Broken Places & Outer Spaces

by Nnedi Okorafor

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.

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.

Sometimes what you don’t understand keeps you from seeing certain obstacles and in not seeing them, you unknowingly scale them. If they had understood, they wouldn’t have pushed me so hard. And if they hadn’t pushed me so hard, I wouldn’t have been able to later dig my heels in and push myself.

I didn’t particularly stand out in that first course, but grades and attention from professors don’t determine everything. Sometimes the burn is quiet, gradual, unassuming, private.

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 move about the world in my own way.” —Nnedi Okorafor

I love "I move about the world in my own way". Reminds me a lot of the Donna Strickland response to why she was never made full professor. But she was still just an associate professor when she was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics. It wasn’t the university’s fault that she hadn’t been made a full professor, she has said: she simply never applied. “I'm just a lazy person. I do what I want to do and that wasn't worth doing.” (https://www.nobelprize.org/womenwhochangedscience/stories/donna-strickland)