Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Sci-Fi, the Surreal and an Afrofuture; or, How it came to be that "Real Life is the Fantasy I Choose to Imagine"

My stories have often been labelled "sic-fi." I've always found this amusing because I do not think they are science fiction at all and I've never actually been very interested in the genre (not to get into the confines of "genre" in this essay). My reticence to accept the label of science fiction is the science part of the term (those of you who balked at "genre" might be groaning about "label" but unlike the former which I have an aversion to, the latter I accept and permit people to cover me in). I could care less about creating a world with a different atmosphere and gravitational pull, I'm not overly concerned with why this planet turns, never mind do I attempt to conceive of a rotational force of an imagined planet in an imaginary universe.

However, I have personified insects and trees in my fiction. I am interested in the relationship between humans and their natural environment, particularly direct dealings between the two. How does the tree feel when a footpath is suddenly carved out right next to where it is rooted for the remainder of its days? How does the insect feel when its home is poison bombed and its either die or evacuate into the great unknown? I am not an absolute tree-hugger and bug lover; I do use this personification to playfully investigate the things humans do to each other. I am less interested in what motivates the oppressor than the attempt at survival, or the resistance of the oppressed.

My fiction puts a magnifying glass on issues so close up that the view is distorted, surreal. This is real, only the experience is queasy.

At least, that's my opinion.

I've been thinking about science fiction the past couple of days since my meeting with Christian Hawkey, the director of my MFA program and the faculty advisor on Raw Fiction this year. Together we're figuring out a curriculum. Or rather, I bring in half-hashed ideas and he adds his own and then I have to go home and articulate to myself why I don't want to focus on science fiction as a focal point for imagining new structures of freedom.

For one, I don't see the end point of all writing necessitating new structures of freedom. It's a nice idea, but it's not everyone's aesthetic. It's not mine that's for sure, my creative work grapples with the lives of the oppressed, insect tree and human, and does not result in happy endings or alternate utopias.

[A beat.]

I recently read my first Afrofuturist novel. "The Trial of Christopher Okigbo" by Ali A. Mazrui



Mazrui passed away in October. The news of his death on social media is how I came to discover his work. It is a shame when death is an introduction, perhaps. It can also be seen as a door opening to a new realm. For me that realm is Afrofuturism, perhaps not unlike what we call Magical Realism in Latin American literature. There is a quality of the fiction that is more surreal and less science. There is an opening between worlds and times that has a spiritual quality, not something that can be defined in the language of physics chemistry or mathematics. The present is the past is the future, the spectrum isn't linear. That is my reality.

The novel itself reads like a fast-paced detective story (not a "genre" I'm very familiar with but I think it gets the simile across) but in fact it is a deeply philosophical work. It is a contemplation on reality, religion, existence and politics in the framework of a plot-driven novel with strong characters, complex relationships, true love, high-art sex, and mob violence with heinous murders that felt honest, not gratuitous. When I realized I was only 10-pages away from the end I thought it would all come too quickly but in fact the last ten-pages worked effectively to leave me feeling satisfied, though not sheltered from the cruelty of reality, and with a better understanding of the world in which I exist. "The Trial of Christopher Okigbo" also concerned itself with survival and that is what resonated in the last few paragraphs. Survival after trauma. That is Africa. That is reality.

So while I understand the importance of science fiction as a space for imagining a better reality, a better future, as an escape for those young people who are completely ostracized by the reality in which they must live every day, I am not so drawn to it on a personal level. In literature, I am interested in the investigation of the immediate politics of the day and how the imagination can be used to simultaneously distort and reveal how that machinery effects the individual, and how absurd it all really is. It is in my conscious actions (for I do not see my relationship to reading or writing as entirely conscious) where I strive to etch out something a bit more hopeful than the norm, and that is where Raw Fiction comes into play. That is why I can say, real life is the fantasy I choose to imagine.

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