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JULIA HOYDIS, Köln

Fantastically Hybrid: Race, Gender, and Genre in Black Female Speculative Fiction

In his 2003 essay "Black to the Future," Walter Mosley predicted an explosion of post-millennial science fiction writing from the black community (Mosley 2003, 204). A few years later, many critics, scholars, and readers indeed consider "Afro-diasporic, fantasy-infused, magic-centered science fiction" (Barr 2008, xvii) to be the currently important 'wave' within the genre. Taking the cue from Marleen Barr's claim that "black science fiction is the most exciting literature of the twenty-first-century present" (2008, xxi), this article addresses the rapidly growing multiculturalism and globalization of SF and fantasy, focussing in particular on black female speculative fiction. The textual examples chosen to illustrate the aesthetics and politics of hybridity marking this field of writing are Nnedi Okorafor's novel Who Fears Death (2010), Tananarive Due's My Soul to Take (2011), and Nalo Hopkinson's Sister Mine (2013). Continuing a line of tradition now taken to have started with Octavia Butler, authors like Hopkinson, Okorafor, and Due produce a hybridization of genres and literary-cultural traditions that invites critical analysis. Although engaging with questions of genre affiliation, the goal is not to find a new classificatory label, because as Joan- na Russ aptly put it when writing to Samuel Delany: "Worrying about the purity of the genres […] is like worrying about the purity of the races" (in Delany 1987, 64).1 Rather, the aim is to see what the literary agenda of what Mark Dery in 1994 first labelled Afrofuturism potentially has to offer with regard to pushing and revitalizing the speculative fiction genre, on-going processes of (de)colonization, and discourses of race and gender, and finally, how the confrontation with these texts challenges (Western) readers in the 21st century. Still comparatively underused in academic practice, speculative fiction is a useful umbrella term for the various kinds and intermeshing subgenres of fantastic writing (i.e. science fiction, magical realism, horror, supernatural, utopia, dystopia, apocalyptic), which all in one way or another unsettle and violate notions of literary realism. It is thus a term "used not to differentiate, but to include all literature that takes place in a universe slightly different from our own" (Wyatt 2007, n.p.). It also suggests that these texts are more concerned with speculation and disturbing notions of reality than with scientific-technological ideas and that they often maintain a concern with history despite a distinctly futurist orientation. Additionally, speculative fiction is a label preferred by some contemporary authors in order to signify racial, gender, cultural, or spiritual differences from traditional SF and fantasy writing.

1 In this context see also Rieder's argument that generic hybridity is, of course, neither a new phenom- enon nor a special case, because "any narrative longer than a headline or a joke almost inevitably uses multiple generic conventions and strategies." Consequently, "pigeonholing a text as a member of this or that genre is much less useful than understanding the way it positions itself within a field of generic possibilities" (Rieder 2010, 197).

Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 26.2 (September 2015): 71-88.

Black to the Future – Postcolonialism, Race, and Science Fiction The interrelations between (post-)colonialism, race, and science fiction have been the subject of a number of recent studies and articles.2 There is hardly any debate about the fact that discourses of race, slavery, and colonialism are woven deeply into the generic texture of mainstream SF and fantasy, as are depictions of conventional patriarchal and heteronormative gender relations. Therefore, re-appropriations of this ste- reotypically "white male genre" (Hoagland and Sarwal 2010, 6) by Black women, who imaginatively remake "a literature in which humans are traditionally white, and aliens, by definition are the other" (Nurse 2003, 14), are especially important. Moreo- ver, dominant tropes are often the exploration and conquering of other worlds and their inhabitants. For black people, Nalo Hopkinson poignantly argues, these do not make for "a thrilling adventure story; it's non-fiction" (Hopkinson 2011, 7). Yet this is also why the genre offers such a potent experimental ground for postcolonial, feminist and Black revisions. Above all, the (Western) claim as to what is or should be considered 'proper' science fiction and fantasy is placed on increasingly shaky grounds. This means diversification on many levels, and in particular literary characters and creatures of different shapes and colours. Deepa Dharmadhikari stresses the need for this: "I cannot continue to escape into worlds of fantasy that treat people that look like me as orcs or savages or servants or invisible beings not worthy of including in a narra-

Winter Journals tive. Dragons are not universal, and fantasies are not homogenous" (Dharmadhikari 2009, 20). However, deep prejudices exist on both sides of the colour line. Black communities view the speculative genres generally as inappropriate, white, and escapist. Hop- kinson explains: "To be a person of color writing science fiction is to be under suspi- cion of having internalized one's colonization" (Hopkinson 2011, 7). Elsewhere, she gives a response to the question why she, as a black Caribbean woman, writes science for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution fiction, and whether she might, by doing so, ignore realities of black Caribbean female lives (by implication) worthier of literary representation: "I find myself thinking something along the lines of ain'tIawomanthisiswhatsicecefictionlookslikemyscience-

fictionincludesme" (Hopkinson 2004, 6). One reason for thePowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) genre's original hostility to Black people is that race and racism were not considered to be pressing problems of imagined futures; unspoken, "whiteness" persisted as the dominant or exclusive colour. Meanwhile, Afro-American and Afro-Diasporic writers were typically confined to writing realist accounts of history and racial protest. The concern with science itself, Mark Dery explains, functioned as an additional dividing line: "And technology was like a placard on the door saying, 'Boys Club! Girls, keep out. Blacks and Hispanics and the poor in general, go away!'" (Dery 1994, 188). Nowadays, although the SF literary landscape has changed significantly, the ground is still not an easy one to tread on, be it for the writers themselves or those involved in the academic and commercial marketing of their works. There remain the hard to abolish, racialized ideas of the literary-cultural "roots" a writers has to follow and the fact that because especially on the North American book market readers want to know if a book has any Black characters in it, the texts end up being placed in the Afro-American rather than the speculative fiction category. Literary criticism, Ingrid Thaler notes, faces

2 See, e.g., Barr (2003); Grayson (2003); Hoagland and Sarwal (2010); Kelso (2004); Raja and Nandi (2011); Rieder (2008); Smith (2012).

similar risks of reintroducing segregation through "the backdoor of hybridity and in- betweenness" (Thaler 2010, 13).3 Regarding the development over the last three decades, speculative fictions and films are in many ways an important "last hurdle" (Mosley 2003, 203) that positive black re-appropriations of culture have to claim for themselves. Sandra Jackson and Julie Moody-Freeman underline the importance of remedying the absence of people of colour from imagined futures in fictional works, which instead should "decenter whiteness, Eurocentrism, and Western cosmologies and offer new visions of what could come to be" (Jackson and Moody-Freeman 2011, 9). However, while black speculative fiction is generally seen to have emerged in the mid-20th century and to be coming of age at the beginning of the 21st, the tradition can be traced back well over a hundred years. Black authors have experimented with the genre for a long time, but in contrast to later generations not identified as writers of speculative fiction.4 The historical lineage reaches from early texts like W.E.B. Du Bois's "The Comet" (1920) and George Schulyer's Black No More (1931), to Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler. The latter two are heralded as being the successful forerunners for the new generation of writers like Stephen Barnes, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Jewelle Gomez, and Nnedi Okorafor, and, in Butler's case, also for first uniting feminist science fiction and Afro-American fiction. According to Rutledge, this recent group of authors, "all publishing their first FFF [futurist fiction & fantasy] novels after 1996, constitute the most rapid appearance of new Black FFF authors in the short history of the genre" (Rutledge 2001, 247). Although the most canonical authors to date are undoubtedly Delany and Butler, academic criticism is catching up on other writers, as the publica- tion of various recent journal issues and critical studies shows.5

Afrofuturism and Afrocentrism Mark Dery first ushered in the academic use of the term Afrofuturism, which he ini- tially introduced to define "[s]peculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century tech- noculture" (Dery 1994, 180). The second important founding figure is Alondra Nel- son who instigated the online community "AfroFuturism" in 1998. The group gained momentum and critical mass at the turn from the 20th to the 21st century, and theorists like Ytasha Womack argue that Afrofuturism now extends as a growing movement across arts and disciplines, centrally seeking to redefine notions of blackness and to claim imaginative control of the future. Womack, author of one of the first in-depth studies of the field, describes Afrofuturists as scholars and artists dedicated to the production of "works that analyse dynamics of race and culture specific to the experi- ences of black people through sci-fi and fantasy works. They use it as a platform to

3 Samuel Delany comments on the difficulty of not perpetuating discrimination: "In a society such as ours, the discourse of race is so involved and embraided with the discourse of racism that I would defy anyone ultimately and authoritatively to distinguish them in any absolute manner once and for all" (Delany 2000, 396). 4 A number of recent fiction anthologies capture the diversity of the field, e.g. Thomas's Dark Matter (2000; 2004), Hopkinson's Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root (2000a), Hopkinson and Mehan's So Long Been Dreaming (2004), Dillon's Walking the Clouds (2012). 5 See the special issues dedicated to "Speculative Black Women" (Femspec 6.1, 2005), "The Genre of SF and the Black Imagination" (African Identities 7.2, 2009), and "African SF" (Para-doxa 25, 2013); or monographs like Thaler (2010) and Georgi (2011).

assess humanity issues […] while also exploring class issues, spirituality, philosophy, and history" (Womack 2013, 23).6 If one follows further Womack's definition of Afrofuturist fictions as a mix of "elements of science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western beliefs" (2013, 9), her arguments that especially "Afrofuturist women […] don't fit neatly into any artistic movement or the history of the times without a healthy dose of explanation" (2013, 104) is plausible. This echoes Marleen Barr's description, given in her study of Afro-future Females, of a group of writers who transcend "ghettoizing generic classification" (2008, x). Hopkinson, Okorafor and Due all conform to the agenda of Afrofuturism by imagining fictions in which black communities are central to the human future and destiny. Crucial is the assumption that in the future race and gender (as factors of identification and discrimination) will continue to matter to individual people and communities in their everyday lives. Above all, they create a new kind of female protagonist, "who fit neither the places assigned to them in a Euro-American racial hierarchy nor the patriarchal fantasies that often authorize Afrocentric visions" (Kilgore 2008, 121). For Okorafor, this aspect is decisive because she sees the main function of fantasy writing in the pushing of the reader's imagination and the provision of different role models, "but of a darker shade this time" (Okorafor 2009, 285).

Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death Though described by some reviewers as a text that makes readers look "beyond mere genre" (Barnes 2011, 8), Who Fears Death by Nigerian-American writer Nnedi Okor- afor won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 2011 and is the first novel by a writer of African descent to be recognized in this category. Its setting is a post- apocalyptic African desert kingdom, torn apart by indigenous genocide and tribal war between the light-skinned Nuru and the dark-skinned Okeke. The first-person narrator Onyesonwu (meaning "Who Fears Death") bears the visible stain of being Ewu (a child of inter-tribal rape) and is an outsider in the community due to her appearance and special magical abilities. Devoting all her strength to seeking revenge on her mother's rapist, the evil Nuru sorcerer Daib, Onye herself becomes the apprentice of the village sorcerer Aro. She encounters discrimination due to her gender and her genetic legacy of being 'born' to violence, but her burden is even added to by the prophecy that she is the one chosen to rewrite history and free her people, the Okeke, from slavery. The novel is divided into three parts, "Becoming," "Student," and "Warrior," which suggests a development as in a bildungsroman, but also draws attention to the violence and fight at the heart of the narrative. Chronicling the growing into sexual maturity of a young woman, it engages critically with matters of liberation, power, justice, and cultural heritage. From the beginning, the heroine struggles to control her fury and her powers, which allow her to shape-shift into a vulture and heal people, but also to harm and kill. Besides the magical elements, Who Fears Death is a clearly

6 On the history, aesthetics, and agenda of Afrofuturism see also: Barr (2008); Bould (2007); Dubey (2011); Hopkinson (2005); Yaszek (2006). The majority of the discussion of Afrofuturism is conducted online, for example on platforms like the Carl Brandon Society, co-founded by Hopkinson, which is dedicated to increasing racial and ethnic diversity in the production and reception of speculative fiction.

geographically and historically anchored text. The plot-driving incident is the story of Onye's conception, an instance of brutal rape. Onye's mother is out in the desert with other Okeke women, when a group of Nurus arrive: "And that was when the raping began. All of the Okeke women, young, prime, and old, were raped. Repeatedly" (WFD, 18). Describing her mother's ordeal, the narrative gives an explicitly political motivation for the rape as a strategic act of warfare: "The Nuru men […] had done what they did for more than torture and shame. They wanted to create Ewu children" (WFD, 21). In the acknowledgments to the novel, Okorafor refers to a 2004 news story entitled, "We Want to Make a Light Baby: Arab Militiamen in Sudan said to use Rape as Weapon of Ethnic Cleansing," as inspiration. After reading the article, she said: "I wondered what these children would be like, what would their struggles be, how would they survive, who would they grow up to be. And that's when Onyesonwu came to me to tell her story" (in Kendall 2010, n.p.). Okorafor's writing is lucid and very direct. The reader is confronted with vivid, realist description of physical sensations, with blood, tears, suffering, and sexual arousal. According to the author, she draws on pain in order to produce what she calls "Big Bang literature," powerful texts, which are in parts uncomfortable to read and deeply affect the reader: "for just as the Big Bang was a violent act that produced the universe and hence ultimately life, so these stories enact pain to produce an evolution of ideas. […] Big Bang fantasy literature by people of colour can be foreign to its majority Caucasian readers and displacing to its readers" (Okorafor 2012, 181). Many examples in the narrative induce the cognitive estrangement and the emotional affect Okorafor is after. Arguably "one of the novel's most confronting scenes" (Dowdall 2013, 179) is the description of the ancient Eleventh Year Rite, which en- tails the genital mutilation of the year's eleven-year-old girls. Although Onye affirms that she "certainly wasn't one to do anything for the sake of tradition," she undergoes the rite against her mother's will in order to gain acceptance in the community: "at eleven, I still had hopes. […] That I could be made normal. The Eleventh Rite was old and it was respected. […]. The rite would put a stop to the strangeness happening to me" (WFD, 33). Later in the novel, after Onye has began her relationship with her lover Mwita, however, she is fed up with the excruciating pain every time she is aroused: "It hurt so badly that areas of my vision were going dark. Tears ran down my face" (WFD, 76). Onye then uses her powers to reclaim the control over her sexuality by re-growing her clitoris and also reverses all her girl friends' circumcisions. Besides sexual violence generally being a frequent topic in black female speculative writing, e.g. in Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber or Octavia Butler's Kindred, the heroines are typically strong women, often possessing special abilities or even being sorceresses and goddess-like figures. This draws attention to an important general subtext of the fictional depiction of feminist spirituality, which according to Janice Crosby signifies "the idea that the female self can be a powerful agent of change, and that the female self is already imbued with the ability to define and shape reality" (Crosby 2000, 73). But in contrast to most masculine varieties of the genre, the power of these figures, "is qualified and restrained by an ethics which prohibits destructive force for purposes other than self- and community-defense" (2000, 74). Onye struggles throughout Okorafor's novel to control her temper and use her powers benevolently, and this aspect plays an equally important role in Due's My Soul to Take. On her journey towards her father, Onye arrives in a town where she is attacked by a group of men and comes close to being raped.

This is what happened to my mother, […] And countless other Okeke women. Women. The walking dead. I began to get very very angry. […] They held my face to the dirt, tore at my garments, and freed their penises. I concentrated. The wind increased. 'There are consequences to shifting the weather,' Aro had taught me. 'Even in small places.' But I didn't care about that right now. When I'm truly angry, when I'm filled with violence, all things are easy and simple. […] I gathered the wind, gray and black in my hands, and pressed it together, elongating it into a funnel. And I would thrust it into each man, as each had wanted to thrust their penis into me. […] I began to tremble as my fury retreated and clarity set in. […] Then the idea came into me. I changed myself. In the Great Book there is a most terrifying creature. It only speaks riddles and, in the stories, though it never kills, people fear it more than death. I changed into a sphinx. […] The men looked at me and screamed. (WFD, 205) The scene, which underlines her struggle and the intersection of fantasy and realism, finds a beautifully ironic, non-violent resolution. Continuing their journey through the desert, Onye and her friends stumble into a cave full of technological gadgets and dead bodies, a reminder of ideas and people past. "[H]alf covered with sand that had swept in over the years, were possibly hundreds of computers, monitors, portables and e-books. […] The desktop computers were too large to hold with one hand. Old and amazingly ancient things packed in a cave in the middle of nowhere and long forgot- ten" (WFD, 329). Characteristic of female Afrofuturist writing, Okorafor's narrative is built around a special valuing of a divine feminist principle and suggests how "technological achievement alone is not enough to create a free-thinking future" (Womack 2013, 103). In this particular projection of the distant future, the heroine has to do it all; technology exists, but it has lost its glory. So in many ways, speaking of "anti- science fiction" might seem appropriate here.7 Meanwhile, Okorafor herself catego- rizes her writing simply as "organic fantasy," which "blooms directly from the soil of the real" (Okorafor 2009, 278). In this regard it is possible to place her in a line of tradition with other African-diasporic writers and to note, as Brenda Cooper does, that in many of theses texts, "we encounter the searing realism of African struggles against violence and dictatorship and poverty and oppression, which coexist with the magic and the fantasy" (Cooper, 2012, 153). Although the conflation of mystical or magical elements and SF is by no means an invention of Afrofuturism, all three writers under scrutiny here emphasize the impossibility of separating "a spiritual life from a technological life" (Hopkinson in Watson-Aifah 2003, 168), which they see as a distinct difference to a 'pure' Western worldview. In the final fight with Onye's biological father Daib, Mwita is fatally injured, whereas Daib escapes severely crippled. Sitting with his dying body in her lap, Onye makes herself conceive a child, Mwita's sperm still being alive inside of her from their previous night together: "I didn't consider the consequences, the possibilities, or the dangers. […] I was not at my moon's peak but I made it so. […] At the moment of conception, a giant shock wave blasted from me" (WFD, 367). The result of Onye's wilful conception, against Aro's warnings, is drastic and highly symbolic: Every sex- ually active male in the area is dead, while all women are pregnant. Onye then fulfils the task of rewriting the Great Book and changing the founding myth of the two tribes, seconds before she is caught by the mob who wants to bring her to justice for

7 Cf. Marleen Barr's definition of "Anti-science fiction" as SF-texts "imbued with black diasporic ver- sions of fantasy, […] which includes such despised unrealistic tropes as dreams and magic" (2008, xvi).

killing all the men. Onye's literal rewriting of history affirms both the script's mallea- ble, fictional nature and its ideological power, which affects political-social realities: "Read it in your Great Book. You won't notice that it has been rewritten. Not yet. But it has. Everything has. The curse of the Okeke is lifted. It never existed, sha" (WFD, 378). Fittingly, the narrative then concludes with two alternative endings. The first is foreshadowed throughout the plot: After completing her mission, Onye is imprisoned and stoned to death. The second one, narrated in an added-on chapter 1 "Rewritten," relates her escape from her prison cell effected by changing into a mythological fire- spitting creature and flying away. The final image is of Onye circling the land from above and a hopeful glimpse at peaceful inter-tribal coexistence in the future. Regard- ing the ambiguity caused by the two endings, Lisa Dowdall has argues that Okorafor thus "avoids the false conclusions and 'happy endings' of the Western fantasy canon" (Dowdall 2013, 184). The author equally counteracts a straightforwardly dystopian set-up and presents a politically engaged, feminist narrative that maintains a utopian impulse precisely by resisting closure.8 All female characters in Who Fears Death, each in their own ways, challenge the laws of society and actively use their sexuality as a weapon to undo or avenge sexual violence and its effects. The novel depicts the subject of the victimization and the dis- and re-empowerment of women as reality, necessi- ty, and utopian possibility of the future. Placing the spotlight on a fictional state closely modelled on Sudan, it shows Africa as a war-torn disaster zone, but leaves room for poetic transformations and above all, emphasizes its imaginative power.

Tananarive Due, My Soul to Take An Afrocentric imagination also marks the writing of Tananarive Due, who, while living in Atlanta, stresses that a Pan-African element is primary in her identity: "We are part of a grand Diaspora" (in Hood 2005, 157). Following closely in the imaginative and stylistic footsteps of Octavia Butler, Due is especially known for writing a blend of horror and SF stories and black vampire tales. She is author and co-author (with her husband Steven Barnes) of various short fictions and eleven novels, including My Soul to Take, which continues Due's popular African Immortals series.9 About her agenda and inspiration as a writer Due says that she seeks empowerment through storytelling and "to mine the stories from our own traditions and history, since so much of that has been overlooked in literature thus far" (in Hood 2005, 160). Her fictions, also typically featuring strong Black female protagonists, negotiate forms and values of community and individual agency; her texts are furthermore marked by an ironic irreverence toward traditions and authorities, teamed with a syncretic spiritual- ism. The African Immortals novels are based on the family adventures of Jessica and her immortal husband Davit and their hybrid daughter Fana. The epic series of novels as a whole, as well as each individual book, allows for a detailed exploration of the

8 This corresponds to a textual design which critics like Raffaella Baccolini have referred to as "critical dystopia." According to Baccolini, "[c]ritical or open-ended utopias are texts that maintain a utopian core at their center, a locus of hope that contributes to deconstructing tradition and reconstructing al- ternatives" (2000, 13), and thus differ radically from canonical male dystopian texts like Orwell or Huxley's. On the concept of critical utopia in feminist writing see also Moylan (2000). 9 The series previously includes My Soul to Keep (1997), The Living Blood (2001), and Blood Colony (2008). The first part, My Soul to Keep, has been commissioned as one of the very few black supernatural films.

female protagonists, showing their complexity and rescuing them from the sexualized 'side-kick'-role they often occupy in mainstream speculative fiction and film. Most of the action in My Soul to Take takes place in North America, while Africa forms the second important setting and cultural referent of the narrative. Again, issues of gender and race are central to a series of texts which, like many of Butler's fictions, develop "a futurology on which many diasporic Africans had fantasized: the restoration of Africa as the locus of epic legends and mighty empires" (Rutledge 2001, 245; see also Lawrence 2011, 86-87). Jessica received the 'Living Blood' from her husband while pregnant with Fana, who came to be born with special magic and telepathic abilities, which cause her rise as a powerful healer and leading figure of the 'Glow' movement. Administered in small doses, the Glow blood serum can cure most illnesses threatening the world's human population in the fictional present, 2016, including cancer and HIV, and im- pede age and death. It stems from an ancient tribe of African immortals, the so-called Life Brothers, who originally operated out of the Lalibela colony in Ethiopia. The main action in the novel is the ensuing battle between Fana and her intended husband Michel. While Fana and her followers rush around the globe trying to save as many humans as possible, Michel, leader of a more radical fraction of immortals, is engaged in the opposite pursuit of killing people in order to create a pure, exclusive community. Due's plot contains at its heart a classic tale of the fight of good vs. evil, infused with mysticism, and elements of post-apocalyptic fiction, love story, and political SF- thriller. After a failed assassination attempt on Michel during their wedding ceremony, Fana and Michel reach a compromise about their future together and about the world's population that is highly ambiguous in its symbolism. They solve the problem of overpopulation and ill health by leaving a majority of people infertile, for them the benevolent alternative to a massive 'cleansing.' Combining a distinctly political with a spiritual-mystical streak, Due dramatizes pervasive late 20th- and early 21st-century concerns: the struggle for global health and resources, care for the next generations, and the fear of super-bugs and viral epidem- ics. In the novel, Fana describes these threats as follows: "It's worse than anyone has admitted. A whole village has been wiped out in Nigeria. And in North Korea. It's been to Puerto Rico. It's airborne. […] It kills almost everyone it touches" (MStT, 60). Due's text is also a counter-narrative that rewrites the image of Africa as the point of origin of contaminated blood, poverty, and fearful diseases (e.g. Ebola, HIV, types of influenza). In My Soul to Take, it is instead the origin of life and African immortals' blood becomes the most wanted resource. Generally, the figure of the immortal-human/vampire assumes a different socio- political meaning in black women's literature than in traditional (white) Gothic literature (see Wisker 2013, 51). Conceived of as threshold creatures between life/death, self/other, and human/non-human, tales of vampires are known in many cultures, only Due's vampires are not pale creatures of the night, but black "superhumans with amazing recuperative abilities" (Lawrence 2011, 89). Another symbolic layer is at- tached to Fana, as a hope-inspiring, powerful hybrid figure, who leads people out of oppression and danger. Her running of the Glow-movement's secret distribution system and mass healings are explicitly compared to Harriet Tubman, one of the most iconic figures of Afro-American anti-slavery resistance. For example, in the novel stories circulate about how Fana "had started the Underground Railroad to share her Blood when she was only a child" (MStT, 411).

Like Onye in Who Fears Death, Fana is a female protagonist on whom it falls to 'save' the community and who has to learn to master and control her powers. There is also a creation myth underlying the story, which inscribes histories of exclusion and a hybrid character coming to stand in the war between races/tribes/species. Realities of inter-racial discrimination and fear of miscegenation – also taken up with a less global focus in Hopkinson's Sister Mine – are illustrated with regard to the immortals' perception of their human others: For example, Johnny, a human and hopelessly in love with Fana, reflects: "the word 'mortals' – […] it was like 'nigger.' Almost every immortal they met, even the ones in Fana's circle, gave him […] looks as if to say, What are YOU doing here, monkey?" (MStT, 152). It is the hybrid characters (Fana, Jessi- ca), themselves products of transgressions, who end up striving for reconciliation: "Fana was grateful that Mom had raised her with mortals in her family, closest to her heart. Her cousin, aunt, and best friend were all mortals, so she hadn't grown up with the feelings of superiority shared by her Life Brothers, and even her father" (MStT, 64). Later on, Fana tells Johnny: "My father chose a woman who did not share our Blood to make his wife. […]. It's the oldest and simplest of stories in the history of humankind" (MStT, 195). Through Fana and her blood, which offers "opportunities for interracial sharing and life enhancement" (Wisker 2013, 58), Due's narrative depicts mortal/immortal hybridity as a positive, transformative power for the formation of a global, multiracial community. Ultimately, it is hybridity, induced by the sharing of blood, which guarantees survival, a suggestion, which allows for both ethical- religious and Darwinist readings. Besides influences of African-American history, the novel engages classic Christian imagery (e.g. references to Jesus' blood, the discourse of salvation) and an allegorical framework based on traditional Yoruba mythology and religion.10 The later is decisive, because, as Monica Coleman explains: "The cosmology of traditional African religion does not fit into the Western philosophical and theological categories of monotheism and polytheism, mortal and immortal" (Coleman 2011, 191). As such, it is again highly dependent on the reader's cultural background how much of the narrative is perceived as realism or fantasy. A main plotline is the evolving relationship between Michel and Fana. Due continues to explore a question introduced in the earlier parts of the series about "the ability of two individuals from different cultural backgrounds to come together to solve social problems that affect a global society" (Lawrence 2011, 105). For Fana, the marriage means a union with a man who is her equal in physical-spiritual nature and talents, but also the irreversible, and potentially fatal surrender of her independence and a loss of control over her people's fate. Michel, despite a deep devotion to Fana, takes her on mental journeys into apocalyptic visions of an overcrowded planet in the future: "A stench grew, the water more vicious and harder to wade through. Missiles sailed toward Fana, a glittering wall of dead fish with clouded eyes. Bigger creatures tumbled past in the maelstrom, frozen in death. Otters. Seals. Porpoises. The ocean screamed around her, boiling red" (MStT, 337). Seeking to change Fana's determination to heal the entire world's sickness, he says to her: "'And then what, Fana?' […] 'What about the ones after them? Should they live forever too? […] the very planet shall die,' […] 'This is what happens if we are childish'" (MStT, 337). Ignoring her family's concerns, Fana still takes the gamble of marrying Michel, certain

10 On the references to Yoruba mythology in The Living Blood see Coleman (2011, 199). See Lawrence (2011, 98-101) for an analysis of Fana and Michel's characters in the first three parts of the series as being modelled on Yoruba deities.

of her power over him; "she would challenge his interpretations one at a time, and he would challenge hers. […] They would have their own Way" (MStT, 339). Yet until the very end of the narrative, there seems to be a very fragile equilibrium of power between the couple. The novel culminates in an apocalyptic scenario, a massacre following the wedding ceremony at which Michel is shot, but brought back to life by Fana. Utilizing a structure that shows similarities to other contemporary post-apocalyptic novels like Maggie Gee's The Flood (2004), Due includes an ambiguous epilogue; only the paradisiacal setting is not London's Kew Gardens (as in The Flood), but New York's Central Park. The time is two years later, and "the crowd in Central Park sounded like sunshine. […] GLOW FOR LIFE, the banners on the trees read, reminding everyone why they were celebrating: Glow was finally legal in the United States" (MStT, 407). The celebratory image is soon ruptured by the narrative voice: "Birth rates were dropping. […] babies were born healthier, but fewer and fewer people could conceive. Scientists didn't know why. There were already reports of stolen newborns. […] the world was panicking. Fana had explained it […] in her typical blunt way: WE THINK THERE ARE TOO MANY. Fana's compromise with Michel; their shared vision" (MStT, 409). Then the epilogue proceeds to provide closure about the fate of all main characters. The last vignette is a conversation between Dawit and Jessica in a hammock somewhere in South Africa, watching Fana and Michel's spirits chase each other in the distance. Jessica, who sees infertility as a cruel curse to inflict on so many people, knows that her husband does not share her opinion: "Like many of his Brothers, he thought overpopulation had been ignored too long. […] Most of them favored creating a smaller, healthier human population; the immortals were a unified front at last" (MStT, 414). In both Due and Okorafor's final vision, oscillating between utopia and dystopia, control over life and death, war and peace, comes out of Africa and is tied to the control over fertility by a powerful female, messianic figure. Jessica's last words are: "What mother since Mary had been so proud?" (MStT, 416). The sentence is characteristic of Due's tongue-in-cheek use of spiritual and cultural-historical references. A feast for any critic in this context is the eclectic mix of epigraphs for each part of the novel, comprising quotes from Wole Soyinka's "Death and the King's Horseman", Due's "Book of Revelation" by the Witness Khaldun, Shakespeare's Richard III, Octavia Butler, James Baldwin, John Keats, R.E.M., Gandhi, and, finally: "It is very beautiful over there. – The last words of Thomas Edison (1847-1931), upon waking from a coma" (MStT, 405). The irreverent borrowing "from almost anywhere"11 functions as a humorous intertextual challenge of authority and strategic reminder of other (hi)stories and is taken even further in Nalo Hopkinson's fiction.

Nalo Hopkinson, Sister Mine Whereas Okorafor has described herself as "shape-shifting" between her Nigerian and American identities (Okorafor 2009, 278), Hopkinson opts for a hyphenated category with regard to her ethnic/national affiliation and identifies herself as Caribbean- Canadian or anything "but African-American" (in Wolfe and Strahan 2013, 293).12

11 I myself borrow this expression from Gary Wolfe and Amelia Beamer who meanwhile refer to what Jonathan Lethem (2007) described as the "ecstasy of influence," "a willingness to borrow tropes, lan- guages, techniques from almost anywhere" (Wolfe and Beamer 2008, 34). 12 Born in Jamaica, Nalo Hopkinson has lived in Guyana and Trinidad before moving to Canada and nowadays divides her time between Toronto and California. She is author of seven novels, numerous

Multiple cultural 'roots' shape her novel Sister Mine, a coming-of-age story set in near-future Toronto, which combines elements of urban fantasy and Canadian and Afro-Caribbean folklore. The first-person narrator is twenty-four-year old Makeda, who has been surgically separated at birth from her sister: "Abby and I were fused, you see. Conjoined twins. Abby's head, torso and left arm protruded from my chest. We shared a liver and three and three-quarters legs between us" (SM, 29). The twins come from a Black family of mixed human-celestial parentage. Their demigod father, Boysie is currently confined to human form and bed-rest in a nursing home and their originally human mother has been condemned to roam Lake Ontario as a sea monster by the rest of the celestial family, punishment of Boysie's transgression with a "claypicken," the demigods' derogatory term for humans: "You might say that Dad married outside the family. To hear some of them tell it, outside the species" (SM, 29). The issue of bi-racial identity, hierarchies of power and ability, and discrimination are played out in the narrative. Other important issues are the intensity of sibling intimacy and rivalry, the exploration of difference and sameness, and familial duty vs. personal fulfilment. As a result of the surgical separation, the twin's each have to live with impair- ments, Abby with a permanent limp, and Makeda with a lack of mojo, that is without any special, magical talent. Compared to her sister's divine voice and musical ability, which give Abby a sense of vocation, Makeda struggles with feelings of inferiority and a lack of belonging. Although she is not fully accepted by her other celestial relatives, the sisters were always extremely close, but have recently started to grow apart: "When you're a twin, the world has its own ways of letting you know that you and your sib are a package deal. Everything I had, Abby had either had an identical one, or she and I would share one. It was like we'd never actually been separated at all. […] Abby's body was as familiar to me as my own" (SM, 124). Significantly, Hopkin- son's originally planned title for the novel was Donkey, in reference to Makeda carry- ing Abby around when they were younger; the term also underlines the racist under- tones and the perceived inferiority of Makeda, who describes herself as "a crippled deity half-breed" (SM, 2) or Abby's "human donkey of a sister" (SM, 30). Trying to finally sever the ties to her sibling and find her independence, Makeda moves out of the house she co-owns with Abby and into a converted warehouse in downtown To- ronto, home to an eclectic number of people, most of them artists of sorts. The group of inhabitants of the building is typical of the 'inclusive' diversity of a Hopkinson novel and features characters of all ethnicities, ages, genders, and sexual orientations. While Makeda is especially drawn to Brian, the building's superintendent and attractive lead singer of the in-house rock band, she is generally ecstatic to have found a place where she is not perceived as an outsider: "I grinned like a fool, con- templating beginning a life in which my pariah status didn't figure in the least" (SM, 22).13 The following plot of Sister Mine evolves around Makeda's quest for her mojo

short fictions, editor of several anthologies of black speculative writing, and has won numerous awards for her writings, mostly in the science fiction category. 13 See Hopkinson's remark: "When I set my last novel in Toronto, some reviewers opined that I had worked too hard to make my story culturally diverse. This tells me that they know nothing about Toronto. In terms of the ethno-cultural, racial, linguistic, religious, and sexual diversity of my characters, I didn't exaggerate even a little bit" (in Samatar 2013 n.p.). Cf. also Amy Patterson, who argues: "In all her work, Hopkinson presents characters of various ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, physical abilities, and combinations thereof, simply and directly, without reference back to some non-existent (male, Eurocentric, heterosexual, ableist) 'norm'. She does diversity right, to the relief of readers everywhere"

and the twins' search for their father after he mysteriously disappears from his hospi- tal bed. This leads to the unearthing of a painful family secret and the final conquering of the haint (ghost) that has been threatening Makeda all her life. In fact, most of the fantastic creatures, regardless of family ties, seem to endanger the protagonist. Intersected with the struggle of keeping vile haints or grumpy celestial relatives at bay are real-life concerns, e.g. the worries about making enough money to pay her rent, or concerns for her health which is fragile due to the twins' surgery: "And shit, I hadn't taken my meds. The little bottle of vileness was also in my room back at Abby's. Stupid, Makeda! I was flirting with liver failure for sure" (SM, 61). The narrative includes many passages marked in italics and written in a beautifully lyrical style, which relate Makeda's memories from the twin's childhood and adoles- cence. One of Hopkinson's main interests in the novel is how the closeness and co- dependence between the sisters is affected by them developing differently and how being perceived by other people impacts their self-perception. The story of Makeda and Abby is paralleled with research and case studies from the history of conjoined twins, who, during the 19th century were often exhibited as curiosities, like "Millie Christine," the twin-singers billed as the 'Two-Headed Nightingale,' but always referred to as one person. The topic poses a truly fascinating ground for exploring the borders between self/other and mind/body. The narrative, at least on the surface, opts for a humorous approach to the topic of forced proximity, e.g. by focussing on the question of what forms sexual intimacy takes if one is constantly and physically bound to another body. Flashbacks of the twins' sex education, their playful experi- mentation with each other, and later hook-ups with their celestial twin-cousins, are infused with Makeda's reflections on how much worse the situation must have been for the Siamese twins Eng and Chang Bunker, born fused at the chest in 1811, well before surgical separation was an option. At the same time, Makeda, who suffers from conflicting desires with regard to wanting closeness/distance from Abby, admits: "Truth was, I kind of envied Eng and Chang. Yoked permanently together, they had to figure out how to get along, and how to disagree. They had no choice" (SM, 127). Developing Makeda's character, her inner landscape and her perception of her sur- roundings, Hopkinson's use of language blends urban slang and dialogue, Victorian poetry, song lyrics and pop culture into a strange harmony. Although many of the psychological preoccupations appear typical of a coming-of-age story, as one review- er of the novel notes, the overall effect is distinctly non-generic, the "magical world of the celestials is grafted onto the urban setting of Toronto. The result is an intriguing hybrid of forms" (Cornum 2013, 34; emphasis added). Concerning Makeda's celestial family, the novel draws heavily on fantastical elements of Afro-Caribbean cosmology, and many characters are based on Orisha deities, which, depending on the reader's (un)familiarity with West African or Caribbean folklore, are harder or easier to identi- fy. Examples are the grandmother Ocean (the riverine deity Oshun), uncle 'General Gun' (Ogoun, the god of battle), aunt Zeely (goddess Erzulie) or the Bejis-cousins (the Ibeji twins). But Hopkinson, who holds an undergraduate degree in French and Russian literature and possesses an extensive general knowledge of world fantasy literature, stresses that she borrows from all traditions and not just the Caribbean. With the modernization and fusion of different mythologies being one of the great strengths of the novel, the author herself argues that it is above all the setting and the

(Patterson 2013, 13). Another salient example of is Hopkinson's young adult novel The Chaos (2012), also set in Toronto.

Canadian context which calls for such a narrative. Toronto, Hopkinson says, is "a lovely place in which to set a fantasy story, […] everybody's folklore is there in a way" (in Wolfe and Strahan 2013, 292). An effect of the use of various folklores and dialects is that Hopkinson's fiction displaces the notion of any dominant (i.e. Canadi- an) culture specific to a place (see also Moïse 2014, 82; McGregory 2005, 5) and interrogates the split between 'local' traditions and locale, and also between time and place. The interest in staging a fictional clash of different folklores, and what happens to different traditions in displacement and proximity, i.e. "when the story is set somewhere where more than one belief system is in operation" (in Samatar 2013 n.p.), concerns Hopkinson in many of her novels. The cast of characters in Sister Mine furthermore includes Abby's boyfriend Lars, who is an inspirited/animate object in human shape but really the guitar of Jimi Hendrix and as such also considered an inferior species by the celestials, yet the most important intertextual reference is Christina Rossetti's classic Victorian poem "Goblin Market" (1862). Characters like Uncle John quote some lines from the poem, but mostly they are placed as epigraphs at the beginning of a chapter, thus imitating a stylistic feature of the Victorian novel. At the centre of Rossetti's poem, which includes fantasy creatures like the eponymous goblins, are two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, who, like Abby and Makeda, live in a house together. The main drama ensues when Laura cannot resist the temptations offered by the goblins, but Lizzie ends up saving her sister. The poem, which has distinct erotic connotations, raises questions about the economy of the female body, love and desire and is often read from a psychosexual, feminist angle. Dorothy Mermin refers to Rossetti's work essentially as "a fantasy of feminine freedom, heroism, and self-sufficiency and a celebration of sisterly and maternal love" (Mermin 1983, 108). With female fantasies, the exploration of sexual boundaries as well as the closeness between sisters being topics which clearly interest both Hopkin- son and Rossetti as writers, Hopkinson emphasizes that she was especially drawn to Rossetti's poem because of "this innocent, deep love between sisters" which is at the same time very sexualized (in Samatar 2013, n.p.). While a detailed analysis is beyond scope here, many motives and images of the poem are closely replicated in the novel. For example, Abby and Makeda sleeping in the same bed, "Like two pigeons in one nest/Folded in each other's wings, /They lay down in their curtain'd bed: Like two blossoms on one stem" (Rossetti, 1879, 7, ll. 186-189). Throughout the narrative Hopkinson furthermore plays with the symbolism of fruits, especially oranges. In the original poem, the goblins try to force fruits into Lizzie's mouth, who resists, but upon returning home askes Laura to lick the fruit juice off her face: "Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices" (Rossetti, 1879, 17, l. 468). In the novel, the sisters have a playful fight with oranges by the beach: "we were smushing our oranges on each other's clothing, on each other's faces, crushing the oranges in our fingers until they dripped juice and pulp and filled the air with the sweet citrus smell. […] She jammed the remnants of her orange against my mouth. 'Eat it. Eat it!' I shook my heed and kept my mouth closed as she smeared sticky juice all over my lips and cheeks" (SM, 223). Laura, who is giving in to a dangerous and ultimately unfulfilling desire, is finally 'cured' by her sister Lizzie's unconditional love and recognition of her own place. Makeda similarly makes peace with her family, her own (dis)abilities, and ultimately overcomes the poisonous jealousy felt towards Abby. Together the sisters face the final showdown with their father and conquer Makeda's haint once and for all; the narrative ends with Makeda having a sudden sense of her life "balanced between

freedom and responsibility" (SM, 305). Watching Abby rush towards her, the ending of Sister Mine affirms the strong bond of sisterly love inherent in the final lines of Rossetti's poem: For there is no friend like a sister, In calm or stormy weather, To cheer one on the tedious way, To fetch one if one goes astray, To lift one if one totters down To strengthen whilst one stands. (Rossetti, 1879, 20, ll. 562-567)

Conclusion: Coming-of-Age as Hybrids In an essay entitled "21st Century Stories," Gary Wolfe and Amelia Beamer dive into the recently booming arena of fantastic literature and suggest a way out of the jungle of possible generic subdivisions by proposing "21st century stories" as an "anti-label," which attaches to post-2000 speculative fiction and comprises a number of shared extra-textual and narratological features. Arguing for a specifically 21st-century para- digm of storytelling, they describe it as: a fiction for the unstoryable, or as yet unstoried, new century. Choosing broadly from the narrative toolbox, […] with self-aware and emotional powerful storyteller voices. Unlike the often coolly ironic surfaces of much postmodern fiction, they are often funny or heartbreaking, though they are comfortable with mystery and irresolution – which is not to say that there is no resolution of plot or story; unlike some postmodern or contemporary mainstream fiction, these narratives have plots and characters, not just style and voice. (Wolfe and Beamer 2008, 20) The main feature stressed by Wolfe and Beamer is an aesthetic coherence and emotional density of the texts as a result of, or rather despite, the free drawing on dispar- ate techniques of storytelling and genre conventions such as fantasy, SF, domestic realism, surrealism, or memoir. It is the specific way of fusing elements and its effect, which is never the experience of dis-linearity or randomness on the reader's side, that marks these fictions. In other words, the hybrid blend of storytelling, which springs from the writers' use of a heterogeneous archive of folklore, myths, fairy tales, and pop culture, is a surprisingly harmonious one. Interestingly, the authors and (short) fictions given as examples by Wolfe and Beamer do not include any Afro-Diasporic writers, nor does their list take into con- sideration the cultural background and setting of the fictions or questions of race and gender. However, many of the narrative strategies, and the free use of genre materials identified as characteristic of 21st- century stories also apply to contemporary Black female speculative writing. This fact supports the argument for the emergence of a 'global' science/speculative fiction in the sense of Istvan Csicsery-Ronay (2012), who argues that it is becoming more of a subgenre of a larger formation, of something, which John Clute refers to as "fantastika" and considers being "the salient literatures of our new century" (2011, 6). There exists as wealth of material by the individual authors on their writing process and interviews about how and why they use and play with genre materials, claiming and disclaiming traditions. Furthermore domesticity plays an important role. Characters and events may be fantastical, but settings and anxieties are those of domestic realism. Mythological creatures, gods and goddesses, and supernatural elements appear not as intrusions but as part of the fictional domes-

tic, realist subtext. This is linked directly to the more general perception and construc- tion of the fictional worlds, which are "neither purely possible nor purely impossible, and may shift among levels of possible reality" (Wolfe and Beamer 2008, 21). Ac- cordingly, the texts employ contradictory narrative markers, utilizing genres "without necessarily inhabiting them" (2008, 28). To sum up further shared specificities of the examples discussed above, all three novels are female coming-of-age stories that call for critical engagement with matters of identity, power, rebellion and liberation. As narratives of female development, they show the tensions between individual freedom and ethnic/cultural heritage and the discrepancies between individual potential and societal limits and communal obliga- tion. The protagonists are all in some sense post- or superhuman, i.e. they possess special magical abilities or are mortal human/immortal divine hybrids. As such the texts take up one of the most urgent and fascinating topics of the 21st century with a twist, that of the limits of the human and the future of the human race. They address the question of growing up and dealing with special powers (or a perceived lack thereof). They are extremely attentive to implications of gender and race, which do not disappear in the futurist, fantastic imagination. While in all three texts science and technology play a role, the protagonists do not resemble cyborgs in the sense that their humanity or emotional capacities are ever questioned. The highest stake in the narratives is the possibility of finding peaceful coexistence and happiness in multiculturalism and multiracialism, at the personal, familial, national, or global level. With hybridity being a central issue at the character and plot level, black female speculative writing generally reflects the intense cross-culturality characteristic of Afro- Caribbean Diasporic culture and consciousness which permeates all aspects of the narratives. As such, it constitutes a branch of fiction that really "switches its codes and realities with the abandon of writers, who have as many inheritances as agendas" (Cooper 2012, 140).

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