Writing the story was a spark to dry kindling. The act of creating a story had a delicious sensation and I instantly fell madly in love with it. It felt like stepping off the edge of a cliff on purpose when you subconsciously knew you had the ability to fly. It took me to a place where I didn’t need to walk. [p. 73]
When Nnedi Okorafor was 19 and already a successful athlete, she underwent an operation to combat the effects of scoliosis. The operation had a 1% failure rate: Okorafor was that 1%, and woke paralysed from the waist down.
After this catastrophe, which she calls the Breaking, she experienced hallucinations, despair, agony: she also drew on her knowledge of Frida Kahlo, whose art was powered by her own chronic pain, and Mary Shelley, who may have written Frankenstein as a way of dealing with pain and fear. Okorafor began to scribble stories in the margins of a book -- in the margins, in fact, of I, Robot by Isaac Asimov.
Though she wasn't at that point writing SF, she did consider the irony of her paralysis having made her more suited to life in space or in water, where gravity wouldn't interfere: due to nerve damage, her proprioception (sense of where one's body is) was unreliable. Thinking about how technology might assist and support her, how she might become a cyborg, sat oddly with her loss of faith in science. Then, during her recovery period, a friend suggested she take a creative writing class: and it clicked. Visits to family in Nigeria inspired her to write about the Nigeria she experienced -- a place of the future as much as, or more than, the past -- and to explore Africanfuturism, 'similar to Afrofuturism, but ... specifically and more directly rooted in African culture, history, mythology and perspective, where the centre is non-Western' [p. 83].
I was struck by Okorafor's resilience and determination, and also by her matter-of-fact account of the bad days: the hallucinations, the rage and despair, the fears that she faced. (Try driving at night when you can't feel your foot on the pedal.) The ways in which she's sublimated pain into art, and accepted her body's limitations while working to minimise them, are humbling. And I'm fascinated by the process that led her to recognise the disconnect between the Nigerian and American aspects of her heritage, and the way she's worked to integrate them.
A short book, but there's a lot in it: skimming for this review, I found myself rereading chapters I'd half-forgotten. I'm certain that I'll be looking out for elements of this story, transmuted, in my future readings of her fiction.
Read for the 'featuring a woman with a disability' rubric of the Reading Women Challenge 2020.
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