Embodying Time and Futurity in the Short Stories of Tendai Huchu and Temitayo Olofinlua

Abstract

ABSTRACT: One of the defining features of sf, Africanfuturism included, is the depiction of the relationship between embodiment and time. This article examines two short stories, "Egoli" by Zimbabwean writer Tendai Huchu (2020) and "The Last Brown Roof" by Nigerian author Temitayo Olofinlua (2022). This article demonstrates how the stories examine the ways in which past, present, and future are interrelated, melt into each other, and form a seamless temporality. The future cannot be imagined without drawing on the past and the present. I argue that nostalgia, and especially its futurity, are important in allowing the retrospective, introspective, and prospective understandings of embodiment in its relationship to space and time. I make use of the idea of Sankofa, a bird in Ghanaian cosmology that flies forward while facing backward, to draw on the wisdom and knowledge of the past. Engaging with the idea of "speculative sankofarration" proposed by Brook et al. (2017), as well as on Boym's concept of "reflective nostalgia," I argue that such an embodiment of time in Huchu and Olofinlua's stories makes it possible to tap into the past and its cosmology to imagine different futures. The futures imagined in the stories highlight not just the plasticity of space and time but, more importantly, the liberation of imagination from the constrictive thinking of time and space as fixed and rigid.