Okorafor blends science fiction with fantasy, technology with horticulture, and politics with spirituality to illuminate dichotomies that can coexist peacefully. African culture and tradition in the forms of ancestors, elders, spirituality, and reciprocity with the earth and its creatures stand at the forefront of Okorafor’s stories.
--Ibi Aanu Zoboi, Strange Horizons
If you haven’t heard of Nnedi Okorafor yet, you will soon. Her YA Binti novellas have won Hugo and Nebula Awards; Who Fears Death won the 2011 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and has been picked up by HBO, with George R. R. Martin acting as executive producer. She’s been writing popular Black Panther installments and last year contributed an acclaimed short story to the anthology Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View, about Omi, the creature in the trash compactor in Episode IV.
Omi twitched. Then involuntarily, her body shifted to being transparent, and then the black color with pricks of starlight. Home will stay home, but you must go, she understood, more than heard. And then she knew deep in her hearts that she would not die. No, she was in the right place. In the right moment.
--from “The Baptist”
The short story collection Kabu Kabu is not as well-known but should be more widely read. Named for Nigeria’s unregistered taxis, these stories, like the Doctor’s Tardis, don’t take you where you want to go but where you need to be. Kabu Kabu tours themes and subjects that presage many of Okorafor’s novels: protagonists who straddle cultural and/or gender divides, who hold to tradition even as they must evolve in order to survive; people who fight for acceptance, for dignity, for empathy — and find it; others who suffer the dehumanizing power of the mob, of the dictator, of the corporation.
Tradition — and much of Okorafor’s fiction is rooted in Igbo tradition — is both a source of strength and a burden for her characters. Women who try to want to be wives and mothers and no more than that but can’t because they have talents or gifts that define them as Other, outsiders, low-caste outcasts and half-breeds who demand their humanity, women whose courage drives them to trespass patriarchy in the name of love and loyalty, people whose lives have been twisted by exploitation from the West: this is all Okorafor’s purview, and more. Her characters are people caught in change and forced to evolve, expand, become something more, often something different, themes repeated elsewhere. Many of the elements on display in Kabu Kabu return in Okorafor’s novels.
The structure of the short story collection eases the reader from an outsider’s perspective of Africa to an insider’s. First there’s a prefatory short piece “The Magical Negro” that stands apart in both subject and tone, and announces up front that Euro-style fantasy is killed off; no Morgan Freemanesque character is going to sacrifice for a random white dude in search of a princess, not in this volume. This is not that kind of fantasy. It’s a different variety, a pu pu platter of diverse tales—from creation myth to fable to comedy to post-apocalyptic desert.
The first group of stories feature culture-straddlers, Nigerian Americans who visit — for a wedding in the cases of “Kabu Kabu” and “The House of Deformities,” or to see family, as in the horror story “On the Road,” and the infuriating, creepy and ultimately mischievous “The Carpet.” As the collection progresses, the speakers — and most of the stories are “told” in their protagonists’ voices — shift from outsider to native, from literary construction to performance art, and that sense of being outside looking in fades. Less mediation, more direct experience.
Last week I mentioned that Okorafor’s work is rooted in folk tradition even as it anticipates the future and its requisite evolutions, as, for example, Binti, the first of her people to leave the earth to go to school, but who must become more than human to fulfill her destiny. It struck me over this past week that I may have mistakenly implied that traditional culture equals a folksy tone and treatment, which is as far from the case as is possible. Traditional culture in Okorafor embraces sectarian and caste differences as different traditions and genealogies compete and subjugate each other. There’s prejudice. There’s intolerance; it’s part of the human condition. And tradition always cuts two ways; it provides identity, yes, but it also constrains growth. And when growth comes, it comes unwelcomed, painfully, often violently, and at a great cost.
Windseekers — people who can fly and are featured in her first novel Zahrah the Windseeker — have it especially rough. Once revered, now considered witches, windseekers (and by implication other people whose talents and arts can’t be controlled by the patriarchy) have to escape when discovered or are put to death. The folkloric tone of “The Winds of Harmattan” doesn’t soften Asuquo’s fate. In “How Inyang Got Her Wings,” Grandmother tries to instruct Inyang in discretion and survival, saying,
As time goes by, we forget more….I thought my grandaunt was the last. You have a true name, Inyang, a windseeker name, but only your mirror can pronounce it….Eventually you’ll have to leave here...Not now but soon, in some years. Windseekers are rarely welcome in one place for long. You’ll see.” **
Inyang does have a true name, Arro-yo, and her stories are interspersed through Kabu Kabu, adventures taking her all the way to Ginen, “where all things began and all things finished...the mother of the motherland where Africans migrated from, Africa’s Africa,” (in “Windseekers”) and back to the horrific realities of genocide in “Biafra,” where Arro-yo finally settles down to tend and heal her people. After death, there will still be life.
War and exploitation run in an undercurrent throughout the collection. People may kill their own, whether out of superstition, frustration, or jealousy, and occasionally a silver-tongued dictator will turn traitor (“Bakasi Man”), but it takes an imperial power to create real monsters, whether they’re imported or home-grown.
The petrochemical industry, and the NDPM, the Niger Delta People’s Movement, that rose in opposition, also threads through the stories. We first meet the pipelines and their AI robot guardians in “Spider the Artist,” which is a particular robot that Eme, the protagonist, befriends through a shared affinity for music.
My husband was a drunk, like too many of the members of the Niger Delta People's Movement. It was how they all controlled their anger and feelings of helplessness. The fish, shrimps, and crayfish in the creeks were dying. Drinking the water shriveled women's wombs and eventually made men urinate blood.
There was a stream where I had been fetching water. A flow station was built nearby and now the stream was rank and filthy, with an oily film that reflected rainbows. Cassava and yam farms yielded less and less each year. The air left your skin dirty and smelled like something preparing to die. In some places, it was always daytime because of the noisy gas flares.
Although Eme wants nothing more than to be a good wife, her husband beats her, she has no children and her village is dying. The NDPM routinely sabotages the pipeline and steals fuel to replace the resources the people have lost to environmental damage, until the spider-shaped murderous robotic pipeline guardians arrive: the Anansi Droids
...we call them “oyibo contraption” and, most often, Zombie, the same name we call those “kill-and-go” soldiers who come in here harassing us every time something bites their brains."
In “Spider the Artist” several themes converge. This is the introduction of the NDPM, and we see it as an entrepreneurial and compensatory force, a kind of Robin Hood lifting a few gallons from the Sheriff’s stash. Each appearance of the NDPM, named or not, is increasingly menacing, until their terrifying return as a mercenary army, complete with child soldiers, murder-initiations, and powerful juju, in “Icon.” As the petrochemical world advances, violence rises and worsens to counter it, which is what I meant when I wrote that it takes an imperial power to create real monsters. Even here, in the first and relatively benign introduction, we catch the brief and casual reference to “’kill and go’ soldiers,” which is just another term for genocidal terrorists. Common as dust in Eme’s world.
The antidote to the fouled land, economy, and marriage in “Spider the Artist” is the healing art of music. Eme is a musician, and through music she befriends one of the Anansi AI Droids:
I'd named my Zombie Udide Okwanka. In my language, it means 'spider the artist.' According to legend, Udide Okwanka is the Supreme Artist. And she lives underground where she takes fragments of things and changes them into something else.
Udide Okwanka reappears in the novel Lagoon, the giant spider that weaves past, present and future.
“Spider the Artist” is one of a handful of stories in Kabu Kabu with a joyous ending. After death, life endures. To say much more than that would spoil the story, and I don’t want to spoil any of these. From the whimsy in the first part of the collection (crazy cabdrivers, magic carpets, a trickster ghost named “Long Juju Man”) to the darker tones of the second part, Kabu Kabu is a feast, an education, a warning. It’s also a greenhouse, from which much of Okorafor’s later, longer fiction germinates. It’s pleasantly surprising to recognize Arro-yo in Zahrah, Ngozi in Sunny, the Spider Artist in a god. And I haven’t even mentioned the eco-warrior swordfish of “Moom!”
It’s all good stuff. Next week we’ll look at Binti, and we’ll slip the bonds of earth to make friends with giant space fish and gas peoples. Really.
**Apologies for my inability to give page numbers as references. I have Kabu Kabu on my Kindle.
The Name of the Rose Group Read starts June 18, 2018.
Make a note and/or order your book: starting June 18th we’re giving over to read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Manuscripts, murderous monks, and a medieval Sherlock Holmes—what’s not to love? It’s going to be awesome — in the Miltonian sense of the word, of course.