Phoenix Rising:The Book of Phoenixand Black Feminist Resistance

Abstract

AbstractThis essay focuses on Nnedi Okorafor’s 2015 novel The Book of Phoenix and reads the black female protagonist and narrator, Phoenix Okore, as a powerful metaphor for a radical twenty-first-century black feminist politics and a signifier of the contemporary social movement Say Her Name. Phoenix is the product of experimentation, “a slurry of African DNA and cells” (146) who is birthed by an African American surrogate mother and then raised in a laboratory prison. She herself identifies as “SpeciMen, Beacon, Slave, Rogue, Fugitive, Rebel, Saeed’s Love, Mmuo’s Sister, Villain” (224). Okorafor thus imagines a multilayered metaphor that speaks to the complexities of black female identities in the new millennium. True to her name, Phoenix is repeatedly reborn from her own ashes after dying at the hands of a white supremacist organization called the Big Eye. Hers is, by turns, neo-slave narrative, cautionary tale, and social critique. As a revolutionary black woman who is never meant to be a simplistic paragon, Phoenix ultimately uses her superhuman abilities and her rage to change the world, albeit in a cataclysmic way. Although the novel predates our current historical moment—namely, international protests, calls for police reform in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and the dismantling of racist iconography—it serves as an uncanny reflection, if not a harbinger, of this moment. Furthermore, it models the ways in which fiction channels our most desperate desires, especially the need for justice.