And
there are others, coming out of older traditions, whose books you’ll
have to hunt for, but are well worth it.
Originally
serialized in Colored
American Magazine
(that
Pauline Hopkins also edited) from December 1902 to January 1903, Of One Blood
has
a steampunkish setting, mesmerism, mediumistic powers, a cataleptic
trance, astral projection, and the scientifically advanced lost
civilization in the city of Meroe, Ethiopia. Yes, a precursor to
Wakanda. It also presents some ideas of race and family--the one
blood/Raza Cosmica thing-- that allow the novel’s central theme to be
both incestuous and interracial.
A
long, long time ago, before George Lucas' dream of a galaxy far, far
away infected Western Civilization, I read a story in an anthology African fiction that blew my
mind. It was called “The Television-Handed Ghostess” by Amos
Tutuola, a Nigerian. Turns out it's part of a novel (okay, it’s not a
novel as we’re used to in what’s left of Western Civilization)
called My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.
I tracked it down and was astounded by the strange world of bizarre
spirit beings that live in modern times, with television-hands,
machine-guns, and such, told in style and structure that owes more to
oral storytelling than the commercial New York book biz.
Between
1936 and 1938, the black-owned
Pittsburgh
Courier ran
two serials, The
Black Internationale: Story of Black Genius Against the World
and
Black
Empire: An Imaginative Story of a Great New Civilization in Modern
Africa--later published together as Black Empire--that allowed George S. Schuyler, known as the Black Mencken, to let
his imagination run wild, creating the first example of pulp science
fiction written for a black audience. Dr. Henry Belsidus gives Fu
Manchu a run for his money, and there’s a cynical, satirical edge
to the pulp mayhem. It deserves to be republished with proper,
sensationalistic packaging.
Chester
Himes is father of blaxploitation (two of his novels were adapted
into the first of that movie genre) and urban crime fiction. His
Harlem crime novels feature detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and
Gravedigger Jones, and blazed a trail that led to Afrofuturism. His work
got imaginative, since he was writing them for a Parisian publisher,
and the French were willing to believe anything about America. His
masterpiece, Blind Man with a Pistol,
shows a Harlem like a Hieronymus Bosch composition full of
sociological nightmares beyond the wildest dystopias. And his
demonstration of how racism spawns seemingly random violence is
chilling.
Frank
Yerby, the first African American bestselling author, wrote The Dahomean,
with idea of blasting open the minds of young black militants. Based
on Melville J. Herskovits’ 1967 anthropological study, Dahomey:
An Ancient West African Kingdom,
it presents a world that makes most commercial fantasy look like
cheap knock-offs of warmed-over fairy tales. There are Dahomey
Amazons, different versions of marriage and family, and a number of
things that will probably disturb even twenty-first century readers.
After reading it, you’ll never think of Africa in the same way.
I
have to say it: Afrofuturism is just a reboot/rebrand of
Neo-HooDooism, and Ishmael Reed has been doing for over half a century.
Mumbo Jumbo
is
the great Neo-HooDoo novel. I think I’m overdue re-reading it,
which I do often.
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