grieving.? ?But she?s... she w as our big sister! ? Lydia 3 insisted. ?Our original!

Without her, there?s no us. You, you...? ?I don?t have to be like you! ? Lydia 2 grow led through her teeth. ?I?ve 25

never w anted to be like you or Lydia ? you know that. And now I don?t have to. I don?t have to be a clone sister ? I don?t have to be a clone. I can be an individual ? an original. And I can do, be and feel w hatever the hell I w ant! ? ?You sound like you?re glad she?s dead! ? Lydia 3 spat out. Her rage made her body shake as she glared at Lydia 2.

Lydia 2 raised her chin and pursed her lips. Slow ly, deliberately, she said ?What I sound like, w hat I feel, w hat I think, w hat I do is not your business. I?m an original. You?re a clone.? ?You are not an original! ? Lydia 3 shouted. ?What you are is insane!

You?re not Lydia! You?re her clone! ? She moved closer to Lydia 2, feeling an urge to hit her clone sister. ?You w ant to tell people that?? Lydia 2 said, staring Lydia 3 in the eyes. ?Go ahead. Go tell the caretakers, but then they might not care.

Then go tell them w hen w e leave the Outlands. Tell people w hat w e both have done ? so they can destroy us both.?

With that, Lydia 3?s emotions w ent from hot to frozen. Her heart beat fast and hard, but her skin felt numb. Time slow ed to a standstill in her head. ?Please talk to Lydia. She thinks you don?t care about her.? ?Did she say that?? ?Yeah. She said you don?t care about us.? ?I love her! And she says I don?t care about her? She doesn?t know how good she has it, how good her life is because she?s my clone! I was going to just let her have her little pouting spell and just leave her alone, like I always do, but you know what? You?re right ? I am going to talk to her. We?re going to have this out right now. This is between her and me.

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I don?t need you trying to mediate or hold us back. It?s all coming out, and let the chips fall where they may!?

Lydia 2 slowly stepped toward Lydia 3, who couldn?t move. ?I?m ready to die,? Lydia 2 said softly. ?Are you??

Lydia 3, her mind shut dow n by the cold shock, could not answ er.

Lydia 2 grabbed Lydia 3 and pulled her into her arms. ?You don?t w ant to die,? Lydia 2 w hispered. ?You don?t w ant me to die. So let?s live.?

While holding Lydia 3 tightly, Lydia 2 touched an implant on her w rist. ?The caretakers are on their w ay now .?

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Chiadikobi Nw aubani is a w eb historian w hose primary research lies in investigating pre-colonial Igbo history. His blog, Ukpuru, features an abundance of pictorial and first hand accounts describing life in Igboland as w ell as other areas of Nigeria.

African Customs and the Original Mantra of Sustainability: Nature as the Sacred Mother There is a sophisticated and unique heritage of conservation among many w est African communities w hich has been in practice for thousands of years and is based on certain principles pertaining to how people sustainably deal w ith nature. These principles of protection aren?t merely rules or obligations in manoeuvring nature, but ethics enshrined in the cultural and religious beliefs of the various communities w here nature is managed. Conservation in these communities became a w ay of life, like in the case of the Igbo and other southeastern Nigerians. So I ask, did these w ell developed ethics among w est African peoples precede the ritual taboos relating to sustainability, or did they develop after the taboos w ere brought about through spirituality, or did the idea of conservation and the taboos pertaining to the desecration of nature appear at the same time? I believe they came hand in hand in most of Africa.

M ore recent new s of the killing of Cecil [Rhodes] the Lion in Zimbabw e has brought about w orldw ide (American) outrage. That a majestic icon such as Cecil w as killed for sport by none other than a random American w as a major issue for a lot of people. The events 28

w ere interesting, and its relation to Africa as w ell as environmental consciousness, animal rights and the nature of long exploitation and its influence on Africans (including those bribed into hunting the lion) had me thinking about the long history of sustainability in other parts of Africa and how the outcry for the lion paralleled some of the long held beliefs of my people about the sanctity of w ildlife and nature.

I?m from Umukabia, a village that is part of the Ohuhu village group near Umuahia in the Igbo-speaking area of Nigeria. M y patrilineage (?? m ?? ? nà) w ere believed to have possessed the ?medicine?that allow ed them to be able to morph into leopards, a story that is still being passed dow n w ith pride. The last ?metamorph?in my family w as shot w hile in leopard-form w hile he w as out stealing goats. Because of this, w e are believed to be leopards and leopards our kin; it is forbidden for us to kill another leopard, harm a leopard, or even allow others to do so or w ear leopard skin. We even have a spiritual leopard passcode in case w e ever got into the mauling path of an unsuspecting leopard brother. The leopard and many of the animals in our community are totem animals, this custom in my community and in other parts of Africa takes the form of indigenous w ildlife and environmental conservation that has probably allow ed the lineages of lions like Cecil [Rhodes] to survive long enough in order to be killed by random foreigners for fun.

Further more, different patrilineages around us adopted their ow n sacred animals; a family friend, w ho is very fond of food, so to say, has the bush pig as his communities totem animal (coincidentally or not). A more famous case of animal totemism in Nigeria w as the Iguana ?w orship? of Bonny Island in the southern coast; until 1867 the iguana w as given the same privileges as any human citizen of Bonny, that w as before Christian missionaries got to the king and convinced him to kill all the iguanas and to burn dow n their shrine as part of conversion to Christianity (Hansen, M , p. 539). Animals are often bestow ed human rights like this w hen they are made totems. In Idemili, central Igboland, the éké, or royal python, is still revered as the sacred auspicious messenger of the Igbo earth mother, Àlà, and associated w ith a slew of river goddesses of w hich Ídé? ílí is the most notable. People in these communities often hail praises at the pythons such as ? nem o! , (my mother! ). The éké is allow ed to roam freely unobstructed even into peoples homes w hich is considered to be a sign of great luck for the homeow ner. It is expressly forbidden to harm or kill (or eat) the beloved python messenger; the fines for such 29

an abomination includes footing the bill for a man-sized burial for the slain creature as w ell as participating in other cleansing rites. The leopard w as also praised as it sw aggered through the villages of Ohuhu, my community, and w as generally much adored and revered as either ancestors or representatives of the communities militaristic spirit (the leopard is the symbol of militaristic might, pow er, and majesty in much of tropical w est Africa). Additionally, for some reason, my family w ere also forbidden from eating rabbits, possibly for health reasons.

In Umuohi, Okija, Igboland, a legend supports the sanctity of the ĂŠkĂŠ, a fable tells of a mysterious and spiritually-pow erful w idow w ho w as said to have been driven aw ay by her husbands people and ended up in Umuohi w here she lived by a riverside and upon her death decreed that no w oman of Umohi be maltreated by her spouse, since then a python is said to visit every Umohi w oman w ho is about to be married and every Umuohi w oman w ho is maltreated by her husband. Some men are reportedly w eary of marrying from Umohi. Of course many in Nigeria perceive these reverences as evil or ?fetish? because of deeply held Christian 30

doctrine. How ever, all of these practices point tow ards a clear tradition of the protection of animals and the conservation of nature in addition to human beings recognising a bond w ith creatures that are often considered lesser or indispensable.

In addition to totemism and the protection of choice animals, many southern Nigerian communities still have a vastitude of scared shrines, groves, forests, springs, and other natural and geological features w hich are mostly off limits to mortals. Outsiders may have heard of the Osun Osogbo scared grove w hich is a major religious site in Yorubaland. There is also the Ikenga sacred forest in Anambra State w hich is much guarded and includes some of the patches of virgin forest in the region. In my community w e have sacred groves w here it is said you?ll be turned insane if you attempt to steal or take any agricultural produce from. We have at least one suspected case of such happening, or so it seems. This show s the other side of this system of preservation in w hich the rate of human consumption and greed is checked by spiritual and legal rules and regulations. These spiritual penalties consecrate sustainability w ithin the community and recognise it as a tenet of the very soul of the universe. ?

African traditions sanctified nature in order to conserve their physical w orld. Using the w orldview of the Igbo for clarity, the physical w orld is a mirror of the spirit w orld so that everything becomes sacred in a balance; the earth itself is embodied in the eternal mother Àlà. Therefore, taboos and customs are intertw ined w ith the respect and obedience of the earth, w hich includes observing rules on cleanliness, health, preservation and conservation.

The health of the African community is recognised as inseparable from the health of the earth and deviating from the rules of nature-care and management leads to the earth mothers?infamous mercilessness in revenge of the corruption of her rules. Looking at old pictures of African villages, the impeccable cleanliness of the sandy streets and public places against the thick forests stands out as tranquil, as someone w ho has lived in such a place. In traditional customs pertaining to the law s of the earth mother, w hen humans commit an abomination in the community they cannot be buried in the ground as it w ould pollute it. When humans die (an acceptable death) they are placed back in the ground and their souls are rekindled w ith the underw orld, represented as the sacred w omb and bosom of Àlà w here they mirror and guide their earthly kith and kin.

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In Igboland, you are believed to reincarnate, so you inherit the w orld you leave behind and the earth itself is the very uterus that rejuvenates you, unlike a remote place in the sky or something. M any people in African communities didn?t w ear shoes even though they existed, their bare feet connected them to the earth source. M any of the Igbo people revered sun rays and tanned in the sun in prayer and reverence of the sun, the source of life, w hich is also revered as an eternal mother, Ă nyĂĄ nw ?? . Trees hold strong symbolism in many indigenous religions around the w orld; divinities congregate around trees and an item like a piece of w hite cloth is placed in the centre to mark the significance of the area and group of trees and as a w arning to the uninitiated of the presence of the capricious divinities.

It?s on these trees is w here the bulk of veneration, libations, prayers and sacrifices are concentrated. Trees are a pow erful symbol of the communities connection to the earth mother.

Essentially sacred forests are no different to the institutions of national parks or w ildlife reserves found in countries w ith more developed infrastructures, and even in modern day Nigeria and other African countries. According to w ikipedia (ahem) a US president in the 1830s w as the first person in the w orld to enshrine into law the protection of lands for their natural elements. Of course, this is untrue because my community has had a protected forest from at least since the 1700s, hundreds of years before the United States w as formed. Traditional African attitudes tow ards conservation is unique and effective, it?s the reason, I believe, w hy there are still so many animals existing on the so called continent in comparison to other continents w ho had many large animals yet depleted so much of their w ildlife leading to the endangerment of tigers, bears, and much more. Some of the most unique yet endangered and extinct species are not native to tropical Africa and similar indigenous tropical parts of the w orld like Oceania. M uch of the endangered ones that are now extinct or endangered became so because of recent imperialistic influence. In fact, looking at the List of extinct animals of Oceania on Wikipedia (again) is striking; most of the species?date of extinction on the list are after 1700, w hich usually marks the invasion of said imperialistic pow ers. M any of the species even became extinct on the exact same year a Captain Cook got his hands on an island. Tropical African ancestors and indigenous people alike w ere able to see something that took others thousands of years to see plus the threat of the complete destruction of the earth, but how so? The answ er 32

lies in the role of traditional religions in the collective consciousness of the society and the role of ?nature as the cathedral?as I like to call it. While some empires around the w orld erected massive monuments to their deities, most tropical Africans utilised the living gifts of nature around them, and today the w hole w orld is clamouring for these gifts w hich have been pushed further aw ay from them by the industrial era. Everything the people of the forest w ere ridiculed for before is now either a trend of ?high society?, regarded as ?high art?or even an ?innovation?, people are building their houses w ith mud rammed earth and other natural materials now , it has come to the point w here these trends are now ironically unsustainably consumed and engulfed by a structurally greedy society w hich results in cases such as the detrimental global affects on quinoa. The idea of conservation is likely an ethic that initially existed in all cultures around the w orld but for some reason w as suppressed by intense competition for resources and, in some places, w as undermined by the development of larger political entities.

Today, traditional religions are dw indling aw ay in many parts of Africa, especially in Nigeria, and the customs and values that buttressed the moral codes of these societies is going along w ith these spiritual practices into the abyss. M odern environmental issues now abound in Nigeria including problems w ith illegal and ?legal? logging, the annihilation of w ildlife, the use of unsustainable methods in w ild scale farming w hich leads to soil erosion, and the general pollution of the environment including the extreme cases of oil spillages in the oil rich delta regions of Nigeria, and it?s of no surprise that these spillages are in connection to the greed and new culture of over consumption that has lead to the oil bunkering that usually leads to oil spills. I ask if it is a coincidence that the blindsiding of the indigenous customs in relation to nature has lead to the punishment from the land w hich the ancestors w arned us of in the forms of sinkholes, landslides, mighty floods, and other human influenced natural disasters? I suggest that these African societies today and the w orld over have so much to learn from the African past including the study of much of the original ethics of sustainability. Africans stand to benefit from incorporating these ethics, once fundamental to their existence, into a modernity w hose trajectory is determined by the ingenuity of the protocols of nature laid out by our ancestors. Ironically many of the pow erful organisations today w ho claim to be in the business of sustainability 33

and the conservation of nature, including high profile zoos and w ildlife sanctuaries around the w orld, are not African, even though many of the animals found in their institutions are African. These organisations only indirectly come from the conservative heritage of indigenous people of the forest, because the reason those animals have survived for so long is because many Africans made a conscious effort to protect the w ild, a point I hope w ill be picked up by more people. In the midst of the grab for resources all over the w orld, especially from the lands of the peoples w ho have become vulnerable for w hatever reason, some of the predators have become fattened and privileged enough w hereby they now feel comfortable enough to shift their roles and become the conservators of the w orld, regardless of their morals being the fundamental root cause of the w orlds environmental problems. The same people subsequently profit tw ice on tw o sides of the coin. It?s a shame.

All is not bleak, though. There still exists many sites in Nigeria, for example, that are conserved both by traditional rites of diverse peoples and by modern Nigerian law . While trying my luck and googling ?sacred forest totem animal conservation? I w as pleasantly surprised that the top results yielded journals based on practices found in southern Nigerian communities. In the Oban district of Cross River State eleven animal species w ere found to be forbidden by the people of the tow n, their killing or the interference of them being off limits. In the case of communities in Delta State w ith conservatory heritage, Rim-Rukeh et al. state that ?the plants and animals species in the study scared groves and forest can be described as an environment w ith w idespread and abundant taxonomy and are not at risk or endangered? (Rim-Rukeh; Irerhievw ie; Agbozu, p. 1). One of the articles verified the suggestion that the adoption of these taboos may be valuable for w ildlife conservation, particularly in protected areas, ?community leaders and youth should be strengthened and officially recognized as partners w ho derive significant benefits from w ildlife management? (Isiugo; Obioha, p. 1).

I agree. And this is something that personally sums up my ideas of the future in the past, everything about the eco-friendly political movement has traces of w hat people have practiced in parts of Africa for thousands of years and maybe in more effective w ays. The future in some w ays is in the past. I remember seeing new s about the demolition of M ushin M arket in Lagos, Nigeria in 2012 and among the pictures in the article stood a tree, a shrine, deliberately left 34

untouched in the middle of the debris as if in honour of traditional w ays and a reminder of the past amidst an urban disaster. Shrines like this can be found in a number of bustling urban centres including Onicha?s shrine to Àn?? (Àlà), the earth mother of w hich appeals, offerings and sacrifices are still made to. These small yet significant examples show that the spirit of earth-love is still there in the essence of these cultures and is just w aiting to be taken advantage of to the benefit of the natural w orld and our relationship to it. Perhaps it w ould be in the w orlds interest if w e all should adopt some totems and sacred species of our ow n that w ould give us a alliance in the natural w orld and provide a connection to the earth mother, in w hatever w ay w e see her. Slow ly but surely, w e?re realising the treasures hidden in our past and the journals on this subject by Nigerian scholars are proof of this. I believe that in the future our ancestors alliance w ith nature w ill once more be restored, to the benefit of us and the earth mother.

References Isiugo, Paul N.; Obioha, Emeka E. (2015). Community Participation in Wildlife Conservation and Protection in Oban Hills Area of Cross River State, Nigeria. KRE Publishers. URL: http://w w w .krepublishers.com/02-Journals/JSSA/JSSA-06-0-000-15Web/JSSA-06-2-000-15-Abst-PDF/JSSA-6-2-279-087-15-Isiugo-P-N/ JSSA-6-2-279-087-15-Isiugo-P-N-Tx% 5B13% 5D.pdf Date Accessed: 1 September 2015.

Jimoh, S. O.; Ikyaagba, E. T.; Alarape, A. A.; Obioha, E. E.; Adeyemi, A. A. (2012). The Role of Traditional Law s and Taboos in Wildlife Conservation in the Oban Hill Sector of Cross River National Park (CRNP), Nigeria. KRE Publishers.

URL:http://w w w .krepublishers.com/02-Journals/JHE/JHE-39-0-000-12 -Web/JHE-39-3-000-12-Abst-PDF/JHE-39-3-209-12-2303-Jimoh-S-O/ JHE-39-3-209-12-2303-Jimoh-S-O-Tx[5].pdf Date Accessed: 1 September 2015.

Hansen, M . (2000). A comparative study of six city-state cultures.

Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels. p. 539. ISBN 8-7787-6316-9.

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A member of ? z? parliament displays the slain Sacred Serpent in a panel from an unnamed comic. The ? z? parliament is a Nri-Igbo politico-religious sect w ho governed communities but also acted as priests. Their services w ere used throughout much of Igboland.

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M ame Bougouma Diene is a French-Senegalese American humanitarian based in Paris, w ith a fondness for tattoos, progressive metal and policy analysis. He is published in Omenana, Brittle Paper, Edilivres (French), and w ill feature in AfroSFv2 in December 2015.

Spirit Walk I set snitches onto rockets And launch?em into black holes.

Black like my soul, M y black heart turned coal.

The fires burn low , Cuz the ghost that be feeding?em Be thinning, and a million men marching Can?t keep the embers from drow ning In the pit.

The gap that keeps grow ing and sw allow ing These black holes, that are my black soul.

I string w alk the horizon touching the limit of reality, Dropping my entity, Achieving spiritual maturity.

A new essence.

Adolescence of the presence, That my baldy reflects: The reminiscence of past decriptences.

The spirits guide my hand.

Alone on the steppe, my yurt?s a pyramid, A million miles from land.

Genghis Khan met Cleopatra in the spirit w orld and Gave birth to the son that kept the eagle at hand.

The spirits guide me.

Giving me lyrical mastery, M ixing the street w ith poetry, Cloaking the sun in mystery.

The spirits w alk my soul, Giving it pow ers to behold, To look upon the future, screen the past 37

And then refold, the black book of the w orld?s mistakes And then remold everything in my image, So my spiritual pilgrimage is done, And w ith that uncloak sun, and the set the fires to rerun.

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Stacey Robinson is an Arthur Schomburg fellow w ho completed his M asters of Fine Art at the University at Buffalo. He is originally from Albany NY and he graduated from Fayetteville State University w here he earned a Bachelor of Arts. He is part of the collaborative team ?Black Kirby? w ith artist John Jennings that creates comic books, gallery exhibitions and lectures that deconstruct the w ork of artist Jack Kirby and re-imagine Black resistance spaces inspired by Hip Hop, religion, the arts and sciences. His thesis exhibition ?Binary ConScience?explores ideas of W.E. B. Du Bois?s ?double consciousness? as a Black cultural adaptation and a means of colonial survival. In 2010, he w as a part of the exhibition Invisible Ink: Black Independent Comix, at University of Tennessee at Beyond the Frame: African American Comic Book Artists, Presentation at the Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, M I. Stacey?s w ork has been collected by various institutions including M odern Graphics in Berlin, Bucknell University and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Escape. No Option, No Return (2015) Digital Here, Simone?s activism and provocative, lyrics are depicted in contrast to popular Black female contemporary artists. White and lighter skinned w omen vs. darker skinned w omen using the African dance both become a conversation of class, race, gender, and appropriation. One image of porn stars ?Pinky? and ?Cherokee D?Ass? are embracing each other. M y conversation deals w ith the ideas surrounding Black bodies. Larger female body parts in Black culture equate to the most animalistic mating practices, not love; w ith violence, not peace; not empow erment, but objectification.

As part of my research I examine sex, it intersections, contrasts in reference to race, religion, politics and gender. With this research I conducted recent ?Google Image?searches of ?Black Sex?and ?White Sex?They both conducted separately revealed drastic differences in their results. Under ?Black Sex?, Google Images many times displayed pornographic imagery from movies and magazines, revealing penile insertions, climactic semen sw allow ing scenes, many times of low 39

40

resolution w eb-cam pictures of a darker unprofessionally photographed quality. Imperfect skin and hair w ere almost ubiquitous; clearly there w as little to no image altering. Often these images w ere in dirty public environments, cars, and low quality motels. At times they w ere group sex scenes.

There w as little indication of love, romance, respect or privacy, very little smiling, hand-holding, w arm embraces or connotations of long lasting romantic relationships or marriage in the displayed images.

How ever, under a ?White Sex?Google image search almost the exact opposite results w ere revealed. Though there w ere some pornographic pictures most of them w ere higher quality professional pornographic photography, even photoshopped. How ever there w ere more stock photography images of White couples embracing, holding hands, smiling and w alking then displayed under the ?Black Sex?Google image search. These images often times w ere posed, illustrating perfectly combed hair and professional lighting, even ideas of long lasting relationships or marriage. One could argue that many of these images are posed in ideal quiet places of peace w ith privacy and Disney type forever love. These images seem equated w ith connotations of romance, love and respect. M any times professionally photographed images seemed private w ith higher resolution brighter colors and clean environments.

There is a demonizing of Black sex, w ith divisions and lack of support even w ithin mainstream feminist circles. Several months ago, Jill Scott?s semi nude pictures received harsh criticism and fat shaming on Tw itter, w hile around the same time, Jennifer Law rence?s leaked photos scandal saw comparatively high support and commiseration from mainstream feminist media. These are some of the ideas I?m thinking about using the racially opposite tw erking photographs w ithin this piece. They contrast the computer draw n images. The draw n images represent the speculative w hile the photos represent the reality of our condition. This condition is one w here sex under colonialism is not equal and w here even its beauty is not reserved, revered or private for Black people. These contradicting ideas are ingrained through a programming of religion, politics, and racial discrimination, and erasure primarily through a locking out of distributed Black ow ned and created pop cultural narratives.

Accompanied by a counter narrative of the derogatory imagery not 41

culturally liberating, not diverse, and primarily not by Black film creators.

These differences should be examined w hen perusing the w ork. Though Nikki M inaj?s picture is higher quality the focus of the picture is her butt, her inviting face to her squatting position. Below that is a screen shot of ?Nelly?s??Tip Drill?video, w ith the text, ?click to play?. This scene is of Nelly preparing to slide a credit card betw een the butt cheeks of a video dancer. This is Nelly?s most popular and controversial video partly for this reason and he w as heavily criticized for the action. How ever according to research, this particular scene w as the idea and desire of the video dancer, w ho proposed the idea to Nelly. Which in part is the reason I choose to use this scene. We can?t argue that derogatory imagery comes from White sources, but there is an inarguable regurgitated application of this type of behavior w ithin Black culture, thus the conversation of reversing Black inequality of sexual depictions is not w ith White people but amongst ourselves.

The White and lighter w omen in this piece (e.g. M iley Cyrus and Kim Kardashian) have a luxury in the appropriation w ithout historical content. There is a picture of ?Jessica Vanessa?a White, former kindergarten teacher w ho admitted to quitting her teaching profession to monopolize on tw erk culture. Here one sees the disparity betw een her status as the ?w orld?s greatest tw erker? bestow ed by mainstream new s outlets and the accompanying financial gains she has made and the lack of similar accolades for Black tw erkers. All of this is absorbed as a visual commentary of White appropriation vs. the Black sexualization of African dance culture, w here Nina?s exposed heart is show n as a Ghanaian Adinkra symbol meaning ?Sankofa?, meaning ?to go back and get it?.

Her exposed Black heart is absorbing the misappropriations, the pain of these Black bodies being misunderstood and unliberated.

All this w hile she chants her ow n lyrics ?birds flying high?and ?please don?t let me be misunderstood?w hile in response an uncaged black bird responds w ith another Simone lyric ?I know how you feel?. The black bird, a reference to the poem by M aya Angelou, is her herald into the unknow n techno space, in continuing narration of escape to Sun Ra?s home planet, Saturn the definition of w hich I leave to the 42

view er.

The Need for escape and redefinition into a Black space aw ay from misappropriation is Simone?s mission. Simone is looking outw ard into a techno space w hile she programs her keyboard speaking a visual code of a language another Adinkra symbol, ?Sankofa?, here a command to retrieve our forgotten culture and bring it w ith us to the future. Her programming transforms enveloping illuminations, in turn becoming African Kinte and graffiti inspired lines.

What should not be lost in the inquiry is that I am examining this portrayal of w omen as a Black heterosexual male artist. Various questions can arise ?Does the reproduction of these images of w omen result in an exploitation of female imagery?? This type of w ork is new to me and the audience?s response is important as I?m thinking about w hat kind of voice can I bring to this critical debate around the representation and appropriation w omen in Black pop culture, and how does this w ork serve my greater purpose of inspiring ?healing? of these prevailing colonial w ounds?

Sun Ra with a Harriet Jesus Peace (2015) Digital Sun Ra is the mothership, the escape, the adapted thinking needed for peace. Here, his arms are folded protecting Black lives in his pyramid-like form. Sun Ra?s ?mind activation?, reacts like he?s facing time and space as the abstract afro-graffiti of space-time is ignited by his cosmic antennae preparing to beam Black people to Saturn w here w e w ill finally have peace in an uncolonized land of our ow n. The X pattern in the w ork intersects Ra?s mind, a crossroad of uncertainty and necessity w here Black people w ill not have to sell our souls to the devil for the blues. Saturn w ill be our healing from the blues, the place w here Black Lives w ill M atter, w here Ra rocks the Harriet Tubman Jesus peace.

Da Vinci?s Jesus did not save us but enslaved us and here, I 43

have subverted the typical imagery to depict Harriet as our messiah. The Adinkra symbols on Ra?s sleeves read ?w ith the circumference of God?s love and protection w e have unity as w e escape through space to freedom.?

Destination Saturn (2015) Digital The inspiration behind ' Destination Saturn?comes from my frustrations living in America w here Black people have to fight for every justice. It also comes from my understanding that White privileges are more important to many in White America than justice, equality and diversity. The inspiration comes from me entertaining ideas of living apart from White people to examine w hat an uninterrupted Black space looks like. I w onder w here Africa w ould be w ithout American and European imperialism, w hat non-genetically modified foods w ould taste like; w hat cures w ould be realized, w hat Black love and 44

45

relations w ould look like beyond depictions in White dominated and distributed pop culture.

For Black folks the intersection of sci-fi, politics and Black Nationalism are crucial. We have been Afrofuturists in practice, w ithout a descriptive name before Dery?s limited definition. The message in this piece is very direct and the key elements make this one of my recent favorites. I?m referencing Sun Ra' s ' Space is the Place' ; I?m referencing The Garvey inspired Pan-African Black Star Line Enterprise; I position the Reverend Dr. M artin Luther King, Jr. as a prominent figure in the Afrofuturist movement, after all, if not for Dr. King Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura) w ould have left the iconic Star Trek role after the first season. ?Right on time?means I w as thinking that no matter how late in life w e w ake up and seek to be free it' s alw ays right on time.

46

After completing a PhD and teaching at the University of Warw ick, Dr. Jennifer Terry joined Durham in 2004. Her w ork is situated at the intersections of such fields as American hemispheric, US and postcolonial studies, w ith a particular focus on black diaspora literature and culture. Previous research has looked at the novels of the contemporary African American author Toni M orrison and appears in various edited collections and journals. Dr. Terry has recently completed a monograph, ' Shuttles in the Rocking Loom' : M apping the Black Diaspora in African American and Caribbean Fiction for Liverpool University Press. This comparative study examines how , through symbolic journeys, trajectories and geographies, selected African American, Caribbean and Black British novelists speak to ongoing debates about postcolonialism, nationalism, essentialism, hybridity and cross-cultural relations in the diaspora engendered by racial slavery. Engaging w ith the ' spatial' aspect of the theoretical w ork of Édouard Glissant and Paul Gilroy, it explores and interrogates diverse transnational responses. Other research includes w riting on Paul Laurence Dunbar, W E B Du Bois and Walter M osley. In 2009 Dr. Terry co-organised the international symposium ' Toni M orrison: New Directions' at Durham and in 2014 organised the HEA-sponsored event ' Teaching African American Literature and Culture' . Her new w ork turns to visions of futurity in contemporary African American fiction and visual art.

The Past, Present and Future in Critical Afrofuturisms As contributors to this collection think imaginatively about the future, and w hat it might mean to be black in the future, an accompanying question is w hat kind of relation to the past w ill there be? In the area of culture termed Afrofuturism (a label first used in the 1990s), alongside an orientation tow ards futurity, artists and critics have negotiated this question in several w ays. To w hat extent does a history of colonisation and slavery, w hich produced constructions of race and understandings of progress still felt today, inform images of 47

the future, concepts of temporality and the envisioning of alternatives to ?now ?? In this piece I w ill focus on how a handful of Afrofuturist critics have addressed the interlinking of past, present and future.

The grow th of science fiction and other projective visions in black diaspora culture in recent decades has called into question w ho the realm of the future belongs to, challenging the historic denial of narratives of modernity, technological advancement and the anticipatory to particular groups. Afrofuturist w ork tends to be concerned w ith the material constraints and discourses that have functioned to narrow black futures, and w ith identifying critical, revisionist, liberatory or creative counter narratives.

In an early definition, M ark Dery connects Afrofuturism to ?speculative fiction?but also describes it ?more generally, [as] African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future?(Dery 1993, p.

180). Sometimes though the engagement is w ith ecological futures, w ith critique of capitalism and w ith alternative visions of sexuality and reproduction. Today it is more common for Afrofuturism to be recognised as emergent from Africa and the w ider black diaspora, not just African America. Thinking more particularly about genre, the author Walter M osley associates black sci-fi literature and film w ith possibility, the ability to see beyond existing normalised structures, commenting ?The pow er of science fiction is that it can tear dow n the w alls and w indow s, the artifice and law s by changing the logic, empow ering the disenfranchised, or simply by asking, What if??

(M osley 1998, p. 32). While for M osley this speculative ?What if??is the utopian first step in changing the w orld, some Afrofuturist thinkers seek a more critical emphasis. As I w ill come back to, Kodw o Eshun defines Afrofuturism as ?a program for recovering the histories of counter-futures created in a century hostile to Afrodiasporic projection?(Eshun 2003, p. 301), and M ark Bould, rather than ?merely celebrating Afrofuturism as resistance?, holds w ork under this label to account for not often enough aiming for ?a transformation?

(Bould 2007, p. 182). Thinking about futurisms in terms of the relation to the past and present that they put forw ard gives another w ay into these possibilities, limitations and debates.

Alondra Nelson?s introduction to a 2002 special issue of Social 48

Text offers a good starting point as it traces persistent patterns of black people being positioned as opposites to technological futures and also poses a pow erful relation w ithin Afrofuturism tow ard the past. Looking at the late 1990s digital boom in the US, Nelson identifies ?tw o predominant discourses of blackness and technology in the public sphere?; these are ?the promise of a placeless, raceless, bodiless near future enabled by technological progress?and, on the other hand, discussion of ?the digital divide, a phrase that has been used to describe gaps in technological access that fall along lines of race, gender, region, and ability but has mostly become a code w ord for the tech inequities that exist betw een blacks and w hites?(Nelson 2002, p. 1). What these tw o discourses have in common is ?the assumption that race is a liability in the tw enty-first century?and also their grounding in earlier schemas arising from w hite European and European American colonialism and accounts of development. With the digital age in mind Nelson points out, ?In these politics of the future, supposedly novel paradigms for understanding technology smack of old racial ideologies. In each scenario, racial identity, and blackness in particular, is the anti-avatar of digital life. Blackness gets constructed as alw ays oppositional to technologically driven chronicles of progress?(p. 1). In the terms of technoculture?s promise of advancement and the new , w e find echoes of earlier racialised narratives of enlightenment and progress. Yet Afrofuturist framew orks have the potential to expose or disrupt such oppositions, something facilitated by tracing the connections to historical constructions.

Considering the ?raceless future paradigm?and digital disembodiment, Nelson unpicks how ?Bodies carry different social w eights that unevenly mediate access to the freely constructed identity?heralded by some critics in the 1990s (p. 1 & p. 3).

She also draw s on Lisa Nakamura?s w ork, w hich probes the reliance in tech adverts on ?imagery of exotic people and places?at the same time as they promise ?a liberated w orld of tomorrow ?(p. 4).

The marketing of technology still rests on a form of alterity even as images of non-w hites are ?emancipated from past histories and contemporary socio-political context?(p. 4). The parallel discourse of the ?digital divide?is encapsulated in an early tw enty-first-century South African Land Rover ad, w hich finds its potency by setting off the sleek, tech-equipped vehicle against a traditionally dressed, bare 49

breasted Himba w oman. Nelson w rites, ?In this single image, w e are presented w ith a visual metaphor for the ostensible oppositionality of race (primitive past) and technology (modern future)?; ?the Freelander rapidly heads tow ard the future, leaving [the w oman] in the past?(p.

5). The novel status (of the virtual self, the high-tech society or, here, the latest cutting-edge product) is confirmed by the ?primitiveness or [? ] obsolescence of something or someone else?(p. 6).

In the face of this, Nelson seeks a technologically enabled future that is not ?unmoored from the past and from people of color? (p. 6). Her commentary on recent technoculture is alert, amidst the rhetoric of the possibilities of the Internet, to the links to a capitalist marketing logic as w ell as echoes of previous utopian heralding of new technology and modernity. Specifically she invokes the ?older narrative [? ] of technology and forgetting?of ?the futurism movement of the turn of the tw entieth century?, citing M arinetti?s 1909 manifesto celebrating speed in modern life, transport and factory technology, and the creative destruction of w ar as w ell as of other industrial changes (p. 2).

Nelson explicates how in shaping his manifesto M arinetti put forw ard a young, European, male subjectivity that w as juxtaposed against ?the past and the ?feminine??and urged a turn forw ard, aw ay from that past (p. 2). She looks to black culture for models of ?a temporal orientation that seems to contradict discourses of the future predicated on either ignoring the past or rendering it as staid and stagnant?(p. 7).

Afrofuturist w orks have the potential to ?excavate and create original narratives of identity, technology, and the future?w hile staying ?grounded in the histories of black communities, rather than seeking to sever all connections to them?(p. 9). Indeed, Nelson poses that theories grow ing out of the context of African diasporic history offer rich resources in terms of both w ays of ?turn[ing] the reified binary betw een blackness and technology on its head?, and defying ?progressive linearity?and associated attempts at detachment from the past (p. 6 & p. 8).

50

Kodw o Eshun?s take on past, present and future provides another key point of reference, Eshun being one of several critics w ho coined the term, and theorised about, Afrofuturism in the 1990s. In particular I w ill draw on his 2003 essay ?Further Considerations of Afrofuturism?, w hich pulls together and reflects on ideas initially arising out of his music criticism a decade before. Eshun distinguishes betw een most science fiction, w hich he sees as far more conservative than the progressive vision often assigned to the genre, and the possibilities of Afrofuturism for critique and disturbance of enduring colonial orders.

Eshun is also helpful in terms of positioning black concerns w ith the future in relation to memorial and historical imperatives in diasporic culture.

Starting from racism?s denial to ?black subjects [of] the right to belong to the enlightenment project?, Eshun proposes that Black Atlantic intellectual culture has been overdetermined by the ?need to demonstrate a substantive historical presence?(Eshun 2003, p. 287).

The resultant emphasis on a cultural project of recovery, the accumulation of ?countermemories that contest the colonial archive?, not only situates colonisation and slavery ?as the founding moment of modernity?, but also has meant that a focus on the future, ?the manufacture of conceptual tools that could analyze and assemble counterfutures[,] w as understood as an unethical dereliction of duty? (p. 288). Eshun argues that ?the vigilance that is necessary to indict imperial modernity must be extended into the field of the future?(p.

288). Indeed, if the future is seen as ?a chronopolitical terrain?, as hostile and in need of contestation as the past, then ?inquiry into production of futures becomes fundamental, rather than trivial?(p.

289). Eshun?s case for attention to counter futures arises out of a different angle on relations to the past to Nelson?s, yet does not mean leaving counter memory behind but rather an orientation ?tow ards the proleptic as much as the retrospective?(p. 289).

His call is underpinned by an urgent sense of the late capitalist tw enty-first century, representing an adjustment to Eshun?s earlier w ork on Afrofuturism. Alert to corporate force, he points out that today ?pow er [? ] functions through the envisioning, management, 51

and delivery of reliable futures?as w ell as through the ongoing ?dissimulation of the imperial archive?(p. 289). We are in a ?cultural moment w hen digitopian futures are routinely invoked to hide the present in all its unhappiness?and Africa, for example, has become the site of overdetermining doomsday predictions; both of these discourses w ork to reinforce the pow erful, w ho ?draw pow er from the futures they endorse, thereby condemning the disempow ered to live in the past?(p. 289 & p. 291).

Eshun also traces ?positive feedback betw een future-oriented media and capital?, betw een ?the futures industry?and ?the desire for a technology boom?(p. 290).

Through this understanding of the present grip of a futures industry and predatory and uneven futures, he highlights the high stakes in shaping counter futures and in problematising technodeterminism (p. 291).

According to Eshun, ?Afrofuturism, then, is concerned w ith the possibilities for intervention w ithin the dimension of the predictive, the projected, the proleptic, the envisioned, the virtual, the anticipatory and the future conditional?(p. 293). He suggests alternative appeals to the future and visions that call progress into question can be found in various forms of ?black vernacular expression?(p. 293). These articulations are ?critical and utopian?, making visible ?competing w orld view s that seek to reorient history? (p. 292 & p. 297). Eshun poses a suggestive mode of chronopolitical intervention: ?By creating temporal complications and anachronistic episodes that disturb the linear time of progress, these futurisms adjust the temporal logics that condemned blacks to prehistory?(p.

297). This recalls Nelson?s dismantling of binaries of race and technology, and disrupts the dominant narrative of forw ard moving advancement. Eshun also considers the potential of recasting science fiction (as manifest in music, visual art etc. not only literature) ?in the light of Afrodiasporic history?(p. 299). His call for a turn to the field of the future is not separate from attempts to challenge the imperial archive and is firmly grounded in the politics of the present. He w rites, ?Afrofuturism may be characterized as a program for recovering the histories of counter-futures created in a century hostile 52

to Afrodiasporic projection?(p. 301). In a new tw enty-first century in the grip of the futures industry, it can also further ?the critical w ork of manufacturing tools capable of intervention w ithin the current political dispensation?(p. 301).

Picking up on Eshun?s mention of Afrofuturism?s complicating perspective for science fiction, M ark Bould?s introduction to a 2007 special issue of Science Fiction Studies offers a related angle on the genre. Bould outlines how mid tw entieth-century science fiction often advanced a vision of a colour blind society linked to the invocation of a long expanse of time: ?From the 1950s onw ards, sf in the US magazine and paperback tradition postulated and presumed a color-blind future, generally depicting humankind ?as one race??and leaving ?questions of race [? ] as marginalized as black characters?

(Bould 2007, p. 177). Here a projected future, temporally distant, involves the evasion of contemporary inequalities and struggles. In follow ing, technologically exciting decades ?The space race show ed us w hich race space w as for?Bould w rites (p. 177). He points out that even ?the satirical sf tale in w hich the alien or the android is the subject of prejudice, w hatever its merits, also avoids direct engagement w ith the realities of racialized [? ] oppressions?(p. 179).

Bould challenges ?the supposedly more objective stance enabled by [science fiction?s] affiliations to science?and ?the criticism of the genre that accepts the genre?s ow n self-image?; ?by presenting racism as an insanity that burned itself out [? ] sf avoids confronting the structures of racism and its ow n complicity in them?(pp. 179-180). Parallels can be draw n betw een the later technoculture promises as looked at by Nelson and Bould?s critique of science fiction futures that perpetuate historic hierarchies by erasing them from view .

Like both Nelson and Eshun, Bould identifies pow erful counter narratives in Afrofuturism. Afrofuturist cultural creations challenge the mainstream science fiction tradition described above by recognising, in M ark Sinker?s w ords, as quoted by Bould, that for black people ?Apocalypse already happened?(p. 180). Such creations are able to put forw ard ?a much more varied and complex set of relationships betw een domination and subordination, w hiteness and color, ideology and reality, technology and race?(p. 182). If historically technology has been coupled w ith discourses of w hite European advancement, then Bould endorses Dery?s definition of Afrofuturism as black ?signification that appropriates images of 53

technology and a prosthetically enhanced future?(quoted by Bould 2007, p. 182). How ever, Bould also gestures tow ard the need for a reoriented understanding of ?technology?; ?only w ithin a certain ideological field is black experience the opposite of technoculture? and ?sf and sf studies have much to learn from the experience of technoculture that Afrofuturist texts register across a w ide range of media?(p. 182).

Bould?s last turn involves cautionary reference to the European futurism of the early tw entieth century, thus interlocking w ith Nelson?s distinction betw een the consciousness of the past in Afrofuturism and rejection of such in the earlier movement. Bould w rites, ?The future proposed by M arinetti and the Italian Futurists w as young and masculine, obsessed w ith speed and the foreclosure of the past?(p. 182). Not only does Bould, like Nelson, emphasise the importance of connection to diasporic history, but he also calls for futurist visions that are truly alternative to our present. He w arns that ?in a postmodern multiculturalist age?it w ould be easy ?to fall into the trap of merely celebrating Afrofuturism as resistance?(p. 182). Indeed, ?Afrofuturism tends tow ards the typical cyberpunk acceptance of capitalism as an unquestionable universe and w orking for the assimilation of certain currently marginalized peoples into a global system?(p. 182). Instead Bould urges more attention to ?transformation?, not acceptance of a logic that affirms a slightly more inclusive privilege in the capitalist system. This recalls Eshun?s focus on critical tools and the need to contest the futures industry, in w hich market predictions, corporate control of futures and technological development are all bound up together. Such technodeterminisms, and also complicit science fictions, can be laid bare through the foregrounding of ?the intersection of race, technology, and pow er?(p. 182).

Considering the perspectives of Alondra Nelson, Kodw o Eshun and M ark Bould, w e find a suspicion of utopian claims and a distinction draw n betw een earlier futurisms and Afrofuturism. Nelson cautions against the ?forgetting?that can accompany discourses of technology and traces patterns of the new and futurist being set off against blackness, the ?ostensible oppositionality of race (primitive past) and technology (modern future)?(Nelson 2002, p. 5). Nelson also offers a positive definition of Afrofuturism, emergent from the listserv that she started in the late 1990s: ?African American voices 54

w ith other stories to tell about culture, technology and things to come?(p. 9). Eshun, too, emphasises counter futures, although his call for attention to the field of the future arises not only from marginalisation w ithin dominant accounts, but also from the need to reorient follow ing a memorial and historical imperative in black cultural and intellectual w ork. Eshun poses the future as contested terrain in the tw enty-first century, seeking out chronopolitical interventions that can disrupt a temporal logic of progress tied into a colonial order and capital. Eshun?s sense of the present futures industry complements Bould?s critique of cyberpunk?s failure to question a capitalist system. For Bould Afrofuturism can productively problematise science fiction genres, w hose tradition avoided tackling racist structures. All three Afrofuturist critics examined here advocate a grounding of ideas in black diasporic history, that is, they reject the severance of connection w ith the past that often comes w ith futurist turns. Past, present and future have to be understood together or rather, as Greg Tate puts it, ?you can be backw ard-looking and forw ard-thinking at the same time?(Tate in Dery 1994, p. 211).

References Bould, M ark, 2007, ?The Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF?, Science Fiction Studies, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 177-186.

Dery, M ark, 1994, ?Black to the Future: Interview s w ith Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose?, Flame Wars: The Discourses of Cyberculture, Duke University Press, Durham, pp. 179-222.

Eshun, Kodw o, 2003, ?Further Considerations of Afrofuturism?, The New Centennial Review , vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 287-302.

M osley, Walter, 1998, ?Black to the Future?, New York Times M agazine, 1 November, p. 32.

Nelson, Alondra, 2002, ?Introduction: Future Texts?, Social Text, vol.

20, no. 2, pp. 1-15.

The Last Angel of History, 1995, directed by John Akomfrah and w ritten by Edw ard George, Black Audio Film Collective, C4/ZDF, London.

This w ork is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

To view a copy of the license, visit 55

Ifeoma M aduka is a UK based short fiction w riter w hose w ork explores counter futures and alternate histories.

MemeSpring Thin Forest w as empty. Sometimes, upon entering, she w ould just catch a w isp of someone exiting the chamber. M aybe their coat w hipping behind them as they left, maybe their shadow flickering a final farew ell as they turned around the corner. But that w asn?t the case today and Chika w as glad that for once, Thin Forest w as truly empty.

Every time she pictured it inside her minds?eye, Thin Forest w as something w elcoming and beautiful. But once one w alked into it, you realised that it w as actually cold. It w as uncomfortable and made you fidget, for by its nature, it demanded a response that w as simultaneously traditional and inappropriate. For this is w hat it w as: a chamber filled w ith clusters of poles reaching up to a false ceiling that reflected and refracted so that the columns looked as though they w ent up to infinity. Sometimes she w ould w ant to brush her fingertips in an almost romantic gesture against the w ooden phalli but then she w ould remember that she w as not in a film and that such gestures w ere at the very least unnecessary, if not plain stupid.

You couldn?t make a film in Thin Forest.

Now she w as alone in Thin Forest and it w as time to complete her assignment. She could choose any husb that she w anted for there w as no one else there. She plugged herself into the one furthest from the entrance, so that - or so she reasoned to herself she could be the w isp of a figure w hen the next agent came in.

The earthquake started w hen she touched Thin Forest Core: the slight tremors that made her feet slip to maintain her centre of balance, the minute vibrations of her nerves against muscle tissue, the shuddering of bone against flesh. She w ished she w as one of those w ho had visions of the future, w ho heard voices and songs 56

w hen they touched Thin Forest Core. The only sign she ever received from Thin Forest w as that familiarly unpleasant sensation of falling that w ould suddenly w ake you up in the middle of the night. She didn?t like the w ay it echoed through her dreams into her w aking moments but she knew that w as irrelevant. Thin Forest didn?t care.

What w as important w as that she came.

Once the session w as finished, she w oke up, expecting to find herself lying on the floor or drifting in an ocean. Instead she w as in the same position as she had been to begin w ith; standing upright and steady, plugged into the husb.

Chika disentangled her core from the machinery of Thin Forest and w ondered w hat Thin Forest had taken from her this time. It w as an impossible game for her - w hilst she certainly w asn?t unintelligent (though she w ould be the first to admit she had her moments of incredible foolishness) she w as not one of those great logicians w ho could unravel a mystery from the meagrest of clues. Still, sometimes she enjoyed w ondering just w hat of her insights that Thin Forest had plundered from her mind w ould end up travelling along the slipstream of the city?s M indframe, mating w ith other slips of inspiration to be deposited in an unknow n mindhive.

When she had first been assigned as an agent/node, she w ould search her memories to see if she could find any missing pieces, any gaps in her recollection until she realised that w hatever had been taken w ould never be remembered to have existed at all.

When one considered the matter of dreams, perhaps it w as true that inspiration w as the easiest thing to steal. How could one miss something that one couldn?t grasp? Certainly, she had never felt any different after Sharing w ith Thin Forest.

How ever, occasionally she liked to believe that somew here out there w as an Ow nmeme, w ithdraw n and repackaged and distributed amongst some other nodes or perhaps simply used to deepen the medium of the zeitgeist-current. How else could she explain the sudden sensation of falling that she w ould sometimes experience w hen reading a random paper, a new sfeed; the same strange sensation that afflicted her w hen she plugged into Thin Forest. It w as 57

a key, she knew . It w as her subconscious reclaiming a part that had once belonged to it. That is mine! it w ould shout and her chi, her inner self, w ould trip and fall from its high perch before righting itself again.

Chika found the primitive impulse quite amusing in some w ays. It made her laugh to think how slow ly the homo sapiens? soul-machinery had evolved w hen such of its kind had been the source of ever developing technologies, rapidly mutating programs and culture-spores, netw orks spreading and recoiling, guided only by chance and algorithm but on a scale so vast and so fast that it gave the appearance of soul-w ork. She w ould think of her younger sister as a toddler, her earliest phrases sentiments of ow nership and w arnings. ?It is mine! That is mine! ? She w ould call out over the silliest of things - a new ly found sap-sap seed under the couch, a slice of guava, a cheap gilt earring bereft of its tw in - and w ith that declaration of ow nership, a declaration of self and an implied threat to any w ho dared deny it.

M uch like her toddler sister, Chika?s subconscious could threaten all it liked but it w as pow erless. That made Chika laugh at herself. What could it do w hen its ow n soul-machinery had been the one to give up w hat had once been hers? It could only remind, perhaps hoping to aw aken some kind of guilt that w ould serve no purpose but lead only to madness. She had read enough Shakespeare to know that.

It w as w hy she never liked asking those questions others asked at the evil of humanity. At tales of corruption and murder and theft and violence, they w ould ask ?Why w ould they do this?? but she knew it w as for the same reason her subconscious w ould rather she suffered angina than be at peace w ith its communal purpose. It w as all the desperate cries of a primitive subconscious, yearning to be recognised as one self amongst many in its brief span of existence before joining the void once more. A virtual self arising like a bubble from the membrane of a collective w hole and then vanishing w ith a pop into the aether. ?It is mine! That is mine!?

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Yes, yes, she w anted to console her poor little primitive subconscious.

Yes, yes you are right it is yours. And now it is somebody else?s.

Sometimes she w ould dream that she w as in the memecurrent. It w as a bit of a cliche how she could only ever see it in her dreams, even though she knew from her training that she w as alw ays a part of it w hether aw ake or asleep. Still, that w as how it w as. When she closed her eyes and fell into a deep sleep, she w ould split into tw o, the sleeper and the guard. The guard w ould w atch over the sleeper and the sleeper w ould find rest, drifting in the dreamspace w here mmuo roamed.

Chika dreamed that the memecurrent w as a purple stream of a fluid thicker than w ater that tasted of limes but smelt of fresh rain.

Sometimes she w ould get slow ed dow n w hen her path w as constricted sometimes she w ould get caught on a rock (w ho knew rocks existed in the memecurrent?), but other than that she w ould simply flow onw ards and onw ards.

She slept for most of the journey home. The metro w as perfectly safe during the w ork-hours and she w as fortunate that her parents lived in a suburb w ell cocooned by layers of surveillance and code. High above the glow ing city of Lagos, it w as impossible to hear the noise of the metropolis, impossible to smell the scents of ozone, garbage and suya meat but she didn?t miss it. When she had first become an agent, she had alw ays w alked back home, delighting in the beauty of her city, quickened by the shared experiences of agents like herself, the perceptions and sensations of their everyday lives translated into code, teaching the very brickw ork how to see, how to feel, how to think. The w alls?flesh w ould bruise and fade as they absorbed the clouds of smog and diesel fumes that still erupted from the tech used by citizens too busy to care that their machinery w as at least fifty years out of date and the houses, the Ileogba, w ould slow ly grow and w ind their w ay around like creeper vines.

The new er Ileogba w ere grow n from seeds that sprouted plastic and ceramics as others sprouted trees, but these creatures 59

w ere all tw isted and bent according to their synthetic DNA, formed into habitations and civic structures for rich and poor alike. Yet, there w as only so much nature could do. Nurture enabled these seeded homes to grow in a manner more suitable for their environment and it w as the nurture that those such as Chika provided.

Ah, how proud she w as w hen she used to w alk through the streets of La Gidis, this her adopted city of Lagos! Older now , she w as more easily tired and the novelty had long w orn off. The spraw ling city that had once seemed like a charmingly w ilful child, w as now an ungrateful adolescent. Sometimes the tendrils from older Ileogba w ould take root and sprout in formations quite unsuitable to live in - they had even created their ow n tw isted sort of mangrove sw amp along the banks of the Niger, (if a mangrove sw amp could have self lighting rooms), and strange, decaying apartments bloomed from spindly stems that grew upw ards above tenements.

These mutants did not last long most of the time. They w ore aw ay, rotted and w ere ingested by other hungry buildings seeking nutrients to expand and grow . It could be a depressing sight: they reminded Chika of diseased skin and distorted lab-farmed hybrids, making her itch and shudder in disgust. That w as w hy she tended to travel by metro these days. It w as quicker, and Daddy w ould not be so w orried.

There w ere times w hen visiting Thin Forest could be a pleasurable experience. When she w as tired or a little bit sad, Chika w ould look to her appointments w ith a kind of relief, know ing that for how ever long she w as needed, she could rest. It w as the rest that did her good, she knew ; Thin Forest w as but the opportunity.

Walking dow n w ell trodden paths, observing the w ell seen sights of the streets and alleys she passed through almost every cycle to reach the agency, allow ed her to observe the w ay in w hich minute differences w ould build upon one another and transform into something altogether new . She liked seeing the creatures of habit, the people w ho w ent to the same restaurant for lunch, the couple w ho w alked dow n the same road before parting for their respective offices. This algorithmic tribe of theirs, livememes w ho barely noticed 60

each other even as they w andered through a shared geometry, w as nonetheless a w ell w oven cult, albeit a cult of happenstance.

Chika w ould miss them w hen she left for University. Whether her fellow cultees w ould notice her absence w as a question she pondered from time to time. The young couple w ere too entranced w ith each other - and soon enough w ould be too repulsed by each other - to notice anything else than the charms of their beloved.

There w as a young man w ho frequently w alked in the opposite direction to her w ho might remember her. He w as alw ays carrying his baby daughter w ho Chika had seen shift from a doddering w ide eyed babbling mystic to a grinning, and sometimes screaming, bundle of delicious plumpness. With each encounter, as he became familiar w ith the otherw ise solemn looking student w ho stalked her w ay tow ards him, sometimes he w ould stop for Chika to admire his little daughter and laugh his w arm chuckle, all flattered pride in w ordless agreement w ith Chika?s soft calls of admiration. He once asked w hat it w as that Chika studied and had put on an impressed expression w hen she had told him.

Could he be another agent/node? Another member of the memesystem that fed Lagos w hole new paradigms to mangle and meld from the minds of its thinkers and dreamers? That w as another question Chika liked to ask herself but it w as fruitless, really. She w as at a level too low to ever require contact w ith another agent - she knew that. It w as w hy she could only meet Thin Forest at the centre rather than link up in the peace of her ow n home. Too low ly to be trusted w ith the machinery.

She liked to ponder such thoughts, to day dream hours aw ay.

They w ere but the sort of fancies she still affected, sometimes to her embarrassment. Nothing more, really, but the last of her baby-fat that w ould be shed to reveal the figure of a w oman.

Did Thin Forest ever change? It never looked like it did, but surely it must have done. The plastic trees w ere capable of grow ing she had once picked off a budding stem out of habit before realising she w as not in the school playground - and certainly the softw are that made Thin Forest possible needed to be continually updated.

Souls grew as bodies do, they alw ays said. Surely, if true, that w ould 61

hold the other w ay round as w ell.

One day, on one of those empty days, Chika w ould climb one of the synthetic trees and attempt to touch the sky. She w ould reach the glass ceiling and place her palm flat against it and push slightly, almost giggling as the glass - cool and aloof and concealing the promise of pain upon shattering - gave w ay slightly. Foolishly - and it w ould be very foolish for she w ould be several years older and a University student besides! - she w ould look to the floor and have to count and sw allow her saliva before making her w ay dow n, tightly pressed against the moist ethyl bark as she slithered back to safety, altogether regretting the capitulation to impulse.

But that w ould be then. For now she w as content to admire the clack of new ly heeled shoes against a polished floor and w onder at the elegance of the colours she had chosen to w ear today, how w ell they set off her glow ing skin. Her future daring w as unimaginable to her now , for she had never yet tried to throw off her fear of heights.

Once w ithin Thin Forest, she strung up the scanty apparatus, smiling as it probed deeper in a w ay that w as almost shy in spite of the fact that it had been three years since her sessions first began and it had no reason to be so skittish. She embraced the unseen prison that sw iftly encaged her mind, transforming her from agent into node, pushing her across the slanted boundary so that she fell, utterly one w ith the memecurrent and yet one w ith the node.

As alw ays, w ith the end of the session, Chika disentangled herself from the machinery and strung it back into place. The back of her neck w ent cold as it did w hen there w as someone behind her and so she turned, ready to smile at the first person she had ever seen w ithin the heart of Thin Forest.

There w as no one there.

There should have been though. It w as in the w ay the trunks of Thin Forest shimmered about their middle, the w ay straight lines alw ays bent slightly around the person they obscured.

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But there w as no one. There w as not a sound - no footsteps, no rustling.

Not enough sleep, Chika thought to herself. And I didn?t eat anything for breakfast.

With relief, she picked up her bag and sw ung it round her shoulder. It w as vital to report irregularities - changes in perception, illusions and foreign voices; that sort of thing - a matter of public safety, she had w arned in her induction. It made sense given the nature of Thin Forest machinery. You didn?t w ant ghosts in the memecurrent after all.

With hindsight, Chika w ould consider that an occasion she had been foolish not to do w hat she should have done. With more hindsight, she w ould be glad of it.

It w as the essay that changed everything. As soon as she had read the abstract, the w arning tremors stirred gently through her body. The earthquake hit in w aves, making her head feel it had w arped into a parallel universe and then suddenly returned to the present time. She felt as though the bed had been removed from beneath her, that initial jolt before the fall leaving her breathless and her heart racing.

When you entered Thin Forest, it w as know n that you w ould end up sharing a great deal more than could be easily expressed but essentially there w as one simple truth to be know n. Any connection w ent both w ays at all times - a node could easily become a sink and vice versa.

In her training, Chika had been w arned that ghosts could just as easily implant themselves into her mind as they could infect the memecurrent. They w ere generally harmless, the w orst cases being things like memories that w ere obviously not your ow n. Easy enough to blow aw ay, as one w ould a case of deja vu.

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But, if it w as possible for ghosts, the same held true for Ow nmemes.

Ow nmemes once shared by Thin Forest w ere perfectly capable of reaching others w ithin the netw ork and there w as nothing that could be done about it. And indeed, w hat w ould you w ant to do about it?

That w as how the hivemind w orked. On some level, one simply had to trust Thin Forest and the assorted complicated intertw ining algorithms that made up its soul and believe that it knew w hat w as for the best.

Yet here she w as, trusting, and thoroughly w inded. This paper, w ritten by a Professor Anyanyebechi from a colonist University several planets aw ay, w as hers. Yes, it w as hers, it w as Chika?s, but precisely how w as frustratingly difficult to say. Was it the sources, w as it the central arguments, or just the kernel of an idea at the heart of it? It w as of course impossible to know . Perhaps the sensation w as just a ghost, an echo of a previous connection Thin Forest had created betw een their minds. The intuition, the know ledge that w as not quite know ledge, w elled up like pus w ithin a boil.

She w as both fascinated and disgusted by this new sensation. The shock at the intercourse of the hypothetical and the real resonated like a filthy sw ear w ord. ?I w ant to see,? she spoke out loud. She got out of her bed and ran out of the house.

The crow ded streets seemed to clear before her as she ran to Thin Forest. Occasionally she remembered to say thank you but she w ad no time. The idea w as too good to lose. She needed to be fast, to get there before her courage ran out.

In her excitement, her hands had become clumsy and stupid.

The cables and w ires w ere trickier than usual, slipping through her fingers and falling against the husb. She draped the tendrils across her head, a w ebbed veil of tiny electrodes that crept about looking for the usual entrance points, and then forced herself into Thin Forest Core. Thin Forest hesitated as though shocked at her audacity, before letting her in.

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For the first time Chika felt herself lost. It w as not Thin Forest that had invited her in after all. She had gatecrashed one of the biggest hiveminds in West Africa but, unlike the M aleficent she must have appeared to the system, she had no great scheme in mind to match her grand entrance. All she w anted to do w as to find her Ow nmeme and then to find her. The Professor.

Chika ran. When she w as almost too tired to carry on, w ings sprouted from her back and lifted her up by a few inches so only the tips of her toes pushed against the ground. The memecurrent appeared ahead of her, fast flow ing and smelling of fresh rain just as in her dreams. She took a few final steps and then leapt into the violet stream, piercing the surface of the fluid like a knife through soap. Dow n beneath she flew and then rose back up to the surface to breath.

There w as only one w ay to go and that w as to go w ith the river. Exhausted, she w as happy to let the current take her to w herever it w ould. There w as, after all, only one place is could take her to. So long as she kept her head above the w ater, she w ould be fine, or so she kept telling herself.

The memecurrent broadened as it continued onw ards. Every now and then, she w ould dive beneath the surface and burst up through the surface, gasping. She might get caught in an eddy, tw irled about by localised turbulent flow s. How many agents had it taken to give Thin Forest a memory of w ater? She felt a pang of hurt, of humour and sadness. Here she w as, half-drow ning in a memory of a river that the hivemind could never sw im in.

She lost count of the number of times she w ould dive beneath the surface. Each time she came up, she could feel a cool breeze brushing her cheek. After a particularly long dive she came up to breath only to bang her forehead against a rocky ceiling.

Automatically she w ent back beneath the w ater, rubbing her head, checking for cut skin. Darkness came about her and she began to sink as though the memecurrent w ere flow ing dow nw ards to the centre of the Earth. Each time it took her longer and longer to push 65

through the increasing w eight of w ater and reach the surface to breath. Each time she could feel the ceiling get low er and low er, like a cave that w as gradually constricting. Still the current flow ed onw ards. There w as nothing to hold onto and her fingers w ere too slippery to grip the rocky outcrop. She felt the fluid enter her mouth and be vomited back out again into the teeming w aters.

She w as going to drow n. There w as no air above her and only w ater below . Chika began to sink and as she sank the pressure squeezed her ribcage, causing a nasty, prickly pain to radiate from her chest. A sudden blow from above and she w as pinned, unable to float upw ards again but still being dragged ever onw ards by the current. Her teeth w ere clenched, her mouth w as closed, her nostrils blocked to ensure no fluid w ould enter. Her head pounded, her ribs cut into her flesh. Spasms of pain tore through her mangled body w hich thrashed this w ay and that in the dark w aters. Her defenses exploded as her diaphragm forced her lungs to exhale. With that, the fluid entered her mouth and her nose, filling up her gut, making her vomit and suck more of the liquid into her lungs.

Exhausted by the struggle, Chika?s body w ent limp. Only the current w ould carry her further. The pain gradually subsided until it w as but a delicious throbbing that bore testament to her virtual near-death by drow ning. She lost the sensation of her toes and fingertips, then of her legs and her arms and then of everything but herself as she w as dissolved into the memecurrent.

She could not even feel the pull of the current anymore.

Floating aimlessly, w ith no limbs to sw im w ith, no current to flow by, all she could feel w as the darkness grow and transform into a w arm, muffling cocoon. This, she realised, w as Thin Forest Core. ?I just w anted to see,? she said. ?That?s all.?

It w as disorienting to feel and yet not feel oneself float and turn about, the sense of motion unjustified by the lack of reference points. Chika could feel the gentle hum of engines, alw ays coming from somew here behind her, yet at the same time there w as a silence just like she imagined there w ould be at the bottom of the ocean.

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She knew there w as no w ay out of Thin Forest Core now . There w as no w ay to find the Professor w ho had w ritten that paper w ith her inspiration. It w as a shame, because she had alw ays w anted to meet another agent, and to think she had connected w ith a mind like that w as actually quite w onderful. She w ondered w hat the Professor w as doing now - w as she giving a presentation at a seminar, debating w ith other academics on a panel? M aybe she w as w riting another paper, maybe she had taken another of Thin Forest?s memes.

At some point, Chika realised she w ould have to go back, but for now she w as too exhausted. She had run all the w ay to the centre, she had flow n and sw am and drow ned in the memecurrent.

For now Chika w anted to rest, w anted to sleep. Let Thin Forest do w hat it pleased, just as it alw ays did. When the time w ould come, it w ould eject her and leave her to the w orld beyond Thin Forest.

Before her, from the murky depths of Thin Forest Core, there appeared a great eye that held her in its gaze. The eye w as her guard.

Was she asleep? Had she been asleep in her bed all this time? Yet, here she w as aw ake and able to comprehend that there w as a giant eye gazing unblinkingly at her. ?Welcome,? she said in her father?s tongue. ?Uh... w ould you mind w aiting??

The eye continued to stare at her and she w ould have laughed at its stupid gaze if she had had a mouth to laugh w ith. But she needed to sleep first.

As the great eye started to blink, the tremors began.

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Walidah Imarisha is an author, educator, activist and poet. She is one of the co-editors of the anthology Octavia?s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice M ovements. She is also the author of the collection of poetry ' Scars/Stars' , and the upcoming nonfiction book ' Angels w ith Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison and Redemption' . She has taught in the Portland State University?s Black Studies Department, Oregon State University?s Women Gender Sexuality Studies Department and Southern New Hampshire University?s English Department.

Rooted in Stars Airlock Breathed open She stepped through, unlatched the Space suit helmet.

Ran her fingers Through hair, Curls that flattened momentarily Then coiled up Like w illow trees.

Out Of the Decompression chamber, Rain w et grass w et Flooded her nostrils.

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That?s right, Summer show er programmed, Tears for new okra crops.

Through Neatly plow ed fields The feel of fleshy plant skin Trailing through fingers As she reached out.

Tomato Plaintain Eggplant Cassava So strange; Here Light years aw ay From Earth We take hands Into dirt, Grow nourishment With taste of ancestors.

She squinted up Blind brilliance No sun there Just curved sloping dome Dressed in 69

Bioluminescence extract.

No sun No Sun Over Earth Either Just that blistering orb Stuck in sky, Burning everything it touched.

Those in pow er then Drank oil Chew ed coal But still Resource starvation.

So the plan: Seed the Sun Harness its pow er, Brand it as only theirs.

She, The Sun, Would not be Enslaved.

Beloved?s Sethe of stratosphere Would rather kill Her children Than see them 70

Property.

And so The Sun Exploded.

But some w ere ready, Had read signs Written in new spapers Graffitied on w alls Intoned through bone Sung in dreams of plantations All that you touch You change All that you change Changes you

She touched refractive w alls, The change that changed her.

For years She computed Through night Laboring To bring to life This.

Biodome.

Haven.

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Home.

It had Danced In her mind Like a Yoruba priestess.

One ancestor Felt everpresent Especially through Final desperate days.

Discovered in Restricted net entries, Hours spent reading About his life In w hat used to be America.

Texas Black First Great Depression Black Death sentence Black.

But this ancestor?s Path of survival Led to the stars.

M athematician at Now defunct NASA. He w orked w ith House-sized computers.

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Data flow ed through Her sub processor chip Buried behind left ear.

M ore gigs Asleep offline Than he could have dreamt of.

The stars Not enough for him.

Shackles stretch Betw een galaxies, So he labored Next to people Who w ere really Panthers Carved space To birth future.

Liberation infectious He must be quarantined.

Captured by a system Too diseased for cure.

She stared -Pixelated face On broken screen: His skin Dusky cinnamon.

Smile so w ide It traversed 73

Solar systems.

Strong hands Shaped constellations.

She passed through The fields.

Reached biodome north w all.

Cheek On the porthole, Optical implants scanned: Scarred rock Cratered barren.

Beyond Blackness Star sparkles Scattered w ide By unseen hand.

Outline of ship.

Ship she bled to create.

Ship colored dark cinnamon.

Ship named Sundiata, Sonic salvation Carrying multitudes To this place.

This home.

This planet Called Freedom.

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The First Interracial Kiss On Television His face loomed Contorted Straining Against the aliens?control He resisted the touch of M y dusky skin M y open raw lips

But in my quarters When the w alkw ay lights Dimmed And a skeleton crew M anned his first true love He w ould come - Inside the door - Inside me He w ould grasp handfuls Of me as Sustenance He searched the galaxy For a language That lingered in his ear Like my w hispered Sw ahili

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But w ith the eyes Of his crew on him He resisted M y mouth With all his might M y mouth Which had tasted every piece of him

I thought of the myths Passed dow n From my great Great Great Great Grandmother Of forced embraces In broken shacks During a time When my skin Would not have been my ow n

And That moment When His lips bruised mine And the aliens cheered Was the first time I tasted those stories 76

On his tongue And knew them to be true

Black Hole Soul cyborg syllables and android anagrams futuristic fusion sound and metal battery acid blood sings bionic ears slaveships turned spaceships dock at astral ports report aw ay team report back to the future Black to the past as laser beams target unbroken chains deranged laughter over the intercom as they ride by on hoverboards souped up engine purrs 77

the past

roaring razor blade dreams no screams in the vacuum of space our sins erased sucked up in a Black hole Black soul reborn as quasar Danger astroBlackness tw erking alchemic genius (re)birthing millennial falcons in overdrive cuz they got stars to ride

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Fatimah White is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and expressive arts therapist living in Brooklyn New York. She holds an International M asters Degree of Fine Arts in Creative Practice from UK Plymouth University' s Berlin based M FA program know n as Transart Institute.

Her w ork evokes the pow ers that exist w ithin the interconnectedness of light and time; exploring themes of storytelling, adornment, and indigenous astronomy. The root of her creative practice is embedded in the beautiful patterns of nature. The purpose of her w ork is to reactivate agencies of change and empow erment. She has exhibited internationally in cities such as Berlin, New York and Sao Paulo. She is interested in the unique quintessence that flow s throughout existence, ultimately seeking to bring the essence of those stories in w hich the view er can experience through multiple mediums.

Nuri Digital Illustration Nuri is a character from my upcoming graphic novel entitled,?Nuri: Floating Through The Space Of M y Ow n Design?. Nuri lives on an earth-like planet know n as Nyika located in the inner ring of the Andromeda galaxy. The illustration portrays the pow erful moment in time w hen Nuri first receives her, ?Ancestral Gift?, of flight.

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Curtia Wright focuses on the unpredictability, fragility and vulnerability of the human body; our bodies being unstable complex structures that decay and experience physical pain w hile carrying w ith it concealed internal mental anguish (stress, emotion, mental illness ext.). Her w ork deals w ith how w e navigate our surroundings in this ?complex skin?and also how our environment plays a part in deforming and forming this skin (physical and societal factors).

Saving Face Oil on Wood Board

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Erik Steinskog is an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen department of Arts and Cultural Studies. Recently, his research has focused on the musical genre of Afrofuturism, from Sun Ra to the present day. He also looks at parallels betw een music and other forms of expression, as w ell as how Afrofuturistic aesthetics can engage w ith other perspectives and musical expressions.

We Travel the Spaceways: Afrofuturist Space Programs

?We travel the spacew ays / from planet to planet.? (Sun Ra) Introduction I In 1967 Sun Ra and His M yth Science Arkestra released the album We Travel the Spacew ays. Included is the composition ?We Travel the Spacew ays? previously heard on his 1963 album When Sun Comes Out. It is one of Sun Ra?s space-chants, w ith a simple text: ?We travel the spacew ays / from planet to planet? sung over and over against an ostinato-like figure in the band. The lyrics illustrates Sun Ra having left Planet Earth behind, and his Arkestra ? both as a misspelled orchestra and as an ark ? has become a spaceship. Such narratives of interstellar travel, how ever, are found throughout Sun Ra?s oeuvre, most obviously in a number of titles. ?Interplanetary M usic,? ?Interstellar Love Ways,? ?Rocket Number Nine Takes off for the Planet Venus,? ?Flight to M ars,? ?Next Stop M ars,? ?Outer Spacew ays, Incorporated,? ?Journey Among the Stars? are some of the best know n examples. Sun Ra?s ?system? ? w hat is most often referred to as his ?M ythScience? or ?Astro Black M ythology? (Lock 1999, p. 33) ? is in many w ays fully formed already tow ards the end of the 1950s. But it is continuously expanded, by w ay of his recordings, his speeches and interview s, as w ell as the teaching he did at the University of California, Berkeley in 1971, on ?The Black 82

M an in the Cosmos? (Szw ed 1998, p. 294).

Introduction II In last year?s blockbuster ' Interstellar ' (directed by Christopher Nolan), a theme of scientists travels on the Endurance to recover data for finding a habitable planet for human beings to travel too. One of these scientists, Romilly (played by David Gyasi), is a black man and is killed by an explosion during the flight. Tow ards the end of the movie, w e find the main character, Cooper (played by M atthew M cConaughey), visiting his dying daughter abroad a NASA space station w here humanity currently is living. This ?humanity,? how ever, is all w hite, yet another example related to the initial reflections from Ytasha Womack?s book Afrofuturism, about ?the obvious absence of people of color in fictitious future/past? (Womack 2013, p. 5f).

Womack?s observation also echoes the opening question of M ark Dery?s article ?Black to the Future,? the article w here the term afrofuturism is coined: ?Why do so few African Americans w rite science fiction?? a genre, Dery claims, ?w hose close encounter w ith the Other ? the stranger in a strange land ? w ould seem uniquely suited to the concerns of African-American novelists? (Dery 1994, p.

179f).

In this article, I w ant to discuss a phenomenon related to Sun Ra?s ?Outer Spacew ays, Incorporated,? found on the album Nothing Is (1979), as w ell as on the sound-track album to the movie Space is the Place (album released in 1993). In that song, the lyrics are ?If you find Earth boring, just the same old same thing, come on sign up w ith Outer Spacew ays, Incorporated.? The ironic dimension of the lyrics should not mislead, though, it is not only that Planet Earth might be boring. In combination w ith the irony there is serious matter at hand, related to the class Sun Ra taught about ?The Black M an in the Cosmos.? This includes the place for the black population in the past, the present and the future. What I w ant to concentrate on is w hat I w ould like to call afrofuturist space programs, both real and imagined ? if that distinction makes sense at all in the present context. These space programs open up for several questions relating to space and time, to history, as w ell as to the place for ?race? in the future (cf. Reed 2014). An argument could be made for pluralizing 83

the notion of ?future,? saying that there are several futures. On the other hand, there is a dimension of this being not primarily ? or not only ? about the future, but rather about the present or the future seen from the present. One thing science fiction does is to set a light on the present from a decentered point of view , w atching current events from the point of view of imagined futures, using today as a template for possible futures as w ell as possible futures as corrections for today. In this William Gibson?s much-quoted statement about the future already being here also testifies to how access to the future is part of our current geopolitical and, I w ould add, interplanetary, situation. This, how ever, at the same time contains a problem. Using the very notion of the imagination ? or, the related term speculation ? might give the impression that w hat w e are talking about is not real.

But one of the challenges of thinking the future is simultaneously to see it as real, as something having, in a certain sense, already happened. Or, perhaps better, to see it as similar or equivalent to how w e tend to see the past. The past is, in one particular sense, not any more present in the present that the future. Still, in perhaps different w ays, they haunt the present, take part in the present, constitute the present.

This haunting is also related to different forms of understanding, and critical for me is the role of imagination as part of the aesthetics and practices found herein. Our understanding of the past is also, in this particular sense, built upon our possibilities of imagining the past, or, better, several pasts, in a double movement aw ay from the present. As it says in the opening of Star Wars: ?a long time ago in a galaxy far, far aw ay? (cf. Womack 2013, p. 6). Distance ? both in time and in space ? is inscribed in many dimensions of the genre. As such science fiction challenges the current understandings of the time-space continuum. M ore generally is also how speculative fiction, all media available, is doing something more: engaging our fantasy and/or imagination, show ing us different w orlds, constructing new w orlds, both in the past and in the future, perhaps even in the present. In this speculative fiction and science fiction is also engaged in w hat is called w orld-building ? or, perhaps better, as in one review THEESatisfactions?s recent album EarthEE, ?galaxy building.?

But as Kodw o Eshun w rites, in ?Further Considerations of 84

Afrofuturism?: ?It is not that black subjectivities are w aiting for science-fiction authors to articulate their lifew orlds. Rather, it is the reverse? (Eshun 2003, p. 299).

The alien and ?the human?

In an important sense, the figure of the alien is doubled. In M ark Dery?s discussion, in ?Black to the Future,? the point of origin for black science fiction is interpreted as an alien abduction. In other w ords, the West Africans taken on the slave ships to the so-called ?new w orld? w as captured by aliens, creatures coming from a foreign w orld/civilization, abducting humans and transferring them to a new and foreign w orld. In this new w orld, things are different ? and the captives thus have to relate to a totally different w orld than the one they w ere forced aw ay from. After the M iddle Passage, another w orld arises, one filled w ith racism and atrocities, all as a result, then, of an alien abduction. This background ? w hich is almost like w hat Isaiah Levander calls ?blackground? (Levander 2011, p. 1ff) ? is never lost w ithin the afrofuturist framew ork, as given the focus on African American and afro-diasporic cultures, this is a point of origin. It is, as Toni M orrison and Paul Gilroy point to, also in a particular sense the beginning, origin, Ursprung, of our ?modernity.?

It?s not simply that human life originated in Africa in anthropological terms, but that modern life begins w ith slavery. (Toni M orrison in Gilroy 1993, p. 178) One crucial dimension w ithin this modernity is the notion of ?the human.? On the plantation, that early biopolitical entity ? early in the sense that the plantation is different than ?the camp? w hich in many w ays has become fundamental in discussions of biopolitics (Gilroy 2000, p. 60; Weheliye 2014, p. 37)? the people descendent from Africans w ere not seen as ?human.? They w ere subhumans. In this the alien/human dichotomy is transformed, w ith a change of perspective, in the sense that those perceived as aliens by the Africans now become the humans, and the Africans become the subhumans, nonhumans, animals. This non-humanity, how ever, also contains the potential for another ?inhumanity,? later incarnated ? if that w ord is not too influenced by the human body ? in the robot and the android. This version of dualism, betw een ?the human? and ?the non-human,? can also, throughout the 19th and 20th century be 85

seen as an unavoidable part in the African American self-understanding, related both to w hat W.E.B. DuBois called ?double consciousness? and to the fight for an inclusion during the Civil Rights M ovement.

Given the on-going fight for inclusion in ?the human,? other strategies w ere found. And w hen inclusion seemed impossible, another solution w ould be to bypass the w hole category of ?the human? and move directly from ?the subhuman? to the ?overhuman,? ?superhuman,? or ?posthuman.? This, according to Eshun, is the strategy of Sun Ra, the arguably most important musician, composer, and theoretician of afrofuturism (Eshun 1999, p. 155).

Other Worlds In the opening of the film Space is the Place (1974, directed

by John Coney) Sun Ra is seen w alking at a foreign planet, claiming that ?time has officially ended,? and that on this other side of time the black folks could be teleported ? through music ? to this other planet.

This plan is in accordance w ith w hat Sun Ra learned from ?the Space Brothers? w hen he w as abducted back in 1936 (Lock 1999, p. 52).

He w as taken up to meet w ith extraterrestrials, and they instructed him in uses of music to change the planet, and, later on, to use the music as a means to leave Planet Earth behind. Then a colony ? if that is not too strong a w ord ? w ould be set up in outer space, making it possible for the Black Race to prosper.

Sun Ra?s abduction ?the Space Brothers? w as not his only relation to aliens; he also claimed to come from outer space, more exactly from Saturn. This is, for most people, an unbelievable story, but personally I tend to follow Kodw o Eshun in accepting the impossibility of this. As he w rites in M ore Brilliant Than the Sun: This is particularly true w ith Sun Ra ? just because Ra pushes it by saying that he comes from Saturn. I alw ays accept the impossibility of this. I alw ays start w ith that, w here most people w ould try and claim it w as an allegory. But it isn?t an allegory: he really did come from Saturn. I try to exaggerate that impossibility, until it?s irritating, until it?s annoying, and this annoyance is merely a threshold being 86

crossed in the readers?heads, and once they unseize, unclench their sensorium, they?ll have passed through a new threshold and they?ll be in my w orld (Eshun 1999, p. 193).

From this impossibility, if that is w hat it is, different possibilities arise, different questions, different w ays of seeing and listening. As Sun Ra says, in the opening of Space is the Place: ?the music is different here, the vibrations are different.? And this difference, this being in an other place, simultaneously challenges ?the same.? There is no ?same? any longer, or, rather, the other (w ith or w ithout a capital O) becomes more important, show ing other possibilities, and other futures. And so, in trying to do w hat Eshun describes, exaggerate an impossibility to see w hether a threshold can be reached, one might show , to quote one of my favorite Sun Ra compositions, that ?There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of)? (from the 1978 album Lanquidity).

While Sun Ra in this particular sense w as an alien, or, as he also claimed, an angel ? a member of ?the Angel race? ? there is a more dow n-to-earth approach to the question of the black future, or the ?blackground? for alternative futures. One such approach is stories about African Space Programs, and here real life and imagination, history and w orld-building seem to interact. Sun Ra?s project is follow ed by a host of musicians, one very interesting in the field today being Ras G, recording under the moniker Ras G and the Afrikan Space Program. He thus points tow ards the African continent as inscribed into a US West Coast musician?s output, w hile simultaneously show ing one line of tradition w ithin afrofuturism.

Another approach is to look into the many important movements on the African continent today w orking w ithin afrofuturism, w here, in other w ords, w hat began as an African American and Afro-diasporic aesthetic and movement, today is found on the African continent.

Science fiction?s relation to history, tradition, past, present, and future, here points to other aesthetic ? and conceptual ? possibilities than in the African American science fiction tradition, and the relation to race is, obviously, differently conceptualized on the African continent than in the US context, even if, obviously, w e can still learn from theoreticians of science fiction, given the globalized dimensions of the genre. How ever, the questions about racialized subjects in the future w ill obviously need to be asked anew w hen taking Africa as point of departure.

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In 1964,the same year Sun Ra recorded Other Planes of There, Zambian schoolteacher Edw ard M akuka Nkoloso w rote in a new spaper about plans of going to M ars. Remember, this is during the full space race w hen USSR and US w ere fighting to get to outer space and the moon. It is only 6 years after NASA w as established, 3 years after president John F. Kennedy proposed the goal of ?landing a man on the M oon? by the end of the 1960s, a goal reached in 1969.

Going to M ars, how ever, is still being discussed and currently the plans seem to be for a human spaceflight to M ars in about 2035.

But here w e are, in Zambia, a country recently having become independent (October 24, 1964), w ith ?a spacegirl, tw o cats, and a missionary,? as the subtitle to the new spaper article has it. They had severe problems getting funded, how ever, so the project came to an end.

This more or less forgotten story came back w ith Spanish photographer Christina De M iddel. Searching for ?unbelievable stories? she came upon the Zambian space program, and decided to create ?an imaginary documentation? of Nkoloso?s visions. The result is the photo book The Afronauts (from 2012), in w hich she imagines the project, blending ?fact? and ?fiction,? documentary and vision, w hile simultaneously show ing us one of past?s futures that never materialized.

Her project thus simultaneously gives testimony to a lost future, a future interrupted back in 1964.

This Zambian project ? or non-project ? w as not the only one on the African continent. Idi Amin, for example, announced a Ugandan human spaceflight program back in 1971 (one never processed, and one called, by Time magazine in 1999 among the ?100 Worst Ideas of the Century?). Today you can find the African Space Research Program, w hich is a non-governmental program of a kind of DIY-style.

And later developments are also in place, as the Kenyan space program (from 2012) and the Nigerian Space Program ? NASRDA, the latter more occupied w ith satellites and communication, but as such obviously contributing to the 20th and 21st centuries? technoculture. This relation to technoculture show s the relation to 88

Dery?s definition of afrofuturism, w here he w rites: Speculative fiction that threats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of tw entieth-century technoculture ? and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future ? might, for w ant of a better term, be called ?Afrofuturism?. (Dery 1994, p. 180) This definition clearly has to be expanded both to include the tw enty-first century, to include other dimensions of technoculture, and to include other African and Afro-Diasporic themes and concerns than the African American.

Whether some of these projects are hoaxes or not ? as some have claimed ? doesn?t really matter. What is important is not the reality of the projects ? although fascinating ? but the imagination related to the projects. And these projects are fruit for the imagination. A good example is Deji Bryce Olukotun?s novel Nigerians in Space (2014), more of a crime novel than science fiction per se, but w here outer space, Africa, globalized flow s, and so much more are at stake. As such the novel could be inscribed in the grow ing field of science fiction and fantasy coming from w riters from the African continent ? some of them living in the US or in Europe, but w here their background is very much a part of their artistic production. As Reynaldo Anderson, one of the editors of a forthcoming anthology on afrofuturism, claimed at the AstroBlackness Conference in Los Angeles (in 2015): ?the future of Afrofuturism is Africa.? In other w ords, the future has a future. It?s in our imagination and in our fantasy, but also in our everyday practices. It might not be realized. In that sense the future belongs to the virtual, and so it might become a past?s future. But on the other hand, some of these speculations, some of the futures imagined might be actualized.

The future...

Another dimension of afrofuturist practices is claiming that the future is already here, or, rather, that some of the artists ? or characters ? actually come from the future. A case in point is Janelle M onรก e, w hose alter ego Cindi M ayw eather is from the 28th century, but has been sent back to our time here and now (Reed 2014, p.

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365). Her music and her emotion pictures are all about this intersection of the future and the now ? w hereas the past is somew hat less obvious, but clearly part of her musical sounds. The story of Cindi is folded out on the songs, in the videos (called ?emotion pictures?), in the cover-art, and in w riting, on tw itter, tumblr, and youtube, and is thus circulating not only in cyberspace, but in w hat is arguably key for today?s technoculture. M oná e?s presence also points to the importance of gender for the discussion of the future, and here too there are parallels to so-called real life.

In some sense, M ae Jemison can be seen as a parallel to M oná e. Jemison, the first African American w oman to travel in space, w ent into orbit abroad the space shuttle Endeavour, September 12, 1992. As is the case w ith quite a few African Americans these days, she?s had a DNA analysis, show ing she descends from people of Cameroon, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Senegal. The first American w oman in space w as Sally Ride, June 18, 1983 on the space shuttle Challenger (the tw o first w omen in space, how ever, w ere the Soviets Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982). With Ride there is an explicit relation to M oná e, as she is the topic ? so to speak ? for her song, ?Sally Ride? from the 2013 album The Electric Lady. Again w e see how facts and fiction interact, how afrofuturism isn?t only about images, but also about using imagination to create the future. Here ?real life? becomes a part of M oná e?s vision. In a similar vein, how ever, M ae Jemison is partaking in w hat I w ould also call an afrofuturist project, her 100 Year Starship, launched in 2012 as a nonprofit w hose goal is to achieve interstellar travel by 2112 (Womack 2013, p. 44).

Jemison?s vision or mission might be real in a different sense than M oná e?s. It might also be more utopian, w hereas M oná e?s is more open-ended, w ith for example Anthony Reed arguing, in his article ?African Space Programs: Spaces and Times of the Black Fantastic? that she is rather dystopian (Reed 2014, p. 359). Imagining the future, and the impact of this imagination on the present, clearly has both utopian and dystopian potentials. Where Jemison seems clearly on the side of a utopian vision, M oná e?s is more double. Take her song ?Q.U.E.E.N.? for example, also from her album The Electric Lady. The title, she has revealed, is an acronym: ?She says that ?Q? represents the queer community, the ?U?for the untouchables, the ?E? for emigrants, the second ?E?for the excommunicated and the ?N?for 90

those labeled as negroid.?

This fits w ith her general statements about ?w hy an android??, that Cindi is a metaphor for otherness, but it also expands upon this metaphor in directions coherent w ith an afrofuturist framew ork. The android represents a future other, and in the case of M onรก e?s framew ork, also an android from the future. She argues that the African American experience might be a kind of model ? and w arning ? for how androids w ill be treated in the near future w hen they w ill cohabitate the earth w ith human beings. The model and the w arning, here are different terms for the utopian and dystopian impulses.

These impulses could as w ell be seen in relation to the 100 Year Starship on the one hand and the ending of Interstellar on the other. Firstly as a question to w ho w ill be in the future, the place, that is, for a future of diversity, and secondly how this future w ill look. Who know s, w hen the 100 Year Starship project succeeds, w ho w ill they ? w e ? meet out there? Will Sun Ra be there, playing w ith his Intergalactic Research Arkestra (one of the many names his Arkestra had during his time here on Planet Earth)? Or w ill Cindi M ayw eather be there to greet the people arriving?

References Dery, M ark 1994, ?Black to the Future: Interview s w ith Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose?, in M ark Dery (ed.), Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994, pp. 179-222.

Dery, M ark (ed.) 1994, Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture.

Durham: Duke University Press.

Eshun, Kodw o 1999, M ore Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books.

Eshun, Kodw o 2003, ?Further Considerations on Afrofuturism?, CR: The New Centennial Review vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 287-302.

Gilroy, Paul 1993, Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Culture. London: Serpent?s Tail.

Gilroy, Paul 2000, Betw een Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race. London: Routledge.

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Lavender, Isaiah, III. 2011, Race in American Science Fiction.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Lock, Graham 1999, Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton. Durham: Duke University Press.

Olukotun, Deji Bryce 2014, Nigerians in Space. Los Angeles: Unnamed Press.

Reed, Anthony 2014, ?African Space Programs: Space and Times of the Black Fantastic?, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society vol. 16, no. 3-4, pp. 351-371.

Szw ed, John F. 1998, Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra. New York: Da Capo.

Weheliye, Alexander G. 2014, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human.

Durham: Duke University Press.

Womack, Ytasha L. 2013, Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Chicago: Law rence Hill Books.

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Sammy Boras is a UK based illustrator. A prolific comic artist, she graduated from the University of Gloucester and has given talks at events such as Laydeez do Comics, Birmingham.

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Naomi M is a M anchester based Belgian visual artist and performer.

She is currently on the final stretch of an undergrad, having bagged an arts aw ard and graduated from a leadership program w hilst navigating mental illness. Her w ork explores the futuristic in the everyday through photography and mixed media.

Urban Dystopia Shots of Moss Side and Hulme shot through a home-made

futuristic lens

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Peter Kalu is a poet, fiction w riter and playw right. He started w riting as a member of M anchester UK?s M oss Side Write black w riters w orkshop and has had eight novels, tw o film scripts and three theatre plays produced to date. His poetry is spread across numerous anthologies. In 2002 he w on the Kodak/Liverpool Film Festival Aw ard for his script, No Trace. In M arch 2003 he w on the BBC/Contact Theatre Dangerous Comedy Script Aw ard for his play, Pants. In 2014 he w as aw arded a PhD Scholarship to conduct creative w riting research at Lancaster University, UK. He has lived in Hulme/Didsbury, M anchester; Edinburgh, Scotland; Leeds, Yorkshire; Abia State, Nigeria (briefly); and San Francisco, USA. He trained in his teens, Kung Fu, regularly practising at the Wu Shu Kw an kung fu centre on the corner of Princess Rd and Alexander Rd, M anchester. He has four children. Before turning to w riting he w orked as a translator (of French and Spanish into English), a glass collector in a Leeds bar called The Shoulder of M utton, and as a street busker around the North West of England. He has a degree in Law and further qualifications in softw are programming and w ind-surfing. For many years he ran a Hulme based Carnival Band called M oko Jumbi (Ghosts of the Gods) w hich took to the streets at M anchester Caribbean Carnival every July on three feet high stilts. He has been learning to tightrope w alk for the last ten years.

Doppelganger Tunde is back from hospital. It?s a miracle. He kissed me and said I w as the only person w ho ever mattered to him and I w as w hy he pulled through. Then he broke dow n and cried and me w ith him, so help me God. He?s quite unsteady on his feet. I didn?t sleep all night in case he had a relapse.

This morning I had to remind him how to cream his skin and brush his hair. I suppose memory loss is usual after these types of accidents. I still blame myself. I w asn?t looking. The doctors said he 95

died tw ice on the operating table and they used new surgery on him.

He sleeps w ith his arms around me like he?s scared I?ll leave him. He?s creaming his face now . His depressions have lifted, but he?s no longer ticklish. I suppose it?s a good trade.

In the morning his eyes are like Saharan pools. I drow n in them w henever he looks at me then he asks me w hy I?m gaw ping.

Tw o w eeks home and Tunde is still not his usual self yet. I suppose I shouldn?t expect it.

He doesn?t murmur my name w hen w e make love the w ay he used to. He?s clumsy as w ell. It?s different though, he takes longer. It?s w hat our sex life needed. Afterw ards w e w atched the Cartoon Netw ork. He didn?t know w here to laugh. It?s hard explaining cartoons.

I w as asking him about how Franz Fanon had left an important legacy to black people the w orld over and did he think Fanon w as still read today? He said w ho?s Fanon? I w ent upstairs and cried. It w as his PhD thesis.

I?ve missed a period. Will do test.

I came back early and found him w ith the landline at his ear, not saying anything. He stayed like that for ages. Could only be his mother. Bought little blue bootees. Should I tell him?

He puts his ear to my stomach and listens to the baby for hours w hen he thinks I?m sleeping.

Picked up the extension to find out. He w as listening to the Internet static sound ? w e?re on dial up. M aybe he is ill. Phoned M elody, she said she?s know ledgeable about these things and I think about getting him to a psychiatrist.

He w as very calm at the suggestion. He says the baby w ill be like him too. A hybrid. He says there is a higher intelligence to human beings but it only exists in softw are form and our technology?s mostly too primitive t host them. They are a benign 96

force, he says, I?m not to w orry.

It?s night time. We?re at the bedroom w indow , I?m gazing at the stars. He says the baby is from one of the stars, then kisses me. I prefer this Tunde. He never slept w ith his arm around me before.

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