Ancestor Alexis, I’ve heard about you.
So begins Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ short story Evidence, which appears in the science fiction anthology Octavia’s Brood. The story unfolds through a series of episodic documents that reveals the link between Alexis’ world and the one of Alandrix, who lives five generations into the future. In this first letter, Alandrix writes with gratitude. Because of the “silence breaking” of her ancestors, Alandrix now lives in a world where she can’t imagine that acts like “sexual abuse...used to happen all the time.” Writing back through history, Alandrix reveals herself as the manifestation of new paradigms. Aptly-named, Evidence is a story of connection – the connection through time between one person’s actions and the evidence that it mattered.
In the foreword of Octavia’s Brood, Sheree Renée Thomas writes: “With incisive imagination and a spirited sense of wonder, contributors bridge the gap between speculative fiction and justice, boldly writing new voices and communities into the future.” Its editors Adrienne Maree Brown and Walidah Imarisha call the anthology a work of visionary fiction, distinguishing it from “the mainstream strain of science fiction, which most often reinforces dominant narratives of power.” That’s why the book stood out to me – it was an unusual project of the imagination.
It reminded me of the time I first met Gareth Higgins - founder of The Porch – and the piece of wisdom that has informed my framework for life and storytelling. During a guest lecture at the Glen Workshop in 2017, Gareth shared about “The Seventh Story” project in which he and co-author Brian McLaren identify six main stories of the world and how they “fail to answer the question of how to make a better world.” He spoke of the seventh story, the one that reaches beyond the narratives that pattern our view of the world. And then he said, quoting Richard Rohr, that “the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.” At first, you want to snap your fingers. That’s it – that’s what I’ve been missing. Then the words seep in. And they leave you wondering, What, exactly, is the “better”?
I’ve struggled to answer that question. At first, pushing for a better world sounds suspiciously like a utopian undertaking, and plenty of people have outlined just how disastrous past attempts at utopia have been (think: oppressive regimes or cults). Still others have pointed out that the very word utopia, credited to Thomas More, contains a satire within itself as “a Greek pun on ‘ou topos’ (‘no place’) and ‘eu topos’ (‘good place’).” Glimpses of utopia in cartoons like The Jetsons showed me a future that was bright, shiny, and white, but not one that had space for people who looked like me. With the challenge to grasp the elusive concept of the future, it’s much easier to ground our visions in the possibility of the dystopia. Dystopian landscapes have their function, and often through the bleak magnification of oppression and disaster emerges a hopeful resilience. The revolutions that arise in the face of these injustices creates a version of hope through the reminder that people who believe in good will always push back against people who embody evil. This is the world that Gumbs recognizes, that of our twenty-first-century world, and it’s one that she situates in the history of her fictive creation. By doing so, she provides a vision of a world in which goodness thrives.
Practicing the better means pushing back against the acceptance of damaging stories as an inevitability. It reminds us that is that in our pursuit to expose problems, we can recreate cycles of the very structures we work to oppose. In her poignant memoir I’m Afraid of Men, Vivek Shraya pinpoints one complexity of fidelity to truth:
If I open Twitter or Facebook on the way to work, I brace myself for news reports of violence against women and gender-nonconforming people, whether it’s a story about another trans woman of color who has been murdered, or the missing and murdered Indigenous women, or sexual assault. As important as it is to make these incidents visible by reporting them, sensationalizing and digesting these stories is also a form of social control, a reminder that I need to be afraid and to try to be as invisible as possible.
I didn’t interrogate my relationship to such representations until my final year of college, when I based my senior thesis on the study of representation of women of color in young adult literature. My results may not have been groundbreaking, but my findings proved useful for myself, if not for anyone else. I’d expected the stereotyping and marginalizing themes, but what surprised me was the pattern of violence woven through nearly every story.
At first, it didn’t seem significant – of course female protagonists would face the same gender-based challenges that women in reality do. But my findings found a home in a broader body of literature that made me face the implications of these representations. Theorist Chandra Talpade Mohanty points out how
defining women as archetypal victims freezes them into ‘objects-who-defend-themselves,’ men into ‘subjects-who-perpetrate-violence’ and (every) society into a simple opposition between the powerless (read: women) and the powerful (read: men) groups of people.*
I started to examine my own stories, and I noticed that same thread of violence. I didn’t write these stories in a vacuum; different versions of them had been woven into the fabric of national narratives. I wrote them as a way of exposing systems of oppression. But when it came time to shift to a new kind of story – one that envisioned what could be rather than what was – my imagination failed me.
It’s a curious dilemma, and yet one that might not be entirely necessary if we expand our capacity for narrative. Some stories serve as guides for fighting oppression and reveal the stark need to dismantle existing systems, but we also need visions of a future in which we flourish, where the work of “silence breaking” takes effect. The Evidence contains both: the exposure of existing problems with a depiction of what it could look like to continue that work through generations.
We learn from those who come before us and from the figures, real and fictional, who can conceive of blueprints for what can come after us. While touring for her new release The Beautiful**, New York Times Bestselling author Renée Adhieh disclosed that she conceived of one of her main male characters out of necessity; writing during the time of the Kavanaugh hearings, she wanted to create a character whose growth could model a form of healthy masculinity.
jackie sumell*** similarly works to bring about different models. Recently featured in Orion Magazine, she created Solitary Gardens, as a way of connecting people in solitary confinement to people and nature through letter-writing. She practices the “better” and uses her imagination to make it happen: “By design, Solitary Gardens inverts the coercive labor practices of chattel slavery….The arrangement models another way of being, an economy rooted in generosity, not capital.” Straddling the present and the future, jackie facilitates the imaginative capacity of inmates while advocating for the kind of structural change that would transform entire communities and their orientation towards justice.
During a time of past political upheaval, Toni Morrison shared her discouragement with a friend who reminded her that “This is precisely the time when artists go to work—not when everything is fine, but in times of dread.”**** To create is an act of faith – we cannot know the end result of the endeavor until we have thoroughly engaged with it – and in many cases, we will not know how if anything will come of our efforts. More than a few points exist between an ideal and its lived interpretation, but the relationship between fiction and reality doesn’t exist as mere wishful thinking. Imagination will be the first act of reclaiming a future from the inevitability of ruin.
Inspired by Gumbs’ story, I wrote a letter to my own ancestors, the ones on the side of my family that had been slaves in this country. I rarely acknowledged this truth beyond the impersonal statement of fact. Due to erasure, my history has often felt out of reach, and I’ve struggled with this feeling of alienation. But sitting down to write this letter, I liked the thought that my imagination could serve as that connection I hadn’t been able to feel.
“Dear Ancestors,” I began.
I wondered if they’d thought of me, and I wanted to tell them I existed. That I am evidence of the imaginations they had, imaginations that reached beyond the truth in front of them.
*Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.
** A historical fantasy centered on vampires in 1870s New Orleans – a subject which prompted its own line of discussion about the stigma around women’s and girl’s interests in literature (i.e. romance).
*** Who intentionally does not capitalize her name.
**** “No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear”
Elisabeth Ivey writes literary non-fiction and young adult fiction. She has contributed to The Odyssey and Messiah College’s The Swinging Bridge, and she has presented research on representation in youth literature at the PA NAME and IMAGINE Social Good conferences.
