Peculiar Shuttling Movements
I half-jokingly say to anyone who engages me on the topic of science fiction that the 1960s and 1970s were the pinnacle of craft in the genre.
This period, of course, encompasses the New Wave, interpreted by Philip Wegner (cited by our wonderful guest editor, Paul March-Russell) as the moment when science fiction crashes into the modernist sensibilities of Literature-with-a-capital-L, exploding formal and thematic conventions. When science fiction, in Wegner’s words, ‘briefly becomes modernist.’
This is far too brief a space (and far too ignorant an author) to offer anything more than a speculation of the socio-historical forces that brought about this convergence. Perhaps it was the unhappy but generative confluence of decolonization, civil rights struggles, the ongoing threat of nuclear war, the resurgence of crises of and about immigration. Science fiction – that bright imaginer of glittering new technology and utopian social formations – suddenly found its joy leached away as the futures it tantalized became manifest in bleaker and, truthfully, mundanely cruel realities. Literature, always seen as a dangerous beast in times of social upheaval, became implicated in countercultural movements, and science fiction was no exception. It was time to throw away the spaceships and oddly familiar aliens, the simpering space damsels (jettison them entirely, they use up far too much oxygen) and dashing colonists. Outer space lost the sheen of adventure and became dull, cold, dead, and empty; Inner space became the place: woman looked out into the cosmos, and saw her own neuroses and hopes and desires staring, baldly, back at her. Doris Lessing defined inner-space fiction best (and possibly first) in the epigraph to her 1972 novel, Briefing for a Descent Into Hell: ‘there is never anywhere to go but in.’
If the contributors to this special issue ‘tend to cleave to Anglo-European modernisms’, let me, in this remaining space, slice a bracing paper-cut before the cleft (if you will excuse the word-play). Let me make the bold claim that the Botswanan author, Bessie Amelia Emery Head, is one of the landmark figures of twentieth century Anglophone modernism. Let me cite A Question of Power (1974) as a novel that, like its almost-contemporary, Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To… (1977), writhes not just in a refusal of prevailing cultural norms pertaining to race (on Head’s part), gender (both Russ and Head strangle that particular serpent) and class (likewise), but enacts a sitting-in that space. A discomfort that, like Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014), is almost, but not quite, deadly. It is almost too much for the English language to bear.
Perhaps the comparison is unfair. Russ’s novel is acceptedly ‘science fiction.’ Head’s is not. I, of course, argue that both should be welcomed into the home-place of genre.
A Question of Power was Head’s third novel, and the second of hers to be published in the Heinemann African Writers’ Series: a bold, vexed, and expansive project that brought writers from the continent of Africa to the United Kingdom, from 1962 to 2003. (Again, here is not the place to transcribe the debates about whether the novel form, a distinctly European technology, was appropriate to writers and artists from primarily oral traditions. The series gave us Head, and Amos Tutuola, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and so many other literary greats). Head herself was born in Pietermaritzburg in 1937 to a white woman and a black father. Much of her life was spent traveling between regions, stateless, illegible to an Apartheid regime. Her mental health, unsurprisingly, suffered. A Question of Power is a largely autobiographical novel that documents one woman’s struggle to make a ‘home-place’ (to repeat Carla Peterson’s human construct) in a country that not only wanted her dead, but that did not recognize her existence. Cruelty abounds within the narrative, but so too does beauty and grace. At times, the narrative falls apart, rupturing as it veers from descriptions of domesticity to mythic terror. Medusa makes an appearance, along with Hitler, Buddha, God Himself and His angelic cohorts, and Priapic demons that torment her with their sexuality. Caligula speaks. Icons of ‘classical’ western education manifest in the novel’s setting of Motabeng, Botswana, reversing the visual iconography of African art that so inspired those venerable European modernists. It is an extraordinary work.
Helen Kapstein writes of the ‘peculiar shuttling movements’ made by Head throughout her life: moving from state to state, inverting violent social norms and turning them back upon themselves, ‘trespassing’ between frameworks of normalcy. Perhaps this is where the modernist subject resides, having ‘reeled towards death’, and then ‘turned and reeled towards life’ (Head, A Question of Power, p. 219). In moving synchrony, it is a trajectory that similarly informs the writing of contemporary Motswana author Tlotlo Tsamaase. Speaking in a 2023 conversation in World Literature Today about her short story ‘Peeling Time’ (2022), Tsamaase describes it as a journey ‘from oppression to freedom, in conjunction with demonstrating one woman’s agency.’
If I may characterize contemporary SF: it has performed a similar swinging-back-necessarily-to offer stories of hope and adventure, inclusivity and peace: places where, as Tsamaase poignantly remarks in the same interview, the woman ‘does not die.’ The genre begrudgingly agrees, in one voice, to keep the woman on the spaceship, after all, and the modernist subject, in all its mess and complexity, may finally make it to outer space.
Phoenix Alexander, March 2024