PRESENTACIÓN DE CONTRATO DE CONCESIÓN DE GENERACIÓN

While the swordfish functions as gateway into the under-narrated ocean of Lagos, one sacrificed for economic profit, the spirit figures that show up after Ayodele’s announcement offer readers a

171 _{For more about how Lagoon operates as a “petrofiction,” see Melody Jue’s “Intimate Objectivity: On Nnedi}

Okorafor’s Oceanic Afrofuturism” (2017).

172 _{Though the technology allowing this agricultural revolution is “foreign,” it is also—since they have been}

chance to engage with the real and often intangible (imagined) spaces of Lagos. Each of the animist figures have direct correlations to (or directly embody) the physical spaces that comprise Lagos. They appear in the novel accordingly, thereby inscribing each space with a renewed element of the otherworldly. Readers are asked to read spaces of belief, where Legba heckles people wandering by the crossroads, Mami Wata appears near a beautifully ostentatious bank on the seashore, the living Road shakes itself to life on a pot-holed and death-filled highway (see the next section), and Ijele… Ijele manifests in an Internet café and then goes to the World Wide Web.

This is remarkable.

While Legba and Mami Wata show up in locations associated with their interests and powers, spirit masquerades are not associated with the Internet, and they aren’t seen frequenting cyber cafes.173 The masquerade, which allows for people to celebrate their own reality with its entrance into village festivals or more recent masquerade competitions, makes tangible “Igbo pride and mightiness” with its presence—Ijele is the largest of the Igbo masquerades and representative of life itself (“Ijele Masquerade” UNESCO). Yet, Okorafor has Ijele show up at an incredibly damaged cyber cafe, startle a scammer, and travel into the Internet with an alien.174 By relocating this particular masquerade to an Internet café and the Internet itself, the text makes a deliberate intervention in science fiction’s prioritization of cyberspace.

173 _{Ijele predates electricity, after all.}

174 _{There have been recent debates about the capitalization of Internet (see Susan C Herring’s 2015 article “Should}

you be Capitalizing the Word “Internet”?”), but since this debate has not yet resolved itself, I must err on the side of conservative caution, even though it seems unnecessary, given my contextualization of referring to the Internet, not just an internet system.

Ijele’s traditional location and timing is a village center for festivals or specific masquerade competition sites. His presence outside of these spaces is overwhelming and difficult to grasp for the chapter’s narrator:

Its tiers of wooden platforms could have been twelve or fifteen feet in diameter. And it stood over thirty feet high. Bamboo sticks and canes stuck out of the top half and it was covered in ceremonial cloth decorated with colorful geometric shapes and magical designs . . . and the designs were spinning and moving. Alive.

There were forty, maybe fifty brown-skinned human figurines and I could see them running around it . . . I could see the mother, father, the one in police uniform, the horses, the trees, the palm-wine tapper. I knew all the characters because since I was a kid I’d enjoyed the performance . . . never could I have imagined something like this. The upper and lower parts were even divided by the giant yellow serpent, the sign of Igbo pride and mightiness. And it was looking around curiously.

The creature was every color of the rainbow, flowing deep and powerful . . . And it made music. The creature’s cloth quivered with the beat it sent into the ground. The sound was impossible, I swear. The sound of life, the beginning.

Holy shit, this was Ijele. (Okorafor 199)

Neatly, the description introduces the unversed reader, one who may not have grown up with the Igbo pantheon of masquerades. However, Okorafor also enlarges and enlivens Ijele so that even those like the chapter’s narrator who are familiar with the spirit are still distanced, forced to reconsider what the presence of a masquerade might offer if it’s not “some guys dressed up in an elaborate costume to perform Nigerian theatrics to celebrate the spirits and ancestors,” but is itself “Alive,” inquisitive, able to glow and communicate with its music that connects not only to

“the ground” of Lagos but to “life” (199).175 A living Ijele breaks the script of a cyber café in “modern” Nigeria. Fittingly, Ijele’s entrance makes it possible to break of one of the more widespread “single story” narratives of Nigerians, that of the 419-scammer by simultaneously reorienting science fiction readers away from the seduction of cyberspace and back to the tangible spaces of Lagos.

On one hand, the Internet is a vital presence in Lagoon.176 While many communicative technologies are utilized to spread Ayodele’s speech (radio, television, phone), the digital sphere (represented by smartphones, Internet cafés, Skype-accessing laptops) is the quickest and most vital way the human characters communicate during the upheaval.177 _{The Internet is becoming}

ever more widely accessible within Africa—as Achille Mbembe points out, “[o]nly 20% of the continent’s one billion people are online, but that share is rising rapidly as mobile networks are rolled out and the cost of Internet-capable devices continues to fall. As a matter of fact, more than 720 million Africans have mobile phones and 1 million were on Facebook by 2014” (“Africa in the New Century”). The digital becomes the space of witnessing, of processing and sharing the change-causing actions of the novel: It is also a space that is available for reading by the rest of the world (see section below on “Deleted Scenes”).

On the other hand, Okorafor rebukes the way our contemporary intimacy with the Internet distracts from the physical realities of our world. The narrator of Ijele’s chapter is so

175 _{Okorafor provides another quick background sketch for the uninformed, here.}

176 _{It may also offer a way for readers who are confident in the simultaneous compound-eye production of the}

Internet to handle the multi-perspective simultaneous narrative excesses of Okorafor’s text.The Internet is where one event can be covered by thousands on Twitter, Facebook, news outlets around the world, individual or themed blogs, as well as digital cartoonists and YouTube.

177 _{It is also through these Internet-spread announcements that the President returns to Lagos, and thus is able to}

reach a peaceful treaty with the aliens. It is through this broadcasting ability that the President is later able to announce the treaty’s terms to Nigerians everywhere. Likewise, the Guardian-associated journalist, odious though he may be, that tags along to document the President’s meeting with the alien council immediately uploads his video footage of Agu, Adaora, and Anthony’s battle with the marine creatures (and, more importantly, Ayodele’s

jacked into his 419 email compositions that he is oblivious to Lagos: “The waters of the ocean were rising and the government was trying to figure out who was attacking us. Yet there I was in the cyber café totally unconcerned and up to no good” (195, 197).178 There is no room for any change or revision as long as his attention is wrapped up in the digital space. I contend Okorafor’s investment is in leveraging physical and lived spaces to propel Nigeria into new positions of literary representation, but the Internet is a mode of escape from physically bound realities. Although it has physical spaces devoted to it, such as the Internet café, the Internet itself is not actually a physical space. Spending time online “permits the subject a utopian and kinetic liberation from the very limits of urban existence” (Bukatman, Terminal Identities 146). However, users have found it necessary to spend a lot of time spatializing it. Everyday Internet users circumnavigate the digital by utilizing spatially assisting platforms, as users unable to read the binary and coded real construction of the digital are given operating systems and text/image- based layouts and design options.179 Society has evolved spatial language to contend with the non-spaced, but also instantly global, digital realm: We roam the World Wide Web (Udide would be pleased), save information in the cloud, and troll the information highway. Science fiction authors helped establish these popularly imagined spaces through their fiction by creating and normalizing the idea of cyberspace.180

178 _{Okorafor explains that this colloquial term, 419, relates to “a highly successful strain of advanced-fee Internet}

fraud popularized in Nigeria, which appears most often in the form of an emailed letter. The number ‘419’ refers to the article (sectioned into 419, 419A, 419B) that deals with fraud in Chapter Thirty Eight of the Nigerian Criminal Code Act (‘Obtaining Property by False Pretenses: Cheating’)” (Lagoon, “Special Bonus Features”).

179 _{As Jillana Enteen phrases it, the Internet is technically “a dynamic, shifting network of computers and other}

electronic signal receptors transmitting and/or receiving bits of digital information,” networks that are often identified through “Uniform Resource Locators (URLs)” that “situate the Internet and the World Wide Web as geographically based systems with corresponding geopolitical reference points in the physical world,” though the network system itself is much more fluid, and the geopolitical points are only there for “reference” purposes, not as part of the actual system (“Spatial conceptions of URLs: Tamil Eelam networks on the world wide web” 2006).

180 _{This lineage has become more important as we turn to the digital for ever more daily functions, and as the}

cyberspace becomes increasingly visually spatialized through widespread Internet gaming and communication platforms.

Though cyberspace entered the genre with William Gibson’s 1982 novella “Burning Chrome,” the idea of a spatialized cybernetic world became established in popular imagination with Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer. This novel instigated the SF subgenre of cyberpunk, which compares the digital with the physical, allowing readers access to each author’s own evolving spatialized version of the cyberscape as a way to critique capitalism and government systems .181 Current SF readers, then, are accustomed to texts allowing them access to the diegetic digital world. Although the Internet is vitally important to the plot of Lagoon, offering a way for the entire city and world to witness and “participate” in the aliens’ interactions, the question of cyberspace only enters in a way that allows Okorafor to challenge SF’s prioritization of the digital non-space over other types of spaces.

She does this by subverting readers’ expectations of being given a rendered cyberspace, partially by writing back to the way the grandfather of cyberspace superficially linked it to the spirit world. Indeed, William Gibson’s 1986 novel Count Zero (book two of the Sprawl Trilogy, which begins with the cyberpunk-founding novel Neuromancer) seems to provide a precedent for spirit-world cyber connections since it depicts artificial intelligences (AIs) populating cyberspace in the personas of vodou gods and goddesses.182 In Gibson’s trilogy, the AIs take on the personas of the loa because of “all the signs” humans “have stored against the night, in that

181 _{Increasingly depicted as more complex virtual reality fictional realms, including Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash}

(1992), which envisioned cyberspace rather like avatar-inhabited online gaming platforms today; the popular film

Matrix Trilogy (The Matrix, 1999; The Matrix Reloaded, 2003; The Matrix Revolutions, 2003) also portrays the

digital world in a complex manner, realistic enough to fool incorporated humans into thinking they’re experiencing the real world. Film and television depictions of the virtual continue to grow, meaning that even SF newcomers are still most likely familiar with some form of digital imagination.

182 _{More specifically, the artificial consciousness of Wintermute and Neuromancer are joined into an artificial}

superconscious at the end of Neuromancer, a super-creation that finds another superconscious out in space, and returns to splinter into separate forms that engender a new generation of separate conscious cyberbeings that take up the personas of the loa. The vodou loa are “alive” and well in cyberspace at the start of Count Zero, though we learn about their existence slowly and are only fully clarified at the end of the trilogy, Mona Lisa Overdrive.

situation the paradigms of vodou proved most appropriate” (Mona Lisa Overdrive 257).183 These are not the gods that “came out of Africa in the first of times,” and there’s no indication in Gibson’s narrative world that Papa Legba, Danbala, Ogou Feray, or Baron Samedi are real outside the personalities that the AIs have chosen to inhabit. Unlike Okorafor,184 _{Gibson does not}

prioritize the cultural foundation of that system, or produce a textual world where vodou spirits operate successfully in reality before the intervention of the AIs. In Gibson’s diegetic space, it doesn’t matter “whether it’s a religion or not. It’s just a structure” and a means to an end (Count Zero 76).185 What is prioritized is the cybernetic.

With all of this intertextual background in mind, it makes critical sense that Okorafor establishes Ijele’s living reality before sending it into cyberspace. By doing so, she successfully revises what can be considered “real” in post-cyberpunk SF and prioritizes the realities outside of the digital realm. If we consider narrative access as an indication of a text’s investment, Okorafor prioritizes the local spirit imagination, and the physical and lived spaces of her characters. As a

183 _{The loa are the pantheon of spirits in vodou (especially Haitian); these spirits are the go-betweens for humans}

with the more distant, and all encompassing, Creator.

184 _{Or Jamaican-Canadian author Nalo Hopkinson, another SF writer known for her blending of the mystical with}

the scientific in her novel Midnight Robber (2000) and even in her “A Reluctant Ambassador from the Planet of Midnight” keynote address at the 2009 conference of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. The type of refocusing that Okorafor does through Ijele’s Internet encounter is familiar in postcolonial SF, though this example is unique in the number of lineages (Gibson, 419-scammers, and masquerades) it revises.

185 _{And it’s a structure convenient for Gibson to filter his AIs through because it allows him to have AIs that can}

connect through (and control) humans in the world in a parallel of the vodou gods riding their chosen “horses,” because they enjoy making deals, because each AI can be in control of a particular element. And, of course, the most important loa to the cyberspace is, in Gibson’s world, Legba, god of communication and crossroads. While Okorafor turns away from this version of Legba (as AI construct, contained—except via horses—in cyberspace), she does still cash in on Gibson’s connection; the narrator of Ijele’s chapter uses the codename Legba for a reason, drawing the same connections between the loa of communication and the cyberconnective network. Okorafor, however, keeps her non-AI Legba in his more traditional location (the physically accessible crossroads) and doesn’t offer an AI. Instead, she sends Ijele and an alien man into cyberspace for a chat, thereby restricting cyberspace as a space, and reaffirming the importance of Ijele (and the alien) as beings. We’re not concerned with the singularity here, though if we were, we’d look at the biotechnical alien community and not at the non-alien, non-“technical” masquerade or god. Gibson’s refusal to fully support the lineage of the loa defuses the potential conjuncture of two traditionally separated systems of knowing: that of Western-derived technology/Afro-Caribbean faith. Indeed, elitist cyber cowboys refuse the notion that a vodou-populated cyberspace would be possible if the AIs didn’t need to manipulate humans to achieve their own goals: “There’s no way in hell there’d be anything out here that you had to talk to in fucking bush Haitian!” (Count Zero, 168).

novel that invites readers to form connections that dismantle the easy and the assumed, Okorafor writes back against the presumed hierarchies underlying a literary connection with Gibson and other cyberpunk novels: We’re not allowed to escape into cyberspace in Lagoon.186 Okorafor deliberately keeps her characters, and her readers, in Nigeria.187 _{Again, we see that the form of}

the novel requires a reconsideration of how readers interpret the hierarchy of space, especially of alien/technology/non-spaced digital with human belief/lived experience/Lagos-cityscape. Readers are asked to reprioritize the physical and lived spaces of Lagos and other, more traditional, types of imagined spaces.

The (non)space of the internet, then, becomes another location for Okorafor’s internal revision of Lagos, and of Nigeria’s representation to the world. This is why Ijele complicates the stereotype of the Nigerian email scam artist. Though the aliens disrupt and instigate change in the diegetic-Nigeria’s contemporary everyday existence, their presence fails to change the space of the scamming Nigerian “prince.”188 This is the figure of the infamous millennial email frauds,

186 _{Okorafor’s many focalizers could be considered an extreme evolution of Gibson’s own multi-threaded narration.}

Okorafor and Gibson also offer the theme of connective perspective in more tangible moments of their respective texts. I’ve already noted Okorafor’s swordfish and Ijele, and describe the connecting space of the Road in the next section. In Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive, Legba is a web-weaver, “still he speaks, Legba, and the tale is one tale, countless strands wound about a common, hidden core” (Gibson 256); in Count Zero, Marly, an art gallery manager, views AI-created art boxes containing “bone and circuit-gold, dead lace, and dull white marble rolled from clay” (26-7) and experiences a moment of understanding the humanity of the new AIs when she, before realizing their non-human origin, ponders “How could anyone have arranged this garbage, in such a way that it caught at the heart, snagged in the soul like a fishhook? She nodded. It could be done, she knew; it had been done many years ago by a man named Cornell, who’d also made boxes” (Gibson, Count Zero 27).

187 _{Indeed, readers are not allowed to escape into outer space in scenes or flashbacks of the aliens’ home planet, their}

journey to Earth, or even their landed alien ship-domain. The scenes set in the landed alien ship are erased from the human protagonists’ memories, and Udide does not offer readers access into a site the aliens wish to keep private (Okorafor, Lagoon 260)

188 _{I’d like to acknowledge that while Okorafor’s scammer may seem like a representative of a stereotype (persistent}

in his hunt for money, ignoring the reality of what’s going on around him to interact with a victim on another continent, and enacting his scheme through the intangible space of the Internet instead of contending with the physical upheaval in Lagos), she deflates that stereotype by presenting him as a complex character in the process of change. For while the presence of the aliens require the Nigerian characters to challenge their assumptions about Others, the alien novum also requires the novel’s reader to reconsider similar tropes used to generalize different segments of the human population (which must exist in the world in order for humans to be taking the aliens’ arrival so badly); it challenges what we might even consider stereotypical reading processes. The construction of one’s

one of the more globally recognized embodiments of Nigeria. But, as with her depiction of cyberspace, Okorafor writes back to mainstream assumptions. Her scammer introduces himself:

“My code name was ‘Legba.’ It was perfect because Legba is the Yoruba trickster god of language, communication and the crossroads. I am Igbo and I peddle in words. I am American, born and raised. Igbo American, then. Or maybe American Igbo. . . . My major was engineering but my passion was acting. I could imitate anything. Any voice.