Jemisin’s Responses

Lecture: Jemisin’s Responses

Earlier in the semester, I mentioned how Jemisin’s story “The City Born Great” is responding to the work of H.P. Lovecraft. This week, the Jemisin stories we read are going to be ones that explicitly respond to the kind of futurism prevalent in mainstream white American speculative fiction of the 1970s. Through that, I’m hoping we can explore how Afrofuturism can incorporate a specific response (and often rebuttal) to kinds of futurism that erase or ignore Blackness.

Even though I’ve divided the deadlines, I’m going to put my commentary on them into this one lecture.

“The Ones Who Stay and Fight”

Paradoxically, I’m starting out by linking to a story by a famous white writer, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin: https://sites.asiasociety.org/asia21summit/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/3.-Le-Guin-Ursula-The-Ones-Who-Walk-Away-From-Omelas.pdf

This extremely short work of fiction, published first in 1973, is more like a thought experiment than a story with characters and a plot. My guess is that many of you have already read it, because it gets anthologized frequently. It presents two options: stay or leave. Embedded in the option “stay,” is the assumption of acceptance of the current system, or acquiescence. Embedded in the option “leave,” is the assumption of personal hardship and the frightening unknown. This story is, I feel, emblematic of a kind of “opt out” philosophy of rejecting the status quo by leaving it rather than resisting it.

Jemisin’s story that I am asking you to read, “The Ones Who Stay and Fight,” is an explicit response to Le Guin’s. It rejects the false binary of options of what to do when presented with injustice, and presents a third option: fight.

Even though neither Le Guin nor Jemisin’s story is about race specifically, I think Jemisin’s is an embrace of Afrofuturism because of its generative, inventive quality in how it presents a wider range of options for the future than the mainstream futurist visions of the 1970s.

“The Elevator Dancer”

In contrast, the story “The Elevator Dancer” presents the kind of dystopian future that was exactly what the stereotype of dystopian futures was. In fact, I would argue that a knowledge of 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale are kind of implied in this story. It can casually refer to wives being assigned by the government, and mandatory prayer, because Jemisin trusts that her story’s audience is familiar with this particular kind of joyless future dystopia.

That’s why I’m assigning it with this unit; because it is seems to be participating in the dominant dystopian discourse of the 1970s. When I read it in the context of Jemisin’s work, I assume all the characters are Black. Do you? Does it influence your reading of the story whether you do or not?

“Heniosis”

Even for me, this is a weird one. I invite you to flip back and forth in the pages, and read “Heniosis” in chronological order, starting with Chapter 1, going on to Chapter 2 and so on. Then go back and read the pages in the order they’re printed. You’ll see that Jemisin is playing with chronology, as Vonnegut did (and the story mentions Vonnegut) but also that she is creating different pathways for reading the same material by numbering her chapters but presenting them out of numerical order. You have choices.

Because of its reference to Vonnegut, and its placement of a male writer as its main character, this story also seems to respond to the 1970s science fiction tradition. The word heniosis means unity or oneness in ancient Greek.