SOBRE 2: OFERTA ECONÓMICA

“There’s a horror movie called Alien? That’s really offensive. No wonder everyone keeps invading you!”

142 _{Nnedi Okorafor is the most celebrated twenty-first century author I use as a case study. Okorafor is a Nigerian-}

American whose work often draws from a love and awareness of her Nigerian immigrant parents’ original country and culture. She has written seven acclaimed novels (Zahrah the Windseeker, 2005; The Shadow Speaker, 2007;

Who Fears Death, 2010; Akata Witch, 2011; Lagoon, 2014; The Book of Phoenix—the prequel to Who Fears Death,

2015), one celebrated short story anthology (Kabu Kabu, 2013), and one novella trilogy (Binti, Part I in 2015, Part II in 2017), along with several published short stories (including “Hello, Moto,” 2011; “Spider the Artist,” 2008; and “Moom!”—the prologue of Lagoon, which was first published as a short story in AfroSF in 2012). Her works span the genres of science fiction and fantasy and the “fields” of children’s, young adult, and adult literature. Fans and critics praise her fantasy and science fiction works—Lagoon was a British Science Fiction Association Award finalist for best novel; part one of her Binti trilogy won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novella.

(The Twelfth Doctor in Doctor Who, created by Paul Wilmshurst and Steven Moffat, “Last Christmas,” 2014)

Lagoon is focalized and narrated by many different Earthling characters, bouncing between the three main human protagonists, supporting human characters, humans only mentioned once, and a variety of marine-, land-, and air-dwelling animals, such as the swordfish in the excerpt above.143 Late in the novel, readers discover there’s also an animistic narrative layer; the extradiegetic narrator introduces herself as “Udide, the narrator, the story weaver, the Great Spider” (Okorafor 228).144 _{This multi-perspectival narrative style immerses readers into the}

crowds of Lagos, allowing them to access different individual reactions to the aliens’ arrival and ensuing tumult. The novel is also not written linearly, but jumps back and forth throughout the timeline of events. This adds to the story’s pervading sense of upheaval and change, of not being able to concretely stabilize or associate with one place, time, or social position; it helps the reader engage with the story’s construction of a fluid but also connected way of being, which is ultimately promoted by the aliens and subscribed to by the Earthlings.

143 _{Characters may be the focalizer of a chapter, or even a section of a chapter, without being the narrator. A narrator}

tells the story and, if a first-person narrator, may also be able to present interior and exterior focalization from their own perspective or even—depending on their narrator-prowess—that of others (either from within the world of the story, intradiegetically, as Legba the Internet fraud artist or Udide the great spider do in Lagoon; or from outside the world of the story, extradiegetically). On the other hand, focalization is not restricted to the domain of the narrator, but occurs because of the severability of the narrator and active characters: One is able to process the plot of a story through a focus (perspective or perspectives) of any of the actants in the story, so long as the text utilizes them to share information and move the plot along. Readers are given internal focalization to many of the characters in

Lagoon, and experience the textual world through the experiences of the swordfish, Adaora, and the President, even

when they are not the de facto narrator. These focalizers are able to share emotional states, unspoken thoughts, and different viewpoints of the novel’s occurrences (sometimes of the same event). My point here is that Okorafor utilizes both various focalizers and various narrators, which is a bit unusual. Texts prioritizing multiple points of view are more likely to do so through the use of multiple narrators and (in shifting between them) use those narrators as the only focalizers, or to have one narrator figure and multiple focalizers. Lagoon is intensely multi- perspectival, at both levels of narration.

144 _{This extradiegetic narrator has spoken directly to readers before. Chapter Thirty Eight “Udide Speaks” (194) is}

the first time Udide is named in a one-page chapter devoted to the spider’s metatextual address to the reader, but she also (identifiable through italics) explains to the reader the existence of “The Bone Collector” in a short paragraph concluding Chapter Twenty-Five (120).

Lagoon begins when aliens land in the waters off the coast of Lagos, Nigeria, and they decide to establish their home alongside the human, animal, and plant inhabitants.145 The aliens are actually a bio-technological community (each individual being is composed of tiny, shifting, metal ball bearings instead of cells) that are able to rewrite their own selves, environments, and any other living thing at the molecular level; those who decide to live on land take up the form of humans. One of the foundational, often repeated, elements in the novel is the idea of change, and it takes no time for the aliens to help usher in change at every level: The sea creatures near their landed ship are able to communicate wishes for new shapes and abilities, and the first humans that encounter and name Ayodele, the alien diplomat, have their own special talents emphasized by the alien’s abilities; Adaora, a marine biologist, can turn into a mermaid; Anthony, a rapper, can unleash a vocal shockwave/echolocative burst of energy; and Agu, a solider, is a superhumanly strong fighter.146

When Ayodele announces the aliens’ arrival by hijacking technological communications, it sparks off a riotous protest and widespread panic.147 _{During the ensuing chaos, mythical}

145 _{Tade Thompson’s 2016 SF novel Rosewater is also about aliens who decide to dwell in Nigeria, though the novel}

came to my attention too late to be included in a meaningful way it also contends with networks, change, and political/societal reform.

146 _{Okorafor takes great pains to indicate that these powers were accessible to the human protagonists before the}

arrival of the aliens, and that Ayodele’s people only brought them to the surface/exaggerated them. This adamancy indicates that systems of power also exist in Nigerians separately from the aliens, much as Okorafor ensures that readers experience systems of knowledge that are both Nigerian and alien (see my section “Reorienting the SF Generic Intertext and the Non-spaced Internet” below).

147 _{The aliens’ ability to change molecular codes is also a potential weapon: Ayodele protects herself and punishes}

the violent Christian zealots and Nigerian soldiers that accidentally shoot her during a mob-induced crossfire: The offenders are turned into palm trees. After Ayodele announces the aliens’ arrival, all hell breaks loose: area boys set upon people and property, an illegal LGTBQ group comes out, power-abusing soldiers overreact to amassing crowds; Lagos is described as eating itself. Note: The inclusion of the LGTBQ group is particularly important, since they are not legally counted as being part of Lagos. As of 2017, the Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act, signed into law in 2013, is still in effect. The act prohibits and punishes by a ten-year prison sentence the marriage between persons other than a man and a woman, demonstrations of “amorous relations” other than between a man and a woman, and the registration of “gay clubs, societies and organizations, their sustenance, processions and meetings” (“Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act 2013”). The legislative discrimination gained attention in the United States, including in news cycles and popular political media shows like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which critiqued similar legislation in India and Uganda (“Sochi Homophobic Olympics”); see the African Commission on Human

figures like Papa Legba, Mami Wata, a terrifying Road Monster, and Ijele also come out to revel, defend, and help mold the upcoming changes to their community.148 _{After Ayodele, Adaora,}

Agu, and Anthony facilitate a peaceful talk between the President of Nigeria and the leading council of the aliens, Ayodele and her community are welcomed into Nigeria. However, this diplomatic welcome does not circumvent human fear, and shortly afterward, Ayodele is shot by panicked soldiers uninformed about their leader’s overtures. Ayodele turns her death into a martyrdom, dissolving herself into a mist that is inhaled by every Lagosian, making them each “a little bit . . . alien,” a little less susceptible to corruption, and much more open to the idea of change and the differences of aliens and their fellow humans (268).149 _{The novel ends with the}

President giving an official welcome to the aliens and announcing great, almost utopian, changes to Nigeria’s economy and political system. It is suggested that this change of heart and more peaceful existence will sweep out from Lagos to all of Nigeria, extending beyond the national borders to neighboring countries and eventually to the rest of the world.

In depicting how the aliens interact with the many facets of Lagos (including the surrounding natural environment, man-made cityscape, the inhuman world of spirits, and the technologically enabled virtual realm), Lagoon offers Lagos as a complex location capable of a future that can address contemporary issues. The novel’s theme is change, and it offers a political shift in the position of African spaces in the SF canon and of SF in African postcolonial canons.

and Peoples’ Rights press release “Press Release on the Implication of the Same Sex Marriage [Prohibition] Act 2013 on Human Rights Defenders in Nigeria.”

148 _{Note the range of these spirits: Igbo, Yoruba, Dogon/Egyptian technology-background. I use Ytasha L.}

Womack’s explanation of Mami Wata as a figure with multiple sources, including “Dogon lore,” which “came from Egyptian stories” as well as “the Togo’s Densu and Yoruba’s Olokun” (Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and

Fantasy Culture 86).

149 _{Corruption (political, economic, and moral) is villainized by Okorafor—a particularly slimy grey priest, a beaten-}

down Marxist President unwilling to struggle against the machinations of his government, the oil that pollutes the natural ecosystem… Each is given a short but stinging moment of narrative time.

Rarely are Africans depicted in literature as the implementers or beneficiaries of advanced technology, economic booms, or world-altering politics (see my Introduction for how this claim substantiates in early SF); the few moments when Africans are positioned differently in science fiction are thus notable.150 _{Instead, Africa is often positioned in what acclaimed}

Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “a single story” that

show[s] a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become. It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power . . . Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali [“to be greater than another”]: How they are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories, are told . . .

to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience . . . The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.

. . . when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise. Adichie, “The danger of a single story” I quote Adichie’s somewhat romantic talk about the power of stories at length because her beautiful rhetoric helps explain how Lagoon reconsiders Lagos. In Lagoon, Okorafor sets out to tell many different stories with one underlying message: the pessimistic “single story” that is

150 _{Mike Resnick’s Kirinyaga: A Fable of Utopia (1998) shows the tensions of traditional Kikuyu world-systems and}

technological progress; AfroSF (2013) and AfroSFv2 (2015) contain several narratives that explore African countries at the peak of technological and political prowess, and that those may be less than wonderful, as in Chiagozie Fred Nwonwu’s “Masquerade Stories” and Efe Okogu’s “Proposition 23;” the imagined northeast African nation of Wakanda, home of Marvel’s Black Panther comics (first appearance in Fantastic Four #52, July 1966) recaps the economic, political, and technological benefits of Vibranium deposits; Lauren Beukes’ Moxyland (2008) shows a very-near-future Cape Town and how the class and racial politics of South Africa are extrapolated into cyberpunk, corporate-backed technologies; Alastair Reynolds’ Poseidon’s Children trilogy (Blue Remembered Earth, 2012; On

the Steel Breeze, 2013; Poseidon’s Wake, 2015) draws a deliberate ray from near-future Tanzania/Africa on Earth to

and through the limits of space travel, exploration, and colonization; the anthology LAGOS_2060 (2013), which I speak more on later; etc.

often told about Nigeria is false. In a 2015 interview with Locus, Okorafor explained, “I knew I was not going to hold back when I wrote Lagoon. That’s part of why I did the multiple points of view. I wanted some non-Nigerians in there. I wanted various types of Christians and non- Christians. There weren’t too many Muslims, but there were some. I wanted to run the gamut of these points of view. There’s a lot of truth in Lagoon” (“Magical Futurism”).151 By wielding multiple perspectives of the diverse citizens populating the cityscape, often relating chapters from the perspectives of the under- (and un)narrated view, Okorafor complicates the pessimistic futures that are normally predicted for Nigeria, fighting against the type of “incommensurability” critiqued by Neil Lazarus, a mode of separation crucial for the futures industry.152 _{As such, I see}

Lagoon as a political repositioning undertaken as a literary intervention. Okorafor uses the form of an alien-encounter novel to offer a repositioning of Africa’s location in postcolonial studies and science fiction texts by engaging with the dually fictitious concept of “the future.” The idea of the Future bleeds from imaginative literatures into real-world business models and technological inequalities, but it also warps texts leaching ideas and societal “realities” from media and business portrayals that have specific motivations in maintaining restrictive “popular” imaginations. One SF anthology in particular, LAGOS_2060: Exciting Sci-Fi Stories From Nigeria (2013) claims science fiction’s ability to manipulate this duality, claiming that “science

151 _{Okorafor continued, explaining her desire to avoid an idealistic reduction of the city, exclaiming, “What am I}

going to do, sanitize Lagos? It would be unrecognizable. I don’t mind showing the negatives” (“Magical Futurism”). In this interview, Okorafor also explained a softened version of her relationship to the South African film District 9, which I consider in my Conclusion. Okorafor criticizes the film’s lack of nuance, for “In District 9 they can have corrupt Nigerians—there are corrupt Nigerians—but in District 9 there was not one single non-corrupt Nigerian. They were all portrayed as criminals, prostitutes, and cannibals, all of them. I think that putting the Nigerians in

District 9 was important. There’s a lot of static between Nigerians and South Africans, so he was hitting on

something that’s real. The year before the film came out there were riots between Nigerians and South Africans at a Nigerian market. When I went there, I asked some South Africans what was up, and a lot of them regurgitated the same stereotypes. It’s supposed to be the first science fiction film set in Africa. How come we can’t have a black main character? I gotta say that. South Africa is only 20% white/non-black” (“Magical Futurism”).

152 _{I do mean under-narrated, both as ‘less frequently’ and also as the spatially below—the swordfish is “below” sea}

level, and Udide, Okorafor’s giant spider narrator, resides underneath Lagos. Regarding Lazarus’ critique of postcolonial studies’ seeming obsession with incommensurability, see The Postcolonial Unconscious 19.

fiction provides an amazing avenue for catharsis, especially in an environment that has suffered stagnation for such a long time. Science fiction unhinges the mind and allows the writer to imagine ordinarily ‘unthinkable’ scenarios. The political stagnation Nigeria suffers can be interpreted within the context of a creative writing process; the nation’s development has been stifled by a lack of imagination . . . writers who dare the future, give courage to others” (Ayodele Arigbabu xi).153 It is not unthinkable that Nigeria would be at the forefront of the world’s future, but thinking so does require one to contend with the economic, political, and environmental reasons why Nigeria is almost never considered as being vital to the world’s future. Lagoon enacts SF’s ability to challenge deadlocked modes of thinking by prioritizing Nigerian spaces in a future-oriented storyline, using SF estrangement to call out current realities of our world that sideline, silence, and ignore the possibilities happening elsewhere (see my section “Deleted Scenes: What Happens When Readers Don’t Engage in Re-Reading” at the end of this chapter).