1At the beginning of Nigerian writer Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s Lost Ark Dreaming (2024), the omniscient narrator explains that one of the main characters’ [Yekini’s] grandparents
had been lowers in another tower, where Yekini’s parents had been born, right before each tower began to fail, one after the other, until all became the decrepit and empty shells they were now, except for the Pinnacle. The survivors all had to move somewhere, Maame and family included. It was how they’d found themselves as refugees in the Pinnacle, beginning the painstaking work of rebuilding their lives, piece by piece, level by level.
Maame and Granpa, that is. Yekini’s parents did not make it over. (11)
- 1 The “Deluge” is referred to several times especially at the beginning of the novella (3; 21). It de (...)
- 2 In the Acknowledgements section, Okungbowa cites some literary and artistic works that he considers (...)
- 3 For more regarding this short story, see Courtois.
- 4 Okungbowa’s text both uses “lower” and “Lower”. When written with a lowercase “l”, “lower” refers t (...)
2At stake in this passage are several key elements of this post-apocalyptic novella that brings to the fore what Matthew Omelsky has called, in another context, the “African Anthropocene” (36, original emphasis). The story is set in a post-deluge1 Lagos, Nigeria, where, as explained in this passage, some of the inhabitants have survived and found refuge in a tower that is “180 levels (over a kilometer high)” (16, original emphasis) and aptly called “the Pinnacle”, which was initially part of a set of high-rises called the “Great Atlantic Fingers” (52)2. The situation faced by the “refugees”—climate refugees, to be more precise—is reminiscent of that of the inhabitants of the Makoko slum in Lagos, implicitly referred to, for example, in Osahon Ize-Iyamu’s “More Sea than Tar” (2019)3, a short story that also deals with the rising waters in the sprawling city. Nyancho Nwanri argues that the “sprawling city of Lagos in Nigeria is sinking” (2019, translation mine). Moreover, Eko Atlantic City, built on land reclaimed from the Atlantic Ocean, seems to be at risk. It is also worth noting that Chief Ede Dafinone warns that “[s]everal communities [in Lagos] have been swept away. If nothing is done, Lagos will be submerged by 2050” (quoted in AFP). Okungbowa seems to take his cue from Dafinone by focusing on the post-2050 era. One of his concerns in this novella is reflected in his analysis of power structures, as can be shown in the use of the term “lowers”—a comparative form transformed into a noun so as to stress the importance of power dynamics—which refers to one of the categories—alongside the “Midders” and the “Uppers” (43)—that structure this post-apocalyptic dystopian society4. The focus on power structures is reinforced through the use of the expression “level by level” and the name of the tower itself, the “Pinnacle”, both a term that points to a natural element—as in the “pinnacle” of the Himalayas, for example—but also to a more metaphorical meaning, that of “the most successful or admired part of a system or achievement” (Cambridge Dictionary).
3Power dynamics and the issue of in/visibility are therefore foregrounded in this novella which stages Yekini—a name that translates into “the unique one” in Wolof—, a young woman whose only surviving family member at the time of the diegesis is her grandmother. Yekini is a “Midder operator” who is sent “undersea” (7) because there has been a “non-tower dweller” (43) breach in security in the lower levels of the Pinnacle that she, as an operator, has to double-check. She is sent there with “a mid-level administrator in the Office of the Pinnacle Leadership” (17), a man whose name is Ngozi. There, they meet Tuoyo, a member of the “lower” community. Together, they will fight for their survival; in their pursuit, they meet yet another essential character, Omíwálé—whose Yoruba name means “The water comes home” (Okungbowa 110, original emphasis), according to Yekini—, a “Child” that, in the context of the novella, is perceived as a dangerous and threatening creature for the order that the powers-that-be have put in place in the “Pinnacle”.
4Lost Ark Dreaming is generically hybrid if one follows what Margaret Atwood explains in “Margaret Atwood: The Road to Ustopia”:
What I mean by ‘science fiction’ is those books that descend from H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, which treats of an invasion by tentacled Martians shot to Earth in metal canisters—things that could not possibly happen—whereas for me, ‘speculative fiction’ means plots that descend from Jules Verne’s books about submarines and balloon travel and such—things that really could happen but just hadn’t completely happened when the authors wrote the books. (2011)
- 5 For the Yoruba, Yemoja, mother of humanity, is the most important water spirit/deity.
5As we will see, Omíwálé, “humanlike and could pass for one” (44), is part of a community of social outcasts, called “Yemoja’s Children”5, that have developed the capacity, unlike other characters in the novel, to live both inside and outside water. If we follow Atwood, they can be said to represent “things that could not possibly happen.” Yet, with the exception of this supernatural element, the novella can be considered as an example of “speculative fiction,” as defined by Atwood, particularly when she explains that the genre stages “things that really could happen but just hadn’t completely happened when the authors wrote the books”.
6In this paper, I wish to explore the tension between in/visibility and power dynamics in Lost Ark Dreaming. To what extent does this example of speculative fiction offer counter-narratives that make it possible to challenge deep-seated norms mainly related to class, but also to hierarchies more generally? In order to answer this question, I will first analyse the social pattern of the “Pinnacle”, based on a pyramidal structure that leads to reciprocal othering processes and a lack of recognition of some groups. I will then move on to an exploration of the passage from in/visibility to recognition as some of the characters indulge in transgressive acts. I will finally address the way the novella invites us to see the world otherwise by offering a decolonial approach so as to show that “[t]he stories we carry change the world” (161, original emphasis) as they are intrinsically political.
- 6 Gayatri Spivak explains the stakes behind “othering” in “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading Ar (...)
7In Les Pouvoirs de l’enchantement. Usages politique de la fantasy et de la science-fiction, Anne Besson explains that literatures of the imagination carry a reflexive and political potential (2). Laurent Bazin further adds that in dystopian fiction “the most persistent motif is undoubtedly the political question, in the etymological sense (polis, the city): what organization should we adopt to live together? What common arrangements and what systems should be favored?” (47, translation mine) The Bourdieusian organization of the Pinnacle finds at its top “the Pinnacle prime,” “the man at the top of the world” (56), “Amos Diekara himself” (52), “whose only job was to exist (and he did not have a problem with that at all)” (17). Most of the time, he is invisible to those that live in the “Midder” and “Lower” levels for indeed, in this tower, the lower you live, the fewer the opportunities to see “the man at the top of the world”. Amos Diekara benefits from a form of hegemonic invisibility, linked to his being all-powerful in his exercise of power. On the other side of the spectrum are the lowers who, unlike him, seem to be constantly watched, as though the tower itself functioned in the same way as “Bentham’s Panopticon” (Foucault, Discipline and Punish 200, original emphasis). While on an exceptional video call with Yekini, Ngozi, and Tuoyo who report their findings to him after the aforementioned security breach, he is described as “[m]ore bored than irritated, perhaps because he was speaking to three underlings whom he wouldn’t have touched with a pole on a regular day. / The three underlings, on the other hand, shrank into themselves, unable to open their mouths” (59). The situation of said “underlings” is reminiscent of Ranajit Guha’s “subalterns”. The latter explains that the word “subaltern” is a “name for the general attribute of subordination […] whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office in any other way” (35). Judging from the situation described in the quotation above, it seems that there is a physicality of power dynamics in the “Pinnacle,” as the bodies of those below the uppers—“underlings”—are considered as unworthy of being touched. Moreover, the passage sheds light on how impressionable subalterns can be in the face of power, a situation that calls to mind that described by Gayatri Spivak in her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) Access—or lack thereof—to voice for invisibilised people is linked to the social class to which they belong. In his book L’Invisibilité sociale (2010), Guillaume Le Blanc explains that “[s]ocial invisibility […] characterises the person who no longer has the experience of being heard, the person whose words are, so to speak, without meaning: social invisibility can be understood as the fact of being nobody” (1, translation mine). The Pinnacle’s society is described as compartmentalised, as shown in the narrator’s explanation about “the tower [being] built in a way that made moving upward without going through certified space—like assigned elevators, for instance—virtually impossible” (75). Those happy few at the top are sometimes admired. For example, Ngozi is literally in awe of the Pinnacle prime while he expresses disgust regarding the lowers. When he is sent down the tower as part of his job, the description is explicit: Ngozi is said to “hit water and was plunged into new darkness” (90, emphasis mine), and the “heavy elevator sank to the Lowers in slow motion” (19, emphasis mine). This points to a form of katabasis. One of the outcomes of this compartmentalisation is that the different social classes—the Lowers, the Midders, the Uppers—“other” one another. For example, when it comes to the inhabitants of the lowest levels of the midder class, Yekini explains that “even they had the gall to talk shit about those living undersea” (10, original emphasis)—that is to say those living below level “32” (Okungbowa 19)—, with the use of italics emphasising what Emmanuel Renault calls “social contempt” (2001, translation mine) and these people’s standing apart in the text itself. Yekini notices that a midder in charge of the “equipment storage” “warehouse” (8), who is called Nabata and used to be a lower but “ha[s] crawled her way up to the lowest levels of the midders by luck—she had won the migration lottery and was now one of those lucky enough to work for the Commission” (10)— “referenced the physical space as down there, reinforcing her distance from it” (11, original italics): this “distance” is both geographical and emotional. Yekini herself is a third-generation midder, as she explains that “Maame and Granpa had been classified lowers as children, but had found a way to ascend for the sake of their children—Yekini’s parents. At least, that was the story Maame told, and that explained why Maame herself still sometimes said we when talking about the lowers in this tower” (11, original emphasis). The opposition between “we” and “them” is, as was explained earlier, linked to an othering process and therefore to power discourse at the heart of the diegesis.6
8One of the earliest examples of this othering process appears in the scene where Nabata and Yekini meet in order for the latter to be fully equipped for her mission to the Lowers:
The list of required protective equipment for her assignment came onscreen: helmet, lightweight, capped boots with suction grip, body armor with inflatable lining, firearm.
‘Savior above,’ Yekini said. ‘A firearm?’
‘It’s the Lowers, madam,’ Nabata said. ‘You know what they say: prepare for anything.’
Yekini snickered. ‘They. As if you aren’t one of them doing the saying.’ (9, original emphasis)
- 7 In the novella, two occurrences of the adjective “monstrous” appear (131; 160), as well as seven of (...)
9The use of the end-focus for the word “firearm” reinforces a sense of surprise for the reader who, were it not for Yekini debunking it, would be convinced that a great danger is awaiting those that dare to go “down there”. Yekini deconstructs Nabata’s argument according to which an unnamed “they” advises those that go to the Lowers to “prepare for anything”: Yekini infers that Nabata is part of the problem and contributes to spreading stereotypes about the lower Other. In this rigidly structured society, one particular group, “Yemoja’s Children”, is part of a system of classifications of threats—from “minimal and limited” to “High-level”, “imminent” and “critical”, the latter being only applied to the Children—that “threaten the continuous and harmonious existence of the Fingers” (43, original italics). At stake therefore, for the sake of keeping a so-called “harmonious existence,” is the construction of a “monstrous” Other.7 When the narrative voice explains that “[o]n another day, [Yekini] would have called Omíwálé the word that clung to the edge of her mind: monstrous” (131, original emphasis), it is clear that it points to social stigma. When they see Omíwálé, “customers and workers and security personnel alike, each, upon sighting the Child, devolv[ed] into the most basic human responses after perceiving something deemed monstrous: fright, flight, fight” (160). The use of paranomasia reinforces the sense of urgency felt by those facing the one that has been constructed as the monstrous Other. In a reflection on the necessity for every group to construct a “monstrous” Other, Yekini explains: “‘I think everywhere has its vampires. […] We up here in the Midders bite too. We’ve never been to the Uppers, but I bet they do just as much, if not even more’”, to which Nabata answers, “‘Just because we live undersea doesn’t mean we’re as bad as the terrors living in the waters themselves’” (11). The figure of the vampire is a monstrous one that aims to “satiate his lust for blood and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless” (Stoker 49). By referring to “Yemoja’s Children” as “terrors”, Nabata echoes another passage when Yekini, Ngozi and Tuoyo realise that it is a Child that has breached the security measures and entered the tower: “They turned their attention back to the loop, as the horror of it slowly dawned on them” (42). Gothic literature, if we follow Ann Radcliffe, establishes a distinction between “terror” and “horror”: “Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them” (150). The closer the “monstrous” “vampire”, the greater the incapacitating fear felt by the inhabitants of the tower.
10Another term used to refer to “Yemoja’s Children” is “creatures” (43-44), which, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, is “c. 1300, ‘anything created,’ hence ‘a thing’ in general, animate or not, but most commonly ‘a living being’”. At stake therefore is the construction of a threatening Other, that is also linked to a process of animalisation, as exemplified by Ngozi’s words once he arrives in the lower levels for his mission with Yekini. He exclaims: “‘It’s like rats live down here’” (23). He therefore animalises the lowers by comparing them to an invasive, pest-like species that is not necessarily welcome in many societies. It is also from Ngozi’s point of view that the reader can notice the lowers’ appalling living conditions (96-97). Corruption—in the sense of “act of becoming putrid, dissolution, decay”—is at the very heart of the lowers’ environment. One of the most striking elements is that it is a very dark place, contaminated with waste emerging from the past. This enables the reader to reflect upon what Marc Crépon calls “inhumane conditions” (2018), linked to what he terms the “intolerable” (2018). The process of animalisation is reinforced especially by the character that is referred to as “an elderly master cleric”, through a description of the lowest of the low, that is to say “the devil spawn that was Yemoja’s Children and what they were capable of” (43):
Yekini never quite left with a clear sense of who the Children were or what they were capable of. Every now and then, when the OPL dispersed security feeds about external threats, Yekini, like most people, left with a clear sense of the threat posed to Pinnacle dwellers, but not of why Yemoja’s Children posed said threat. Some people thought them as monster-ghosts who could slip through walls. Some thought of them as magma-spitting demons, complete with little horns tucked into their hair. Some thought of them as shape-shifting ancient warriors with sharp-like teeth. The OPL did not discourage any of this thinking, and rather helped recycle and re-feed these images, especially through the archtemple and its subsidiaries’ homilies.
The only thing everyone agreed upon was that they looked obviously humanlike and could pass for one. (43-44)
11A great deal could be written about the similes used to depict “Yemoja’s Children”, but one specific detail is worth analysing, that of the “little horns tucked into [Yemoja’s Children’s] hair”. This is reminiscent of René Girard’s analysis when he refers to what he calls “the scapegoat”:
Medieval communities were so afraid of the plague that the word alone was enough to frighten them. They avoided mentioning it as long as possible and even avoided taking the necessary precautions at the risk of aggravating the effects of the epidemic. So helpless were they that telling the truth did not mean facing the situation but rather giving in to its destructive consequences and relinquishing all semblance of normal life. The entire population shared in this type of blindness. Their desperate desire to deny the evidence contributed to their search for ‘scapegoats.’ […] Apart from certain intense beliefs, the scapegoat no longer appears to be merely a passive receptacle for evil forces but is rather the mirage of an omnipotent manipulator shown by mythology to be sanctioned unanimously by society. (2-3; 46)
12Yemoja’s Children are perceived as “omnipotent manipulator[s]” whose aim is to wreak havoc in the tower and therefore need to be “sanctioned unanimously by society”. Since they cannot be accepted, they need to remain where they belong, that is to say in the ocean. Girard explains that in instances of scapegoating in medieval communities “[t]he entire population shared in this type of blindness,” an element that is present in the Pinnacle, whose population has “relinquish[ed] all semblance of normal life”.
13Once Omíwálé has breached the tower’s lower levels, the uppers make a drastic decision that is immediately understood by Tuoyo: “But today, she had no doubts. It was clear. The OPL was willing to murder anyone who was an inconvenience to them. A whole level filled with people—thousands of them” (73). Yekini is also perfectly aware of this when she addresses Ngozi: “‘What the fuck! Are you even looking around? Your bosses are going to drown us. They know we’re down here—they know you are down here—and they’re going to do it anyway!’” (80). Tuoyo’s hate of the uppers (66) is logically reinforced by the latter’s uppers’ decision to “flush [them] out to sea” (174) and also by a lack of consideration and recognition for what she does as an individual and as a former member of the lower community, despite the huge (structural) importance of the Lowers as a (foundational) basis, as explained by Tuoyo herself:
‘We have a saying down here: every leak is death,’ she replied. ‘Maybe for you up there, a leak only means a failure of plumbing. But down here, an unattended leak could easily mean a structural failure. A leak here is bad for all of us.’ She leaned in, hoping to drive home her message. ‘All of us.’ (30-31, original emphasis)
- 8 A good example of this appears when Yekini goes to work: “Most [midders] were dressed in the same w (...)
14Without the lowers, there is no possibility for the uppers to survive what has increasingly become a hostile and “intolerable” (Crépon 2018) environment, especially for those at the bottom of the social ladder. As a consequence, Yekini, Ngozi, and Tuoyo transgress some of the dictatorial rules imposed onto them by Amos Diekara. One of the most, if not the most, transgressive character is Yekini, described as a “stronghead” (9), critical of power structures (10-11). To go back to a quotation used earlier—“[o]n another day, [Yekini] would have called Omíwálé the word that clung to the edge of her mind: monstrous” (131, original emphasis)—it is worth noticing that the sentence is completed and nuanced: “But once they’d finally settled into the crate, locked inside, another word came to her: victim. Non-tower dweller or not, the Child was simply yet another victim of the Fingers and their decades-spanning legacy” (131, original emphasis). From an othered being rendered “monstrous,” Omíwálé becomes a sacrificial “victim”: the fact that Yekini thinks this is in itself a transgressive act, in a society where transgression is deeply frowned upon8. Bertrand Westphal explains that:
The effects of […] transgressivity are also felt, in a more carnal way, in every piece of literature that draws on the discourse of minorities (ethnic, sexual, religious, etc.) forced to transgress the dominant discourse in order to gain access to the spoken word. […] Transgression is a process that accompanies and motivates movement. [...] Transgression corresponds to the crossing of a limit beyond which a margin of freedom extends. [...] But transgression is also in the deviation, in the new, unforeseen, unpredictable trajectory. It is centrifugal, because we flee the heart of the system, the space of reference. (81)
- 9 Omíwálé is a non-binary character, as shown in the use of the “they” pronoun.
15By transgressively referring to Omíwálé as a victim, Yekini points out their9 vulnerability and precariousness. Indeed, the fact that they and their group are called “Children” already indicates a form of “precariousness, which excludes them from society and prevents them from showing themselves” (Peeren 37). As Marianna Fotaki explains, drawing on Judith Butler’s ideas, “precariousness [is] an existential concept often interchangeable with shared vulnerability, and precarity [is] the more specific process of rendering some lives more valuable and more equal than others” (299-300). Judith Butler explains: “The question that preoccupies me in the light of recent global violence is, Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, What makes for a grievable life?” (Precarious Life, 20, original emphasis) For the Pinnacle’s uppers, some lives have become “ungrievable” (Butler, Frames of War 22), knowing that “[w]ithout grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life. Instead, ‘there is a life that will never have been lived,’ sustained by no regard, no testimony, and ungrieved when lost” (Frames of War 15). The Children’s lives are even more “ungrievable” and “unlivable”: “the unlivable is not simply death, in general. It is a specific form of death. Just as I cannot ‘live’ death, similarly and conversely, when I can no longer live an experience, it is like death, because life continues but ‘I’ cannot live it: the experience of the unlivable has destroyed the subject of life” (Butler and Worms 21).
16The insistence on the Children’s “invisible lives” (Le Blanc 2010) is extended in a process of in/visibilisation that is linked to what Esther Peeren calls
- 10 In the novella, the word “ghost” is repeated four times and “ghostly” is used once.
spectrality—adopted as an analytical tool throughout the humanities and social sciences. I argue for a broad notion of spectrality that enables it to encompass not only the ghosts of the past (the way history haunts the present or childhood traumas the subject), but the possible and impossible hauntings of those living ghosts produced in and by the present. (9)10
17The most striking episode of “spectrality” concerns Omíwálé when they are taken to the upper levels of the tower by Yekini, Ngozi and Tuoyo: “Omíwálé was to be covered in a large bedsheet, to be revealed at the proper time to cause the right kind of distraction. The Child put it on, and was instantly transformed into a ghostly, spiritual character. A god, even, if Tuoyo tilted her head the right way” (153). The use of a bedsheet serves to delay the inhabitants’ recognition of the figure constructed as a monster: monsters are meant to be simultaneously visible and invisible, revealing what ought to remain hidden. When asked how they feel about this situation, Omíwálé answers: “I have wanted nothing but to be seen, […]. I welcome it” (154, original emphasis). To some extent, this can be interpreted as a metaphor for their own situation as a “wandering subject” (Peeren 34, original emphasis; Peeren uses Mbembe’s idea, expressed as “sujet fantômatique” in French, 2003), inscribing here both passivity and agency (what Peeren calls the “agency of invisibility” in her book). Omíwálé wanders in the visual world but can be considered as “avisual”:
Presented to vision, there to be seen, the avisual image remains, in a profoundly irreducible manner, unseen. Or rather, it determines an experience of seeing, a sense of the visual, without ever offering an image. A visuality without images, an unimaginable visuality, and images without visuality, avisuality. All signs lead to a view, but at its destination, nothing is seen. What is seen is this absence, the materiality of an avisual form or body. (Lippit in Peeren 36)
18As explained above, Omíwálé “want[s] to be seen”, which could also mean that they want to be acknowledged. One could argue that they are properly seen when Yekini imagines “coming face-to-face with one of Yemoja’s Children” (39, original emphasis). In Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, Emmanuel Levinas explains that
the relation to the face is straightaway ethical. The face is what one cannot kill, or at least it is that whose meaning consists in saying: ‘thou shalt not kill.’ […] The first word of the face is the ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ It is an order. There is a commandment in the appearance of the face.” (87; 89)
19And indeed, the face has a central place in the novella, with forty-four occurrences of the word “face”, “faces”, or “faced”, as exemplified in the passage when Yekini sees the Pinnacle prime for the first time on the computer screen: “Yekini had never thought of Pinnacle Prime Citizen Amos Diekara as anything more than the man at the top in the gray-brown suit—an image, a persona. But staring directly at him now, for the first time, even though through a screen, she was suddenly taken aback by how much of a person he was” (59, original emphasis). Seeing the face enables an access to the one that used to be imagined, by giving access below the (sur)face. Moreover, when Omíwálé is introduced to Yekini’s grandmother, this is what happens:
Omíwálé obliged, knelt, put their face in front of Yekini’s grandmother. Maame put her hands on the Child’s cheeks, felt the smoothness of their fish-skin, massaged over their gills. In the silence that ensconced them all, Yekini experienced a true moment of the sublime, her mind racing upon contemplating the vastness of the ocean, the malleability of species, the inadequacy of the concept of humanity, the endless possibilities of being. (141)
20The passage explores what Jacques Derrida would call “hospitality”:
We know that there are numerous what we call ‘displaced persons’ who are applying for the right to asylum without being citizens, without being identified as citizens. It is not for speculative or ethical reasons that I am interested in unconditional hospitality, but in order to understand and to transform what is going on today in our world. (70)
21This transformation is linked to what Renault calls “an ethics and politics of recognition” (2001), that concerns both the Child outcasts, but also those of the lowers and midders, whose representatives are Yekini and Tuoyo. Renault further explains:
The only way to satisfy this need [for recognition], to ease this anxiety, is to try to prove our worth to others through our actions. […] It is possible that our need for recognition remains unsatisfied and that the behaviour of others reflects back to us a depreciatory image of ourselves. We experience these kinds of situations as real moral wounds. […] The experience of such moral wounds is painful and radical enough to lead to lead to a revolt. (32-34, translation mine)
22The reflection on in/visibility and recognition is present in yet another scene when Yekini, Ngozi and Tuoyo look at the video footage of the breach:
‘This is how the outside feed was too,’ Tuoyo was saying. ‘Except this is closer to real-time, so we should be seeing… it come out of there.’
‘Unless,’ Yekini said, surprised she was even entertaining this possibility, ‘we can’t see them.’
‘Yes, that’s what she said—’
‘No, you’re not listening to me,’ she said. ‘I think the Child is in that video. We just can’t see it.’
[…]
‘Children are… invisible?’ whispered Tuoyo.
‘Oh, come on!’ said Ngozi. ‘Invisible Children? You two must be smarter than this. We don’t even know that Children exist!’
‘They exist,’ said Tuoyo, quietly but firmly, in a way that even Ngozi knew not to dispute. (42-43, original emphasis)
23This passage illustrates Renault’s idea according to which “denial of recognition […] consists of denying identity” (Renault 15, translation mine). This denial whereby “the threats [are] out of mind” (Okungbowa 43) leads to the emergence of “dissenters and resistance groups who refused to adhere to the Pinnacle’s regulations” (Okungbowa 43). This “insurrection of minuscule lives” (Le Blanc 2020, translation mine) is linked to what Guha calls “insurgency” (1999) emanating from those Sara Ahmed calls “willful subjects” (2014). Towards the end of the novella, the narrator ponders over various “riots” (163) that took place in the history of the Pinnacle, especially because the “Pinnacle was a metal container, and its inhabitants were cockroaches captured and bottled up inside it. No matter how good any of them had it, it was only a matter of time before they would become erratic, strained, stretched taut to the limits of their sanity” (163). In this sense, as an example of apocalyptic fiction, Lost Ark Dreaming “invents a contemporary form of tragedy that places humanity under its own critical gaze” (Engélibert 11, translation mine).
24Once the bedsheet used to hide Omíwálé has been taken off their body, “[t]he Pinnacle Police Force ascended the steps to the balustrade, their helmets and visors commingling into one red wave, swallowing everything they touched” (161). Facing them, Omíwálé explains to Tuoyo: “We are but messengers […]. Every once in a while, we perish at the mercy of the weighty stories we carry. But sometimes—sometimes we prevail, and the stories we carry change the world” (161, original emphasis). To some extent, as in the Book of Isaiah’s, Omíwálé is a messenger of peace, whose stories have the capacity to “change the world”. This sentence should also be interpreted as a metatextual comment whereby speculative genres enable their practitioners to question the powers-that-be by educating the readers’ eye and inviting them to critically analyse the extra-diegetic world by seeing otherwise. Although Lost Ark Dreaming stages a post-apocalyptic future world, it is difficult not to recognise some elements of our own world as 21st-century readers. This idea is developed by Anne Besson:
Making imaginary fictions the preferred vehicles for political demands, or expecting them to correspond as closely as possible to social expectations, means first and foremost giving them power over reality. By touching us, they make us see the world differently; by holding up a mirror in which we can contemplate our fears and hopes, the[se] works supposedly ‘shake things up’ [and] reintroduce the possibility of thinking differently about the reality in which we live. (13)
25Okungbowa’s novella offers an allegory to make its 21st-century readers think about refugeehood, perhaps aiming to “reintroduce the possibility of thinking differently about the reality in which we live”. Several references are made to “refugees” or “illegals” in the text. For example, we are told that when he was a young child, “too young to remember,” Ngozi was carried by a person called
Lota [who] had had to carry him as they were smuggled into the tower. The groups that brought in refugees or illegals born in floating settlements outside the Pinnacle always kept them moving. Stairs were an efficient pathway to survival, it seemed, but also revolution. Without these stairs, he wouldn’t even be alive. (167)
26The vocabulary used here is reminiscent of that used by politicians and the media to portray asylum-seekers and refugees, especially so in a context of a rise of the reactionary right. “Yemoja’s Children” can be seen as refugees that are considered as “one source of critical danger” (43). Another occurrence of “Yemoja’s Children” appears on the very same page and we learn that
the Children were not part of an agency briefing given to Yekini and her orientation group. To learn about Children, they had been taken to the Pinnacle’s archtemple, the seat of spiritual worship in the tower. There, an elderly master cleric sat them down and told them the history of the devil spawn that was Yemoja’s Children and what they were capable of. (43)
27“Yemoja’s Children” are depicted as a homogeneous group, whose members are denied any individual identity. Their alleged “devil[ry]” appears tied to their status as the Children—followers—of Yemoja, a deity of the Yoruba pantheon who, during colonial times, was branded as heathen. This homogenisation recalls the way refugees are often represented in the media, especially so when there is a so-called migration crisis underway, as Crépon observes:
The foreigner became part of the landscape, as part of a controversial accounting whose effect was to raise awareness about a threat, with the fear and rejection that goes with it. Political life became accustomed to this uninterrupted reminder [...]. Numbers were the law, obliterating the attention paid to individual destinies [...]. It was no longer individual lives that were taken into consideration, but the scarecrow of an abstract tally. (21, translation mine)
- 11 In The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Den (...)
28Omíwálé is no longer an “abstract tally,” and his behaviour is completely different from what is explained in a “Hazard Intelligence Report,” supposed to be “Top Secret,” published by the “Commission for the Protection of the Fingers (COPOF)” for which Yekini works. In it, a reference to “mami wata” (35) is included and people like Omíwálé are described as “non-tower dweller[s], unclassified and potentially hostile—NTD-UPH” (37). The “Addendum” reads: “Upon multiple consultations with the master clerics, NTD014-UPH is now collectively referred to in contemporary usage as ‘Children of Yemoja’” (38, original emphasis).11 One of the specificities of Okungbowa’s novella is that it includes (fictional) archives of different kinds in the narrative (newspaper articles, top secret reports, …). Most of these archives take the form of “excerpts”, underscoring that “[p]olitical power entails control of the archive and memory” (Pandey 3). To complete this idea, Pandey explains:
For the disciplinary historian, the archive may fairly be described as a site of selection and classification, of framing and authorizing—and hence making intelligible. In Foucauldian terms, the archive authorizes what may be said, laying down the rules of the ‘sayable,’ negating (making inaudible and illegible) much that comes to be classified as ‘non-sense,’ gibberish, madness, and is dispatched therefore to a domain outside agential, rational history. In this process of selecting, framing, authorizing, as even the most hard-boiled of traditional historians will acknowledge, every archive excludes a great deal that is not of direct interest to its custodians. (4)
- 12 In Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Foucault explains that “mo (...)
29By using this type of document, and a different typeface, Okungbowa signals a shift in the narrative regime and aims to make the reader pay attention, or care about the individuals that are described. One of his objectives seems to be the development of a new regime of visibility (and attention). In his book The Poetics and Ethics of Attention in Contemporary British Narrative (2023), Jean-Michel Ganteau explains that in William Wordsworth’s “The Daffodils,” “the poet’s loneliness and musings [are] interrupted by a sight that triggers off [sic] a surprise effect and produces an event breaking with the continuum of habit” (1). I argue that the change in typeface and narrative regime constitutes a way to “interrupt [our reading] by a sight that triggers off [sic] a surprise effect,” for us to develop an ethics of attention (to the “monstrous” Other)12.
30Ganteau’s “ethics of attention” is reinforced through yet another narrative regime that can be considered, this time, as decolonial. I am alluding here to the various passages that mention the “Queen Conch”, or Yemoja herself. While the archives that are provided are to some extent very much linked to a Eurocentric perspective on history, these specific passages on the contrary focus on what Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vazquez call “aestheSis” (2013):
Modern aestheTics have played a key role in configuring a canon, a normativity that enabled the disdain and the rejection of other forms of aesthetic practices, or, more precisely, other forms of aestheSis, of sensing and perceiving. Decolonial aestheSis is an option that delivers a radical critique to modern, postmodern, and altermodern aestheTics and, simultaneously, contributes to making visible decolonial subjectivities at the confluence of popular practices of re-existence, artistic installations, theatrical and musical performances, literature and poetry, sculpture and other visual arts. (2013)
31The various passages on the “Queen Conch” are related to the senses, as exemplified in the poem entitled “Origin; Or, upon Placing the Queen Conch to Eye” (115), the short texts “Mutation; Or, upon Placing the Queen Conch to Nostril” (117) and “Recollection; or upon Placing the Queen Conch to Skin, to Tongue” (127). By referring to the five senses, Okungbowa encourages readers to pay “attention” to what the “Queen Conch” has to say and tell, possibly “tales from above and under the sea” (3). Yekini forces all the inhabitants of the tower to listen to the Queen Conch for, as explained by Omíwálé to Yekini:
Avail yourself to the Queen Conch of our foremother. The Queen Conch will reveal her secrets to an eye that fears not to see, ears that listen willingly, a tongue that speaks no violence, nostrils that parse before inhaling, digits that crave connection, and a heart that holds no prejudice. Perhaps you may qualify, and witness its secrets for yourself, understand what needs to be done. (113)
32Just as Yekini “put the cold, dark tunnel of the Queen Conch to her eye” (113), the reader is also invited to pay attention and develop a way of seeing otherwise. This can be linked to what Françoise Král calls the “scopic power [of literature] to make the unseen visible” (12). We are encouraged to pay attention to gestures of care, as exemplified in Yekini’s grandmother’s act towards Omíwálé:
Omíwálé obliged, knelt, put their face in front of Yekini’s grandmother. Maame put her hands on the Child’s cheeks, felt the smoothness of their fish-skin, massaged over their gills. In the silence that ensconced them all, Yekini experienced a true moment of the sublime, her mind racing upon contemplating the vastness of the ocean, the malleability of species, the inadequacy of the concept of humanity, the endless possibilities of being. (141)
33It is no surprise, then, that Lost Ark Dreaming is a water-centric narrative that privileges fluidity, including in its treatment of gender— Omíwálé being a striking example. The ocean occupies a central place in this novella. As Steve Mentz observes, the sea is “at once the most meaningful and the most overlooked feature of our cultural imagination” (2). When Ian Buchanan defines “blue humanities”, he explains that its aim is to “re-establis[h] a kind of poetics of the ocean, thus re-establishing a humanistic connection to it” (2018). This seems to constitute one of the novella’s central objectives, especially so when Yekini asserts that “[t]his time […] everyone gets on the ark” (131)—an explicit allusion to title itself and to the great legacy and lineage of survivors of episodes of Deluge, “Olókun [,] Noah, [,] Sekhmet [,] Uta-napishtim [,] Deucalion or Waynaboozhoo” (3), to which Yekini now belongs (decolonially).