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

by Nnedi Okorafor

I was an imaginative child. Pop-up books were portals to other planets and dimensions, even if they were nonfiction books about human anatomy or the world of birds.

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.

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.

I lost my faith in science after an operation left me mysteriously paralyzed from the waist down. It took years, but battling through my paralysis was the very thing that ignited my passion for storytelling and the transformative power of the imagination.

This series of openings and awakenings led me to a profound realization: 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.

It was May 18, 1993. I was nineteen years old and just back from my first year at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I entered the hospital that fateful day on my own two strong legs. I woke up many hours later paralyzed from the waist down. This was the Breaking, and little did I know that it would lead me to become more than I would have ever been without it.

My family was one of the first black families to move into the neighborhood and there was a heavy price to pay for this. They threw paint into our swimming pool, sent letters of hate to our mailbox, shouted “Niggers go home!” as they passed in their cars. Constant harassment. Nevertheless, neither my sisters nor I thought much about it. It all came with the territory. And being the daughters of confident, academically gifted immigrant doctors from Nigeria, we were taught that all ailments—physical and otherwise—could be worked with, if not cured, taught to always walk with our heads up and to look a scary thing in its many eyes. My parents were essentially healers, their jobs were to make people feel okay, and their kids were not exceptions. Their words were like vitamins to us.

I was now malfunctioning. I needed a hard reset.

I felt nothing from the waist down. At about my belly button, there was tingling when I touched the flesh there, but beyond that perimeter was an abyss. It was as if half of me had teleported to another dimension. Probably one where I had a straight spine and an athletic career.

wanted to run. Out of the room. Out of my body. I’m broken, I thought. Oh my God, I’m really, really broken.

What am I? Who am I if I can’t run?

I looked up and blinked, realizing something. I still felt the pain, clutching me as tightly as ever, its weight pressing me down. It was so bad that I was squinting my eyes, tears were rolling down my face, my mouth hung open, and I was gripping the pen so hard that my double-jointed fingers bent in crazy directions. And yet, under that weight and compression, something in me aligned, focused, opened.

if the timeline is accurate, Shelley was pregnant when she wrote Frankenstein. In the novel, the scientist creates unnatural life and it runs amok. It’s not hard to see the connections.

In this stillness, she is forced to rediscover and then use mental skills she’s forgotten because of the hatred clouding her mind. The lessons she learns from this moment of forced staticity would save her life later on and make her a far greater warrior.

After a hard reset, the reboot had finally truly begun.

The sensation in my legs was returning, but standing was still like standing on semi-invisible objects that weren’t quite a part of my body. “You basically have to learn to walk again,” my physical therapist, Siedah, had said.

Monstrous pain. Then I thought about how badly I wanted to walk and took all these emotions and flooded them into my legs for support. I didn’t think about my ancestors who most certainly had been there that day, standing behind me. Giving me strength. I stood there. I was standing again. 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.

On the tennis court, there were days when I could see through time. It happened most often when things got really heated. Something inside me would align. The tennis term for this heightened state of being is “treeing.” It is when you are playing out of your mind, when you can do no wrong, when you can make the universe yield to your every whim. I know it sounds intense, because it is. When I treed, sometimes I could predict the future. Not that far, about one second. I’d know exactly where my opponent was going to hit the ball because I’d see it happen right before it did. It was just enough time to make use of the knowledge.

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.

there was no other way. I would never walk again if I didn’t take the risks.

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.

Science had failed me. And I certainly didn’t want to study it.

He brought out one of the epic letters I’d written to him and I cringed. I was always writing to him; they were a combination of love letter, storytelling, and just my general strangeness. I never knew if he actually read them or not (a couple of decades later he told me he’d read and kept nearly every single one), but I got a kick out of the possibility. I never wanted to talk to him about them; I liked the closeness of the words and distance of the pages.

Then Damani said one of the most valuable things anyone has ever said to me. “Or, since you’re good at writing stories,” he said, waving the letter at me, “maybe you should take a creative writing class.” I considered asking him “What’s creative writing?” but I didn’t want to sound stupid, so I just said, “I’ll check it out.” I was so enamored with Mr. Damani Arnell Harris that the next semester I signed up for an introduction to creative writing class without really looking at the course description. The result was immediate. That class aligned all the planets scattered about my shattered universe. As I sat there listening and learning and eventually writing, everything came into focus. It was my Big Bang. My singularity. I finally heard my calling.

I wrote the story late at night in my dorm room and the experience was distinctly different from any homework assignment I’d ever done. By this time, after all I’d been through, I’d been broken, I was open, I was ready. And the gems I’d been carrying began to tumble right out through the cracks.

Writing the story was a spark to dry kindling. The act of creating a story had a delicious sensation and I instantly fell madly in love with it. It felt like stepping off the edge of a cliff on purpose when you subconsciously knew you had the ability to fly. It took me to a place where I didn’t need to walk. And it came so damn easily.

even before I submitted it to the professor, I knew it was good. I knew. And I didn’t need anyone to validate this knowledge.

I wasn’t diminished by my limitations. I’ve become more, greater.

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.

To my imaginative eyes, Nigeria was paradise.

From that moment, I started looking out for technology in Nigeria. The only TV channels we received in the village were BET and MTV, and this gave a lot of people some questionable ideas about African Americans.

The struggle that I sublimate through all my writing has been in my actively, willingly facing, breaking, and fusing my American and Nigerian cultures into what many of us call “Naijamerican” (“Naija” is Nigerian slang for “Nigerian” or “Nigeria”). And it has been in my learning to live with and embrace my strange crippled body.

Most traditional science fiction depicts a white world where I was not able to freely exist.

During his term, his condition worsens and he has to undergo a special heart transplant, one that gifts him with a 3D-printed heart made from the harvested healthy cells of his own heart and fortified with spinach leaves. He becomes the world’s first “xyborg” president (xylem are plant veins).

I wrote about a Nigerian girl named Ngozi whose legs were destroyed a year earlier in a car accident. Ngozi joins forces with an alien symbiotic organism to become a shape-shifting superhero that not only can walk but also fly, and much more. The strong will she uses to control the symbiote is one she developed while learning to live in a world in which she was disabled.

Nigeria was my door to science fiction. The opening of this door restored my faith in science after science failed me. And once I was back as a proud disciple, I was free to embrace my own cyborgity. Something just had to break first. “I