“Afrofuturism” is a long-standing internet discussion group – a listserv – now housed on Yahoo. Its members include SF author Nalo Hopkinson, DJ Spooky and cybernetic researcher Ron Eglash. The listserv’s main focus is the exploration of “futurism” as a recurring motif in the work of black cultural producers. Science fiction, they argue, is an apt metaphor for black life and history. Thus, the Afrofuturism listserv explores “futurist themes in black cultural production and the ways in which technological innovation is changing the face of black art and culture”.
I was intrigued by the correlation between their aims and my research into SF’s exploration of “inner space”. It seemed the Afrofuturists had an entirely new, and highly provocative, take on the abduction myth – and indeed, on our increasingly science-fictional society. And so I started a thread.
I present the fruits of that here. It’s a great discussion, covering fairytales, myth and legend, black history, psychology, chemically altered states and the power of the mind. This transcript should leave you in no doubt that Earth is the alien planet.
From: Simon Sellars [ sws_sellars@… ]
Hello. My name’s Simon and I edit a magazine of experimental fiction and thought here in Australia. We draw our inspiration from J.G. Ballard’s early fiction: “Earth is the Alien Planet”, “Science Fiction is the authentic literature of the 20th century”, and so on. For our next issue, we’re examining the UFO phenomenon, in particular, ways in which the metaphors of alien abduction can be used to illuminate cultural flashpoints and fissures here on Earth. I’d like to begin by asking anyone here if they feel that the alien abduction “myth” can be used in an afrofuturist context?
This quote from film-maker John Akomfrah fired my imagination:
“The interest in science fiction for me has to do with the encounter between Africans and Modernity. Science fiction narratives are usually about alienation, abduction and transportation and that is a very powerful narrative for understanding the transportation and displacing of African people across the world.”
I guess Akomfrah is talking more about the actual state of “displacement” found in SF: the manner in which the genre habitually estranges empirical environments, whether through abduction metaphors, altered realities, the usual tools of the trade. These strategies can of course be used in powerful artistic and political statements; it’s always interesting to discover artists, such as Akomfrah, who fully understand and utilise the potential of the genre. But his films are hard to find here in Australia. By the way, has anyone seen Last Angel of History, Memory Room 451 and Mothership Connection, the films of his to which Akomfrah specifically refers to in the rest of that quote?
From: Lester Kenyatta Spence [ kspence@… ]
I’ve digested science fiction and fantasy in various forms since birth. Real life just wasn’t that interesting to me… however “the abduction” hasn’t had a hold on me at all really. After Derrick Bell dealt with the metaphor in one of his works, I started to think about it… but it doesn’t move me. I think the quote above is interesting – but did modernity exist before Africans were enslaved and brought across the Atlantic?
From: Pam Mordecai [ marpam@… ]
Anyone have a working definition of “modernity”?
From: Simon Sellars [ sws_sellars@… ]
Pam: as I understand it, when defining against postmodernism, “modernity” is usually employed to refer to the period comprising the first half of this century, up until WW2 (especially when discussing “modernism” as an artistic movement). But classical sociological and historical texts use the term “modernity” to define the period of history from the Renaissance onwards. I think John Akomfrah is referring to “modernity” in Western culture in that broadest sense, as a time-sweep opposed to “pre-modern”/traditional times.
From: Pam Mordecai [ marpam@… ]
Re: modernity – thanks Simon. I’m always hunting behind “terms”; I find Akomfrah’s use of modernity interesting for all the possibilities. I’m also engaged by the notion of the Middle Passage as a fluid mark in time inaugurating “modernity”.
From: Nalo Hopkinson [ nalo@… ]
Last Angel of History has an interview format tied together with a story line about a black “data thief”, who I guess could be said to be investigating the historical roots of afrofuturism in music (Paul Miller [ DJ Spooky ], who’s on this listserv, is one of the people he interviews). It also has interviews with writers Greg Tate, Ishmael Reed, Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler. I saw it when it had a Toronto premier at the International Film Festival, with Akomfrah present to take questions. It was an interesting discussion.
Have not seen the other two. I’ll have to look them up. I do remember that people asked him about the lack of women artists in Last Angel of History (only Octavia Butler was interviewed). He responded by saying that he intended to fill in that gap in a subsequent film.
From: Simon Sellars [ sws_sellars@… ]
Pam, can you elaborate? I like to hunt “behind” terms also; it’s for this reason that I find the rules of engagement in SF endlessly fascinating.
From: Pam Mordecai [ marpam@… ]
I’ll get back to you, Simon. It’s got something to do with ideas of history and language and literature and experience as constructed, manipulated and broadcast by a very small group of powerful people. My grasp on history is tenuous, and that’s one reason I like SF – it’s a tie that doesn’t bind in time. I’m realising even as I type that the African–European encounter begins earlier than the Middle Passage, and black people crossed over various seas. There are 15th-century frescoes that prominently feature black people dressed up to look, for all the world, like “real people”.
Also, black people didn’t only come to America via the Middle Passage, or the transatlantic slave ship, or as slaves. Some came (some freeborn there) through the Azores. Certainly it was not at a point in time, but over time. Also, the crossing when there were no kin to meet was different from the crossing to join Creole African kin. But something about ships hauling Africans in their holds expelled prerogatives and ingrained conceptions about “the world” and “time” and “human beings”.
Those ideas have influenced how it’s all been reported since and how we have come to think of it and, through it, how we envision our futures. Something in my belly is wanting to decode terms like modernity without getting duped; I think I may end up with something linking modernity to the Martinican notion of “creolisation”, to that phenomenon on the American side. We’ll see. But the key to Afrofuture has gotta be in Afropast.
From: Simon Sellars [ sws_sellars@… ]
Nalo, can you point me to “afrofuturist” texts that engage with the concepts outlined in the Akomfrah quote?
From: Nalo Hopkinson [ nalo@… ]
Often the clash between “Africans and Modernity” is expressed in metaphor. Octavia Butler’s “Xenogenesis” series is a first contact story with aliens who swap genetic material with humans. Many of the characters in the series are African. Also her new “Parable” series: Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. The main character is a young black woman – a visionary who survives an extreme economic downturn that turns America into an apocalyptic nightmare – to lead people to move offplanet. Some of the texts investigate the past, and in that way can be directly about the clash with Modernity.
Butler’s novel Kindred is about a black woman who gets taken back in time to slavery. Maryse Conde’s novel I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem is about a woman enslaved in the Caribbean, her child taken from her, who gets brought to the US as caretaker of a white family’s children. Dionne Brand’s new novel At the Full and Change of the Moon is about another enslaved woman in the Caribbean who led a mass suicide of slaves. Middle Passage by Charles Johnson is about a freed coloured man in America who gets on a slave ship heading back through the Middle Passage triangle to pick up more Africans and transport them to the West Indies.
Voodoo Dreams: A Novel of Marie Laveau, by Jewell Parker Rhodes, imagines the life of New Orleans voudun leader Marie Laveau. There’s a novel by Barbara Hambly, a white woman, titled A Free Man of Colour, which has a coloured doctor in New Orleans in the 19th century investigating a suspicious death. I don’t know much about the place or time period, but it seems as though she was thorough in her research. Certainly the racial tensions feel familiar and realistically portrayed. What’s interesting is the apologia she made at the beginning of the book.
Samuel Delany’s sword-and-sorcery “Neveryona” series is not based in a real past, but does in part investigate what happens when a more industrialised society clashes with one whose values are somewhat different. Then there’s The Black Insider by the late Dambudzo Marechera: “Outcasts holed up inside a ruined and deserted faculty building tell of their experiences in the post-colonial disaster zone”. And Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo-Jumbo. I don’t know how you’d classify it, but I recently began reading it and so far it’s an elegant, pointed, witty, funny, satirical gumbo of a lot of the things we’ve been talking about on this listserv.
My novel Midnight Robber uses as its base story the kidnapping of a Caribbean child and shoves her through a few paradigm shifts into a new world from which she can never return. Metaphor running through it is the midnight robbers of the Trinidad carnival: individual masqueraders who write and perform speeches in the streets on Carnival day about being the sons of African kings – captured into slavery – and how they managed in the alien world they were brought to.
From: Ben Williams [ bwilliams@… ]
You might want to look at an article by Kodwo Eshun from a few years ago, “Abducted by Audio”: it’s tangentially related to this theme.
From: Alondra Nelson [ arn8047@… ]
My two cents: alien-ation and abduction can be powerful metaphors for talking about the black Atlantic experience, as the Akomfrah quote states – but I think this is a starting point rather than an end point. Thinking of oneself as an outsider/alien and being “legally” alien puts a whole other spin on Simon’s original question, especially in light of immigration policies in the US, Australia, Germany, and so on. It can be, for lack of a better word, alienating.
However, it can also be a source of power that can imbue aliens with a “different” view of the world: DuBoisian “second-sight” , if you will. I think much of our discussion on the list has been more about a history of bridging/healing alienation, and the trauma of abduction, with culture and philosophy, rather than a wholesale acceptance of alienation that might actually be disempowering.
One other thing: there’s an article in the science section of the New York Times that argues that accounts of alien abductions might be better explained as a sleeping disorder (the body and brain becoming disconnected)…
From: Nalo Hopkinson [ nalo@… ]
Alondra, I once read either a book or an article about this too. The medical phenomenon is called “sleep paralysis”. Seems to be a state of consciousness between sleep and awake. Large muscles are paralysed, but the person is aware. Tends to be accompanied by the hallucination that there is some immediate danger – often a monster sitting on the person’s chest, about to attack – but the person cannot make their muscles move to escape it.
The piece I read tied it in to legends of succubi and incubi. Apparently inNewfoundland, that state of sleep paralysis is what’s meant when they say “the Hag is riding you”. Was very interesting for me to read, because there’s a creature from Caribbean folklore, a sort of succubus figure: it has different names in different Caribbean countries, but in Guyana one of its names is “Ol’ Higue”, which means “Old Hag”.
From: Reid Harward [ reid@… ]
I’ve heard alien abductions explained away as pre-seizures. And there’s also Terence McKenna’s take on it: lots of people who take ketamine talk of out-of-body experiences and alien encounters, too. Nalo, did the article talk about whether there were negative mental and physical ramifications to this disorder? Can you recall the title of the book? Interesting. I wonder if the Jungian “nightmare” archetype is related to this physiological disorder.
From: Andrew Shiel [ andrew.shiel@… ]
Nalo, I’ve experienced this, although I put it down as a dream. It lasted for about five minutes, subjectively, and not only could I not move, but I couldn’t speak, or even make any noise. I was alone in the house and it was a truly terrifying experience. From your reading, am I likely to go through it again?
From: Nalo Hopkinson [ nalo@… ]
Dunno, Drew. You might do an online or medical database search under “sleep paralysis”. I was once sitting beside someone who was undergoing the experience; he was eventually able to make himself speak and tell me he was in trouble. It was the eeriest thing.
From: Lester Kenyatta Spence [ kspence@… ]
Sleep paralysis has happened to me a few times. There’s a term for it here that probably came from the south that black folk refer to…forget what it is, though. Something to do with a witch, maybe?
From: Simon Sellars [ sws_sellars@… ]
Alondra, you mention an important point: “Thinking of oneself as an outsider/alien and being “legally’ alien…can also be a source of power that can imbue aliens with an “different” view of the world: DuBoisian “second-sight,” if you will.”
It’s something that presents itself in abduction “myths” of all kinds. From the Western UFO perspective, for example, many people who’ve had encounters with the archetypal “small greys” become changed profoundly by the experience, lifting the veil of reality. Suddenly they possess heightened ESP, concern for the environment, spiritual transformation and so on.
According to John Mack (a very controversial ufologist):
“Virtually all the abductees with whom I have worked closely have demonstrated a commitment to changing their relationship to Earth, of living more gently on it or in greater harmony with the other creatures that live here…”
Consciousness expansion and personal transformation is a basic aspect of the abduction phenomenon. Sleep paralysis is also very intriguing – it seems to draw on a well of archetypes. I appreciate the theories that suggest that “outer space” is really “inner space”. It’s interesting how different cultures would interpret the succubus differently.
I wonder how the “Old Hag” appears to the Guyanese physically? What does she do to the sleepers? Does she take them away to strange lands? Put them under a spell of any sort? I’ve been reading a book by Jacques Vallee that suggests elf and faerie mythology are part of the same “reality” as UFOs and alien abduction. Vallee, by the way, rejects any extraterrestrial hypothesis, insisting that all the evidence points to the existence of a “holographic”, parallel dimension running in and among our empirical world.
The following quote from Vallee’s book Dimensions has, I believe, special resonance for the areas of afrofuturism and the Australian indigenous perspective, which we have been discussing in previous posts. Vallee is talking about the phenomenon in the broadest sense – not just small greys and UFOs, but also elves, faeries, succubi and so on, right throughout the ages:
“If the world around us is a world of informational events, the symbolic manifestations that surround UFO reports should be viewed as an important factor… For many years, UFO phenomena have served as a support for human imagination, a framework for human tragedy, a fabric of human dreams. We react to them in our movies, our poetry, our music, our science fiction…
The phenomena function like an operational system of symbolic communication at a global level…their effects, instead of being just physical, are also felt in our beliefs. They influence what we call our spiritual life. They affect our politics, our history, our culture. They are a feature of our past. Undoubtedly, they are part of our future.”
Whether you take the issue of “aliens” and “abduction” literally or otherwise (as metaphor, for example), I think the implications are the same: very Jungian.
From: Cooper409 [ cooper409@… ]
Simon, this reference may be a stretch, but the literary sources Nalo mentioned brought it to mind as something that may bear on your area of concern. Have you ever read James Blish’s “More Light”? It was a longish story conceived as his particular contribution to HP Lovecraft’s Cthulu Mythos, the horror/fantasy myth cycle created by Lovecraft at the turn of this century. The cycle had serious issues with race mixing and all cultures other than the most repressed and puritanical Anglo-Saxon ones.
Lovecraft wrote dozens of horror stories with xenophobia and the terrors of miscegenation as central themes. One of the secret books mentioned by Lovecraft and his acolytes was “The King in Yellow”, named after a series of stories by another writer, Robert Chambers. The power of this book was supposedly that reading it drove the reader mad. As a result, its full contents were never divulged. In “More Light”, not only does Blish essay to deliver a full “transcript” of the forbidden work, he specifically points out that all the characters in the work are black, except the titular “king” in yellow tatters: he wears a “pale mask” and brings about the total destruction of their civilisation.
From: Andre Williams [ avanjasound@… ]
Well, Chambers work has scared many people over the years: maybe because of the occult influence, maybe because Chambers was out of his mind. Either way, I don’t see him as any prophet. I am not at all familiar with “More Light” but the mystery surrounding Chambers truly fascinates me.
From: Simon Sellars [ sws_sellars@… ]
Blish, I seem to recall, wrote some Star Trek novelisations in the late ’60s and early ’70s which managed to tie in themes of cultural appropriation, displacement and genocide in among representations of various alien races aboard the Enterprise. A neat example of popular culture being emptied out and filled with subversive levels of signification.
From: Cooper409 [ cooper409@… ]
Yes, indeed Blish did! Bravo for your scholarship. Anyway, the only place I know to find “More Light” in print is in an excellent book from Chaosium Press, The Hastur Cycle. It compiles all the independent short stories that refer to, or are based upon Chamber’s King in Yellow, itself a book of short stories published around 1899.
It also includes the Chambers short story, “The Repairer of Reputations”, a brilliant extrapolation that takes place mostly in what is now Greenwich Village. It postulates the US after a race war in the 1920s that resulted in “the free Negro state of Suwaannee”. Interestingly, Chambers – originally a Brooklyn native – was primarily an artist. He studied in France and then wrote genre fiction – mystery, SF, and romance novels – when he got back to the States. He’s considered a contemporary and peer of Poe.
From: Ben Williams [ bwilliams@… ]
The tantalising thing about the occult is that it constantly invites interpretations and explanations but never, in the end, quite succumbs to them; there are always discrepancies and uncertainties that undermine any given unifying theory, whether it be Jungian archetypal or otherwise. At the end of the day, out-of-body experiences just aren’t particularly useful. Anyway, Colin Wilson’s Beyond the Occult is one of the better examinations of the succubi/UFO/drug/any-other-weird-phenomena-you-care-to-name interface.
Simon: speaking of the Australian indigenous perspective, I wonder if you’ve read Eric Michaels’ work on Aboriginal uses of television?
From: Pam Mordecai [ marpam@… ]
Peter Tosh reports being held down on a bed by a force that he construed as evil, struggling with it and cussing a few choice Jamaican words in the effort to make it let him go. First duppy I hear of that a man run by cussing – but then, Tosh delivering a few choice bad words would have been a force to reckon with.
Don’t think “kanashibari” is an unusual experience in the Caribbean (that’s an old Japanese folk expression describing sleep paralysis: it literally means to be “tightly bound” or “tied down”).
From: Simon Sellars [ sws_sellars@… ]
I studied Michaels a few years ago in a documentary film subject I was doing. I remember he visited remote Aboriginal townships that had set up their own TV station and network, linked in a desert chain of privately-owned (tribally-owned), Aboriginal TV networks. The principals involved had appropriated discarded video-mixing equipment, beta-cams and so on, building their own studios. Participation was (and is) encouraged and no one was made to feel cut off from the informational process.
For those of us living in Australia’s capital cities – which are spread around the coast, cut off from the interior – this was something we’d never heard of because it had nothing to do with us and was never given any attention by our media. All we get is the big four commercial networks: bland and insane, as they all are; bleached white and made, daily, ever more remote from those whose needs they are apparently servicing.
I seem to remember Michaels saying that tribal customs, stories, languages were all being kept alive and transmitted from town to town by the Aboriginal network. I’m sure I’ve got some stuff on him somewhere. I feel inspired to dig them out now. Ben, to which of Michaels’ writings were you specifically referring to?
From: Ben Williams [ bwilliams@… ]
Eric Michaels’ book is called Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons. Very interesting stuff on all the complex politics – power, cultural, and otherwise – involved in Aboriginal use of TV. The people he was working with used it in a very different way to your four main Aussie networks, or to the hundreds of American cable channels. What interested me was, where “western” (for want of a better word) TV is an experience of radical placelessness, the Aboriginals made it all about place. If you think of the Dreamtime as a means of mapping the land and spirits associated with it, they used TV as part of that mapping.
From: Alondra Nelson [ arn8047@… ]
You may be able to find the article “Alien Abduction or Sleep Paralysis?” on the NYT web site (look for the Science Times section). There were no negative side effects or physical ramifications mentioned in the article, but an interesting cultural reversal was apparent: a Japanese researcher basically argued that Americans don’t have a way to process these experiences and so the alien abductions stories proliferate. He intimated that most Yanks aren’t spiritual enough or mystical enough to deal with phenomena as other cultures have in the past (Old Hag, etc) and so we have alien abduction stories.
I thought this was quite interesting given that it’s usually American anthropologists, researchers, and so on, who go around the world discovering cultural variety in medical phenomena, only to deliver the truth about what a culturally based disease or condition might really be.
Another interesting reversal: as Nalo mentioned, sleep paralysis is often connected to feelings of dread – the fear of being attacked by some malevolent force, or whatever. But with most alien abduction cases, the visitors are often benevolent, providing the abductee with special powers, heightened consciousness; an interesting transformation in the intention, I think. Anyone have any hypotheses why this might be the case?
From: Nalo Hopkinson [ nalo@… ]
But are most “alien” visitors benevolent? My sense is that many people who experience these phenomena are scared out of their wits, are violated, testifying that the examination they underwent was physically painful, while subsequently displaying the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder…even if they do feel the visitors were trying to be benevolent.
By the way, a friend of mine has a wonderful story called “True Thomas” which nicely conflates alien abduction with older Celtic descriptions of the “faerie folk”. It’s by Bruce Glassco and it’s in an anthology called Black Swan, White Raven, Copyright © Avon.
Alondra, I can’t say I know of any Caribbean stories of alien abduction. I do know one told by a Maroon woman, of falling down inside a cotton tree root (some people say duppies live in the roots of silk cotton trees, some say the spirits of our ancestors) and having a visitation from her African ancestors, who promise to protect her. So there’s anxiety there as well as benefit. It’s a scary experience, but you get a reward if you endure it.
The Trinidad calypsonian “Sparrow” – I think it’s “Sparrow” – also has a scary song about falling down inside a root in a graveyard and meeting jumbies and being terrified, but he says it’s a bamboo root. Can’t think of other instances of crossing or being dragged across a threshold into another land. But I guess already – thinking on my feet here – if you assume the beings you meet in that other land are malevolent ghosts of the dead your reaction is primarily terror, but if you take a wait-and-see approach, then you’re not too scared to observe and perhaps communicate.
From: Alondra Nelson [ arn8047@… ]
Simon, do you think Mack’s observation is valid cross-culturally? Nalo, are stories of alien abduction in the Caribbean reflective of Mack’s quote? Do they exist alongside the more anxiety-producing characters of sleep paralysis?
From: Simon Sellars [ sws_sellars@… ]
Alondra, I’ve read a lot of accounts of alien abduction. It’s true that a lot of these cases imbue the recipient with altered consciousness; however, a great many of them contain fear and terror writ large. Many abductees regale us with tales of “good” and “bad” aliens, accompanied by suggestions that these competing forces are battling for some form of pyschic control. I, too, would love to know more about the myth of the Old Hag: can anyone help?
From what I’ve read in this thread, there would appear to be some interesting parallels between this creature and the malevolent aliens of abduction lore. As the Old Hag and stories of faeries and elves indicate, some basic element of human consciousness across cultures has been throwing up the same archetypes since the dawn of time. Whether the experience is “real” or in the imagination, it’s high time for serious inquiry into this area. Too many people have experienced the same thing for it to be dismissed out-of-hand.
What is the archetype telling us? Perhaps all these “demons” are part of the same phenomenon: an interesting conclusion would be that they appear differently according to cultural backgrounds, expectations, societal structures. As an example, it’s commonly believed that UFO sightings are a late 20th-century phenomenon.
However, in the 1800s, Americans were startled by a series of “phantom” airship sightings. These craft would behave as our contemporary UFOs do: appearing, disappearing, performing bizarre manoeuvres. Ancient art depicts blazing chariots flying across the sky. Now, as we are more technologically advanced, western societies start to see spaceships in the skies.
Some would say the realm of dreams and imagination is the fourth dimension of reality: as real, tactile and as influential as our waking world. Is afrofuturism in SF, music and other cultural pursuits part of the same desire?
From: Ben Williams [ bwilliams@citysearch.com ]
So isn’t there a contradiction between the idea of eternal archetypes causing these things and the idea of them being some kind of unconscious working through of trauma caused by a presumably historical event?
From: Pam Mordecai [ marpam@… ]
In the Caribbean there are, of course, tales of Bermuda Triangle experiences and, where dreams and prescience are concerned, lots of not just lore, but really exciting material for examination. Example: I have a friend, a Jamaican historian, who comes from a family of “seers”. While his sister “practices”, he eschews the ability (which I think, is also shared by his brother). He says he prefers not to know and therefore discourages insightful experience. Many “dreamers” are common, and commonly accurate. There’s lots more, for anyone who’s interested…
Afrofuturist web site: www.afrofuturism.net