Beyond Geography, Past Time: Afrofuturism, The Rainmaker's Mistake, and Caribbean Studies

"See you there. In the free." This is the closing statement in Erna Brodber's fourth novel, The Rainmaker's Mistake (2007). In the novel, Brodber creatively imagines a past for the New World present, taking advantage of the space literary speculation and science fiction offer to create a counterhistory of the present. Reading the novel through the lens of Afrofuturism and via Kamau Brathwaite's conception of a Caribbean cosmology and Sylvia Wynter's theories of aethetics, this essay examines the novel's representation of "the free": a rapidly changing present existing simultaneously with an imaginary past and slippery future, all unmediated by physical geography.