#102 = Volume 34, Part 2 = July 2007
Darryl A. Smith
Droppin’ ScienceFiction: Signification and Singularity in the Metapocalypse1 of Du Bois, Baraka, and Bell[P]erceptions of reality are in no sense absolute; reality is a function of many variables. Writers present models of reality rather than a description of it, though obviously the two may be related variously. In fact, fiction often contributes to cognition by providing models that highlight the nature of things precisely by their failure to coincide with received ideas of reality. Such, certainly, is the case with science fiction.—Gates, Jr. Figures in Black 36
Call it “K-829.”
This, let’s say, is the rather impersonal astronomical call-sign of a certain massive post-stellar object. Reclusively so, this dark star—K-829—is quite invisible. It’s invisible because it is one of those sorts of stars that have collapsed in on itself due to its own insufferable gravitation. The environs of this black hole are the effective setting for a story we will call “The Pit of Babylon,” a title inspired by Franz Kafka’s parable that goes like this:–What are you building?
–I want to dig a subterranean passage. Some progress must be made. My station up there is much too high. We are digging the pit of Babel. (35; emphasis in original)2And although we’ll mean “event horizon,” we’ll have our characters refer informally to the edge of K-829 as “levees.” Also, we’ll nickname the infinitely dense singularity that lies beyond these levees—deep at the heart of K-829—the “Pit.” The story itself is about the dehumanized, disenfranchised personnel forced to “dig” at the Pit’s dangerous levees at constant risk of being sucked in. This is all so their well-perched overseers might retain control over them, a control brokered by a certain colossal farce, a galactic confidence scheme that has kept the overseers on top for ages. Though told that such is nonsense and heresy, an abiding rumor in the levee camp is that the Pit shrouds a great truth. The secret is most scandalous indeed. For were it discovered, the social order would be upturned irrevocably. It is just this: that everywhere and after all, gravity is alive. And what’s more—as with K-829—it turns out that gravity is, in special states of greatest concentration and darkest density, divine.
Were one to write such a story, one would not just be utilizing certain literary techniques to stealthily call out and “problematize” the ambiguities that gothically emerged between the real and the absurd in the spectacle of Hurricane Katrina.3 One would not, for instance, only be trying to tap a national collective unconscious by associating an ostensibly anonymous number like “829” with a date now as particular as that of August 29, 2005. And, again, one would be doing something in addition to setting up a dialectical encounter between such metaphorical pairings as black hole/superdome, gravity/water, space-time/waiting-time, Galactic Babylonia/Global America in covert service to, say, some consciousness-raising end. Aware or not, one would also be participating in a long-standing geneo-critical mood of black speculative literature and, in doing so, highlighting the distinctive relationship between it and the wider speculative genre.
In 1917, the year Kafka wrote his parable, German archaeologist Robert Koldewey was completing his excavation of Babylon in modern-day Southern Iraq, having found the footprint of its undone tower eighteen years earlier. The track tracing the foundation of the Etemenanki4—the tower of Babel—built by Nimrod and embellished by Nebuchadnezzar, measured a square some 300 feet on each side. This perimeter marked the earthly threshold of human access upward to the vault of heaven. With regard to a certain idiom within the genre, the mythological preoccupation with what happens above the foundation of the Etemenanki parallels the metaphorical preferences of Anglo-European speculative fiction. It is telling and fitting, then, that Kafka’s parable is in actuality a marginal literary flicker—a rather novel inversion of the tip(ification) of the Babylonian ziggurat—and that well encapsulates the shadow tradition of the pit of Babel with which black sf is principally engaged. One could say, then, that if the motto of Anglo-European sf has been “Excelsior!” (“Ever onward and upward!”), then the rebel yell of Afro-Diasporic sf has been “Excavate!” (“Dig it!”).5
Certainly, significant expressions of ambiguity on the one hand, and outright skepticism over the commendation or even possibility of posthuman technological transcendence beyond the Spike/Singularity on the other, are present in Anglo-European sf. Perhaps N. Katherine Hayles, who takes us to have already in some sense passed into posthumanity through the inception of a kind of cybernetic singularity in computing some six decades ago, best expresses this Anglo-European ambivalence towards the Spike: “At least for me, the prospect of becoming posthuman both terrifies and gives pleasure. The terror is relatively easy to understand” (Hayles 9). The prefix “post” implies, at least for Hayles, the pathos of the sun of evolutionary dominance setting on the biological human animal. Literature departments of Anglo-European orientation as a whole, she points out, tend to be not only ambiguous about such notions of change but positively unreceptive to them. Typically, they hold any idea of a radically posthuman condition beyond the Spike or singularity in grave and pessimistic doubt, tending “to be skeptical of any kind of transcendence but especially transcendence through technology” (Hayles 9; my emphasis).
Such views on the idiom of the Spike and its implications for humanity are, indeed, significant, but they need not be downplayed in order still to take notice of a long-standing juxtaposition between Anglo- and Afro-sf with respect to the megatext in general and the Spike specifically. Anglo-European sf’s discernible enthusiasm for the posthuman Tip of Babylon is regularly reversed by a conscious and scrupulous black penchant for highlighting the Pit of Babylon. It is this dialectic, between Anglo sf’s relatively optimistic preoccupation with, and black sf’s refiguring of, the Spike that concerns me here.
The dominant idiom of the Spike itself concerns the redoubling momentum of technological humankind in its acceleration toward something utterly beyond itself, beyond its own entelechy, or natural potential, and into a sensual, evolutionary, and perceptual status both quantitatively and qualitatively wholly other than what it was.6 Damien Broderick characterizes the mainstream sf trope of this acceleration as follows:
Runaway change can be represented as a Singularity because it is a spike on the graph not just of human progress but of human reality in its entirety. The strangest feature of such a graph, taken literally … is that the higher you rise on the curve, the faster it climbs ahead of you. The slope is worse than Sisyphean, because we can’t even get to the top and slide despairingly back to the base. “As we move closer to this point, it will loom vaster and vaster over human affairs till the notion becomes a commonplace…. Yet when it finally does happen it may still be a great surprise and greater unknown.” (112, quoting Vernor Vinge)
The Singularity sidesteps the eutopian/dystopian progressive framework of collective “damnation” or “perfection” by emphasizing the Great Question Mark lying beyond all human progress. The precondition of human apocalypse is rendered the merely formal, essentially dispensable, starting point for a fully post-homo-sapiens reality. The exponential alacrity of contemporary human techné fuels visions of the Spike—the Tip of Babel—in contemporary sf: human genomic research and the proposition of unlimited cell repair flirt with immortality; nano-machines caress the scheme of super-amped mental cognition; the interconnectivity of the world’s now smaller-than-heads personal computers hint at the rapture of the global mind-meld. Such is the slope into Singularity and post-humanity, of which Broderick asks:
Will we, preserved by the wiles of that science into the Singularity (or, if not us, our transhuman children or great-grandchildren) any longer be “human”? Perhaps not, or not for long. Maybe we will live almost infinitely accelerated lives within a virtual computer in a grain of sand at the edge of the world’s last drained sea. Maybe we will be quantum states of a cosmically dispersed, radio-linked hypermind. Maybe we will be, well, quite literally gods, inflating fresh universes out of the quantum foam and placing our impress upon everything that forms there. Or maybe we’ll stay at home and watch the ultimate television channel, forever. (120; emphasis in original)
Broderick’s whimsy bolsters as well as belies the acute intent behind the Singularity: to extrapolate an absolute phase shift in substantive human reality —as seen in fiction by Broderick, Vinge, and Charles Stross, as well as Extropian transhumanist fiction—that is conditioned by the symbolic Tip(ification) of Babel.7 However one gauges the possibilities for the Tip/Spike, it brings into focus a long-standing counter-tradition, beginning with W.E.B. DuBois, which turns the Spike on its head, into the Pit.
First, though, I must say more about what it means for black writers to signify, before accounting for such signification in relation to mainstream sf. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., working within the signifying strategy of literary critique first elaborated by Ralph Ellison, argues that signification—the set of complex rhetorical strategies of simultaneous repetition and revision that refigures the semantic register of words and messages—is the controlling principle of black intertextual play or troping, and that “Signifyin(g),” as he writes it in order to distinguish its function within black vernacular from “signifying” in standard English, has been the executive technique for identity negotiation within black life generally. Unlike its counterpart within (idealized) “standard” English, the formal vanishing point of which is to exclude unintended senses in order to cash out the denotation of a word or message, Signification does not seek the semantic contextual stability and coherence of a word or speech performance. Rather, Signifyin(g) is a sophisticated, improvisational calling-up of simultaneous, aesthetically selected, indirect signal associations that, far from being a tool deployed with recreation or insult in mind, as is commonly assumed, is an expansive form of alternate language for critically tracking one’s own identity over against that of others within a shared milieu. As such it operates in dialectical agon with the model, denotative signification of “standard” English. Signification of the lingua noir, thus, does not downplay but, instead, highlights and valorizes the Signifier herself rather than that which is signified (upon). In this sense, the Signifier is foregrounded as a kind of rough-and-ready poet within her environment, manipulating language in the service of world and personality and at the happy expense of the linguistic charter-mission of fact-finding. Gates aids in making the case when he writes that “[t]he Afro-American rhetorical strategy of Signifyin(g) is a rhetorical practice that is not engaged in the game of information-giving, as Wittgenstein said of poetry. Signifyin(g) turns on the play and chain of signifiers, and not on some supposedly transcendent signified” (Signifying 52).
Because words are usually taken to be so bound up with things like identity and personality, there is an inherent suspicion in black Signification that the meanings of words are the stuff of soul rather than dictionaries. Citing Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, Gates concurs that “[t]he Black [sic] concept of signifying incorporates essentially a folk notion that dictionary entries for words are not always sufficient for interpreting meanings or messages, or that meaning goes beyond such interpretations” (81). While the Signifier does not like to explain the meanings she has brought to her words, she holds out for their “real” meaning in order to set herself as accuser when, in her milieu, she “tropes-a-dope” (52).8 The pun does not necessarily carry the antagonistic intensity it implies to every particular situation, though it properly stresses the intrinsic, negotiated agon between the Signifier and that upon which s/he signifies—a tradition, person, or set of persons—within it. “To discuss Signifyin(g) revisions in the Afro-American tradition,” Gates says, “is to discuss what Ralph Ellison has called ‘the Negro writer’s complicated assertions and denials of identity’” (Signifying 117). An everyday example of Signifyin’ in this sense can be drawn from what DuBois would have called a “twice-told tale” of African-American experience, particularly that of black males, in a recalcitrant culture of racial profiling and surveillance. Such a young man, we imagine, perceived as he is by a passing white patrol officer as “not belonging” in a certain area of town, is stopped and asked snidely (it being obvious that the officer harbors no real concern for the young man’s welfare), “Evening, there. Say, are you lost, son?” Without missing a beat, the young man casually replies, “This is America, officer. Of course I’m lost.” The officer mumbles an obscenity and drives off.9
As an example of Signifyin’ we notice several things here. The youth has just “signified” on the officer. Here there is a Signifier and a Signified(-on). The officer may himself have expected to be the former but ended up being the latter. The youth was expected to return information and not formation (of his character/identity). Here the youth connotes his feeling of being insulted rather than denoting it. He connotes, rather than denotes, his intelligence, his somebodiness, as well as the ignorance of the flummoxed officer. The youth “tropes-a-dope,” doing so by both repeating as well as revising the cop’s denotative linguistic sign: the word “lost.” The semantic register of the officer’s key word is transformed and re-figured, repeated with a difference that makes all the difference. Gates argues that the same, if a more loving, process of antagonistic criticality operates across the black literary tradition. For all its genuine and ingenious sophistication, it is still a mode of “trading twelves,” and through it literary genius emerges.
The title of this article refigures the phrase “droppin’ science,” which has spread beyond its “God Hop” origin within the Five Percent Nation,10 and appends a struck-through reference to fiction, and thus to science fiction. To “drop science” has traditionally meant the recovery and poetic dispersal of lost or hidden knowledge that reorientates perceptions of reality so as to enlighten and empower the self and others in a process of identity (re)formation. As an instrument that seeks to destabilize received practices and model alternative visions, sf is, at its best, such a droppin’ of science. It becomes, particularly in the hands of the insurgent subaltern writer, a pedagogical tool for the perceptual recalibration of “the real.” As it does so, however, it ironically disavows itself as fiction even as it retains that label. In this way it is also a droppin’ of science fiction. My title further alludes to the downward direction of those distinct realities underscored by black sf as it signifies upon the upward movement of white sf. With the former, I suggest, it is the Sink, the Pit, and not the Spike or the Tip, the dropping and not the rising, which is the organizing trope-on-the-slope toward the infinite. As a touchstone for what follows, consider one aspect of Five Percenter theology in relation to our imagined allegory, “The Pit of Babylon,” and its subject K-829. For when we note that for the Five Percenter “scientist” the origins of all things lie in “a triple blackness of space, water, and divinity,” the referential ambiguity of K-829 in its location within domed space, deluging water, and denunciatory divinity marks a genuine contemporary site of “science fiction.” With this metaphor of the Pit of Babylon in mind, I now turn to Du Bois.
I.
The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls straight and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat availing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.—Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk 45 (my emphasis)
The mainstream sf Spike tradition originates in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when consciousness of the frenetic, unprecedented, change in material reality—mechanical repetitiveness and acceleration, ever more commodified and bureaucratized time, increasingly specialized and compartmentalized space— brought about by the revolutions in scientific and political techné began to emerge. This relatively new techno-social consciousness was further determined by new, radical, speculative meditations in the physical sciences, which suggested that sensual reality might well have everything to do with the protean geometry of what was beginning to be conceived as a continuum of space and time together inseparably structuring the world. Edwin Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884) was a response to and reflex of this incipient consciousness. Constituting the trials, tribulations, and travelogues of one A. Square, the narrative introduces us to a planar world of bi-dimensionality. Populated by a variety of circles, triangles, other squares, and a plethora of increasingly multi-sided polygons, each can only see the rest as straight lines—possessed of breadth and depth, but lacking height as all Flatlanders do. Flirting with a dystopian schema, the narrator reveals the literally narrow vision of its authoritarian oligarchy, comprised of the circles, who sanction women for being sharp-pointed and condemn the bygone, radically democratic “Color Period,” in which class distinctions had been all but erased because individuals then distinguished unlike shapes by what one might incongruously call the content of their color alone. During his journeys, A. Square visits both the one-dimensional realm of Lineland and the three-dimensional realm of Spaceland. For his troubles he is rewarded with imprisonment for heresy and sedition.
Abbott utilizes satire as effectively as a Rabelais or a Swift, marshaling the speculative-fictional elements of the story to assist him in shaming and lambasting prevailing attitudes, which selected ruthlessly for social cut, conformity, and constancy. Abbott does this through a kind of nascent articulation, couched in geometrical language, of the fantastic passage through the Singularity. It is a language that Du Bois would find useful for refiguring in order to describe worlds of such radical existential difference as those of the black and the white Americas of his day. But in metaphorical terms, Du Bois conceptualized his own dark spacetime geometry in a prehuman rather than posthuman sense. He would write (the incomplete and unpublished) “A Vacation Unique” cognizant of Abbott’s Flatland, but as one seeing himself as being seen as a lesser creature of lower aesthetic, moral, and intellectual “dimensionality.” On his way, in 1899, to deliver an editorial on the lynching of a black man to the Atlanta Constitution, he passed a local store and saw the very man’s knuckles on display in the window. This represented just such a moment of prehuman spacetime displacement for Du Bois. Sam Hose, the victim, had simply never existed in the ostensible transdimensionality of the white world. Critically, the metaphor of the “Veil” that Du Bois would later develop out of his meditations on geometry in order to help describe the black American psychic predicament would retain both the shape and the planar dimensionality of Abbott’s protagonist, A. Square. It is no leap to suppose that Du Bois would have felt a resonance with, and Signified on, A. Square through personal empathic identification.
As reflected in Flatland, the mainstream sf tradition of the Spike, in which tremendous aggregates of change occur with such swiftness as to irrevocably throw human existence beyond its own entelechy, takes the anxiety over mechanistic technological development as its point of literary departure. Beginning with Du Bois, however, the Spike is not seen as the inception of posthumanity, but is construed as an already realized state of affairs in human reality, in which the subaltern finds herself currently menaced. Here, in the geometrics of spacetime, the Spike lies not at the highest point on an infinite curve but at the lowest. The entelechy defined by the slope of that curve and transcending humanity at its absolute apex becomes, rather, the slope slipping into the Spike’s domain of collapsed rational reality. But it, too, is worse than the Sisyphean Ascent, worse than the Dantean Descent. For the drop down the slope into the Spike is, in fact, complete even before the precipitation begins. As with the Schwarzschild Radius of a black hole, to find oneself even just inside the event horizon of a singularity (i.e., an absolute “spiking” of collapsed spacetime) is already to be irrevocably beyond the world and subject to the effect of the Spike lying however much further “down.” This is what Ralph Ellison means when describing a ride on a Southern bus, which he likens to a spaceship caught in a time warp: once a black individual moved inside the event horizon defined by the fare box at the front, with its “horizontalized bottom” at the back, nothing was impossible—“almost anything could happen, from push to shove, assaults on hats, heads or aching corns, to unprovoked tongue-lashings from the driver or from any white passenger, drunk or sober, who took exception to their looks, attitude or mere existence” (621-22). In characterizing “the timewarp of history,” through which travels the “doomed” Southern spacebus, as “that man-made ‘fourth-dimension’ which always confronts our American grasp of ‘real’ or actual time or duration” (621; emphasis in original), Ellison harkens back (probably without realizing) to the quadro-dimensional talk of Du Bois’s “A Vacation Unique.”
This story, probably written at the end of the university’s 1889 spring term, concerns a black student at Harvard who proposes to render a white peer of his temporarily black through the methods of a third party. They are to then spend the summer giving readings to subsidize their schooling before returning in the fall, whereupon his classmate’s temporary condition “will all drop off just in time for you to register” (qtd. Zamir 222).11 In the interim, the Fool, as the narrator calls him, “will be in a position to solve in a measure the problems of Introspection and the Fourth Dimension” (221). Du Bois’s use of the expression “Fourth Dimension” is an allusion to C.H. Hinton’s story, “What Is the Fourth Dimension?” (1884), and draws, too, on the ethical reconfiguring of that phrase by Du Bois’s then instructor in philosophy, William James.12 For his own part, Du Bois construes the fourth dimension as an incomparable and peculiar realm of black consciousness, behind the edge of which one can gain a critically literal view from nowhere. To enter this fourth dimension of color, says Du Bois, is to “step into a new and, to most people, entirely unknown region of the universe,” to “break the bonds of humanity and become a—er—colored man” (qtd. Zamir 221). This fourth dimension inverts the description of the transhuman Spike in favor of a metaphorical social form of the natural poststellar singularity described in astrophysical theory. I will later suggest how Du Bois might very well have known about natural astronomical singularities and their structure (the absolute compression or collapse of a great mass through immense gravitational acceleration culminating in the separation from communal dimensional existence of an infinitely pinched point of infinite curvature), but for now I suggest that Du Bois was acutely aware of a parallel phenomenon in the ethical world and of the existential necessity of escaping it. Far from being the shift into a posthumanity, the Negative Spike is understood by Du Bois, then, as an infinite collapsing and, thus, negation of reality. Escape from such a region thus requires an opposing infinite movement. “You must have an indefinite [something not purely quantitative] or as I should prefer to say infinite if you would escape a tiresome insipid farce and gain true life,” declares the narrator of “A Vacation Unique” (qtd. in Zamir 225). Ridiculing the preoccupation of scientists with empirical trivialities to the exclusion of humanistic concerns, this criticism extends to the prejudiced “Teuton” as well as the apolitical mathematician. The narrator continues, “‘The moral equation with its indefinite is the only equation that will make 6930 [the result of a contended and tedious puzzle among the scientists] worth living.’ No matter whether it is consistent or not, true or false; the important thing is a world…” (225; my emphasis).
Jim Davis—the black, New York City bank messenger protagonist of Du Bois’s “The Comet” (1920)—also finds himself already in the Negative Spike: “outside the world—‘nothing!’ as he said bitterly” (5). On the day that the comet’s tail is to sweep the Earth, he is sent by the bank president into the “lower vaults” (5) in order to retrieve apparently precious documents that were missed when others were saved from water seepage. He is given this task, he intuits, because “[i]t was too dangerous for more valuable men” (5). He descends through “the dark basement; down into the blackness and silence beneath that lowest cavern,” arriving “in the bowels of the earth, under the world” (5-6). Like being trapped in the gravity well of a singularity, or on Ellison’s bus, Jim’s descent is complete before he begins it, realized on the bank’s steps, being talked at by the president. Standing unnoticed on the threshold of the “human river that swirled down Broadway” (5), Jim is always already at the point of no return in his drop into the Negative Spike. Broadway, not the secret vault far below it, is the boundary at which the escape velocity necessary to cross into the world from behind the color line of the Fourth Dimension exceeds the photonic constant.
The term “Schwarzschild Radius,” which defines the point of no return for light within a black hole’s gravity well, was coined at the close of 1915, when German theoretical astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild developed his spacetime geometry in the weeks following the publication of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.13 As with “A Vacation Unique,” which makes direct reference both to Hinton’s query regarding the fourth dimension and to Abbott’s Flatland five years after their publications in 1884, so, too, does “The Comet” arrive on the scene five years after Schwarzschild’s revolutionary success. Du Bois, knowing German, would have aware that “Shwarzschild” means “black sign” or “black shield.” Certainly, the notion of a black shield or barrier, a socio-dimensional Schwarzschild, is used to powerful effect in the story. For it is not simply the depth to which Jim descends that protects him from the apocalyptic effects of the comet’s “deadly gases” (7). Indeed, we are led to suspect that his sheer vertical depth in the vault is incidental to his being left alive compared to the darkness—the blackness—of the depth itself. It was blackness that put Jim beyond the world in the first place, rendering him immune in a most peculiar way to its effects, including those of the comet. He ascends to make the gruesome discovery that apparently everyone else on earth is dead save a well-to-do, young, white woman in her home off 72nd Street, who survived because she was developing pictures in her darkroom. Impervious to all light, this Schwarzschild placed her beyond the world.
What follows in the story is what would happen to a trapped body within the Schwarzschild radius of a poststellar singularity if its diameter somehow began to increase without a like increase in mass, i.e., the singularity would be undone and the trapped body (if still intact—an equally fantastic proposition) could potentially free itself. With the world’s end, the diametric expansion of the black singularity that was once beyond the world now inflates and unfolds collapsed spacetime. This is represented by Jim’s new access to that which was denied him before: to the food of a posh Fifth Avenue hotel restaurant (“‘Yesterday, they would not have served me,’ he whispered, as he forced the food down” [8]); to Julia’s car, a swift Stutz in which to search the city for the living and gain unrestricted entrée into any of its buildings; to a recognition of his humanity; and, finally, nearly, to Julia herself:
Silently, immovably, they saw each other face to face—eye to eye. Their souls lay naked to the night. It was not lust; it was not love—it was some vaster, mightier thing that needed neither touch of body nor thrill of soul. It was a thought divine, splendid. (“Comet” 16)
Inverting the journey across the event horizon of the Negative Spike, the protagonist of “A Vacation Unique” manages, through a circumstance as extraordinary as would be a black hole re-connecting to the universe, to escape back into the world. Likewise, Jim, where he could before only navigate at or below the Schwarzschild radius represented by Broadway, now sits with Juila on the roof of her father’s business at the Metropolitan Tower. The horizon, the fourth dimension of color, is clearly below them in the dead city as they launch signal rockets into the air and discuss “the race to be” (15).
But the downturn is swift. Car horns honk below. Only New York was affected by the comet. People begin to arrive from beyond the city limits. Julia’s father and Julia’s Fred emerge on the roof with onlookers, alive and well. From each other, Jim’s and Julia’s eyes “faltered and fell” (16). The star collapses back in upon itself, and for Jim the Inverted Spike is restored: “‘Well, what do you think of that?’ cried a bystander. ‘Of all New York, just a white girl and a nigger’” (17).
A black woman, surely Jim’s wife, ascends the platform. carrying in her arms a dead baby, whose cap we now learn is what Jim had recovered earlier in his desperate search of Harlem. This is almost certainly a symbolic recapitulation of the needless death of Du Bois’ own first-born child years earlier, due to the unresponsiveness of a white doctor, the only one available when the child fell ill. The story is movingly recounted in Chapter 11 of The Souls of Black Folk. Although it is shortest chapter of the book, it contains the greatest number of references to “The Veil” of the color line, which Zamir (46-60, 217-220) convincingly shows is the rhetorical metaphor that evolved from the fourth dimension. Through the unbearable image of a dead child, both “The Comet” and Souls indicate the most common, though no less peculiar, means of escaping the Negative Spike. To “the corpse of a dark baby” in the former he speaks via the latter: “Sleep, then, child—sleep till I sleep and waken to a baby voice and the ceaseless patter of little feet—above the Veil” (232).
II.
Thus in my dark singularity I often appeared to be perceived more as a symbol than an individual, more as a threatening sign (a dark cloud no larger than a human hand, but somehow threatening) than as a disinterested seeker after culture. —Ralph Ellison, “An Extravagance of Laughter” 624 (my emphasis)14
If “A Vacation Unique” and “The Comet” emphasize the tragic aspect of the tragicomic self-conception of African-American life, then Amiri Baraka’s “Rhythm Travel” accentuates the comic. Deploying an arresting and accomplished armada of poetic black vernacular prose, the compact story constitutes an exchange between an anonymous narrator and an equally anonymous man identified in scare quotes only as “Misterioso.” Signaling a troping of the concept of time travel within its title, the tale also refigures that obsessive techno-savant, the mad scientist. His own hep Victor Frankenstein, “Misterioso” descends upon his arriving visitor—the narrator—as disembodied musicality. As if by a funkadelic Transporter, he lazily materializes in the room before the narrator’s eyes.
Implied is an abode shock-numb with all manner of fantastical wiz-bangs, collectively running the gamut between early abandonment and unrefined functionality. The narrator has seen them all before. However, he realizes this anew only when he comes calling, for the charismatic inventor somehow exercises the precautionary wisdom of causing all who know him to forget what they have seen when they leave his home. Now once again within it, the narrator is prompted to recollect the particulars of the man’s accomplishments. The latter has cooked up a new device, the Molecular Anyscape, capable of, among other things, enabling a person to enter into a certain peculiar state of invisibility by adjusting its setting to one marked “Ellisonic.” “Misterioso” has recently added to it the capacity and setting of “Rhythm Travel,” which allows one to go to wherever in time a selection of music is being played, and indeed, as that music:
“So if you become ‘Black, Brown, and Beige,’ you can Re Appear anywhere and anytime that plays.”
“Go anywhere?”
“Yeh, like if I go into ‘Take This Hammer,’ I can appear wherever that is, was, will be sung.” (114)Certainly one could wind up at its gala premier at Carnegie Hall on January 23, 1943—a rather happy prospect by most accounts—and although one might find oneself issuing from the stage of a Lead Belly concert as “Take This Hammer,” one is just as likely to end up on a plantation as that particular work song. This is the possibility that distresses the narrator, who is then told by “Misterioso” that this is exactly where he has been in one of his tests of rhythm travel. The experience he relays sounds a wondrous one, neither perilous nor morbid:
“I seen some brothers and sisters digging a well. They were singing this, and I began to echo. A sorta blue chattering echo. The Bloods got to smilin. Because it made them feel good, and that’s the way they heard it anyway.
“But the overseers and plantation masters winced at that. They’d turn their heads sharply back and forth, looking behind them and at the slaves. Man, the stuff I seen!” (114; my emphasis)The narrator is intrigued, but hesitates when “Misterioso” suggests that he try it for himself. Seeing his apprehension, the techno-mack reassures him: “‘Hey brother,’ he said, grinning with that wink of his. ‘Ain’t no danger. Just don’t pick no corny tune’” (115).
Baraka deftly reminds us of the parallels between his Rhythm Traveller and Wells’s Time Traveller precisely through his ingenious refiguring of them. First, he makes the narrator name the traveller with a specific word that is anyway flushed of all nominal capital. Second, he renders this substitute non-name the product of one of the lower settings of the Molecular Anyscape—“Nick names”—next to the first one marked “T-Dis-Appear” (presumably, the lowest setting was the one engaged prior to the Rhythm Traveller appearing at the beginning of the story). The easy, deflecting anonymity of Wells’s Time Traveller becomes a statement both on social invisibility as well as on how it becomes part of the cultivated, self-highlighting mystique of the gregarious Rhythm Traveller. Third, the Rhythm Traveller visits a plantation whose slaves—found beneath the surface of the earth, digging a well—and slavers recall and revise the era of The Time Machine’s 802,701 A.D. with its ignoble, subterranean Morlocks and indolent, surface-dwelling Eloi. In that story the point is made that class distinctions if not ended can only grow to become infamies of the sort in which race cannibalism is practiced, with the will-less Eloi becoming the wretched Morlocks’ chow. Baraka exhibits the curiousness of using the number 8,028 to designate the century of such an occurrence just as Du Bois had problems of an ethically distanced and arbitrary 6,930. Baraka suggests that that horror is not only nearer in time than this, but that it is a part of the human past and was, indeed, part of Wells’ own century. (He was born in 1866, the year following the end of the US Civil War.)
And here is another instance of the inverted Spike. These slaves are literally sinking (and sinking with) a well. Corresponding to the astronomical gravity well and the black hole, it literalizes Du Bois’s “prison-house closed round about us all … relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who … half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above” (Souls of Black Folk 45). But half-hopeless is also half-hopeful, and that hope is provided by the Rhythm Traveller becoming “a sorta blue shattering echo” (Baraka 114) above and around the slaves’ heads and as part of their singing, as part of their sorrow song. As their music, the Rhythm Traveller is up beyond the event horizon of the well and the world, beyond the infinitely warped spacetime of the Negative Spike. To enter his very abode is to make a phase shift into an unfolded, unbounded, authentically sensible, reality: “This dude is out—it ain’t no jive” (113). Whereas Du Bois’s is outside authentic reality, by being trapped in the Negative Spike, the Rhythm Traveller gets beyond the Negative Spike through an incredible, enabling invention.
At the conclusion of the story, the Rhythm Traveller’s caveat to the narrator—“Just don’t pick no corny tune”—is advice for avoiding the Negative Spike. To pick a corny tune, in Baraka’s sly humor, is to risk finding yourself in a place fatally unsympathetic to the souls, sighs, and sorrow songs of black folk. To truly fly away and get above the event horizon of the Negative Spike is to rhythm travel to past, present, and future places where the music itself gets beyond it.
III.
[I]t warms her to know that the perfect elevator reached out to her and told her she was of its world. That she was a citizen of the city to come and that the frail devices she had devoted her life to were weak and would all fall one day like Number Eleven. All of them, plummeting down the shafts like beautiful dead stars. —Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist 225 (my emphasis)15
There is no potentially liberating streak or echo of blue above the event horizon of the black Spike in Derrick Bell’s allegorical “The Space Traders,” making his story either the grimmest or the most merciful of the speculative depictions I discuss. The space overhead, where the hope of blue resides in both Du Bois and Baraka, is occupied and blocked by ominous spaceships whose occupants wish to dispatch all African Americans to an unknown fate in exchange for goodies that will fulfill a flagging America’s economic, energy, and environmental needs.
The US is given just seventeen days, from the first of the year until January 17, to accept or reject this offer. While shock over the proposal is universal, public moral outrage is less so, and hegemonic culture quickly chalks the attitude of the indignant black population up to selfish and alarmist shortsightedness:
“Will the blacks never be free of their silly superstitions?” whites asked one another with condescending smiles. “Here, in this truly historic moment, when America has been selected as the site for this planet’s first contact with people from another world, the blacks just revert to their primitive fear and foolish-ness.” Thus the blacks’ outrage was discounted in this crisis; they had, as usual, no credibility. (328)
The protagonist, Gleason Golightly, is a conservative black academic serving as an economic advisor to the President, an “unofficial” member of his otherwise all-white cabinet. Professor Golightly, though confident that his reasons differ from those of the administration, has supported its anti-affirmative action policies as well as its efforts to repeal civil rights legislation and drastically reduce public aid monies. There is no love lost between himself and African-American communities and civil rights organizations, but he finds himself the lone member of the administration horrified by the Space Traders’ extraordinary proposition. It is clear by Day 2 that the President and his cabinet have already made up their minds. They are simply going through the motions of deliberation as they begin to outline the legal form and rationale the decision must take given the inevitable issues of due process and judicial review that will arise from the forced trans-emigration of all black US citizens.
Golightly’s appeals to law and conscience are sidestepped and dismissed. On Day 3 he manages to gain permission to speak before the hastily-assembled coalition of “black and liberal white politicians, civil rights representatives, and progressive academics” (338) to organize legal and civil opposition to the Trade. Suspicious of his motives, the coalition nevertheless allows him to speak. Believing their efforts are doomed to failure, he pitches an unusual scheme to play off the invidiousness of those in favor of the Trade: by giving up all opposition, and cultivating the rumor that the Traders are saving blacks from interminable prejudice, the infuriated pro-Traders will believe that African Americans are on their way to an alien paradise and reverse their stance.
Golightly’s plan is rejected when Baptist minister Justin Jasper argues that it would both re-enforce race hatred and fail to condemn a proposal beyond betrayal, beyond evil. The struggle on both sides of Golightly continues over the next fortnight. Oscillations occur as big business and sports franchises wonder if they will not suffer after all without the cultural investiture of black folks. Progressive environmentalists weigh whether sacrificing African Americans would, in fact, constitute the lesser of two evils in order to rescue a beleaguered ecosystem through the Space Traders’ promised technology. Anti-Semitism flares up as the members of the underground “Anne Frank Committee,” which hides black people and is led by Rabbi Abraham Specter, are persecuted for undermining the Trade effort.
Ultimately, the Twenty-seventh amendment to the constitution is expeditiously passed, clearing the way for the exile of black America from Earth under the guise of a special form of selective service. The sun rises on the last, defamed Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial holiday. Virtually all African Americans have been rounded up and now stand waiting, half-naked on the shores of the northeastern seaboard, “finally, to enter those holds which yawned in the morning light like Milton’s ‘darkness visible’” (354). They are taken: “Heads bowed, arms now linked by slender chains, black people left the New World as their forebears had arrived” (354).
A new middle passage, one that will be measured in light-years rather than ocean-lengths, is begun. Perhaps the distances are co-equal, however, when measured in the re-figurative way we expect of sf against that human reality which has sustained an infinite displacement. The story’s local narrative figuration against traditional sf occurs at the level of representations of the alien. We expect that a transterrestrial civilization capable of bringing a thousand starships, with their cargo of fantastically superior techné in tow, to our planet, and who upon their arrival perform nothing less than the miracle of walking on water (to the New Jersey shore, a nod to Orson Welles, whose Martians arrive on Earth via the Garden State), might exhibit some behavioral exoticism. Instead, they not only speak English, but their verbal deportment is a mimetic triumph of Ronald Reagan, a figure mapped as the very paragon of humanity by the power-elite on hand to welcome them. White America does not conceive of these beings as aliens but as “people from another world” (328; my emphasis), even as it harbors no illusions about what the fate of blacks is likely to be at the hands of the Traders.
The Traders are the people, blacks the aliens. The historical and de facto legal status of the latter as having had at best “sanctuary” in America, rather than citizenship, has gone a long way to condition and validate this consciousness. Therefore, the moves to “undo” black citizenship in order to bring the Trade are of form, not substance. A great game of make-believe is set off, resulting in the pretended reversal of a status that never existed in the first place. The Twentieth-seventh Amendment, which effectively nullifies all legal courses of appeal against the Trade, merely renders explicit a heretofore implicit and timeworn practice of human exclusion. It represents the Negative Spike of a once bright, collapsed star in the form of the constitutional document, its wording taking on the infinitely dense proportions of that entity that negates all the volume and brilliance that came before it: “Without regard for the language or interpretations previously given in any other provision of this document, every United States citizen is subject at the call of Congress to selection for special service for periods necessary to protect domestic interests and international needs” (348; my emphasis). Now even de jure rights have been lost to black folk. The Negative Spike, thoroughly wrought, is rendered infinite and mobile (again) as the black holes/holds of the ships that, like those of the Middle Passage, will mobilize doom through the dark, endless hollow of space itself. As if to affirm cosmological speculations about the end of time, the universe itself has become an unimaginably vast, eventless, Dark Spike.
Golightly realizes this only after the fact, as he makes his way to Canada, hoping to escape with his family before a final betrayal by the administration turns him back at the border. There can be no flight from the Inverted Spike. Golightly’s name, a reference to his particular political allegiances within white American society and possibly to the shade of his skin color (he goes whitely in perhaps both cases), may also be interpreted as verb-play on the phenomenon of light radiation. For even Golightly—who in the world goes like light, goes lightly or lightlike, having progressed with swift and constant success in the world—cannot escape the effects of the Inverted Spike. The border separating the United States and the “Great White North” operates as the event horizon of his final undoing. He too, at last, is pulled into the black holes/holds of the Trader ships. “Other” to them all—whites, blacks, and Traders alike—Gleason Golightly, all-too-human, becomes the real alien in the story.
Conclusion. And what of the rumor concerning the divine vita gravitas, the righteous living gravity, within K-829?
For our hypothetical story, “The Pit of Babylon,” we can imagine some future-born, Hip-Hop-enculturated, Five Percenter16 in the role of the (levee) digger out of Kafka’s parable. Using key tools of the Five Percent Nation, such as the Supreme Alphabet and the Supreme Mathematics, the digger “drops some science,” methodically working out the hidden truth about the maelstrom of K-829:
Science of Supreme Mathematics
The Supreme Alphabet
1 = Knowledge
2 = Wisdom
3 = Understanding
etc...
0 = CipherA Allah
B Be, Born
C Cee or Understanding
etc…
K King; Kingdom
etc…
Z Zig-Zag-ZigK equals King or Kingdom. 8+2+9 = 19 = 1 + 9 = 10 = 1 + 0 = 1. 1 equals Knowledge. Therefore, K-829 equals the (true) place of the King(dom) of Knowledge, which is necessarily a dark place, a singularity, much like that triune darkness of space, water, and divinity of the primordial cosmos. In “The Tower of Babel,” the complementary parable to “The Pit of Babel,” Kafka writes: “If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without ascending it, the work would have been permitted” (35). Is it, indeed, possible to build the tower without ascending it? Is this a paradox with which mainstream sf has not been able to sufficiently cope? Perhaps black sf allows us just such a means of “building without building.” Perhaps the levee diggers of K-829 knew something their overseers did not—that it was not something beyond human ken but rather a most ordinary, naturally replete, and abiding habitude of conscientious humanity that manifests itself within the Pit of K-829. Maybe the diggers knew that the overseers would never reach the kind of singularity they pursued because they were too busy building toward something beyond themselves, all the while failing to recognize those whom they had alienated for so long. Perhaps the levee camp of K-829 hoped that by collectively digging the Pit of Babel, they might actually build the tower without ascending it. “Some progress must be made,” says Kafka’s digger enigmatically (35). This attitude aligns with Five Percenter theology, in which the human being is always already God, and vice versa (though, importantly, in a genre that has a historical tendency to generalize “humanity,” only the black male). A debate on the issue of chauvinism versus encouragement could be had here. But a Five Percenter-inspired sf would refreshingly Signify on this frequent universalizing drive in the tradition it would trope. Further, divine wisdom on this view is only able to realize itself through human flesh. In the spirit of the Supreme Alphabet, Five Percenters break down the word “Islam” to mean I Self Lord Am Master. Discovering the living gravity in the Pit of K-829, our future Five Percenter proclaims the words of a twentieth-century predecessor: “Man is God and God is man.”17
Perhaps, in the digger’s future time, rap has come into its uncontested own as the most sacred of music. The digger pulls out his speaking Hip Hop Hymnal and turns to a dog-eared page where the ancient Five Percenter group Brand Nubian’s “Ain’t No Mystery” sings itself in fine, floating blue Arabicesque holography:
See me and my people been lost for over 400 years
And done tried this mystery God and all we got was
Hard times, hunger and nakedness from the snake that hissed
Beaten and killed by the ones who said
Look to the sky for your piece of the pie
They didn’t wanna tell you that God was yourself.Our protagonist sees that this is how to build the Tower of Babel without ascending it. If so, then what resides in the singularity also resided in the levee camp. The diggers already just were that divine wisdom to be found in the Pit—the Pit is Man and Man the Pit. Here is the parable’s corrective to the overseers’ desire to become something beyond human. It is also a critique of the mainstream idiom of the Spike for the same reason: Divine progress is only made by getting closer to ourselves, to our own humanity, not to something held to be beyond it. In the end, for black speculative fiction, digging the Pit of Babel is the divine activity of self-transcendence par excellence.
NOTES
1. By “metapocalypse” I mean to signal the idea that African-American futurist literature of the kind with which I am dealing is, in essence, apocalyptic commentary on apocalypse itself and is, therefore, meta-apocalyptic in character. That is, these narratives of historical culmination remark upon the apocalyptic nature of the actual African diaspora─what Public Enemy had in mind when they declared “Apocalypse been in effect.”
2. Kafka’s title is slightly different, being “The Pit of Babel.”
3. Although the major trope would be Katrina, the combination of forced labor and other elements might intentionally combine and critique related experiences of black life in America (e.g., conscription in the twentieth century of black males to work flood levees, often through arrest on trumped-up charges).
4. From the Sumerian, literally “House of the foundation of heaven on earth” (see Lendering).
5. The suggestion that much mainstream sf can be characterized as retellings of the Tower of Babel myth is not new. The claim here is that black sf often signifies on these retellings. Black sf’s“Excavation” as a refiguring of white sf’s “Excelsior” has much to do, of course, with the relative transparency and continuity of the past for the latter. To “dig it” in an excavational sense is to perceive in a way that is different from but always dialectically linked to how one perceives in trying to “get over it” in an excelational sense.
6. Sf tracks the contingency of that which is by conceptually deposing it with the constraint of that which is not, which can take the form of familiar devices (spaceships, robots, time machines, aliens, exotic dimensions, eschatological annihilation, etc.), individually or commingled. The Singularity, related to the constraints of apocalypse and utopia/dystopia, treats the end of humanity through corporate annihilation or utopian completion.
7. Male-dominated as Singularity fiction is, a phallo-critical reading of all this is both possible and necessary, perhaps starting with the idea of the Singularity as ejaculate─that which, in some parallel sense to the Tower of Babel, is seen as beyond the entelechy of the Penis.
8. Kimberly W. Benston originated this pun for one who signifies on another.
9. Clearly, this scenario assumes a relatively happy conclusion. Part of good Signifyin’ is knowing contextually what you can and cannot get away with. Doubtless other, less “smart-assed” responses would have been opted for by our clever youth in other sorts of situations.
10. Serious academic study of the Five Percent Nation has finally begun with Felicia M. Miyakawa’s Five Percenter Rap, in which she considers its historical and theological development out of the Nation of Islam and traces the work and mission of the Hip Hop artists who serve as its cultural representatives.
11. “A Vacation Unique” is Zamir’s title for this incomplete work, composed of several fragments of variable length, but whose overall theme is apparent from the extant text.
12. James is quoted in Du Bois’s Philosophy 4 notebook as saying “we live in a 4th moral dimension separating us from animals” (Zamir 50). Certainly Du Bois realized that it also could separate humans from one another
13. The notion of black holes was contemplated as early as 1783, when Reverend John Mitchell suggested the possibility of a stellar body of sufficient mass─500 times the diameter of the Sun, with the same density─to put its escape velocity at the speed of light.
14. Ellison’s self-description as both a “dark cloud” and a “dark singularity” recall certain conceptions of God from religious mysticism (e.g., Christian mysticism’s so-called “negative theology,” in which discourse is dominated by descriptions of the divine concerning “the cloud of unknowing” or “brilliant darkness”). See Turner, especially ch.2.
15. Whitehead uses allegory to ground his figuring of the black Singularity. While talk in the novel about the coming “second elevation” promised by the invention of the black box elevator looks like a recapitulation of mainstream sf’s “skyward” occupation with the techno-transcendental singularity, it actually suggests ascent from the great “subterranean” racial absurdity up to a “surface” of ordinary, reasonable, racial sanity. Significantly, Whitehead refers to the symbolically charged, otherwise white, workplace of the black protagonist as “the Pit.” Heaven, as imagined by the heroine Lila Mae Watson, is simply racial rationality here on Earth in history, not some transcendent singularity: “The elevator world will look like Heaven but not the Heaven you have reckoned” (241).
16. So far as I know, there has never been the depiction of a Five Percenter in the future. There have, however, been portrayals of “mainline” Muslims in Pitch Black (Twohy, 2000) and The Chronicles of Riddick (Twohy, 2004), movies which also refer to and represent an interstellar hajj to a place called “New Mecca.”
17. The words are Jabril Muhammad’s (born Bernard Cushmeer) of the Nation of Islam, as reported by Gardell (144).WORKS CITED
Abbott, Edwin A. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. New York: Signet Classic, 1984.Aldiss, Brian W. Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973.
Baraka, Amiri. “Rhythm Travel.” Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. Ed. Sheree R. Thomas. New York: Warner Aspect, 2000.113-15.
Bell, Derrick. “The Space Traders.” Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. Ed. Sheree R. Thomas. New York: Warner Aspect, 2000. 326-55.
Broderick, Damien. Transrealist Fiction: Writing in the Slipstream of Science. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000.
Du Bois, W[illiam] E[dward] B[urghardt]. “The Comet.” Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. Sheree R. Thomas, ed. Warner Aspect. New York. 2000. 5-18.
────. “A Vacation Unique.” Unpublished short story. Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888-1903 by Shamoon Zamir. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. 223-25.
────. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Signet Classic, 1995.
Ellison, Ralph. “An Extravagance of Laughter.” 1986. The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. New York: modern Library, 1995.
Gardell, Mattias. In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.
────. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.
Hayles, N. Katherine Hayles, “How We Became Posthuman: Humanistic Implications of Recent Research into Cognitive Science and Artificial Life.” Presentation at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, May 8, 1998. At <http://online.itp.ucsb. edu/online/colloq/hayles1/>.
Kafka, Franz. Parables and Paradoxes. New York: Schocken, 1966.
Lendering, Jona. Etemenanki: The Tower of Babel. 5 May 2007. <http://www. livius.org/es-ez/etemenanki/etemenanki.html>.
Miyakawa, Felicia M. Five Percenter Rap: God Hop’s Music, Message, and Black Muslim Mission. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005.
Turner, Denys. The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995.
Whitehead, Colson. The Intuitionist. New York: Anchor, 2000.
Zamir, Shamoon. Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888-1903. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.
ABSTRACT
This essay presents the argument that black speculative fiction can be construed generally as a dialectical riposte to the broader sf megatext. Specifically, I argue, black sf can be understood as refiguring in apocalyptic terms the so-called Spike (or Singularity) as posited by an important quarter of the Anglo-European sf tradition through the critical inversion of this idea by African-American sf. Consideration is also given to the relevant discourse on the posthuman within the genre. To these ends, I focus on the speculative fiction of W.E.B. Du Bois, Amiri Baraka, and Derrick Bell, paying particular attention to both explicit and implicit expressions of this inverted Spike in each, which tend to disrupt dominant paradigms of reality. I draw substantially on the critical signification theory articulated by Ralph Ellison and substantially elaborated by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Back to Home