MARK DERY BLACK TO THE FUTURE: INTERUIEWS WITH SAMUEL R. DELRAY, GREG TATE, AKD TRICIA ROSE UNE all records told the same tale—then the lie passed inte history and became truth. “Who con ‘tos the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell ‘There is ncthing more galvanizing than the sense of acultural past —Alain Locke Yo, bust this, Black To the Future Back to the past History is a mystery ‘cause it has All the info You need tc know Where you're from Why'd you come and That'll tell you where you're going, —Def ef I. interviews that follow began with a co- nundrum: Why do so few African Americans write science fiction, a genre whose close encounters with the Other—the stranger in 4 strange land—would seem uniquely suited180 Mark Dery to the concerns of African-Americar. novelists? Yet, to my knowledge, only Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, Steve Barnes, and Charles ‘Saunders have chosen to write within the genre conventions of sci- ence fiction. This is especially perplexing in light of the fact that African Americans; ita Very Teal sense, are the descendants of alien’ abductees; they inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen Butio Tess impassable force fields of intolerance ents; offi- cial histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brat ear on odies (branding, forced st ion, periment, and tasers come readily to mind). Moreover, the sublegtimate status of science fiction a a pulp genre have been relegated throughout American history. In this context, William Gibsons observation that Sis widely known as “the gekion ghetto,” in recognition of the negative correlation between market share and critical legitimation, takes on a curious significance.! So, too, does Norman Spinrad’s use of the hateful phrase “token nigger” to describe “any science fiction writer of merit who is adopted .. . in the grand salons of literary power.”* Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and ad- dresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth. century technoculture—and, more generally, African-American sig- nification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future—might, for want of a better term, be called “Afro- faturism.” The notion of Afrofutui rise to a woubling an- tinomy: Can a community whose pest has been deliberately rubbed Thermore, isn’t the unreal estate of the future alredy Owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners, and set designers—white to a man—who have engineered our collective fantasies? The “semiotic ghosts” of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Frank R. Paul's illustrations for Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, the chromium-skinned, teardrop- shaped household appliances dreamed up by Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfuss, Norman Bel Geddes's Futurama at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and Disney's Tomorrowland still haunt the public imagination, in one capitalist, consumerist guise or another? Numer! NGIRY Copyright © 1993 by Milestone Mecia, Inc. Reprinted with permission,182 Mark Dery But African-American voices have other stories to tell about cul- ture, technology, and things to come. If there is an Afrofuturism, it must be sought in unlikely places, constellated from far-flung points. Glimpses of it can be caught in Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings such as ‘Molasses, which features a pie-eyed, snaggletoothed robot; in movies such as John Sayles’s The Brother from Another Planet and Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames; in records such as Jimi Hendrix’s Elec- tric Ladyland, George Clinton's Computer Games, Herbie Hancock's Future Shock, and Bernie Worrell's Blacktronic Science; and in the intergalactic big-band jazz churned out by Sun Ra’s Omniverse Ar- kestra, Parliament-Funkadelic’s Dr. Seussian astrofunk, and Lee “Scratch” Perry's dub reggae, which at its eeriest sounds as if it were made of dark matter and recorded in the crushing gravity field of a black hole (“Angel Gabriel and the Space Boots” is a typical title). ‘Afrofuturism percolates, as well, through black-written, black- drawn comics such as Milestone Media’s Hardware (“A cog in the cor- porate machine is about to strip some gears....”), about a black scien- tist who dons forearm-mounted cannons and a “smart” battle suit to ‘wage guerrilla war on his Orwellian, multinational employer. Mile- stone's press releases for its four titles—Hardware, Blood Syndicate, Static, and Icon—make the Manhettan-based company’s political im- pulses explicit: a fictional metropolis, Dakota, provides a backdrop for “authentic, multicultural” superheroes “linked in their struggle to defeat the S.Y.S.T.E.M."* The city is a battlefield in “the clash of two worlds: a low-income urban caldron and the highest level of privileged society.” Tcon, an exemplar of Atrofuturism that sweeps antebellum memo- ries, hip-hop culture, and cyberpunk into its compass, warrants de- tailed exegesis. The story begins in 1839, when an escape pod jetti- soned from an exploding alien starliner lands, fortuitously, in the middle of a cotton field on Earth. A slave woman named Miriam stumbles on “a perfect little black baby"—in fact, an extraterrestrial ‘whose morphogenetic technology has altered it to resemble the first, life form it encounters—in the smoldering wreckage of the pod and raises it as her own. The orphan, christened Augustus, is male, and echoes of the Old Testament account of Moses in the bullrushes, the ‘Black to the Future 183 fay changelings of European folklore, and the infant Superman’s fiery fall from the heavens reverberzte in the narrative's opening scenes. Like his Roman namesake, Augustus is a “man of the future" the man who fell to Earth is seemingly deathless, outliving several generations of his adopted family and eventually posing as his own great-grandson—Augustus Freeman IV—in present-day Dakota. A rock-ribbed conservative who preaches the gospel of Horatio Alger and inveighs against the welfare state, Freeman is a highly success- ful attorney, the only African American living in the city’s exclusive Prospect Hills neighborhood. His unshakable belief in bootstrapping is challenged, however, when he takes a homegirl from the projects, Rachel “Rocket” Ervin, under his wing. A juvenile delinquent and ‘Toni Morrison fan, the streetwise teenager opens Augustus’s eyes to “a world of misery and failed expectations that he didn't believe still existed in this country.” She calls on him to use his otherworldly powers to help the downtrodden. When, in the guise of Icon—a ‘mountain of bulging abs and pecs—he does, she joins him as his side- kick. “As the series progresses,” we are told, “Rocket will become the ‘world’s first superheroine who is also a teenage, unwed mother.” The New York graffiti artist and B-boy theoretician Rammellzee constitutes yet another incarnation of Afrofuturism. Greg Tate holds that Rammelizee’s “formulations on the juncture between black and Western sign systems make the extrapolations of [Houston] Baker and [Henry Louis] Gates seem elementary by comparison,” submitting as, evidence the artis’s “Ikonoklast Panzerism,” a heavily armored de- scendant of late 1970s “wild-style” graffiti (those bulbous letters that ook as if they were twisted out of balloons).* A 1979 drawing depicts a Panzerized letter “S”: it is a jumble of sharp angles that suggests a cubist Nude Bestriding a Jet Ski. “The Romans stole the alphabeta system from the Greeks through war,” explains Rammellzee. “Then, in medieval times, monks ornamented letters to hide their meaning from the people. Now, the letter is armored against further manipu- lation.”” In like fashion, the artist encases himself, during gallery perfor- mances, in Gasholeer, a 148-pound, gadgetry-encrusted exoskeleton inspired by an android he painted on a subway train in 1981. Four184 Mark Dery Copyright © 1995 by Milestone Media, Inc. Reprinted with permission. Black to the Future 185 ‘years in the making, Rammelizee’s exuberantly low-tech costume bristles with rocket launchers, nozzles that gush gouts of flame, and an all-important sound system. From both wrists, I can shoot seven flames, nine flames from each sneaker’s heel, and colored flames from the throat. Two girl doll heads hanging from my waist and in front of my balls spit fire and voit smoke. . .. The sound system consists of a Com- putator, which is a system of screws with wires. These screws can be depressed when the keyboard gun is locked into it. The sound travels through the keyboard and screws, then through the Computator, then the belt, and on up to the four mid-range speakers (with tweeters). This is all balanced by a forward wheel from a jet fighter plane. I also use an echo chamber, Vocoder, and system of strobe lights. A coolant device keeps my head and chest at normal temperature. A 100-watt amp and batteries give me power? The B-boy bricolage bodied forth in Rammellzee's “bulletproof ar- senal,” with its dangling, fetish-like doll heads and its Computator cobbled together from screws and wires, speaks to dreams of co- herence in a fractured world, and to the alchemy of poverty that transmutes sneakers into high style, turntables into musical instru- ‘ments, and spray-painted tableaux on subway cars into hit-and-run art. Concretizing Gibson’s shibboleth, “The street finds its own uses for things,” hip-hop culture retrofits, refunctions, and willfully mis- uses the technocommodities and science fictions generated by domi- nant culture, offering eloquent testimony on behalf of Gates's asser~ tion that “[tJhe Afro-American tradition has been figurative from its beginnings.” How could it have survived otherwise? . . . Black people have always been masters of the figurative: saying one thing to mean something quite other has been basic to black survival in op- pressive Western cultures. .. . “Reading,” in this sense, was not play; it was an essential aspect of the “literacy” training of a child. This sort of metaphorical literacy, the learning to decipher complex codes, is just about the blackest aspect of the black tradition?186 Mark Dery Rammelizee in his costume Gasholeer. Photo courtesy of Tracy A. Smith. Black to the Future 187 What stories, then, are told by the “human beatbox” effects used in early hip-hop, in which MC's such as Fat Boy Darren Robinson used vocal sounds to emulate electronic drums and turntable scratch- ing; the electro-boogie releases of the early 1980s, which David Toop called “a soundtrack for vidkids to live out fantasies born of a science- fiction revival (courtesy of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind) . . . (records characterized by] imagery drawn from computer ‘games, video, cartoons, scifi and hip-hop slanguage”;” and the stif- limbed, robotic twitches that breakdancing inherited from the 1970s, fad, “robot dancing”? In a first, faltering step toward the exploration of this territory, 1 put these and other questions to three African-American think- ers whose writing suggested points of connection with the subject at hand: Samuel R. Delany, a semiotician and long-standing mem ber of the science fiction community; Greg Tate, a cultural critic and staff writer for the Village Voice; and Tricia Rose, Assistant Profes- sor of Africana Studies and History at New York University, who is currently at work on a book on rap music and the politics of black cultural practice. Their responses, taken together, constitute a map of one small corner of the largely unexplored psychogeography of Afrofuturism, MARK DeRY: You mentioned, in an earlier, informal conversation, that the black presence in science fiction fandom was on the rise." What leads you to believe this? SAMUEL R. DELANY: Simply going to SF conventions and seeing more dark faces. One only wishes there'd been a comparable rise in black SF writers. When you look around at the various areas of popular cul- ture—take comic books—you find a notable increase among black cteators—Brian Stalfreeze, Denys Cowan, and Kyle Baker (whose graphic novel Why I Hate Saturn is a contemporary satire involving black and white characters talking to each other about their problems with some rather problematic observations on feminism thrown in), Malcolm Jones, Mark Bright, and Mike Sargent with his James Scott project (but one could double the length of this list, with names like Derek Dingle, Trever wan Eeden, David Williams, Ron Wilson, Paris,