Broken Places & Outer Spaces: Finding Creativity in the Unexpected (TED Books)

by Nnedi Okorafor

adrenaline blends with my poor proprioception and this robs me of my balance.

Familiar

Before I can get to the point where I am swimming, I have to fall.

it could be augmented with technology and allow me to move about the world with ease and agility. Not as I used to in the first half of my life, but as a cyborg.

back, I already identified as a rudimentary cyborg, part basic machine, so it wouldn’t be that much of a leap.

For me, the dark has never been uninhabited. The wind has always brought things. Masquerades are real and the ancestors can be guides.

Growing up, most science fiction novels and films presented boldly white male–dominated worlds where I knew I could never exist on my own terms. In these narratives, I found that I, more often than not, empathized with the aliens/others more than the protagonists, so reading these stories felt more like an attack on my person than an empowerment. I also resisted the themes of exploration with the intent to colonize that ran so strong in these narratives. They never felt right to me (especially being the child of immigrants from an African country colonized by Europeans) or interesting.

returning to Nigeria brought me back around to the sciences through science fiction, for those family trips to Nigeria were where and why I started wondering and then dreaming about the effects of technology and where it could take us in the future.

What we perceive as limitations have the potential to become strengths greater than what we had when we were “normal” or unbroken. In much of science fiction, when something breaks, something greater often emerges from the cracks. This is a philosophy that positions our toughest experiences not as barriers, but as doorways, and may be the key to us becoming our truest selves. In Japan there is an art form called kintsugi, which means “golden joinery,” to repair something with gold. It treats breaks and repairs as a part of the object’s history. In kintsugi, you don’t merely fix what’s broken, you repair the total object. In doing so, you transform what you have fixed into something more beautiful than it previously was.

Because in order to really live life, you must live life. And that is rarely achieved without cracks along the way. There is often a sentiment that we must remain new, unscathed, unscarred, but in order to do this, you must never leave home, never experience, never risk or be harmed, and thus never grow.

No, my parents knew better than to go by old American “truths.”

It had been like this almost every day. We were always running. The minute we got off the bus, we were running from white folk.

“Where’re you little monkeys gonna run now?!” Michelle Ryan sang. The other kids grinned uneasily. They had never caught their prey and they weren’t sure what to do now that they had us. But I saw their hands, which were clenched and shaking. And I saw the look in their eyes that broadcast group violence.

my sisters and I outran the masquerade and for the rest of the trip we bragged that we outran the spirits that day. You can’t, however, outrun your ancestors. I sighed, wondering if I’d ever outrun anything again. And what I wouldn’t have given for a visit from the ancestors right at that moment, so they could tell me what the hell to do.

He’d been crying and losing sleep, just like my mother. I wanted to punch him in the face and make his eyes more bloodshot with fresh blood and swelling. But I couldn’t get up.

My surgeon didn’t notice a thing. Neither did the residents standing behind him. The room should have looked as though a tornado had ripped through it. Everyone’s hair should have been blown about. Some of the residents should have been dead, dashed violently against the battered walls. Instead, they all stood there smiling pleasantly at me, studying me, taking in my details, yet missing the most vital ones. They’d all assumed I knew about my condition from the moment I woke up. But how could I have with all those hallucinations?

“Well, you look okay. Don’t worry,” he said. Then he smiled. To my eyes, his smile was sheepish and dripping with guilt, doubt, and dishonesty. He had no idea whether I would walk again.

Another wave of dizziness washed over me and I could hear my pulse in my ears. “Oh God, no no no,” I sobbed, pounding a fist into the pillow. Even this was weak. I wanted to run. Out of the room. Out of my body. I’m broken, I thought. Oh my God, I’m really, really broken.

My legs looked so thin. How quickly one’s muscle mass decreases when the muscles aren’t used.

During all that, this beast of pain was born. Unhindered by morphine, this fiery beast writhed and roiled.

Still, it was clear that my surgeon wasn’t telling me everything. It was in his sleep-deprived eyes, his tentative body language. The quiver at the corner of his mouth. Regardless, if I could conquer pain, I could conquer other things. Bigger, worse things.

I told myself that had all just been practice ...

I broke down, not fifty percent, not ninety-nine percent, but one hundred percent. Into pieces. My head tumbled into a corner, my torso rolled under the bed, my legs stacked on the floor, my potential track career vanished into thin air, my tennis career bounced into the trash, and my happiness moldered into the rotten gray color of depression. I’d become a Frida Kahlo painting. At the time, I couldn’t see past my broken self. However, when I look back, considering Frida’s lifelong struggle with her body and what that struggle opened into probably would have given me some much-needed perspective and strength. Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter who is most known for her self-portraits and ability to paint her pain into beauty. Much of Kahlo’s work centers on broken bodies, most often her own. In her painting The Broken Column, Frida paints her spine in a way that accentuates its disintegrating ...

don’t see a stone column for a spine; I see a column of steel. The cracks in it make her more flexible. I don’t see nails; I see sensors that detect the world around her, bringing her more information than any purely organic human being. I see a cyborg. Frida’s Breaking did not break her. In fact, it was because of all the pain she transcended that she made beautiful art that still moves the souls of many today. “Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?” —Frida Kahlo

didn’t view my body as broken. I reasoned that a human being can never be ‘broken.’ Technology is broken.”

People are still intrigued by the exoskeletons and getting through TSA is still a hassle, even with PreCheck, but those are minor things.

In 2029, I’m anything but normal. I am a cyborg.

in 1993, I wasn’t quite there yet. I was closer to where I’d been as an infant, frustrated as I tried to retrain my body to do such a seemingly simple task.

I brought it all with me back to my hospital room. The distant ache in my awakening legs from muscles I hadn’t used in weeks, the shake in my hands from the adrenaline that had washed into my system, the hot, tight pain of the healing scar running down my back, the glowing evidence in my heart that I could and would. I was charged. I was magical. Small yet potent, like a venomous beetle deep in the soil that had just seen a path to the surface, a crack that ran deep. I put all this down on paper, letting it heat my pen. I stayed up late, whipped up in a small tornado of writing about the woman who could fly and the shadowy man who was always standing behind my hospital bed just out of my sight.

Even before I began to write science fiction, though I didn’t know it, I was sci-fi. In those moments, my athleticism really was a superpower. Now, when I write about characters with abilities, the gift of flight, time travel, shape-shifting, I draw from my own experiences as an incredible athlete. And for these characters’ conflicts and limitations within the narrative, I draw from my experiences with and recovering from paralysis.

I raise the leg, lean forward, bring it down, I thought. Slowly, I began following my own instructions. And that was how I took my first step. Not the way a baby does it, by instinct, but by mechanics. As a science. I was reading a mental manual on walking as I made myself walk.

I was returning as a different person. Slow-moving, thinner, sadder, my head swollen with new experiences. I didn’t want to face any of this.

That other me would be lurking around the house, a confused ghost. She’d have all that energy and nothing to focus it on because her purpose had been cut free and sent spiraling into outer space.

Sometimes what you don’t understand keeps you from seeing certain obstacles and in not seeing them, you unknowingly scale them.

It’s yet another way that I have become something new, something more.

wasn’t diminished by my limitations. I’ve become more, greater. Before the Breaking, the day I awoke paralyzed from the waist down, I could not have written these words, this world, this character. The cracks the storyteller in me required weren’t there. It was because of and after the Breaking and my subsequent journey that I acquired this part of my self.

Like my space-faring character Binti, I had to leave what was normal to become greater still. It was in these strange, deep, old, and new waters that I was free. And also like Binti, after venturing into, being broken by, and changed by the unknown, it was the return home that brought it all together.

Most traditional science fiction depicts a white world where I was not able to freely exist. But in the science fiction of what I’ve come to call “Africanfuturism” (which is somewhat similar to Afrofuturism, but is specifically and more directly rooted in African culture, history, mythology, and perspective, where the center is non-Western), my characters inhabit worlds in which I can fight, play, invent, run, leap, and fly.