I finally found a minute to binge-watch HBO’s Lovecraft Country earlier this week.
I love what it does politically and aesthetically—inserting black Americans into HP Lovecraft’s racist sci-fi imaginary, and then seeing how blackness explodes/exposes the whiteness, racism, antiblackness of mainstream sci-fi, while showing the everydayness of horror and speculative thinking for African Americans.
Since I teach about Afrofuturism and am writing a monograph on Caribbean time travel narratives, a number of the show’s elements excited me. [SPOILERS AHEAD!!]
The latter part of season 1 sees the black characters time traveling, including to what turns out to be parallel universes where one character, Hippolyta Freeman, has the power to enlarge herself from the strictures of being black and female in the 1950s, to travel to spaces of freedom and joy, and to name herself as she chooses, which naming creates realities she desires. But then we immediately see the consequences of that freedom: if she takes full advantage of her newfound powers she’ll have to abandon her black daughter to orpanhood and the spiritual oppression of white men.
The conundrum of time travel for Hippolyta is a great example of the show’s larger premise: that even when black folk imagine and enjoy the freedoms of sci-fi and the speculative, the horrors and threats of reality pull them back, ground and often kill them. In some ways, there is no escape, at least not permanently; even your escape empowers white supremacy.
What struck me too about Hippolyta’s travel, was not just its parallels to and amplification of her husband’s literal travel on the roads of the US to create the black travel guide, but that it made really palpable for me the traumas of being black in America that are still foreign to me. (As someone who grew up in an independent, black majority country with black and brown prime ministers and even a black female prime minister, who’s never had to live from birth with the knowledge that my skin marks me as other, a threat, or grants those in power license to kill me for just existing while black, I’ve had to learn through mediatized images of black death the everpresent horror my black brothers and sisters in this country I now live know intimately.)
In “Lovecraft Country,” all the familiar tropes of sci-fi and horror take on new dimensions and impossibilities. What is the road movie to a black man when freedom of travel and being are not available to African Americans—not in the 1950s of the show’s primary setting, nor in the 1920s of the Tulsa Massacre, nor even today in 2020 as we’re watching or 2016 when the novel was published? What is horror, or a monster that eats your flesh and maims you, to black folk whose close relatives were kidnapped, tortured, experimented on? Or, what is fantastic or science-fictional about time travel when the horrors of black history are not past but ever-present, when the present time and space are haunted by the re-memory of oppressed and brutalized ancestors?
This haunting of the ghosts of the brutalized shows up in the episode when Leti buys a mansion in a white neighborhood, while the notion of the past that is not past recurs in the Tulsa memories and when Leti, Tic and Montrose “rewind” or travel back in time to 1921 to retrieve a book that otherwise perished. And in this episode, even with a time machine and a cyborg mother who can be the ‘motherboard’ to rig time travel, they cannot save their ancestors from the brutal burning of the Tulsa massacre, constrained by the grandfather paradox (and also the loop effect: that if you’ve traveled to the past, your travel to the past and presence there was always in the causal loop--and so if someone intervened back then, that was likely you).
This is the value of the Afrofuturist mode: not to imagine places of escape, but to render aesthetically the impossibilities, the realities of the black condition that make escape impossible, realities that constrain, realities that jar us from the fiction, realities that make the normative tropes of mainstream sci-fi unstick or go out of joint. One of the most jarring subplots raises the question of how do you enjoy body-switching spells into white womanhood when you are still the black woman underneath watching and perhaps participating in antiblackness; what are the limits of allyship and system-breaking you can accomplish in this body?
Misha Green’s (showrunner) and Jordan Peele’s (exec producer) and Mark Ruff’s dub version of HP Lovecraft’s tropes and aesthetics perform an Afrofuturist read: how do black readers read mainstream sci-fi? Where do they see themselves, and what happens when they imagine themselves in those narratives? What is undone, what is deepened, what is problematized, what is revealed? And so white cops are revealed as more monstrous and frightening than actual monsters (the monsters are actually the best news for the black characters, as they save them from being lynched in the bushes, never to be heard from again).
I love that Dee crafts her own black comics and in effect writes into being her mother as time traveler; that Hippolyta, a middle aged black woman, is a math/engineering genius that figures out and rigs the time machine; that the unborn son of Tic and Leti writes the story we’re watching, but as “family history” not as sci-fi (note, one man’s sci-fi is another man’s history/realism).
I didn’t love the season’s ending or the moments in the series where killing white people is the culminating point of the plot arc (even though, obviously, characters are in a fight for their lives and the killing is often justified). It’s the same problem I had with Django Unchained and Inglorious Basterds and HBO’s Watchmen too, but perhaps that’s just because revenge fantasies have little appeal for me.
I’m more interested in the use of speculation to shift power and to dismantle systems. So a more provocative moment in the final episodes was when Tic’s black female ancestors join forces with Leti in the present to wrench magic from the Braithwaites and to keep magic only for black folk. That’s a system change. One of the recurring themes of the show and one of its lingering messages from the finale is that white people no matter how benign, even those in relationships with black folk, will always find ways of killing/torturing/consuming black bodies for their own power and supremacy. Unless black folk can steal or co-opt the means of power (in this case, magic) the struggle and system will continue with new agents.
I must say my absolute favorite thing was the moment in the final episode where all our characters pile into Woody for one last road trip, and they start singing the song on the radio—I mean singing “Life can be a dream” (Sh-boom) on the way to fight magic-wielding white supremacists! BTW, the music in this series was SUBLIME—even the use of speeches as soundtrack was amazing.
To conclude: More black stories, more black nerdery, more black sci-fi, more black people being bad-ass, more black storytellers and directors, more black stars in shows not about slavery, more black awesomeness please!