From African Caribbean Pasts to Afro-Futures: Reimagining Resistance in Michelle Cliff's Abeng

Hack this: Why do so few African Americans write science fiction (SF), a genre whose close encounters with the Other—the stranger in a strange land—would seem uniquely suited to the concerns of African American novelists? Yet to this writer's knowledge, only Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, Steve Barnes, and Charles Saunders have chosen to write within the genre conventions of SF. This is especially perplexing in light of the fact that African Americans are, in a very real sense, the descendants of alien abductees. They inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done to them; and technology, be it branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, or tasers, is too often brought to bear on black bodies.

Mark Dery, "Black to the Future"

As much as any other text in the contemporary black woman's novelistic tradition, Michelle Cliff's Abeng (1984) offers a narrative overture to the vexed question Afrofuturist critic Mark Dery poses in "Black to the Future" when he asks, "Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?"¹ His catalog of black science fiction writers betrays a disturbing US and masculinist bias, with award-winning novelist Octavia Butler as the lone woman named as a contributor to the genre. But Cliff merits placement among writers whose works reveal an engagement with the speculative mode as she endeavors to create worlds that confront us with utopian visions of a society where humanity can be transformed, often in dramatic ways, making space for a reappraisal of issues surrounding Afrofuturist canon formation.²

Cliff's deployment of speculative genre conventions is aligned with a narrative project involving efforts to recuperate a lost, fragmented history and build from it an alternative reality—one where dispossessed women realize their full, complex potential as mothers, "other" mothers, wives, sisters, daughters, friends, and lovers. In "Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise," the author mentions her struggles to define herself as a multicultural Caribbean woman who is light-skinned enough to pass for white.³ Much of her work is fantasy work, in that it involves an imaginative re-engagement with the past in recovering the myriad histories that inform a complex identity. As far as Cliff is concerned, the act of writing is a decolonizing gesture designed to liberate her from the contradictions associated with essentialist identity formations—the idea that identity is compartmentalized and tied to a singularly constituted notion of self—to create a radically transformed society free of hierarchal social designations and strict binaries. Cliff is equally as invested in dismantling the system of oppression resulting in the marginalization of raced, queered subjects whose histories are erased in the service of a hegemonic master narrative of racialized, sexualized dominance. In carrying out her "writerly" imperative, she draws upon stories involving the exploits of female personae whose multiple overlapping subjectivities resist positive categorization, frequently with implications for redefined gender roles and sexualities. Efforts to recover such a past are fraught, as Dery points out, not only as result of the systematic erasure of an indigenous history and culture but also a resistance to the ways in which the past, in its diasporic figurations, unsettles established locational and identity formulations underlying conceptions of nation-state and national boundaries, threatening to disrupt the dominant culture and its raced, gendered inscriptions. What postcolonial scholars refer to as the shiftiness of borders has implications, in a narrative and geographic sense, for an investigation of black writers' reliance upon the conventions of fantasy culture in framing alternative worlds: cosmic time travel, supernatural transformations, cultural clashes involving a fanciful encounter with the alien "other," and efforts to settle in a previously unexplored territory.⁴ For black women writers whose literary and expressive mediums have been excluded from the Afrofuturist canon, the stakes involved in the poetics of futurity are...