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Writing Black people stories is my own reminiscence that I\u2019m Australian and African, and it\u2019s okay. I am many, betwixt, a sum of cultures. I am the self and \u2018other\u2019, a story of inhabitation, a multiple embodiment and my multiplicities render themselves in cross-genre writing.<\/p>\n
As a reader, writer and an editor, I\u2019m increasingly noticing black speculative fiction, and how it\u2019s on the rise. In my prefatory essay<\/a> published in Fafnir\u2014Nordic Journal of Science<\/em>, I ask myself and the reader, what are Black people writing about? And guess what, trends in black speculative fiction mirror my own clutching, my seeking to belong.<\/p>\n Increasingly, people of colour\u2014once invisible in literary texts, fewer characters looking like them\u2014are now finding empowerment through storytelling. In the Fafnir<\/em> essay I stated:<\/p>\n Like any fiction, speculative fiction helps the reader to understand other perspectives, seeing the world through a character\u2019s eyes, their world, psychological, physical, or imagined. In its qualities of \u201cnon-realistic\u201d, speculative fiction comes with power inherent in the surreal or abstract: it offers a safe space in which to explore \u201crealistic\u201d themes \u2013 for example, racism, sexuality, social injustice, or whichever individual or societal dysfunction \u2013 that may be tougher for a writer or reader to tackle or relate to in their fuller constructs or reality.<\/p>\n In a form of subversive activism, speculative fiction empowers a different kind of writing with its unique worldbuilding that has, over decades, emboldened writers like Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison to write a different kind of story that\u2019s also about writing oneself in. Morrison was compelled to write something she could relate to, and Butler finally decided to \u201cwrite herself in\u201d because stories of her time did not feature an \u201cother\u201d like her.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This theme on the politics of identity recurs in my fiction, and that of other Afrocentric writers seeking understanding of the self, seeking decolonization from western hegemony.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t understand my own feelings of disconnection, until I explored inhabitation and hybridity through speculative fiction.<\/p>\n This understanding boosts my own fascination, in particular, with white South African contributors to my book Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction<\/em><\/a> by Bloomsbury Academic.<\/p>\n In her chapter, \u2018A Gaze At Post-Colonial Themes That Re-Envision Africa\u2019, South African author and editor of science fiction and fantasy Nerine Dorman, writes about her story \u201cOn the Other Side of the Sea<\/a>, published in Omenana Magazine that pays attention to stories from Africa and the African diaspora. She speaks about her feelings of being \u2018neither fish nor fowl\u2019, and how she explores this in her fiction:<\/p>\n I intended this story to function on a literal and a metaphorical level, to discuss the way in which white people can let go of their preconceived notions of being somehow apart and superior, courtesy of South Africa\u2019s apartheid legacy within the difficult changes inherent in a post-colonial society. The story was about a way for them to shed their hubris and accept that they are integral to rebuilding a land ravaged by the effects of institutionalized systemic racism. In many ways, this is my story about claiming an identity as an African, despite the cultural baggage that I carried with me for many years growing up, feeling neither fish nor fowl in terms of where I belong. I have no homeland to go to. That ship has sailed centuries ago. Africa is my home. This claiming of an African identity comes with a degree of personal humility, of acknowledging the painful past associated with my ancestors and an acceptance of moving forward, of being able to participate in a new cultural movement where I am but one small part in a greater community, no better or no worse than the next person. My ancestors\u2019 sins are not mine, and I can be better than they were. (pp. 201-102)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Xan van Rooyen, an autistic non-binary storyteller from South Africa,\u00a0 explores their own queerness in the chapter \u201cQueer Imaginings in Africanfuturism Inspired by African History\u201d. They write:<\/p>\n In this text, I use \u201cqueer\u201d as a way of including all identities beyond cisgender, which describes those whose gender identity aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth, and heterosexual, which refers to those who are sexually attracted to people of the opposite sex. I personally prefer the word \u2018queer\u2019 as it allows for a certain fluidity of identity, and also implies acceptance of those who either don\u2019t yet know which specific label best fits who they are or who eschew the rigidity of labels altogether. (p.120)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n van Rooyen finds fascination with speculative fiction for its \u201cwhat if\u201d that challenges dominant hegemonies that have made them feel \u201cless than.\u201d<\/p>\n I connect with this sense of belonging\/unbelonging, and how other people with perceived birthrights can feel entitled to question the identity of an \u2018other\u2019 who does not look, behave or speak like them.<\/p>\n Stephen Embleton, born in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, now resident in Oxford, finds captivation with cosmologies and languages, and says in Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n You don\u2019t have to be Tolkien to create fictional languages, pantheons of gods, or cosmologies for fantasy worlds. But how people have told their stories, their histories and, most importantly, their traditional beliefs through the ages\u2014in the variety of ways\u2014shows the depths of the human (condition\/psyche) in developing their identities. Finding our place in the world coexists with the philosophical seeking and scientific evidence necessary to rationalise where we are in the inner and outer universe.\u00a0 (p. 24)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In inventing language, myths and folktales, Embleton finds his place, most at home, with fictional, fantastical cultures, albeit based on \u201cthe people and cultures, and real-world systems (political, familial and linguistic)\u201d (p. 24) around him.<\/p>\n Authors are increasingly taking ownership to reimagine new ways of engaging with difference, whichever difference, casting a gaze on protagonists grappling with their own identities, and harnessing their own resolutions to whichever conundrums.<\/p>\n My own black speculative fiction, as does that of other Black writers, scrutinises the complex and diverse experiences of African and Afro descendant peoples\u2014I talk about this in the Fafnir essay<\/a>:<\/p>\n People of colour are increasingly leveraging the supremacy inherent in storytelling to craft revolutionary speculative fiction in stories of soul and claim: snatching their own power with fundamental philosophical questions and confronting themes that not only contemplate but demand different futures for Black people. Writers from Africa and the diaspora are pushing the envelope, even splitting it, to chart new and perilous (depending on who\u2019s feeling threatened) fiction that tackles sombre topics. As writers like N. K. Jemisin, Nalo Hopkinson, Tannarive Due, Suyi Davies Okungbowa, and Tochi Onyebuchi increasingly become household names among speculative-fiction fans, along with the likes of Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, and Toni Morrison in their recognition in literary worlds, more writers of colour will join them.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em>I playfully explore the dichotomy of the self and other in an essay, \u201cInhabitation\u2014Genni and I<\/a>\u201d that appears in my book An Earnest Blackness<\/em> in which I hold a conversation with myself:<\/p>\n Eugen<\/strong>:\u00a0What language do you dream?<\/p>\n Genni<\/strong>:\u00a0I dream in English, but it\u2019s not my first language. I think in English, it\u2019s never a translation. Swearing is another matter! When I\u2019m cross, I curse in Swahili:\u00a0Ng\u2019ombe mjinga! Mbuzi nyangau!<\/p>\n E<\/strong>:\u00a0Do you wonder about betwixt?<\/p>\n G<\/strong>:\u00a0Loh!\u00a0I\u2019m surprised you ask me this question \u2013 you\u2019re a scholar who\u2019s an artist who was once a scientist. You write across forms: short story, poetry, novels, nonfiction. You write across genres: in a spectrum of literary speculative fiction. You\u2019re an African who is now Australian, who once lived in the UK and writes for readers around the world \u2013 mostly in the US and the UK. With your dualities and multiplicities, between worlds across the self and other, you ask about betwixt?<\/p>\n E<\/strong>:\u00a0I think I\u2019m wondering about duality \u2013 does it fraction the self?<\/p>\n G<\/strong>:\u00a0Let me tell you a story. I was born in a town at the foot of Mt Kilimanjaro. I inherited something from my African mother \u2013 her\u00a0derri\u00e8re. Please don\u2019t laugh, I\u2019m going somewhere with this. This bum, you know the kind you put a baby on your back, and it sits, you don\u2019t have to hold it? Growing up, I really loathed my behind. But one day it dawned on me. I realised it wasn\u2019t going to pack its bags, get a post code of its own. I was stuck with it, and it was mine. It\u2019s funny how you change when you grow older, now I choose clothes that bring it out \u2013 it\u2019s an asset. What happened is I accepted this appendage that was part of me, and that first acceptance was an integral acceptance of the sum of self.<\/p>\n As with this bum, we don\u2019t get to choose our cultural or other multiplicities. As human beings, we are each individually situated in our unique relationship with the world, a relationship whose distinctive situation is not closed with respect to other cultures we experience.<\/p>\n Like you, as an African Australian migrant, I am a person who is experiencing hybridity, where my sense of \u2018otherness\u2019 is a result of immersion in multiple or mixed cultures \u2013 you wrote about this, Eugen.<\/p>\n The language I have inherited and matured underpins the meaning I assign to any text. My \u2018lived experience\u2019 is that of having roots in multiple cultures. This \u2018difference\u2019 that pervades the everyday in urban settings, as cultural anthropologist Renato Rosaldo makes clear in his discussion of cultural borderlands in modern cities, is integral to multiple identities and voices \u2013 the sum of who you are in \u2018zones of difference within and between cultures\u2019, never a fraction of the self.<\/p>\n E<\/strong>:\u00a0But is duality conflicting?<\/p>\n G<\/strong>:\u00a0It can be, yes. As an African Australian, in those early years, I grappled with matters of identity \u2013 I was trying to be African, trying to be Australian. No one came up to me and said, \u2018Can\u2019t you be both?\u2019 I had to figure this out for myself.<\/p>\n And I guess this is how I fell into speculative fiction, that is, a fiction of the strange. In exploring my curiosity about myself and the world, in bending genres, subgenres, I found myself creating worlds where I didn\u2019t have to ask the questions:\u00a0What colour are my characters? What languages do they speak?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In speculative fiction, I can write a different kind of story only constrained by imagination, finding pleasure in destabilisation, crossing genre, resisting the parameters of traditional genre. This is how I engage with difference.<\/p>\n Black speculative poetry works this way too. It\u2019s text that is flexible and immediate. It\u2019s a safe space to explore Afrocentric text rooted in story, song, dance, rhythm that natural flows from my intrinsic self. It\u2019s text that has a lot of hurt, as in pain, and a lot of healing\u2014an acceptance of self, black is beauty, despite what the slave trade, colonialism, racism, social injustice might tell us.<\/p>\n Writing the self in is also about finding \u2018like\u2019 community, locating affinity with all their speculative fiction stories that write us in. It\u2019s about seeing ourselves in their protagonists, and their quests to find some truth, or to belong.<\/p>\n Because, indeed, who are we to judge an \u2018other\u2019s\u2019 identity?<\/p>\n In her chapter in Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>writer Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga\u2014whose name is short for \u201cmoonlight\u201d in Kinyarwanda, talks about Afrofuturism and exploring cultural identity as a process of becoming. She pays attention to the self and morphing identities through the application of futurism, with examples from her novellette \u201cFell Our Selves<\/a>\u201d published by GigaNotoSaurus. She discusses positionality and her hybridity as a \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u201cwoman of African descent, born in Quebec, Canada, to parents who immigrated from Rwanda.\u201d She\u2019s also a migrant who has lived in the US and is a first-generation immigrant to Australia. She uses speculative fiction to explore her cultural identity that \u201coccupies an in-between space of all and none of these: Quebecois, Canadian, Rwandan, and Australian\u201d and asks a stirring question:<\/p>\n When you occupy a liminal space, is your identity collective or individual? Is it worth exploring the self-determination of this identity through fiction?\u00a0 (pp.140-141)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n She seeks answers in remixing cultural identity in Afrofuturist literature, as do the following South African authors (de-identified in this essay) who shared with me their own struggles with identity:<\/p>\n ~~~<\/em><\/p>\n I was born [in South Africa]. My parents were. So were theirs. I can literally trace my roots back to 1652.<\/p>\n \u00a0*<\/p>\n I battled with identify for many years... too Afrikaans to be English. Too English to be Afrikaans... And, of course, feeling I have no place in the land of my birth because of what my ancestors did and the colour of my skin. But not being wholly Dutch or French to consider a return to Europe... Besides, home and place is here. I love my country, its people. I don\u2019t want to leave.<\/p>\n \u00a0*<\/p>\n Where does that leave South Africans whose ancestors were brought over from Asia? Are they not African, too?<\/p>\n \u00a0*<\/p>\n I still hanker for SA every day. I feel out of place in [country]... still... I have always felt included in the science fiction and fantasy space, only going where invited, and been mostly published outside South Africa. I am always grateful for my speculative fiction and fantasy family across the globe and cherish that inclusion and most importantly... open collaboration and honest discussions.<\/p>\n \u00a0*<\/p>\n On the whole, I am grateful for the inclusion I\u2019ve received over the years from the African science fiction and fantasy writers who have encouraged me to embrace my African-ness.<\/p>\n \u00a0*<\/p>\n Being African is about how we live, what land cradled our bones and not so much of an accident of birth related to how we look on the outside.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Regardless of what others may think because of the colour of their skin, imagine saying \u201cgo home\u201d to any of these authors, where would they go? Africa is what they know. They are African and have every right to represent South Africa.<\/p>\n And so, like me, they continue to write that clutching, that seeking to belong into the characters of their speculative fiction, finding empowerment through storytelling. As we encapsulate the self in the other through discerning speculative fiction, in time, we find ease with our differences, with our sums of many, our betwixts.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Black speculative poetry works this way too. It\u2019s text that is flexible and immediate. It\u2019s a safe space to explore Afrocentric text rooted in story, song, dance, rhythm that natural flows from my intrinsic self. It\u2019s text that has a lot of hurt, as in pain, and a lot of healing\u2014an acceptance of self, black is beauty, despite what the slave trade, colonialism, racism, social injustice might tell us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-columns","category-non-fiction"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p82q22-ej5","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54999"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54999\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55054,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54999\/revisions\/55054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Pic2.png?resize=295%2C443\")
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