Bye Bye Binary: Reimagining Gender in An Unkindness of Ghosts

Abstract

Bye Bye Binary: Reimagining Gender in An Unkindness of Ghosts Kamri Jordan (bio) There is no rulebook for navigating oppressive systems, but oppression cannot eradicate discovery and creation. Marginalized groups rely on a multitude of practices to assert their subjectivity against institutions that say otherwise. One such method that has lasted for centuries is the act of storytelling, which for African Americans over the years has taken many forms ranging from work songs, spirituals, and slave narratives to dramas, poetry, and novels. The last of these forms is exemplified by the contemporary counter-story created in Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017). Aboard a spaceship in a post-climate catastrophe future, Solomon presents a society where institutional oppression and slavery remain upheld. With an Afrofuturist structure, Solomon pushes for a new vision of Black people’s subjectivity, and agency develops within and against systems that seek to deny them such. Aboard the HSS Matilda, residents are separated into the Upper and Lower Decks. Divided by Solomon’s imagined caste system, upperdeckers live a life of comfort, while the lowerdeckers ensure the ship’s day-to-day running. However, all are put in peril as a problem with the Matilda’s energy source causes a series of blackouts. Amidst the quest to solve the mystery of these blackouts, characters such as the protagonist Aster seek to find their identities. Following the notes left behind by her deceased mother, who was a former technician on the ship, Aster connects the mystery of the ship to that of her own identity. Thus, as the Matilda faces the instability and challenges brought on by the blackouts, Aster also takes the time to evaluate her own positionality. Through Aster’s exploration, An Unkindness of Ghosts becomes a counter-story of gender and sexuality. Under the oppressive caste system and the turmoil caused by blackouts, the lower deck communities become spaces for sexual and gendered violence. However, under this oppression, characters such as Aster fight to understand and claim their gender and sexual identities rather than those forced on them by the oppressive systems of Matilda. I argue that the novel offers a space to rethink Blackness, gender subjectivity, and sexual agency. While the characters operate within their own futuristic chattel slavery society, they also engage with conversations on gender and sexuality that dominate our present-day discourse. Thus, An Unkindness of Ghosts does not create an idyllic future of freedom and gender and sexual liberation. Instead, Solomon shows that Afrofuturism is a space in which it is possible to reconsider and imagine Black people’s relationship with gender and sexuality in the past and present so that the future creates new avenues of subjectivity and agency. [End Page 23] An Unkindness of Ghosts opens three hundred years after the destruction of the Great Lifehouse, the novel’s presentation of Earth, with Aster aboard the Matilda and preparing to amputate the foot of a lowerdeck child, Flick. Flick and Aster are united through their shared social status; both are lowerdeckers and belong to the Tarlander classification. The Tarlanders are the residents of P, Q, R, S, and T decks, and as Aster describes them, “as close to a nation as anything on Matilda” (Solomon 11). The Tarlanders provide the manual labor to sustain life onboard the Matilda. Each day thousands of lowerdeckers go to work on the Field Decks. Rotating around the ship’s artificial sun, known as Baby Sun or Baby, the Field Decks are described by Aster as being “of varying size, each of them a different field, forest, or orchard” (73). Also, an estimated eight thousand workers reported working the fields during Aster’s shift, with two of the Tarland decks represented (70). Though the Tarlanders exist physically and socially at the bottom of Matilda’s structure, they are crucial to its operation. They provide manual labor and material resources that keeps the Matilda afloat. Seventy years after the Matilda began its voyage, there had been a decline in the Tarlander population (19). Dependent upon the labor of the Tarlanders, this decline was of grave concern to the authorities of the Matilda, referred to as the Guards and the Sovereign...