Fish Out of Water: Black superheroines in Nnedi Okorafor's <em>Lagoon</em>

Abstract

Fish Out of Water:Black superheroines in Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon Dr. Nedine Moonsamy (bio) She swims around the alien home that was in the water … they could not stay underwater for a long time, they could not breathe it as she could –Nnedi Okorafor, Lagoon Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon opens with a swordfish narrator who watches aliens while they populate the Nigerian waters. Unlike the narrator, who is entirely at home in the ocean, the aliens cannot breathe water with the same ease because, like the two black female protagonists in the novel, Ayodele and Adaora, the aliens are amphibian-like in nature. As the novel proceeds, Ayodele and Adaora's amphibian bodies become increasingly suggestive of the tentative navigation of spaces that they do not necessarily inhabit. My sense is that this oxymoronic habitation of an "alien home" alludes to that which is both strange and familiar, and so performs a metatextual mapping of the precarious space that black women more generally occupy in science fiction. As Mae G. Henderson observed "the complex situatedness of the black woman as not only the 'other'of the same, but also as the 'other' of the other(s)" implies "a relationship of difference and identification with the 'other(s)'." Because oppressive representations of black women in literature stem from both racialized and gendered discourse, she argues that multiple sites of othering must be interpolated and interrupted in black women's writing. This is equally true of science fiction, where race and gender discourses can often work at cross-purposes in wanting to produce alternative and affirmative narratives for black female characters. The importance of Lagoon, however, is that it is more self-conscious in this regard and plays with our expectations of science fiction superheroines by marking ideological and representative failures that arise in relation to black women. It thus follows that in wanting to [End Page 175] retain the integrity of the black female subject, Okorafor insists on the tentative abode of an "alien home" that operates both within and against the wider generic frameworks of popular science fiction. In his monograph, In Search of the Black Fantastic, scholar Richard Iton argues that popular culture is, by definition, a nonblack culture-a series of hegemonic tastes that rely heavily on the identification of the other that, in the American context, was achieved through the production of the negro. This is not to suggest that black characters do not appear in popular arts and culture, but rather that the abundant stereotypes of blackness exist only as counterfoils to the neutrality of normative whiteness. Somewhat ironically, the range of available signifiers for blackness is an excess that renders the black experience invisible. According to author Michelle Reid, this invisibility of black experience occurs in science fiction, where early space exploration stories were "narrated by the inheritors of advancement, often assumed to be white, Western, and on an adventure." Consequently, the genre became susceptible to various colonial and imperialistic fantasies that captured a troubled relationship to women, people of colour and nature by using the figure of the alien to symbolise these others. Nevertheless, in "Becoming Animal in Black Women's Science Fiction," Madhu Dubey explains that "although science fiction perhaps more than any other genre traffics in otherness, its conventions strongly discourage direct representations of that which is alien to humanity. The alien is typically encountered, comprehended, and subsumed by a human perspective; rarely (if ever) is the alien the subject of narration." Science fiction is replete with feminised or racialized robots aliens and monsters, however, they are always othered and the narrative requires that their otherhood be rendered benign through a process of masculine purging or consumption. Consequently, the question remains—what does it mean for a black artist to engage in contemporary popular culture? For Iton, the solution is to lend visibility to the black experience by engaging the fantastic that sits on the margins of popular culture. Black self-narration must then take on surreal dimensions and embrace the art of making strange. Hence, it is a search for blackness in a "minor key" where, much like the surrealists, the engagement with popular culture...