There is an old one The story of Octavia Butler that I often return to: A young man once asked a visionary sci-fi novelist for the answer to ending all suffering in the world. “Not a single one,” Butler replied. “So we’re dead?” he asked confused. “No,” Butler said. Then she offered words that might make me understand the future better: “There is no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There are no magic bullets. Instead, there are thousands of answers — at least. You can be one of them if you want to be. ”
Black futurist artists are often seen as prophets, and are expected, unfairly, to herald the path that will lead us to a brighter tomorrow. Butler, who began writing during the Black Power movement and died in 2006 at the age of 58, is considered a prophet of her time. Today, one of Butler’s most important successors is the multi-talented artist Janelle Monáe. But if Monáe foresaw the future, she wasn’t so sure. Talking to her felt less like questioning a seer than conspiring with an older, wiser friend.
I’m talking to Monáe about her new book, Memory Librariana collection of Science Fiction stories she wrote with five writers. During our conversation, which took place on Zoom, Monáe’s voice was soft but not shy, casually commanding attention. Once a performer, her face was amazingly hidden under a faded black-and-white bucket hat. In answering my questions, she spoke carefully, as if slowed down by the gravity behind her vision and work.
Like Butler before her, Monáe is active in a genre called Afrofuturism. Loosely defined, it imagines the future of Negro emancipation from a hostile world — ours. Although she is publishing a book and acting in movies, Monáe is best known as a musician, and that is her 2018 concept album, Dirty computer, that defined her Afrofuturist vision. Monáe told me, “What Afrofuturism does is allow Blacks to tell our story, from our voices, of how we see our future selves, thriving. With Memory LibrarianMonáe seamlessly translates the detailed chaotic world of Dirty computer from audio to page. We see many of the same characters: a cyborg named Jane, her love interest Zen, a bunch of government workers and commoners. We see an uprising forming against a violent and eerie surveillance state in the midst of the apocalypse.
In her book, Monáe offers us a warning, but also a way out. Look around, she said. Increasingly, we are stripped of our flesh-and-blood identities and have our data extracted. But this transformation doesn’t have to destroy us; Monáe asserts that even a computerized body can preserve its humanity. Dirty, filthy, glittering with pride, the monstrous robots in Monáe’s vision could not have been turned into 1s and 0s so easily. Memory Librarian maybe not the the answer to the social and political turmoil of our time, but it is one and a wildly inspiring answer: deepening Afrofuturism’s potential to weaponize our dreams for a freer, more joyful world.
The central proposition of Afrofuturism As Negroes can control their own future and moreover, they can free themselves from the suffocating confines of time. The past becomes the future becomes the present; memory becomes prophecy come true. Freedom is not only a dream for the future but also a history in which we know we will live again. In Memory Librarian, the protagonist of Monáe collects and preserves people’s memories, possessing a terrifying power. She understood that memory retention could be used as a weapon, while its revival could act as a means of survival.
This memory motif is based on a historical fact: White people have controlled the individual and collective memories of black Americans for centuries. When slaves were first brought to the American continent, their names were changed, their languages suppressed, their marriages undocumented, their graves unmarked. Family separation; Blacks took pictures of their mother’s face, their sister’s smile. Many black Americans today struggle to trace their family members from more than a few generations back. Their lineage, their names and their identities are remembered only to the extent that whiteness allows.
