KarinƎ, the forgotten goddess of light, has defied the other gods by following her dream of singing worlds into creation. She creates Dↄrə, earth, but with earth comes mankind, who destroy her creation. KarinƎ is cursed to sing her song for eternity, thus locking her, Dↄrə, and humanity in an endless cycle of creation and destruction.
So it is told in the short story, “Dↄrə’s Song,” by Victor Forna, published in 2022.1 The cycle of creation and destruction and the emphasis on celestial relationships suggest an underlying temporality that is reminiscent of Kyle Whyte’s “time as kinship.”2 Written in the first-person narrative perspective of a feminized earth (Dↄrə), the story unfolds in fragments as a cyclical creation story interspersed with telling visceral imagery of the female body.
Spatially conveying “the scales of the Anthropocene” often takes stories such as this one to a “god level,” writing from what Tim Morton calls “earth magnitude.”3 Thus, this story, like many other contemporary African speculative fiction texts, provides access into an imaginary of the planetary. In Planetary Longings (2022), Mary Louise Pratt discusses an assortment of world-making practices that carry within them imaginaries of the planetary, a concept “linked to the crisis of futurity and agency posed in particular by climate change and impending ecological catastrophe.”4 Pratt argues that a crisis of futurity emerged in the 1990s and 2000s as the myth of development was increasingly challenged, and narratives of progress collapsed. Out of this crisis emerge a number of movements that in some way looked beyond the horizons of referential worlds to find imagined futures that were attractive enough to sustain. Sometimes, as she exemplifies with the alfa y omega movement in Peru, these movements combine spirituality, world religions, or traditional knowledges that predated colonial incursions. Worlds ending, or being existentially threatened, generates “a great deal of . . . world-making activity,” as Pratt argues.5
In these planetary longings, outer spaces could represent not just adventure and exploration but also a space beyond the reach of global capitalism, the horrors of wage labor systems, and precarity. Singing “worlds into creation” could become a refuge for those seeking to find soil that was not depleted, water that hummed with nutrients and microscopic life.
Africanfuturism displays promising modes of articulating such planetary imaginaries rooted in African and Afrocentric standpoints. As Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò contends in his argument against decolonization, there is no reason why African-originating philosophies should not take a universalistic approach or why the planetary should not be imagined from Africa.6 In fact, as Achille Mbembe argues, there are many benefits to “thinking the world from Africa,” as “Africa is one of the oldest and the youngest laboratories for the living in human history.”7 New pathways open up through understanding Mbembe’s “thinking the world from Africa” as building theory on a foundation of deep time, deep memory, and a view towards a basis for cohabitation that shall not be the universal but “the in-common, which acknowledges the multiplicity of perspectives and realities that come together in the planetary weave.”8
Africanfuturism provides modes of articulating Africa-based conceptions of time, place, and ways of thinking about epistemologies, perhaps in more fearless and far-reaching ways than the rigid forms and modes of metropolitan science.9 It can provide a way of accessing (planetary) imaginaries, hopes, and aspirations emerging from the continent without romanticizing “glorious pasts” or reverting to developmentalist progress-oriented ideologies.
The blurriness and weirdness that genre fiction enables are especially valuable here. There is room for things that are many things at once, for multiple equally whole manifestations, for “nothing ever being identical with itself,”10 for unholy interactions and “oddkin”-ships.11 Africanfuturism welcomes covert genius and malignant foolishness, unfinished palaces and eternal vegetation, visible seams and invisible histories like dust in the air. There is room for awkward invasions, sultry assertions, oil and sun, the abyss of the mine, and life, always life, “the obscenity of life,” one might say, bursting through.
In other words, Africanfuturism can allow for the weirdness of African nows. It can provide modes of capturing both the imaginings of this now and what it means for understanding humanity and its place. In allowing for the weirdness of nows and in articulating planetary imaginings, Africanfuturism also holds solidaric potentialities. Arturo Escobar argues that building cross-cultural solidarities is necessary to take on the “monsters” of imperialism, capitalism, and globalization. He makes an argument for “‘worlding’ life on new premises” to develop “cosmovisions” that recognize “radical interdependency” and inter-relationality, to open spaces for new possibilities, and to develop room for a multitude of ontologies.12
Building on this, I hold that it is not just the actual solidarities but also the imaginings of such “unseen” solidarities that matter. These imaginings affect our mindscapes and, thus, the construction of both presents and futures. These potentialities are mycorrhizal networks of unseen care under global capitalism, seeds of hope based on an impression of “others out there.” In today’s highly connected world, world-making with a notion of the planetary diverges from the world-making of, for instance, fantasy literature or major religions. Rather, it is a type of world-making based on notions of other people, human and nonhuman, existing in something like parallel universes or other dimensions that are understood to be real, coeval, and that can be communicated with, read, and remixed. Rather than being only processes of meaning-making, this type of world-making is additionally an active site of power struggle and communication, like any earthly meeting place, as Achille Mbembe notes in The Earthly Community. As such, it resembles more relationships with “local” deities or spirits, or living mountains, rather than abstractions of a removed God, extraterrestrials, or set fictional characters. The mountain and the soil talk back, just as the not-present people “talk back.”
These processes of “talking back” reshape how worlds are made in specific contexts, including ideas of the planetary. Solidaric potentialities can, thus, strengthen and fortify in deconstructing, surviving, and conceiving of alternatives to there-is-no-alternative global capitalism, what Mark Bould has called aptly the “shambling jerry-built corpse-machine” that “keeps on keeping on.”13 Thrice KarinƎ creates Dↄrə and thrice her creation is destroyed, in Forna’s short story. But KarinƎ keeps on singing. Like her, people around the planet keep on humming better worlds into creation. What a comfort it would be if we could hear one another’s songs.
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Endnotes
- Rachel Zadok, Karina Szczurek, and Jason Mykl Snyman, eds., Disruption: New Short Fiction from Africa (Short Story day Africa/Catalyst Press, 2022), 104-112.
- Kyle P. Whyte, “Time as Kinship,”The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities, edited by Stephanie Foote and Jeffrey Cohen (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 40.
- Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia University Press, 2016), 22.
- Mary Louise Pratt, Planetary Longings (Duke University Press, 2022), 13.
- Mary Louise Pratt, Planetary Longings,9.
- Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously (Hurst, 2022).
- Achille Mbembe, The Earthly Community: Reflections on the Last Utopia, trans. Steven Corcoran (La Découverte, 2022), 20.
- Maurice Jones, “Book Review: The Earthly Community: Reflections on the Last Utopia,” New Media and Society 25, no. 9 (2023): 2539.
- Roy Malcolm MacLeod, “On Visiting the ‘Moving Metropolis’: Reflections on the Architecture of Imperial Science,” Historical Records of Australian Science 5, no. 3 (1982): 2.
- Achille Mbembe, The Earthly Community, 17.
- Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Experimental Futures. (Duke University Press, 2016): 1-2.
- Arturo Escobar, Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible (Duke University Press, 2020), 4.
- Mark Bould, The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture (Verso, 2021), 31.
Marta Tveit