DREAM*HOPING INTO FUTURES

Abstract

The Harlem Renaissance espoused the modernist belief in radical new beginnings and the celebration of (aesthetic) interventions into old certainties, while resisting the “monologism” (Bakhtin) of white Western modernity and modernism. As a result, the Harlem Renaissance strived towards new futureS, nourished by dreams and hopes. The same endeavour was echoed but handled differently by the (post)modernist aesthetic strategy of Afrofuturism. Both the Harlem Renaissance and Afrofuturism’s conceptions of dreams and hopes, in given intersections (hence dream*hopes, the asterisk marking the fluid entanglement of the two concepts) and as agents of future-making, are at the fore of this article. Framed by critical race theory and underpinned by “future” as a critical category of analysis, it starts off with an examination of dream*hoping agencies of future-making in view of both the Harlem Renaissance and Afrofuturism. In doing so, Georgia Douglas Johnson and Zora Neale Hurston as well as Wanuri Kahiu’s negotiations of the agencies of dreams are discussed.

Keywords:

• futureS
• Harlem Renaissance
• Afrofuturism
• modernities

1 multiple and entangled modernities

[F]or those of us who cannot indulge

the passing dreams of choice

[…]

seeking a now that can breed

futures (Lorde, “A Litany for Survival,” lines 4–5, 10–11; emphasis added)

These verses from Audre Lorde’s poem “A Litany for Survival” (1978) narrate dreams as stemming from choices and giving rise to subsequent agencies that have the power to generate futures. The poem thus declares its intertextual kinship with the most well-known dream-narration of an ongoing Black revolution:¹ Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech (1963). This dream, as the dreamer himself passionately proclaims, is in turn “deeply rooted in the American dream” (King 113) – an illusory phantasm of future that, since its conception, has systematically excluded Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) through intersectional racism. Actively negating this exclusionary “utopia,” King’s dream epitomises what the poet Langston Hughes, more than a decade earlier in his “Harlem” (1951), had propounded as a “dream deferred” (line 1).

Ever since the first wave of European colonial conquests, BIPOC not only in the Americas but across the globe have fought racism and colonialism, investing their lives and endangering their survival. The colonisers’ infliction of physical violence that robbed people of their lands and resources, lives and labour, freedom and futures was bolstered by racist narrations postulating that since only white people were endowed with reason, they were ordained to single-handedly modernise the world and “civilise” its inhabitants. While proclaiming the absence of religious, juridical, or political structures as well as knowledges and moralities, colonisers in fact encountered full-fledged societies with multifarious histories and prospering modernities, which had to be silenced and annulled if the civilising myth was to continue functioning as truth.

As is only too well known, this so-called civilising mission had the sole purpose of justifying colonialism. However, this enormously profitable yet inherently fabricated self-justification would have begun to quickly unravel once the colonised too were accepted as having already been modern, or as capable of becoming truly modernised. Accordingly, the imperialist modernisation theory had to include the claim that the mission to modernise the world was a white duty and, yet, one that could never be fully accomplished. While colonialism was disguised as the agent of modernisation, its ideology strongly maintained the vacuity of this project: though in need of civilisation and modernisation, the colonised were deemed incapable of becoming truly civilised or modern. Positing itself as the only concept with universal validity, Western modernity ushered the colonised into what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls the “waiting room of history” (8).

Having painted itself into a corner with the blood of its victims, white Western modernity eventually betrayed the proclaimed ideals of freedom, equality, and progress, and was consequently challenged and complemented by interventional projects both in the colonies and the respective diasporas – the Harlem Renaissance being a prominent manifestation. Radical new beginnings that intervened into white Western certainties were envisioned, which white Western modernism failed to uproot. Echoing the reformist attitudes of Renaissance humanism, the Harlem Renaissance aimed to transcend the feudalist economy and violence of the rural Deep South, aspiring to an urban future that could finally be dreamed more inclusively. It espoused the modernist belief in radical new beginnings and the celebration of (aesthetic) interventions into old certainties, in doing so resisting the “monologism” (Bakhtin) of white Western modernity and modernism. As a result, the Harlem Renaissance strived towards new futureS, nourished by dreams and hopes.

The same endeavour was echoed but handled differently by Afrofuturism. As a (post)modernist aesthetic strategy, Afrofuturism comprises narratives of futures conceived by Black agencies from Africa and its diasporas. Both the Harlem Renaissance and Afrofuturism’s conceptions of dreams and hopes, in given intersections (hence dream*hopes, the asterisk marking the fluid entanglement of the two concepts) and as agents of future-making, are at the fore of this article. Framed by critical race theory and underpinned by “future” as a critical category of analysis, it starts off with an examination of dream*hoping agencies of future-making in view of both the Harlem Renaissance and Afrofuturism. To revisit the Harlem Renaissance in relation to modernity, we will focus on two women writers of this cultural movement – Georgia Douglas Johnson and Zora Neale Hurston – and their literary negotiations of the agencies of dreams. Then we will discuss the Afrofuturist film Pumzi (2009) by Wanuri Kahiu, investigating the agency of dream*hopes in terms of memory-powered acts of future-making. Framing these analyses, we first theorise dream*hopes with respect to futureS, which will then lead into a discussion of the Ghanaian concept of Sankofa and its philosophy of looking into the past while moving towards futureS.

2 dream*hoping futures

“Future” denotes more than the time to come, and it is too multifarious to be reduced to the (simplicity of any) singular. We must speak of “futureS” to emphasise their plurality and polyphony while being governed by modes of relationality and causality. FutureS do not simply occur; they are made, or unmade, by human actors with distinct agencies, who are positioned within power-coded social spaces nonetheless. FutureS are moulded by both the past and the present and are thus causally interlinked and interlocked. Formed in the context of conflicting, competing, and complementary interests and framed by contingencies, alternatives, and possibilities, some futureS have supported and advanced each other while destabilising or preventing others. Therefore, futureS are not only concerned with what will or might happen but they also deliberate on what could have happened if they had not been devastated, or at least deferred, when “only” a dream (see also Arndt, “Dream*Hoping Memory into FutureS”).

What would have happened, one wonders, if Maafa – coined by anthropologist Marimba Ani, denoting the European enslavement of Africans (see also Arndt, Rassistisches Erbe 165–70) – had not destroyed the lives of millions as well as the economic and political structures in Africa to funnel stolen labour and ransacked resources into the insatiable furnace of the Industrial Revolution and its modernity. This is not an exercise in counterfactual history; it is a matter of “remembering” that the BIPOC “were never meant to survive” (Lorde, “Litany,” lines 2–3). And yet, BIPOC survived into futureS full of resistance and intervention, the most recent incarnation of which is the now global Black Lives Matter movement, pursuing – among other goals – reparations for the white enslavement of Blacks.

Dreams exceed the limits of the plausible; hopes breed new plausibilities. Entangling the two in mutual complementarity, the concept of dream*hopes is intended to encompass individual and collective impressions, images, and ideas in various states of their inception and iteration, from the slightest to the highest forms of their manifestation. If, as Toni Morrison puts it in Playing in the Dark, “The subject of the dream is the dreamer” (17), then dream*hopes must be the province of dream*hopers. Dream*hopers are socially positioned subjects who act within power-coded agencies; and although their dream*hopes, too, are moulded by such social positions, dream*hopes are much freer and thus more powerful than dream*hopers themselves. Just like their human subjects, dream*hopes can be silenced, but, unlike humans, they cannot be imprisoned or killed. Bridging individual and collective visions, they can even survive the physical death of the dream*hoper. What is more, dream*hopes enjoy a particular mode of freedom, in that they intervene into “realities” without being expected to map out the road or hand out the tools needed to realise them. As such, dream*hopes are time travellers that voyage to the horizon that keeps projecting evenly shared futureS. Take abolitionism, for example; it was Black enslaved people who were bereft of the agency to shape their own lives and futures. Yet their resistance persisted and they insisted that this condition is neither normal nor perpetual. Memories of former lives fed dreams of change that nourished hopes for futureS. Such dream*hopes fortified the enslaved in their resistance and revolt against the enslaver’s structures of violence; and while countless were forced to give up their lives in pursuit of freedom, none gave up the dream*hopes that turned into a movement such as the Harlem Renaissance. Glimpses of alternative futureS triggered structural changes that eventually garnered support even from within white structures and generated new options for Blacks in Africa and its diasporas.

Dream*hopes do not constitute agency per se, but they have the power to offer agencies to move on, intervene, resist, and effect change. They materialise when translated into agencies and actions – the more collective, the more powerful – to generate alternate futureS. Dream*hoping relies on the knowledge afforded by memory. We dream because we can remember; we hope because we have come to know that there are other options out there. Seen the other way around, the death of memories may be the onset of dream*hopes and the respective futureS thus envisioned. Memory has the power to narrate what has been done, what has been wrong and what has gone lost. However, if we do not actively (try to) remember, it is as if memories were never formed in the first place. Memories, though, can remind us that things have been different in the past and could therefore change. They can also focus on the historical becoming of power-coded social inequalities and their agendas of normality. Thus tuned, remembering – that is, (re)activating memories – can translate into ideas for a present in transition towards new futureS. Forgetting, in turn, manifests itself as a disconnection from what has been, thus nullifying the drive for envisioning dream*hopes and alternate futureS.

To further explore how futureS are indebted to memory-driven dream*hopes, we now turn to a poetic reading of the Akan symbol of Sankofa, the West African symbol of the wisdom in learning from the past, which also finds reverberations in the Harlem Renaissance.

3 the akan sankofa

“Sankofa” (1976) – poet Albert Kayper-Mensah’s transmediation of the Akan symbol from image into verse – furnishes us with a metaphoric constellation for elaborating on the concepts of dream*hopes and futureS. The poem’s lyrical I immediately asserts the bird’s wisdom: “That bird is wise” because Sankofa is picky about what to invite into the present and its futureS. As axiomatic as this may sound, it is in no way a poetic ploy to alienate – as ancient aphoristic symbols tend to – but an invitation to “Look” in order to emulate, not to disarm but to empower. We are being summoned, in other words, by and together with the poet, to choose to see Sankofa as nursing an egg or a seed rather than struggling with a burden. Thus seen, we perceive the past as the locus of dream*hopes in given entanglements capable of nourishing agencies that can un/make futureS. Bridging past, present, and futureS, Sankofa projects agencies informed by both memories and dream*hopes, beckoning us to acquire a methodological approach to mining the past as the treasure trove of ancestral dream*hopes long deferred. It is only “then” – only after adopting such a mindset for dealing with the past – that the bird “steps forward.” FutureS are not granted but are made by agencies nurtured by memories and dream*hopes. It is this convergence of ingredients (only) that makes it possible to meet futureS undaunted and “undeterred,” futureS bearing movements such as the Harlem Renaissance that move generations forward.

4 harlem renaissance as entangled counter-modernity

Colonialism claimed to be the agent of modernity; and while European colonialism terrorised the planet, modernities met, multiplied, and mobilised. As a result, the racism of white Western modernity was called out and pushed back by what Paul Gilroy calls “counter modernity” (2), a most prominent instance thereof was the Harlem Renaissance, which we now turn to discussing.

The year 1916 marked the nascence of the Great Migration, in the course of which millions of Black people relocated from the rural South to the industrial, urban North, where they nonetheless continued to face racial segregation and contend with white terrorism. The early civil rights movement, as represented by such seminal figures as Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and W.E.B. Du Bois, nourished Black resistance with new ideas and strategies. It is of little wonder then that, to many Blacks, the 1920s felt as a moment in time when the “dream deferred” would once and for all “explode” (Hughes, line 11) – a realisation that informed the very spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. As argued above, the Harlem Renaissance was a reactive reinterpretation of white Western modernism that aimed to resituate the latter through Black interventions, such as the aesthetic strategy of “remixing” (see Arndt and Ofuatey-Alazard) modes and genres. This is most visibly manifested in Jazz, which eventually became the music of the 1920s – not merely as Black music but as the American art form par excellence. Likewise, Black modernist literature remixed languages, genres, and media by, for instance, featuring African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and intertextualities indebted to African oral literatures.

This monumental movement, despite paving Black people’s way toward a more equitable American Dream, was not immune to its own strains of sexism. Black women had to fend off the oppressive forces of patriarchal norm/ality ingrained not only in white Western modernity/modernism but in the Harlem Renaissance as well (see, e.g., Hull; Story). Thus framed, Black women, even more than Black men, had to seek new beginnings in the realm of contingencies rather than realities, struggling to open up their own routes through the movement, sustained by the power of dreams. In other words, for this generation of women, futureS were about dream*hopes rather than real-life changes and tangible achievements. An overview of these challenges is exemplified here by two texts from two of the most influential women protagonists of the Harlem Renaissance – namely, Georgia Douglas Johnson and Zora Neale Hurston. This selection also allows us to delve into the aesthetic commonalities that crisscross the two genres of poetry and prose.

5 dream*hopes in georgia douglas johnson’s poetry and zora neale hurston’s their eyes were watching god

The lyrical I in Georgia Douglas Johnson’s “Your World” (1962) opens by letting us in on something so simply true that it often goes overlooked: the dimensions of our reality are of our own making. She is sharing that with us now, having learned it the hard way, for she too “used to abide / In the narrowest nest in a corner” (Johnson, “Your World,” I/2–3). However, this being a narrative of triumph over paralysis, she would not let us despair too long over this sorry state of affairs. Thus, in the second stanza, we are entrusted with how she came to be a messenger of hope: she fought her stagnation when she sighted hope burning bright on “the distant horizon” (II/1), becoming determined to “travel” (III/4). She mobilised the seemingly feeble power of the breeze by the strength of dream*hoping into futureS, enabling herself to soar towards new horizons (III/3). As the poem concludes, the lyrical I’s firm belief in new beginnings and ruptures – which promise “rapture,” em“power”ment, and “ease” (III/4) – delivers us back to the cautionary note with which the poem opened.

This mood is also featured in Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). It contrasts the protagonist, Janie, who, against all odds, dream*hopes herself into “the distant horizon” of new futureS, and her grandmother, Nanny, who remains in the grip of a past trauma that kills her capacity to dream*hope big enough to find “rapture, power and ease” (Johnson, “Your World,” III/4). The novel’s opening lines speak of “ships at a distance” that “have every man’s wish on board” (Hurston 32), while fulfilling them unevenly in Jim Crow-era West Florida. “For some” – and against the backdrop of the novel, this “some” reads as being about white people – “they come in with the tide,” while “for others” – and this “others” is consequently all about being Black – “they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time” (32).

This death of dreams and the respective resignation happen to Janie’s grandmother, Nanny. Born into slavery, she is raped by a white man, and when faced with the threat of being tortured to death for giving birth to the child, she escapes. Yet freedom does not turn out to be a safe space for her either. Her daughter is raped by a white man too, and when she consequently drowns herself in alcoholism, Nanny has to raise her daughter’s daughter, Janie, on her own. Traumatised by white patriarchal violence, Nanny does something that the lyrical I of Johnson’s poem “My Little Dreams” (1918) speaks about: “folding up” her “little dreams” in her “heart,” eager to “forget” them because seeing them not come true is a “torture” (I/1–4) that echoes the tortures that have coloured her life. As a result, Nanny says to Janie:

[U]s colored folks is branches without roots and that makes things come round in queer ways […] Ah was born back due in slavery so it wasn’t for me to fulfill my dreams of whut a woman oughta be and to do. Dat’s one of de hold-backs of slavery […] Ah didn’t want to be used for a work-ox and a brood-sow and Ah didn’t want ma daughter used dat way neither […] Ah been waitin’ a long time, Janie, but nothin’ Ah been through ain’t too much if you just take a stand on high ground lak Ah dreamed. (Hurston 49)

Restraining oneself from dreaming is of a piece with the “abid[ing] / In the narrowest nest in a corner” that constrains Johnson’s lyrical I in “Your World.” Eventually paralysed into a bereavement of dreaming and respective agencies, Nanny cannot dismantle the “master’s house” and is hence unable to dream big (Lorde, “Master’s Tools”). As a result, she forces her granddaughter into a marriage with an elderly Black man whom Janie loathes – because, to Nanny, this would at least be not rape. Nevertheless, this does not correspond to free-born Janie’s understanding of dream*hoping into futureS. “Sighting” herself at “the distant horizon,” she is upset that

Some people could look at a mud-puddle and see an ocean with ships. But Nanny belonged to that other kind that loved to deal in scraps. Here Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon – for no matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you – and pinched it in to such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter’s neck tight enough to choke her. She hated the old woman who had twisted her so in the name of love. (Hurston 130)

This attitude of Nanny equals the “folding up” of dreams that is eventually perceived as history repeating itself on and on. However, unlike Douglas’s lyrical I, Janie does not want to fold up her dreams. Her take on dreams is summarised by the lines that complement the novel’s very beginning: “Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly” (32).

Women (or some of them, since Nanny does not behave like this) pick from the past what they wish to carry with them into the future, thus manipulating dreams into (some kind of) “truth.” In other words, women have, just like Sankofa, the capacity to reconstruct pasts based on an amalgamation of both forgetting and remembering selectively – thus helping themselves to what is left at their disposal: dreaming into truth and acting according to this dream-truth. Dreams, however, are as powerful as they are fragile, we are told both in Johnson’s poems and Hurston’s novel; they can be disillusioned and sentenced to death – or breathed into new lives.

When Nanny’s promise that the at-least-not-rape-marriage will eventually trigger love does not come true, because Mr Killicks (nomen est omen) belongs to those “folks” that were “never […] meant to be loved,” “Janie’s first dream was dead” (Hurston 57). Yet neither did she die nor did her dreaming dry up. Rather, “she became a woman” (57). Reading “woman” in the light of the opening paragraph, we see Janie asserting her agency to leave the unwanted past behind by translating the disappointment into a dream*hope that can build new truths, get things done, and generate futureS.

Janie leaves her husband, Mr Killicks, for another dream – as projected (in the midst of a patriarchal social order) onto another husband, Joe. Though Joe “did not represent sun-up and pollen and blooming trees” – that is, dream-love – “he spoke for far horizon. He spoke for change and chance” (Hurston 61). Janie believes that these changes and chances are about pursuing the American Dream together. Yet, just like the Harlem Renaissance was first and foremost a patriarchally coded social and cultural movement, Joe’s heading towards the horizon is coloured by a patriarchal agenda. After founding their own Black town, he becomes the mayor, silencing Janie into the role of a submissive, serving wife and eventually beating her. Disillusioned, she admits, Joe “never was the flesh and blood figure of her dreams” but “just something she had grabbed up to drape her dreams over” (111). Rather than giving up, she once again “folds up” her dream while waiting eagerly, once again, for the morning to set sail in a dream-vessel of her own to travel the sea towards the horizon, from despair to hope.

Eventually freed by Joe’s death, she returns to dreaming again and using its agency for effecting another chance and change: she falls in love with yet another man, nicknamed Tea Cake, who, although a gambler and the cheater that Janie’s friends believe him to be, turns out to be her dream-love. Nevertheless, this dream too ends as a nightmare when, defending Janie from a rabid dog, Tea Cake himself is bitten and falls ill. In his frenzied state, Tea Cake attacks Janie, who fatally shoots him in self-defence to femicide.

Pondering on this bittersweet ending from the standpoint of the opening lines, one wonders whether this third dream actually unfolded as described by Johnson’s lyrical I in “Your World.” In other words, catching rabies might be a metaphor with which to imply Tea Cake’s violence and thus Janie’s renewed disappointment in Black patriarchy. If, as the opening lines suggest, Janie remembers what she can bear in order to keep on living in the midst of disappointment – since dreams are the very elixir that keeps her faith in futureS – she might have made up this bittersweet ending to keep on dreaming herself into survival or, even better, into enjoying life. After all, if she is able to remember Tea Cake as a fulfilment of her dreams, whether he lived up to it or not, symbolically, this same “tea cake” becomes equated with the very “bread” she needs to “eat”: “Maybe he ain’t nothin […] but he is something in my mouth” (Hurston 76). This “something” is the nourishment that her mouth knows how to translate into the agency to speak up and dream*hope, allowing her to become herself in her very own world.

It is not only the recalling of the third marriage that may be unreliable though. Since we are told in the opening lines that Janie chooses to remember what suits her best, and the novel’s autodiegetic narrator keeps focalising Janie’s perspective above all, we may wonder whether the novel’s entire narration may rely on an unreliable narrator. And if it is rather an unreliable narrator who is at work here, why would that be the case? Perhaps because only an unreliable narrator is capable of dealing with the “death” of dreams in a way that the new dreams “will not reflect the death” of the old ones, as Audre Lorde’s lyrical I stresses (“Litany,” I/14). The unreliable narrator blurs Janie’s memories, dressing her in a coat of wind, and allows for a vagueness that keeps paving Janie’s dream*hopes for new futureS. She overcomes the trauma her mother and grandmother were paralysed by, while also rising above the very betrayals and disillusionments that keep framing her own life. The narrator’s unreliability thus feeds her with some bread of hope, the taste of which is stronger than the smell of hopes that have been forced out of existence.

In other words, to Black women such as Janie, Sankofa-esque, dream-driven memories seem to be the only reliable option for living one’s very own life in the midst of a world order that keeps discriminating against Black women intersectionally. By stressing that a selected-memory-narration can turn dreams into “truth” and inform actions that “do things,” the narrator stresses why dream*hopes are desperately needed for exploring new horizons and pursuing changes, chances, and thus “dreams of choice.” This very take on future-making also informs Afrofuturism.

6 afrofuturism

White modernism denied BIPOC modernisms, having itself devoured them, only then to claim that BIPOC societies had neither history nor futures. This vicious paradox is especially paradigmatic of science fiction, which not only predominantly casts white characters as protagonists but, more importantly, functions as an apparatus of “control through prediction” of white-centric futures (Eshun, “Afrofuturism” 289). Projecting a more advanced image of the white present, mainstream science fiction “colonises [and] preprograms [the future]” by promoting those narrations that feature white modes of existence, politico-economic interaction, and artistic creation (Gibson, qtd in Flint). What is more, catastrophes are often narrated as shattering the continent of Africa first, while white survival in America is guaranteed to make for a happy ending.

Countering these narrations of Africa as a testing ground for apocalyptic plotlines, writers from the Global South have, for decades, invited the world to imagine futureS through the alternative prism of non-white technocultures. “Stag[ing] a series of enigmatic returns to the constitutive trauma of slavery in the light of science fiction” (Eshun, “Afrofuturism” 299), Afrofuturism is one of the most potent modes of this intervention. Afrofuturistic scenarios take place in a technologically advanced Africa, giving centre stage to Black characters and, thus, negating the perpetually dystopian fate usually imagined as gripping the continent. In Afrofuturist storytelling, contrary to the white supremacist propaganda that characterises Africa as pastless, narratives are nourished by dream*hopes that, à la Sankofa, bridge the past, the present, and the future. While giving space to the mourning of past tragedies such as Maafa by acknowledging that those “who were never meant to survive” had history before violence descended upon them, memory is not meant to debilitate but to enable agencies of future-making that demand futureS to be shared evenly (Gibson).

As a genre, Afrofuturism mobilises an array of ideas that find expression in music (e.g., Sun Ra’s soundtrack album and film Space Is the Place), philosophy (e.g., Kodwo Eshun’s book More Brilliant Than the Sun), novels (e.g., Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon), essay-film (e.g., Black Audio Film Collective’s The Last Angel of History, or The Mothership Connection) as well as film, one of the most influential being the environmentalist-feminist short Pumzi by Kenyan artist-activist Wanuri Kahiu.

7 wanuri kahiu’s pumzi (2009)

Having been informed of the narrative’s spacetime – thirty-five years after WWIII, standing not for the third “world” but “water” war, in East Africa – we learn, through glimpses at newspaper pages, of the devastations leading up to the formation of the Maitu community. A postapocalyptic settlement governed over by a techno-dictatorship, it is powered by exercise machines transforming free human labour into energy. The Kikuyu word maitu means “mother” and consists of “MA” (truth) and “ITU” (ours), hence “our truth.” This we read on the label under a jar containing a seed kept at the Virtual Natural History Museum, where we meet the sleeping protagonist, Asha, dreaming herself in a desert, reaching out to touch a lonely tree.

“DREAM DETECTED … Take your dream suppressants” (Pumzi 1:12–1:20), commands a digitised voice that, despite its monotony, is clearly alarmed. This is the voice of the techno-dictatorship’s justifiable dread of a rival power: dream*hopes.

“Our truth,” or the status quo, is that “The outside is dead,” a bone-dry nuclear wasteland. Just like its real-world analogues, this dictatorship, too, blinded by the same lies it feeds its subjects, mistakes those who have bought into this truism – i.e., living on their own recycled urine and sweat as their world’s currency – as representative of the whole population.

Within that system, however, we encounter Asha, who is privileged, not only because she is not among those having to provide physical labour but because her position at the museum puts her in daily contact with pictures of trees as well as the (dry) branches of this erstwhile life form, now long lost. Although memory is all that remains of vegetation, it is powerful nonetheless, as it serves as the soil that can nourish dream*hopes of alternative futureS. Pumzi features the memory of nature and its death. Despite the museum’s narration of dead nature in the museum’s pictorial palimpsest, nature is alive. And it is the imagination thus provided that grants Asha the very agency needed to imagine a tree in her very Now. Thus equipped, she can dream*hope and long for it, so that what might seem like a void (i.e., her failing to touch the tree in her dream, interrupted by the digital voice that awakes her) eventually turns into a success, in that the dream*hope is already a thinking beyond the possible. Her dream triggers a hope that eventually turns into resistance for the sake of futureS.

Shortly after her first dream, Asha discovers a soil sample with an “abnormally high water content” (Pumzi 5:06) and without “radioactivity” (5:22). Upon smelling the soil, Asha is overtaken by a vision of herself submerged, floating, surrounded by the underwater roots of a mighty tree. As she is about to run out of air and suffocate, it is revealed to her in a flash as the very same tree of her dreams. She awakes and anxiously sets out to take the first steps towards realising her vision, proceeding to water the soil, planting the seed, and, Sankofa-like, nursing the soil*seed of memory into the dream*hope of futureS. To “test its growth potential” (6:55) outside, she needs to apply to the Council for an exit visa, which is immediately denied on account of Maitu’s constitutive truth “The outside is dead!” (7:51). As if to falsify this alleged impossibility, the outside speaks its own truth: a seedling has in the meantime sprung. “But I know it’s alive!” (8:04) Asha protests, and to substantiate her claim, she invokes the alternative truth of her dream*hope, casting it on the interface screen, which, however, only results in the Council’s instruction to take her dream suppressants again.

In defying her superiors, she asserts her agency, but this naturally comes at a price. She is fired and sentenced to labour at the machines. Yet irreversibly energised by the dream*hope, Asha resists and flees, determined to sow the seedling at the soil’s very origin in the middle of the desert. She crosses it, exhausting herself, neither eating nor drinking, watering the seed instead, while herself subsisting on her dream*hope. Though ending up meeting “her tree” dried up and dead, Asha keeps dream*hoping. She plants the seed, nurturing it with water recycled from her own waste, shading it with her body, giving birth to a trans*species human*tree that grows into a forest.

“Pumzi” is the Kiswahili word for “breath,” and breath it is that Asha is giving to the world. Photosynthetically, human exhalation provides trees and plants with carbon dioxide, which they turn into the oxygen that we breathe. Metaphorically, this is the symbiosis that ultimately outwits and outlives the techno-dictatorship, thus reviving futureS declared to be dead. Donating her bodily fluids such as her recycled sweat, urine, and eventually blood for the survival of her seedling is a trans*species idea of inhabiting the planet – which seems to be our last chance indeed.

8 conclusion

This article discussed the power of dream*hopes in undoing white ablations of BIPOC futureS by examining the central role that revisiting old truths and certainties plays in the Harlem Renaissance as well as Afrofuturism. Yet no rupture is ever a complete break with its past; to the contrary, new beginnings are about processes of continuation in the midst of discontinuities. Throughout processes of modernisation and modernity, racism and sexism continued to exist, not haphazardly but actively implemented into modernity and modernism by white heteronormative supremacy, not to mention the sexism ingrained in Black patriarchy. Forced into these power structures and the respective futureS, Black women have shared dream*hopes that travel into futureS yet unseen. This is an ongoing revolution amidst “counter modernities” and Afrofuturist interventions – a revolution that keeps informing Black women’s art about dream*hopes that have the power to pave new futureS. Black Lives Matter protesters keep reminding us that although the majority of these dreams have yet to come true, they, just like Janie and Asha, will never give up dream*hoping. That is because narrations such as Georgia Douglas Johnson’s “Your World” and Zora Neale Hurston’s interventions into futureS have empowered generations – all the way from Audre Lorde’s to Wanuri Kahiu’s – to keep on intervening.

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We believe that the concept of “race” was invented to serve as a pseudo-biological footing for the discriminatory ideology of racism. However, as racism continues to terrorise the planet, “race,” as a matrix of power, also continues to position individuals and collectives, both locally and globally. In order to reflect these racialised positions orthographically, we capitalise Black and italicise white. This distinction is to mark that it is Black rather than white agencies that have shaped the struggle to undermine race and fight racism.