Butler, Due, Wideman and Morrison have found in the spirit-child fount, indeed in “[the] human drama “ that is the experience of born-to-die, what Houston A. Baker Jr., describing the blues matrix, appropriately calls “the symbolically anthropological”. They have mobilized aspects of this mythic spectacle of spirit-versus-humans as cultural mnemonics. They re-channel it’s epistemic frequencies also to frame characters, design narrative interiors, and negotiate inextricably racial,historical, gendered, maternal, political, philosophic, and artistic questions related to the lives of Africans and their descendants enslaved in a hostile New World and still unjustly treated in both life and totalizing white-master narratives.
As Jacqueline de Weever writes, in concurrence with such literary appropriation, “The experiences of black peoples in the New World, into which they have been forcibly thrust against their will, cannot be told or treated in realistic or naturalistic traditions in which much of American literature has been cast - the pain of the results of three centuries of oppression is too great to be faced and confronted in a realistic mode. Such an experience demands another mode for which mythic narrative is more appropriate. “
Walter Mosley could not agree more. He believes that those racial plights of which de Weever speaks account for black writers attraction to science fiction. “The genre speaks to those who have been made to feel powerless… Black people have been cut off from their African ancestry by the scythe of slavery and from an American heritage by being excluded from history. For us, science [and mythic] fiction offers an alternative where that which deviates from the norm is the norm”.
Excerpt from “A Spirit of Dialogue - incarnations of Ogbanje, the Born-to-Die, in African American literature
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