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Black People on Mars: Race and Ray Bradbury

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Black People on Mars: Race and Ray Bradbury

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Read in tandem with Cruz-Duarte's essay, this opinion piece is written in far more student-accessible language. In addition, it touches upon a very real and personal story by its POC author. Students are able to draw connections, examine history, and, when read alongside the short story itself, contribute to the debate and discussion surrounding race, gender, sexuality, and more in Bradbury and Orwell's dystopias.

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Prolific science fiction writer Ray Bradbury died this week, at the age of 91. I read my first Bradbury book in middle school-The Illustrated Man- and it *blew my mind.* It wasn't my first speculative fiction book by any means. I'd long torn through Middle Earth, traveled Narnia, tesseracted across space and time with Meg and Charles Wallace and tried my hand at inventing with Danny Dunn. (Yeah, let those memories sink in). But the stories in The Illustrated Man were on another level-it was like everything I loved about the old Rod Serling hosted Twilight Zone episodes my mother got me into, but on paper...and with words! From the creepy virtual reality nursery story "The Veldt" to the hauntingly sad "The Exiles" (we made Santa cry!) to every-kid's-revenge story "Zero Hour," I knew I'd never look at sci-fi the same way again. Most startling of all was a story by Bradbury called "The Other Foot"-startling to my young PoC eyes, because the main characters were something I'd hardly seen before. They were black.

As I've recounted enough times on this blog, as a PoC in my early days of reading speculative fiction, I searched for any mention of characters who could be *remotely* black. All I needed was the word "swarthy" or "dark" or "dusky" or "ebon"-and they were black, at least in my head. Either I went to those extremes, or confront the reality that people who looked like me were all-but absent from the genre.

Here in Bradbury's "The Other Foot" however, there was no need to 'create blackness'-these characters were black. They were African-Americans, who had amazingly colonised Mars! Unlike our reality, this futuristic Black Wall Street wasn't destroyed by marauding racist whites-because this colony had no white people. A sci-fi story with no white people?! I had to flip to the back of the book to make sure Bradbury wasn't some lighter-skinned bruh passin'-a crafty " Spook Who Sat by the Door."

As the story goes, turns out the black people in this Martian colony left Earth-America to be exact-to escape the racism and oppression that pervaded the Jim Crow South. Like a latter-day W.E.B. Du Bois and following in a long legacy of black emigration politics, they became fed up with living in subservience and fear and decided to "do for self" and hop on a Garveyite inspired Black Star Line that flew them all the way to Mars. The concept boggled my mind-so much so, I re-read this first part several times just to make sure I got it right.

The tension behind the story turns out to be the imminent arrival of a rocket ship-carrying some white people (see! I knew they had to be somewhere!). The black inhabitants of the Martian colony are agitated, as disputes arise on how the whites should be treated. One side believes they should be welcomed; another, remembering the horrors they'd left behind, suspect nothing but ill-tidings and form a lynch mob. It all comes to a climax when the ship lands and, to everyone's surprise, a single old white man emerges. He explains that war broke out right after the black colonists left, laying waste to the Earth in an atomic holocaust. When the crowd asks about the many cities of the world, he informs them they've all been destroyed-burned away. When the black mob leader, rope in hand, asks about the town in Alabama where his father was lynched, the white man says it's all gone. He has come to the blacks of Mars, hat helmet in hand, willing to repent for the past. On behalf of the whites left on the war-torn and dying home planet, he begs the blacks to send rocket ships to take them in as refugees. The whites are so desperate, they'd even be willing to take on all the menial tasks and jobs they once forced upon the blacks. Realizing that the Earth he knew-and all the pain it carried-is now gone, the stunned leader of the mob drops the rope and nods his acceptance, declaring it's time for a new start. He later reflects that the white man is now just as lonely and downtrodden as blacks had been, and for the first time he sees them with clarity.

To my young eyes, this was the best sci-fi story I had ever read-period! Like the old Eddie Murphy joke about throwing a starving man a saltine cracker, I was so hungry for a story with black characters (and one with such stark social commentary that tackled race head on!) I was certain it was a ritz! The message of confronting the racial past and the black character moving towards understanding and racial reconciliation was moving. It was heart-warming. It was genius.

I held that thought, until about college-when everything from Public Enemy to critical race theory came floating my way. I read the story again in a modern English Lit class, and found my feelings towards it had changed dramatically. I remember the few other black students (all of us filled with race-conscious-collegiate-militancy) decrying the story as a farce. Why did the black folks have to forgive anyone? What was up with those hanker-chief-heads who wanted to welcome the white people with open arms? How come the one person who had a counter-opinion was an "angry black man" stereotype? How did a story about prejudice and racism in the future manage to make the black folks the reverse "racists" who are taught about humanity by the old white guy? And what made Mr. Bradbury think that black folks were just waiting to hold hands and sing kumbaya with their former oppressors? In our re-worked version, the story should either have ended with (1) the mob saying, "No. No. And HELL No! Get back on that ship and look for real estate on Venus, Mr. Christopher Columbus. We seen how it worked out for them Indians" or (2) the black colony locking its targeting missiles on the rocket ship and blowing it out of the sky before it even touched down-a justified preemptive strike.

Re-reading the first part to the story "Way in the Middle of the Air" in Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles didn't help improve my perspective. This earlier tale is told mostly from the POV of whites, watching as the blacks in the American South all pack up and head to Mars. Sentences describing the black bodies leaving as "the slow, steady channel of darkness" grated on my more racially-aware nerves. So too did allusions to fingerprints no longer being found on watermelons (yeah, that's right), or black children at play described as "pickaninnies rushing in clear water." How the heck could I have missed all this when I was younger I wondered? My childhood love affair with Bradbury took a serious tarnishing. I didn't stop reading his other works, or admiring his creative genius. But I saw his whiteness all too clearly-perhaps more than I'd ever wanted.

Okay. So let's flash forward. If in college as a PoC you get that rush of racial-consciousness and awareness, it takes a few series of life lessons later on to figure out how to apply it critically. So when I picked up both of these stories years later, I tried to give them another chance. Sure enough, they didn't hold the wide-eyed splendidness of my innocent adolescent mind. I don't gloss things over and play amnesiac with troubling discoveries-I deal with them. But I found I wasn't as jaded as that young college guy in that English class. If maturity had brought awareness, a bit more maturity had now introduced nuance.

Ray Bradbury was a man of his time. I usually hate that cliché excuse, because you know who else lived during those times-the people who were getting screwed over. And I'm sure they weren't like, "oh don't mind our oppression...we're just products of our times." So I don't accept it as a reasoning for unrepentant white supremacists like H.P. Lovecraft-don't try selling me on "looking past" On the Creation of Niggers; that conversation will not go well. But Bradbury was no Lovecraft. And the times he wrote in mattered. Bradbury published MC in 1950 and IM in 1951. Likely he wrote his stories of black people on Mars much earlier. Brown V. Board and Rosa Parks were still some years from making history, and the Civil Rights Movement was in its nascency. Groundbreaking films like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner or To Kill a Mockingbird (all with their own issues when we look back at them), were still a decade and a half away. Gene Roddenberry's futuristic dreams of racial harmony that put Uhura and Sulu on the bridge of the USS Enterprise without any need to even mention their race, would take just as long to hit American television screens.

Yet Bradbury was not just a man of his time, he wrote ahead of his time-plunging head-first into stories that struck directly at racism, segregation and Jim Crow at a time when no one was certain those well-established walls would even begin to start coming down. It's quite possible that "Way in the Middle of the Air" was his experimental dip into those troubled waters, where he wanted to convey the perspective of Southern whites if only to highlight the absurdity of their racism. I'm even willing to entertain, as some believe, that those "pickaninnies" and allusions to watermelons were written to be seen through that Southern white lens, though I also understand the reality is that in 1950 many whites (even well-meaning guys ike Bradbury) had not yet been schooled in the fine art of racial sensitivity. I mean Gwyneth Paltrow's still botching it, and she's had the benefit of 60+ years of cringe-worthy white racial faux pas to learn from.

Despite its faults, "Way in the Middle of the Air" remains a profound story in which Bradbury sheds some interesting light on the contradictions of American racism. In the story, the very whites who uphold segregation, at the same time are angered by the blacks leaving. How dare they go without giving notice, one white man declares. Others hope bitterly that the rocket ships will explode and kill tens of thousands of the black emigrants-a bitter prayer for mass murder that's chilling in its lack of basic human empathy. Holding what Bradbury describes as "sour water" in their mouths, they rage and use tactics to keep the blacks from going-but they can't, as the blacks in the town seem prepared to overcome whatever obstacles are placed in their way. The whites scratch their heads, trying to figure out why the blacks are leaving now, when the poll tax has just been abolished, states are passing anti-lynching laws and they're getting all kinds of equal rights. "What more they want?" one white asks. "They make almost as good money as a white man, but there they go." Their inability to understand, to empathize with a people they've oppressed, a people who might suddenly decide they're tired of fighting to achieve "almost," and just plain fed up, reveals their own blindness to a strain that has long pervaded the history of black social struggle-and Bradbury, while he unfortunately doesn't give it black voice, taps into it. One of the black emigrants, a character the whites call Silly (described as "all arms and feet and long legs and round watermelon head"-sigh, yeah), listens to the mocking taunts they toss his way in silence. It's only when he walks a ways off that he yells back a final farewell, asking what the whites plan on doing at night now once the blacks are gone. The allusion to lynching, the nighttime habit of the whites is unmistakable. But what's also implied is the loss of identity the whites will soon suffer-for if there are no more black bodies to hate, to attack, to oppress, what will whites do then? Who will they be then? What is the worth of whiteness if it has no one against which to claim superiority? In the end the whites are left to grapple with this new existence, as they face the gaping emptiness-both physical and psychological-left in the wake of the black diaspora.

If Bradbury did not spend too much time on black voices in this first story, the sequel "The Other Foot" placed primacy on black agency. Here was an all black world, that had decided the best way to deal with racism was to leave it behind-and had managed to create a society all of their own. Sure, I would have liked to learn more about that journey and the lives they made. Also wonder what happened to all the *other* black people in the world-is there a West Indian, Afro-Latin or African quarter/neighborhood in the colony? And yes, I still think using the "angry black man" stereotype takes away from what could have been a more nuanced and fleshed out black radical perspective. Even if the blacks of the Mars colony had arrived at the same conclusion, it could have come from another source than one old white man expressing rationality to overcome their furious emotions. And if they'd decided to just send him home empty-handed, decided they could forgive but never forget, that would have been something quite daring-quite Bradbury in fact-forcing readers to think perhaps how those on the receiving end of hatred may harden themselves not out of equal hate, but a sense of self-preservation. The oppressed get to be angry too, and aren't always just waiting to "transcend" and be the "bigger persons." Deal with that reality.

But, again, this was 1950 and 1951. And in the time these stories were written, they were powerful. Heck, to cause this lengthy of a blog, they still are. So thanks for all the thought-provoking and entertaining tales Mr. Bradbury. You'll be sorely missed. And just so you know, if you were that old white guy on that rocket ship-I'd let you stay too.

But enuff already with the watermelons.

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Black People on Mars: Race and Ray Bradbury

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Prolific science fiction writer Ray Bradbury died this week, at the age of 91. I read my first Bradbury book in middle school--The Illustrated Man-- and it *blew my mind.* It wasn't my first speculative fiction book by any means. I'd long torn through Middle Earth, traveled Narnia, tesseracted across space and time with Meg and Charles...

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Ray Bradbury on Race and Segregation:The Case of “Way in the Middle of the Air”and “The Other Foot”

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Ray Bradbury on Race and Segregation:The Case of “Way in the Middle of the Air”and “The Other Foot”

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Juan David Cruz-Duarte's essay highlights the racism present both within the universe of the short stories and in real world in which they were published. By reading each story and excerpts from the essay, students get the chance to discuss how and if these stories do justice to the subject. The idea that there is more to be said than simply using race and current events as a vehicle for the plot is something students need to dig into and can discuss in groups or together as a whole.

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The 'Product of Its Time' Defense: No Excuse for Sexism and Racism

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The 'Product of Its Time' Defense: No Excuse for Sexism and Racism

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Noah Berlatsky's article is an excellent example of not allowing a piece to hide behind being "the product if its time." Students can discuss the death of the author concept, death of the media, the idea of reading something with or without a contemporary lens and more.

The 'Product of Its Time' Defense: No Excuse for Sexism and Racism

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George Orwell's handling of his main female character in 1984 is clichéd, clumsy, and not a little sexist. I made that argument in a piece I wrote last week, and in response, a couple of readers replied with what I'd call the "of its time" defense. Yes, they said, Julia is not necessarily treated as a human being, but you can't really expect more from a book written in 1949. In the words of commenter LaurelhurstLiberal, "As for the claim of misogyny, that's scarcely surprising in an author of his era, but he comes off a lot better than many of his contemporaries."

This argument comes up a lot (as, for example, in this piece on Snow White). As others have also pointed out, the "of its time" defense is standard response to writing about sexism or racism in any non-contemporary cultural product. It's quietly ubiquitous-but it's also wrongheaded.

In the first place, the idea that sexism or racism is "a product of its time" assumes that the past was self-evidently worse than the present, that culture progresses in some sort of straight-line fashion, and that we can therefore assume that folks now are smarter and more enlightened than folks in the past. This is unduly flattering to the present, which has by no means overcome prejudice or stereotype. As just one example, Her, much-lauded for its philosophical depth and human warmth, is, I've argued, about a sensitive writer's mid-life crisis and the sexually adventurous Manic Pixie Dream Girl who helps him self-actualize. Which is to say, it follows the same basic stereotypical, sexist script as 1984. Orwell's sexism, then, isn't of its time at all. It's still with us.
Langston Hughes also lived and wrote in the same period, proving that it was in fact possible to write in the early 20th century and not be a racist ass.
Additionally, the idea that racism and sexism were ubiquitous before we came along is a slander on our own parents, grandparents, and ancestors. Yes, there was virulent racism and sexism in the past (as there is today). But that doesn't mean everyone, everywhere in the past was equally racist and sexist. Charles Dickens's female protagonists are treacly and vapid, but George Eliot's aren't-just as Eliot's working class characters tend to be condescending sentimental portraits, while Dickens's are human beings. Similarly, H.P. Lovecraft's racism was certainly of its time in many ways-he lived in the late 19th and early 20th century, a period many historians have described as the nadir of American race relations. Yet, Langston Hughes also lived and wrote in the same period, proving that it was in fact possible to write in the early 20th century and not be a racist ass. Saying that Lovecraft was "of his time" erases all the folks (not least black people) who were not racist, or held different views. And it erases Lovecraft himself, turning him into a blank slate, devoid of free will, simply regurgitating accepted wisdom, as if he had no other choice (though the example of Langston Hughes and of, say, Stephen Crane, shows that he did.)

The "product of its time" line, then, makes a hard divide between past and present, assuming that the past was completely benighted and that we are completely enlightened. It does this in the name of defending past literature: of morally exculpating Lovecraft, or Orwell, or whoever, on the grounds that they couldn't be expected to help themselves, living as they did in such a dim and corrupt age.

Rather than defending them, though, this argument threatens to make these creators irrelevant. If, after all, the past was so different than the present, if we know so much more now than then, if we're so morally superior, then what can these writers teach us? If we have progressed so far beyond Orwell in our understanding of equality and freedom and justice and humanity, then why should we read 1984, which purports to discuss issues such as equality and freedom and justice and humanity?
We should still read Orwell not despite the sexism, but in part because of it.
The answer is that we should still read Orwell not despite the sexism, but in part because of it. The fact that 1984 uses a Manic Pixie Dream Girl doesn't make it helplessly of its time-MPDGs show up in our contemporary culture with a wearying consistency. Being attentive to Orwell's sexism is a way to be attentive to ours; it makes 1984 more relevant, not less. For example, in the book, the ultimate triumph of totalitarianism is that Winston and Julia's love fails. You could read that as saying that all love, everywhere, is crushed by the power of the absolute state. But you could also see it as a comment on Winston and Julia's relationship, which is unreal insofar as Julia is treated as a tool for Winston's happiness, rather than a person in her own right. Sexism prevents their love affair from being a real love affair, which is why the state can break it apart. From that perspective, 1984 can be read as an analysis of how totalitarianism and sexism are intertwined-and maybe, maybe, Orwell meant to be read that way.

None of this is to deny the importance of historical context. Of course it would be silly to dismiss Jane Austen as sexist because her female characters look to men for financial security rather than leaning in to become CEOs. But one important historical context is that inequities of race, gender, and class (to name just three) have been around for a very long time, and aren't going anywhere. When creators address those issues, whether well or poorly, they are speaking to us. It's a lot more respectful to argue with them than it is to pretend we have evolved past the need for ears.

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The 'Product of Its Time' Defense: No Excuse for Sexism and Racism

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George Orwell's handling of his main female character in 1984 is clichéd, clumsy, and not a little sexist. I made that argument in a piece I wrote last week, and in response, a couple of readers replied with what I'd call the "of its time" defense.

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What’s Really Orwellian About Our Global Black Lives Matter Moment

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What’s Really Orwellian About Our Global Black Lives Matter Moment

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Priya Satia's opinion piece asks students to confront the personal experience of Orwell's police days and the connection to the very real trauma many face in the current movement.

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Black Lives Matter is reverberating around the world, triggering a fresh reckoning with the racist global history of colonialism and slavery. While Confederate statues began to tumble across the American South, in Bristol, England, a diverse group felled a statue of a slave trader that has long provoked offense. Statues of colonial conquerors of Africa and South Asia have followed, along with a robust discussion of the ways in which such actions make history rather than erase it. These movements abroad are not merely echoes of BLM; BLM itself is global.

The shared impetus is a common opposition to racism, of which anti-Black racism has been the most lethal and traumatic. But the history of policing also bridges them. No historical figure makes this clearer than George Orwell, whose name has been increasingly bandied about in recent weeks-by those fretting about the erasure of history as well as those calling out the euphemistic language around policing, such as the use of "nonlethal" bullets against protesters.

The right and left have long fought over Orwell, who identified as a socialist but authored what many consider the iconic literary critique of socialism, . This is a man who showed us the moral evil of the totalitarian quest for mind control and a culture of denunciation but also compiled a list of untrustworthy leftists for the British Foreign Office; a critic of empire and believer in human equality who persisted in writing and thinking in blatantly racist ways. But his central beef was always with policing, whose tyrannical power he discovered through his own experiences as a colonial police officer.

Born Eric Blair, Orwell described himself with characteristic precision and irony as a member of the "lower-upper-middle class." He went to Eton but on a scholarship. His family had status but not money. Through University College London's Legacies of British Slave-ownership project, we know that the Blairs traced whatever status they still had in Orwell's lifetime to earlier ownership of slaves. Orwell's great-great-grandfather was a slave owner in Jamaica in a time in which slavery was part of a colonial system connecting Europe, West Africa, South Asia, and the Americas. The Blairs were among the 3,000 slave-owning families who received a total 20 million pounds in compensation (now worth more than $2 billion) when slavery was abolished in the British empire.

The Blair family held on to its status thanks to opportunities that continued to be afforded by British colonialism. Orwell was born in India, where his father was an official in the Indian Civil Service. His mother was the daughter of a teak merchant in Burma (today, Myanmar; then part of British India). The humiliation he felt at boarding school for his relatively poorer means prepared him for a life of "ruin," which he understood variously as: "the colonies or an office stool, perhaps prison or an early death."

Fatefully, he wound up a police officer in British India. But he quit after five years out of a deep sense of shame, evident in his first published piece of writing (still under the name Eric Blair), a short piece titled " A Hanging" (1931), in which the narrator, a police officer in Burma, is quietly complicit in the execution of a colonial subject whose crime we are not told-it is irrelevant to the point Orwell wanted to make about the inhumanity of the system that policed and killed him. A dog is the only being that acknowledges the prisoner's humanity, jumping up to lick his face, to the crowd's horror. It was in Burma that Orwell first discovered thought-policing: "You are not free to think for yourself," he explained in his first novel, Burmese Days(1934). "Your opinion on every subject ... is dictated for you by the pukka sahibs code," in which you too are complicit so that "your whole life is a life of lies."

What if all police officers heeded the pangs of conscience as Orwelldid?

Colonial policing also sharpened Orwell's awareness of the anesthetizing effects of sanitized language, whose apotheosis, he showed us, was the soulless Newspeak of 1984. In this period, in the Middle East, on the Indian frontier, and in East Africa, work previously performed "by policemen and sticks" was undertaken by the Royal Air Force, with aircraft and bombs. Orwell summarized aerial policing's abuse of humanity and language: "Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification." These British innovations would deeply influence the development of American military and policing power.

Orwell came to see British rule in India as an "unjustifiable tyranny" in which the police were the "actual machinery of despotism," as he confessed in The Road to Wigan Pier(1937). He came to loathe "the whole machinery of so-called justice," never entering a jail without feeling that his place was on the other side of the bars. The claim that colonialism spread the rule of law was a cover story for theft. He suspected police officers in England were likewise "haunted by a secret horror of what they do." Indeed, in England too, modern policing had evolved from an effort to enforce the theft of the commons and suppress the collective values on which they depended in favor of private property and individualistic values. In a 1933 work, Orwell called out the police as the true source of the "immoral conduct" that they routinely pinned on the poor to justify their brutality.

In Burmese Days, the moral path of the colonizer leads to suicide, anticipating the bleak destiny of the Inner Party member in 1984. Orwell himself, however, escaped and sought redemption from "bad conscience" by living several years as a tramp in Paris and London. He wanted to expiate "an immense weight of guilt" and determined to "submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants." The English working class, then struggling with deep poverty and high unemployment during the Depression, struck him as analogous to the Burmese:

They were the symbolic victims of injustice, playing the same part in England as the Burmese played in Burma. In Burma the issue had been quite simple. The whites were up and the blacks were down, and therefore ... one's sympathy was with the blacks. I now realized that there was no need to go as far as Burma to find tyranny and exploitation. Here in England ... were the submerged working class, suffering miseries.

And among them were preserved the collective values the modern world still needed.

For Orwell, at home and abroad, policing and incarceration were the essence of oppression; they thus defined his vision of dystopia in 1984. Cold War Americans liked to read the work as a narrow attack on Stalinism, but its target was far more universal. Policing works by corrupting the soul of both police officers and the policed, destroying human bonds-destroying community, as racism does too. A police officer's "normal" feelings are abject bitterness and moral confusion, Orwell told us in " Shooting an Elephant " (1936), an essay routinely assigned in high school English classes: "With one part of my mind, I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny ...; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts." His experiences in Burma and among the poor turned Eric Blair into a political writer; in taking the pen name George Orwell in 1933, he was partly forging a new self from the moral ruin of his policing life. To the extent that Orwell's ideas now saturate our common understanding of liberty and threats to it, that understanding is based on a realization of the fundamental immorality of policing. We have always known policing is the problem.

Orwell wrote 1984 in 1947-49 (it appeared six months before his death), just as the British Empire was beginning to fall apart and spawn an afterlife at home. Policing methods designed to pacify and invigilate subversives abroad were used to discipline the unemployed, women, and crowds at home, precisely (and not coincidentally) when nonwhite immigration to Britain from its former colonies was increasing. Those immigrants also endured the insult of living among statues of slave traders and brutal conquerors-at last being toppled by their descendants today. For many, including perhaps Orwell himself, the totalitarian world of Big Brother and doublethink was not merely the exotic trajectory of Stalinist Russia but the fate of imperial policing everywhere, including Britain. What could be more Orwellian than the proud display of statues of conquerors and slavers in a society continually protesting imperial innocence and devotion to liberty and equality? "Ignorance is Strength," the Ministry of Truth would say.

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And, "War is Peace": Racist militarized American policing remains part of wider racist policing abroad, often from the skies and in the very regions in which the British first devised such policing tactics. Aerial policing is now being applied to the BLM protests against policing. However much we may try to reform modern policing, its fundamental purpose is social control, which, in unhealed parts of the world that are continually retraumatized by a racist past, cannot but depend on a dynamic of criminalizing particular racial and social groups.

Orwell may have felt he ought to be on the other side of the prison bars, but he did not seek penance by surrendering himself to the police or prison for his sins; those institutions had no moral legitimacy. Rather, he felt he would find expiation in understanding and giving voice to an oppressed community. What if all police officers heeded the pangs of conscience as Orwell did? It is time for us too to recover the cooperative values that policing seeks to suppress and find community-based forms of moving forward, of redeeming the past and keeping societies safe and just.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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What's Really Orwellian About Our Global Black Lives Matter Moment

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Black Lives Matter is reverberating around the world, triggering a fresh reckoning with the racist global history of colonialism and slavery. While Confederate statues began to tumble across the American South, in Bristol, England, a diverse group felled a statue of a slave trader that has long provoked offense.

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Orwell used the homophobic epithets "nancy" and "pansy", such in his expressions of contempt for what he called the "pansy Left", and "nancy poets", i.e. left-wing homosexual or bisexual writers and intellectuals such as Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden

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Orwell used the homophobic epithets "nancy" and "pansy", such in his expressions of contempt for what he called the "pansy Left", and "nancy poets", i.e. left-wing homosexual or bisexual writers and intellectuals such as Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden

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In 12th grade, we are able to confront things a bit more head-on and if I don't bring up Orwell's homophobic views, believe me, a student will quickly. And they're not wrong to do so-- hiding behind "Well it was 1940!" doesn't erase what the man said. Instead, we look hard at his (and Bradbury's, etc.) views and examine how it colored his choices and decisions in his writing. We do the same with race and religion as these writers were not shy in their critique of everyone.

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Ray Bradbury once wrote, "In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction."

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Ray Bradbury once wrote, "In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction."

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I give students this quote as we begin The Pedestrian because again, it's topical for the world we live in. Students (and teachers, let's be honest) have earbuds in constantly. There is a very "eye-roll" element to this quote, of course, but it really does make the students think.

In terms of multicultural elements, again, this can come down to personal experience and input from the class.

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The story explores the politics of totalitarianism and a government that seeks to protect its people by curtailing their freedom. Touching on very real connections to past and current totalitarian rule, this short story confronts the hopelessness felt by many and the willingness to risk it all to escape.

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Do not go out to the dunes, the Chief says to Isiuwa. You'd do well not to awaken the wrath of the whistling gods.

This does not stop Nata from trying to leave again.

Once the New Moon assembly is over, she slinks away to the community market. This early in the morning, the desert haze hangs heavy, and everything moves in stutters, like tortoises in the sand. The sun is out and warm, not hot because Isiuwa isn't really in a desert; or at least, not like the deserts the Elders speak of when they tell us about the world before it was all dunes.

Isiuwa moves like a buzz, like sandflies in formation. The market is a manifestation of this, laid out in wide corridors of bamboo and cloth, a neat crisscross of pathways. Bodies scuttle along, dressed in cloth wrapped to battle every iteration of dust-laden wind. No one pays Nata any heed-no one ever does-as she drags a bag too big for her frame, folds of cloak falling over her arm multiple times so that she has to stop every now and then to wrap them again. Her hair is wild with fraying edges, and her eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, but Isiuwa does not notice.

First, she goes to the moulder. The bulk of what she has available for barter here is household jars and utensils she will no longer need. The man takes everything without a word and pays her in sugarcane, which is just as well because quenching thirst is the number one priority out there. Next, she takes Mam's big old metal box, the one with which she used to make those contraptions for the village. No one in Isiuwa has tools like these any longer; strange, archaic, from the time before sand. It was the only thing Nata could salvage after Mam's disappearance. It still contains all her tools for carving and repairing artifacts no longer here. When she places it in front of Isiuwa's prime fruit merchant, he stares at it for a long time.

"They will catch you," he says. "Again."

"Maybe," Nata says. "Maybe not."

He nods and gives her brown sugar and dried fruit for it.

She leaves her most valuable barter for last. She hefts her flatwood under her arm and visits the woodworker, the same woman who helped her find the bulk of old tree Mam carved for her into this sleek, flat thing polished with paraffin wax. Wood is so scarce now, unlike in the early days of sand, Mam used to say. This could literally be Nata's most prized possession.

The woodworker isn't there, but her apprentices are, and they offer her a good amount of water in an earthen jar. She haggles and gets some bread and roasted termites thrown in before she lets them have it, staring as they discuss butchering it to barter in bits.

She remembers how she cried and cried to Mam that she must, must have a flatwood. One just like those in the books the Elders keep in the archives of artefacts before dunes, which only they, the Chief, and their novitiates are allowed access to (though Mam somehow managed to have that one). She remembers having hopes that one day, even if for just a day, she would go out to the dunes with the flatwood and slide down the up-flow like the children did in the pictures in that book. But it's too late for that. This dream will belong to someone else now.

Nata leaves them without saying goodbye. Goodbye would mean that she is bidding positive farewell to Isiuwa, but no, she really isn't. She hopes that the minute she steps out of the bamboo fence, the sun will lean down and slap the settlement with fire, for everything they have done to her, to Mam. She hopes that all the dunes will whistle at once, a harmony of dooming dissonance, and the sand will flow and sweep over all of Isiuwa like a great ocean so that no one will ever need to know pain like hers again.

But first, she must get Tasénóguan.

* * *

Do not go out to the dunes, the Chief tells Isiuwa. The gods will whistle you to death.

Isiuwa listens to a dune whistle about once every moon-cycle. Each time, the sand advances on Isiuwa, moving with a morose, flutelike song, the only sound to plant tears in their chest that does not come from a living being. A shrill, underlined by wind rushing through a tube. The Chief calls it the whistle of the gods and says it is the sound of an errant person being taken. Every time an errant person dares venture beyond their allowance and ends up taken by the dunes-as they always are-the dunes move towards Isiuwa. The whistle is a warning, a warning that those of the world before it was punished with sand refused to heed. The Chief tells a story of a time before the old world, when it was once punished in the same way, but by the gods of water. It is Isiuwa's duty to preserve this order and bring forth the next world.

Isiuwa knows the Chief is right because he bears a cross on Isiuwa's behalf, along with the troupe of Elders, sentries, and novitiates: the cross of going beyond the fence and seeking solutions, praying to the gods and asking them to stop moving the dunes closer. The troupe sometimes returns with strange things they've salvaged from the sand, things that look like they belong to another time, and the Elders keep them in the archive. The Chief reminds us that this is not a privilege but a burden, for it is impossible to look upon the face of the gods and live; and every time the troupe returns home intact is a blessing from the whistling gods. Isiuwa nods and remains behind the fence; remains grateful.

Not Nata's Mam, though.

Mam was born stubborn. She said so often herself, that it wasn't wise to take things that came from the mouth of man, which confused Nata because those words came from her mouth. Mam lived by this practice too. Nata knows how many times Mam disregarded Isiuwa and slipped out of the fence (five). The dry bamboo barricade wasn't really what kept Isiuwa in, Mam said. Bamboo was easy to slip through. Words planted in the mind, not so much.

Mam was an expert at that, the slipping; slipping through the fence, slipping through time and space, slipping in and out of proper reason, so that many times Isiuwa forgot she was even there, that Nata was even there. Many times, Isiuwa were surprised when they appeared, struggled to remember where they were from, wondered why they were still here and had not been offered to the gods already as appeasement.

It was easy for Nata and Mam to fade from the mind, being shunted to the edge, living in the outermost corner of the settlement where scorpions abound and only those deemed unworthy were offered land to build shelter. Nata blamed Mam in the beginning, believing it was her fault, that she could've just stopped arguing with the Elders, telling them that there were no whistling gods, that the civilization under the sand was just swallowed by an extreme ecological disaster. She insisted there were thriving civilizations out there and she was going to find them, that the whirlwind of time would take her there. She insisted she had seen it for herself.

So, when Mam kissed Nata on the forehead and said, "Let's go," she knew then that Isiuwa was right: Mam was a mad woman. A whirlwind that took people to a world where there was no sand? Going willingly into the dunes to be swallowed by the gods?

She refused to go, of course. Mam even tried to force her, after multiple arguments, them both screaming at the top of their voices in the shelter. Mam said she was just trying to save them, and Nata reminded her that Isiuwa was trying to save them, that was why they had rules. Mam saw then that Nata would never be ready, so she tied her wrists and ankles when she was asleep, gagged her mouth and put her in a cart, but she couldn't even pull it from the shelter to the fence. She untied Nata, and Nata ran as fast as she could.

She went back to the shelter and waited for Mam to return because, of course, there was no whirlwind of time, there was no magical dust storm roaming the dunes, waiting for people to save. So, she waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Until the dunes whistled.

* * *

We mind our own business, the Chief says to Isiuwa. We stay alive because we do not seek beyond our means.

Nata finds Tasé just easy. The small boy, scrawny, elbows like the edge of a box, eyes so sunken they could hold seas: he would never be found with the courtyard troupe. He was always somewhere else (and even when he was, he wasn't). He was the kind of son Isiuwa thought the Chief shouldn't have; a sickling, eyes always to the sky in thought. It was probably best for everyone that he always took off, always went missing.

Nata finds him by the old, dead dwellings, the dump site of shelters of those from Isiuwa who have been taken by the dune song. Somewhere in there lies Mam's best tools, implements, all the things she salvaged from the world before, which she refused to be allowed to be confiscated for the Elders' archive. All these, alongside their shelter itself, which was hacked down to ensure it was never rebuilt (it would've been burnt if Isiuwa could, but fire is too dangerous a thing in these times), are mixed in here somewhere.

Tasé squats right in the middle of it, his feet ashy, perched on some hard debris with a slate, writing on the polished surface with a white rock. He is the Chief's only child, and his role in becoming a novitiate was written before he was born; he was going to be given the chance to be the future of Isiuwa. He did a lot of spend time with the Elders, mostly to learn to scribble the shapes that represented Isiuwa's language and their sounds, but he barely ever spent time with the sentry group or the courtyard troupe. Every other time, he was alone, practicing.

Nata approaches slowly. He looks up.

"Will you come with me?" Nata says.

The boy stops writing, his eyeballs dancing in their sockets. "Where?"

"I'm going to find Mam."

He pauses, then writes something on the slate, slowly. "Your Mam?"

"Yes," Nata says.

He thinks for another second. "And my Mam too?"

Nata is silent for a beat. Everyone knows the stories about Tasé's mother, about the Chief's first wife. Isiuwa says she too was errant, was a mad woman like Nata's Mam, talking about getting away to someplace else. Isiuwa says the Chief was right to let Isiuwa offer her to the gods beneath the dunes, to the breath of their wrath.

"Maybe," she says.

He scribbles some more, lays down his materials, rises, and dusts off his buttock.

"Okay," he says.

Nata has always known it would be this easy when the time came. Tasé was never really here. He has always lived somewhere else, but Isiuwa just can't see it. Once, she asked him why he was only learning to write, and he said he was going to need it when he got away from here. It was then she realised he was just like her Mam, like his Mam before him.

"You know where to meet me," Nata says. "Come after dusk, when the sentries are drunk. And don't tell anyone."

"Dusk?" he says. "It's moonday. There'll be whistling today."

"Yes," Nata says. "Exactly."

* * *

Anyone who leaves belongs to the gods, the Chief tells Isiuwa. They shall not be allowed to return.

The first time, Nata didn't make it far. She found nothing but sand and sun in all directions, the shadows cast by the dunes falling over her when the day began to wane. She found a few skeletons of people and animals, dried out, and a few artefacts she had never seen before which she salvaged. Her water ran out. She did not find Mam, not even her dead body. She did not find a whirlwind to take her where Mam had gone.

The sentries found her when she returned to the fence. They swooped in, their foreheads shiny beneath their cloaks, faces long and lined and expressionless. They rounded her up without a word, because who needs words when the agreement is unspoken?

They did what needed to be done and paraded Nata through the settlement, carrying her in the carved ceremonial stretcher, offering her as a sacrifice, a warning, a performance of her chosen path to death, into the mouth of the gods. Isiuwa emerged from their shelters and flocked behind the sentries, shaking their heads sadly, whispering, pointing. They reached out to touch Nata, maybe in pity, maybe in solidarity, maybe asking, "Why?" The sentries whipped their hands off. They always returned.

The Chief's shelter is in its own courtyard in the centre of the settlement, the largest and only one with an anteroom, where they set Nata before him. Isiuwa crowded around. The Chief is just like every other man in the settlement, only slightly plumper and with a permanent frown on his forehead. He doesn't dress any differently from the others either, cloaked in the exact same cloth, except for the large woven headpiece made of fragile beads that Nata knows is passed down from chief to chief.

The decision was swift and simple. As custom, she could not be allowed back, lest she anger the gods and the dunes advance on Isiuwa. She would be sent back out with nothing, not even a cloak, to ensure her transition into the mouth of the dune gods was easy and hassle-free. This would ensure the many moons of carefully created community order were not put in jeopardy due to her self-indulgence. The gods would understand. Plus, it was a favour. It was her desire to leave, after all.

But, Tasé. He changed everything. Right in the middle of proceedings, with no regard for the court, he scuttled over to her, kneeling there in the centre of the anteroom with her found artefacts laid out on the floor before her. He was younger then, smaller. He touched her hair and smiled. He fondled her ear. He pulled a hand from behind himself and offered her a piece of bread. She took it and munched.

Isiuwa held their breath and waited. Tasé had never found purchase with anybody, no matter how much the Chief tried. Not even his nurses could get him to do anything. He was a person of his own, and the Chief had come to accept that he would exist in solitary and die. There was no hope for Tasé in the world that was to come forth from this, where the strength of community and order would be the sole decider for survival. People like Tasé would have no place in that world. But the Chief had not quite moved on in this acceptance, and Tasé still represented a glimmer of hope for him, a hope which had suddenly rekindled.

The Chief cleared his throat and asked her to be held in lockup. She was there until the next day, and that was how she knew she wasn't going to be ejected

No deserter had ever been held. The punishment was always the same right after the courtyard declaration: the sentries would open the gate and prod, prod, prod until the person was several steps away from the bamboo fence. And even if they cried and cried, the gates would be shut against them. Then they would wander away, their cries for help sailing back to Isiuwa in the wind. When it came time for the dune gods to whistle, their wail would be cut mid-scream, and then there would be nothing but silence and safety for Isiuwa once again.

She was brought before Isiuwa the next morning. There was, after all, some use for this one, the Chief said. It would be a waste to discard of this one so uselessly because she wasn't in her right mind, following in the footsteps of the bad example set by her Mam. The troupe would pray to the gods on her behalf on the next trip, while she would atone by serving the community. That service would take the form of becoming a serving companion to Tasé, helping him assimilate into the community and become stronger and better to take up his role in the coming future.

Isiuwa hummed and nodded and praised the Chief for his wisdom, forethought, and benevolence. And this was how Nata knew Mam was right after all: that the gods that did exist were not beneath the dunes at all, but words planted in the mind. This was how she knew she was going to leave again.

When they dispersed, the Elders confiscating her artefacts for their archive, Tasé knelt in the dust with her, leaning close, his nose almost touching hers, his young breath racy with excitement.

"Did you smell it, then?" he whispered. "Did you feel it, outside? Did it smell like power?"

* * *

They leave at dusk, hand-in-hand, hearts racing in sync. It is harder for the sentries to spot them in the sand when it's dark, when shapes no longer exist and the dunes in the distance are the only shadows left. They leave without a light, navigating the darkness through Nata's mental memory alone, lugging the food and water she has gathered. They wear thinner cloaks so they can move faster. In the cold of the night, Tasé's teeth chatter.

In every direction conceivable is nothing but sand and dust and wind, with only the peaks and crests of dunes, small and big, for company. The largest dunes, under which the greatest ruins of the perished people before Isiuwa lie, form a shadow against the red glow of failing light in the distance. They avoid walking up the crest of any of the miniature dunes they come across, to stay out of long-range sight. The sand is cool against their feet and leaves many holes for tracks. Nata knows that come morning, they will be easily found if their pursuers ride Isiuwa's one camel hard enough, or if the fastest sentries are set on their trail.

Tasé is silent, for the most part. For a boy only slightly younger than Nata, his silence speaks well beyond his years. Nata remembers telling him the same thing Mam used to tell her, which she didn't believe then, but does now: You, alone, are a god. You are a dune too, and the dune will not swallow itself. Don't let Isiuwa tell you otherwise.

Nata watches him clutch his cloak tight about himself and stare ahead, his eyes fixed on the undulating shapes in the horizon. The Chief didn't know that when he punished her, he only gave her more light, see. She was meant to be Tasé's companion because she was the only one who understood why he was the way he was, because the same questions that were asked of him roiled within her. They both grew up listening to the constant susurrus of Isiuwa, wondering if they were sane or just as mad as their mothers, and the questions have formed a knot within them that will be unknotted only by leaving. They had always known, in some way, that they were going to find the women who birthed them and breathed this fire of liberty that cannot be quenched. They were going to find home there.

They put more distance between themselves and Isiuwa, moving in a straight line, in the direction of the dunes. No one seems to be following them, a good sign. Nata hopes for them to reach a dune before dawn so they can rest in its shadow at high noon. But they can only stomp in the sand so long before their legs get tired. The undulating outlines still loom in the distance, and Nata cannot tell how close they are yet, but they are far enough from Isiuwa that it makes sense to rest.

They have some bread and the roasted termites. Nata lets Tasé have the allowable sip of water for today, while she settles for sugar-cane. She munches, wondering what she'll say when she finds Mam. She has focused so much on leaving that she has forgotten she might not be happy to see Mam at all, that her chest might become tighter, that she might never forgive her for leaving, for not sacrificing everything and coming back for her. But she also isn't ready for whatever answer Mam has to give. Maybe this is why she found a way to take Tasé with her, despite the odds. Maybe she is trying to do it over, how it should've been.

"We should move," Tasé says.

Nata lies on her back in the sand. "We don't need to. It will come to us."

He frowns. She sees this and says. "It's a roaming whirlwind. That's what causes the whistle. My Mam used to call it the wind of opportunity, that it comes for you only if you present yourself."

He lies on his back next to her, wrapped from head to toe and becoming one with the sand. Soon, they fall asleep, and Nata dreams of meeting Mam, but Mam no longer recognises her. She wakes once, and lies awake, remembering all Mam's stories about the wind, about the five times she slipped beyond the fence and slipped back in, and what she saw. She called it the whirlwind of liberation, of return to a time when even though her tongue was just as tied, her body just as controlled, it was at least hers. It did not belong to Isiuwa.

Whatever time that was, Nata was sure Mam had somehow returned to it but was unable to return as promised. Now she was going to find that whistle, and she was going to blow it herself.

* * *

People will kill what they do not understand, Mam used to say. They will flay it with their tongues if their hands are tied.

It takes longer than the last time for the sentries to catch up with Nata. But this time, it is too late: the dune song has already begun.

It is almost the end of night when the whirlwind first starts to appear. Its coming is announced by a faraway lament, a deep-throated complaint, serving as the right augury for the arrival of feet and torches at the exact place where Nata and Tasé have succumbed to fatigue and made camp.

The Chief has come along with the sentries. The light of the torch and shadow of his cloak darken his face in a manner that is representative of his heaving chest and his thoughts so clear they could've been bellowed: There will be no mercy this time.

"Take them," is all he says.

There is a spat, sand flying in all directions, torches wavering in the wind of coming dawn, but all is soon settled. Nata is at one end, subdued; Tasé restrained at the other.

The Chief faces him first, stooping to his height. Then he raises his hand and deals Tasé a big slap in the middle of his face. There's a snap of cartilage.

"Just offer me," Tasé says, his voice loud for the first time, his speech bubbling with blood and snot and spittle. "Offer me, so this nightmare can end for the two of us."

The silence that passes is filled only by the picking up of sand into dust, the whirlwind now visible in the distance, gathering force, a storm within a storm. Against the backdrop of the orange horizon of the rising sun, it is a roaring ghoul of black wind.

"No," the Chief says, looking at the cloud as it approaches. "No."

And in the midst of all this, with no one paying attention to Nata at all, she finds her opening.

She darts, moves too quickly, out of reach of the sentries' arms, too quickly for their legs to find purchase in the silty sand. She flits with smaller feet, one step, five steps, and soon she is too far. The shouts behind her curse, yell, call her crazy, mad girl, selfish, putting Isiuwa in jeopardy, but she is deaf to them because her eyes are fixed on the glorious, glorious light ahead.

For the first time, she sees the whirlwind through her own eyes, and not through the eyes of Mam's stories. The Chief is right in calling it the breath of the gods, because it holds within in a crackle, light, and lightning, embraced by wind roiling within itself, gloved in sand and dust and debris. It moves like a cloud would if it were angry. It roars mightily now, up close, as if made of mouth alone. Sand hisses in its wake, an unending flute, an orchestra of whistles, a posse of snakes.

Glorious.

She halts then, right in its path, and turns, the wall of light and sound and dust right behind her. The Chief and the sentries have stopped chasing, standing well out of the path of the wind, Tasé held down between two sentries. This far out she cannot see their faces, but by the light of their angled flames, their postures say it all: that she is a waste of existence, that she has ruined all the good work Isiuwa has done.

She takes a step forward, two, hoping he understands it. She takes another step. The wind comes behind her, but she steps forward again, buying time, reminding herself she can do better, be better. Her Mam tried, but she can try harder.

Please, please, she thinks, watching him, static between the two sentries. Please.

And as if he hears her, at the very instant she starts to feel the hairs on the back of her neck stand in response to the crackle of the wind, Tasé moves. He slips, lithe, darting, the sentries too shocked by everything to react properly. He ditches his top cloak as he speeds across the sand, his skin black and melding with the night. His father, the Chief, follows, lumbering along, screaming his name, the fires of the sentries bobbing alongside him.

The whirlwind of time, of gods, of opportunity, of liberation, leans down right then and embraces her. Sand fills her eyes, her mouth, her nose, her ears. Her skin tingles softly, and she feels her feet leaving the sand.

But she sticks out an arm all the same.

It feels like ages, and like a faraway thing, when a sandy hand grasps hers. She pulls-to herself, to the Mams who dared to leave before, to the future, to power.

They rise, together. She knows it is together because she knows the weight of defiance. She offers herself to the wind and they slip, slip, losing all sense of time and space. They become nothing and everything, and all is possible in the breath of the gods, a breath that is now theirs to breathe. Wherever it would take them, they do not know, but at least one thing is sure: that their tongues and their bodies and their hearts will belong to them.

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Do not go out to the dunes, the Chief says to Isiuwa. You'd do well not to awaken the wrath of the whistling gods. This does not stop Nata from trying to leave again. Once the New Moon assembly is over, she slinks away to the community market.

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What the Dead Man Said by Chinelo Onwualu

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What the Dead Man Said by Chinelo Onwualu

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A short story about climate change, migration, and family secrets, "What the Dead Man Said" is a look at a dystopian future through a modern lens. It draws on the experiences of its BIPOC narrator but is not reliant solely on race to express the tension and ties.

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Read a New Short Story About Climate Change, Migration, and Family Secrets

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The latest Future Tense Fiction story is by Chinelo Onwualu looks at the interplay between climate disaster and family disaster.

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The students get a kick out of this video. What life would be like "in the future" world of... 22 years ago. This video is especially fun since they go outline "schooling at home" and it conjures a lot of "No! No more ZOOM!" from the ckass.

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I show this YouTube video when we start looking into the world of Dystopia and 1984. It's fascinating to see what people thought the world would be like and how technology would help.

In terms of race and diversity... well-- there isn't any. But that does open the door to discussion based around why not and what the climate was like at the time.