i / “Speculative fiction” is a tautology. All fiction is speculative, unless we are to believe that sentences written under the aegis of the other genres do not contain some margin of conjecture, or are not based on an imaginative filling-in of the blanks. The moment you write, organic reality is transmuted into ciphers on a blank page, ultimately to be divined into meaning by the reader. Works of fiction, therefore, always represent a refraction of reality into a new form. This is an elemental proposition of literary theory that seems to have been forgotten as the university literature departments desperately transform themselves into neologism-factories, whose principal purpose in life is to churn out an esoteric vocabulary of lexical sleights-of-hand which allow its practitioners to posture as though they have privileged access to some obscure deeper meaning. In reality, one generation after another, they simply modernise the terminology, thereby policing who may be let in and out of their anguished inner cloister.
Today’s scholars are custodians of fashion, and their grumbling over the perimeters of genre or the true composition of the canon amounts to a series of internecine border wars to determine who will have the power to arbitrate over what is considered cool and in vogue. One should recall here that squalid affair around ten years ago, when “crime fiction” had gripped the imagination of the chittering classes: campus seminars and online thought-pieces and literary festivals and shadowy bookstore “conversations with” thereafter congregated around the usual platters of hors d'oeuvres and wine, and alongside the epic digestion of samosas and cucumber sandwiches came the pronouncements, the retaliations, the revisionary readings, the fallouts, and then the long quiet aftermath… in other words, all the anticipated convulsions in the life-cycle of an aesthetic disagreement. Astonishingly pointless, much of it. And as the production of “science fiction” or “speculative fiction” in continental Africa dips into its cruising altitude, perhaps we should prepare ourselves for another wave of genre-compulsion and its assorted banal commentaries, into which I shall here make my own brief adventure.
As an accidental film critic, a profession I stumbled into around fourteen years ago through the mercenary ambition to earn money despite the pragmatic uselessness of my education in the arts, I became familiar with the general outline, the broad contours, of science fiction in cinema. From that time, I can recall only a handful of enjoyable sci-fi epics I saw at press previews, like “Inception”, “Her”, “Under the Skin” and “Snowpiercer”. Otherwise, sci-fi was overwhelmingly immature in plot and theme. I’m thinking here of such imaginatively conservative offerings as “Chappie”, “Elysium”, “Prometheus” and so on. One thing that always struck me is that in the cinematic representations of the future, the antagonisms of race have always been elegantly resolved and thus we are free to leave behind the orbit of our earthly discriminations to pursue other frontiers of struggle against aliens or artificial intelligence. In this sense, many of the commercial movies from the last decade-and-a-half propel into the future an ideologically-dishonest version of contemporary society, shorn of the uncomfortable dystopian realities of our present age. Thereby, in terms of scene-setting, we are often given a free-floating diorama unmoored from the possibility of proper political commentary. Of course, it is not a sine qua non of sci-fi that it must contain some dimension of political relevance, but even a cursory glance suggests the genre has a unique latitude, and is able to attain a fantastic vantage point, when it comes to world-building and needling-in an interrelation between past, present and future. For this reason, at least in its mainstream cinematic output, sci-fi has often been disappointing because of an imaginative failure on the part of its creators to take seriously the true capabilities of the form with which they are working. I hope that in the coming days of the sci-fi bum rush in Africa, that some authors, film-makers and artists carefully calibrate their works to pierce beyond the boundary lines of what we have already seen and heard, and in doing so, take up their part in the war against cliché.
A few final words in closing off this preamble. It would not be original or even daring to suggest that what is considered “science fiction” in some quarters of planet earth, is historical reality in many other parts of the world. In Africa, for example, the colonial invasions are a kind of blueprint for alien occupation in which the sea stands in for the sky. All of the usual themes are concealed within the narrative: the asymmetry in technological power, the complete oddity of incommensurate ways of life, the trigger-prone fear and anxiety, the collection of specimens for scientific inquiry and anthropological display, the communication breakdowns, the prolonged wars and territorial conquests, the tales of rebellion and mythologisation of heroes, the fracture and incorporation of societies into the whole of a foreign empire, and the splitting of the world into those who struggle and those who dominate… around these parts, rather old hat, one might say. If we are to look up to science fiction in the coming years, then we shall not be content with the table-scraps thrown to us by Hollywood in the form of “Black Panther”, but shall rather hope for a more proper integration of these historical realities in the cosmos of science fiction.
ii / Mohale Mashigo’s “Intruders” is a slim volume of short stories set in a phantasmagoric South Africa and, having read Masande Ntshanga’s “Triangulum” a week or so before starting on this one, I flipped to the opening pages with a genuine sense of hopefulness. In all fairness, Ntshanga is a tough act to follow, no doubt, but my initial optimisms were rather soured by the gambit of a seven-page pseudomanifesto called “Afrofuturism: Ayashis’ Amateki”, in which the author freestyle-riffs around a less-than-earth-shattering insight: the idea that “Afrofuturism is not for Africans living in Africa”. If you you had the constitution to trudge through my first five paragraphs above, it should be beyond all suspicion that I am deeply sympathetic to this phenomenon. Nine times out of ten, when Africa appears in cultural artefacts, if it appears at all, it is as a cliché-ridden placeholder in which to project all the colonial-exotic fantasies of the creator. African-Americans are particularly guilty of this, behaving as they do, as though they possess some invisible umbilical thread which ties them to the most primordial heritage of the continent, and thus do Oprah Winfrey’s lips touch the soil upon dismounting from her private plane (this is pure race reification). But for centuries, Americans, Europeans, and even our own countrymen, have taken to prostituting a vision of Africa which confirms the basest stereotypes for the delectation of a foreign audience. For years, interviewing directors and authors complicit in such exoticist tale-telling, I would be told that this was a rite of passage, that one had to appeal to the foreigner in order to obtain his glistening finances, and that once all the capital was thundering in the direction of African industry, we would abandon the fetish and knuckle down to some genuine storytelling on our own terms. This turned out to be a false teleology.
Therefore, I don’t disagree with Mashigo’s proposition. On the contrilly, I think she aims to inaugurate narrative pathways that redress the longstanding imbalance outlined above and this is a valiant move and a desperately-needed counter to the status quo. What bothers me about her prologue, then, is that it sets up a mammoth expectation for the all-too-brief vignettes to follow, encumbering them with an historic duty, the weight of which they were simply not designed to bear. One feels almost militarised reading the grandiose intro as it shifts between the registers of manifesto and memoir, research tract and dear-diary, and then, immediately after slipping into the stories themselves, a sense of opportunism prevails when the author fails to live up to the impossible quest of her own challenge. Because her fantasy conceits are not properly imbricated into the stories on a narrative level, I’m left with the impression that she chose to work within the genre of “Afrofuturism”, precisely because it is, as she says, “all the rage these days”, rather than out of any actual necessity to make use of its literary instruments to tell her stories. Perhaps the publisher should have had the humility to let Mashigo’s stories “speak for themselves”, rather than empoisoning the collection with this editorially misshapen framing statement.
So, how does “Intruders” aim to write back against the alienation the author identifies in the introduction? Mashigo looks toward a tradition that has long been successful elsewhere on the planet, that of incorporating elements of myth, folklore and urban legend into her scene-setting, the major difference being here that these mythic, folkloric and urban-legendary components are drawn from the local universe, departing from the established canon of the Greek pantheon, the Transylvanian blood-slurpers and frostbitten lycanthropric prowlers, the extra-terrestrial anal-inquisitors and the sundry demons we know all too well from their cameos in global pop culture. Instead, here, we have incarnations of nearer oddities: phantom-hunter sisters in Bloemfontein tracking down a “Vera” ghost who terrorises drunken males at night; an orphan mother with a fatherless child sprouting tentacles and sharp-edged fins like some kind of underwater monstrosity; a young woman who murders a taxi-rank molester with the fatal-point of her stiletto heel; drug-addled “ghosts”, dead-eyed and drooling, who comb the townships streets tearing out the oesophagi of their victims “because they had wine poured down their throats instead of being compensated and invested in by those who profited from their labour.” All of twelve of her stories are written in a youthful style and the best parts are often an unexpected surge of intimacy in the writing, or an hilarious moment of dialogue, such as when she opens a story with the following exchange between siblings:
“Bloemfontein is a shithole. I wanna be out of here like yesterday”
“Busi, this is an old car. Calm your tits.”
“Language, Bell.”
“You literally just said ‘shithole’… and I’m 25!”
“Congratulations, now watch your fucking mouth.”
An example of what happens when Mashigo gets it right before I move onto a last round of criticisms. In the second story, “Ghost Strain N”, we have a more or less seamless intrusion of the fantastic into the everyday, which offers a political undercurrent to the story of a viral outbreak which turns young people into zombies or “ghosts”. The ghosts are manifestly drug addicts, phantoms on the peripheries of social life, burnt-out and bug-eyed and perpetually in pursuit of the “ecstasies of oblivion”. Here, the undead metaphor is properly interwoven within the plot and so it doesn’t seem extraneous or additive to the theme that Mashigo is trying to explore. But elsewhere in the collection, this is unfortunately very much the case. The “sci-fi” or “afro-futurist” elements are a congealed layer separated from the story itself. One could carefully spoon out this layer and leave the fundamentals of the story intact, suggesting that there is no proper reason for these fantastic phenomena to exist in the first place, except for the fact that they conduct these pulpy adventures and teenage dramas and lovelorn mini-sagas into the realm of science fiction. As for using these narrative and thematic devices to enter to into an otherwise inaccessible territory of comprehension, this is not case. For this reason, “Intruders” had almost zero purchase on me throughout my reading experience, and I thought on each page and at each paragraph break, that it is written for an indiscriminate teenage audience who don’t care about sophistication or daring, but simply want to swap out the usual pale-complexioned characters and American mise-en-scene for something more terrestrially proximal.
There is a final objection that contributes to my negative impression and it is endemic to the short-story format. With such a diversity of plots on exhibition (from aquatic metamorphosis to apocalyptic zombie outbreak to feminist vengeance delivered via the knife-point of a stiletto etc.), there is a sense in which all this world-building is swiftly squandered no sooner has the reader had chance to begin settling into its grooves. Concepts bloom and are cut dead in fifteen pages. Impatient paragraphs accumulate and are then summarily snuffed out by a new chapter heading. One wonders whether the book could have been redeemed if Mashigo was willing to sustain the energies required to follow these threads deeper into the wilderness of their perplexity. But I fear that the opposite might be true. Drawing out these generic conceits (undead, transmogrification) might have had the effect of simply revealing the shallowness upon which they are based and producing an overall work in the vein of, say, a South African “Twilight” or something like this. All things considered, then, this is my final estimation: I give Mashigo hearty applause for the idea and the ambition; but execution is such that I pretty much wouldn’t recommend this to anyone. “Intruders” is the first draft of a concept and only in the future will this concept be perfected.