Nnedi Okorafor: Magic, Myth, Morality and the Future by Sandra J. Lindow (review)

Reviewed by: Nnedi Okorafor: Magic, Myth, Morality and the Futureby Sandra J. Lindow Nedine Moonsamy Getting Mad andGetting Even. Sandra J. Lindow. Nnedi Okorafor: Magic, Myth, Morality and the Future. McFarland, C riticalE xplorations inS cienceF iction andF antasy, 2023. 240 pp. 39. 95 pbk. Various forms of Black and Indigenous sf are having a moment in the sun, and Lindow's monograph makes a timely contribution through an exclusive focus on Nnedi Okorafor and her growing canon of speculative and science fiction. Overall, the book is a thoughtful and considered meditation on how Okorafor's work intersects personal biography with such seismic cultural movements as Black liberation and feminist struggles in the End Page 314US, and with the history of sf as a predominantly white genre. The chapters provide complex analyses of how Okorafor's work consistently returns to an awareness of the ongoing psychological and ideological warfare levelled against Black girls and women and, more importantly, how her use of sf leads to explorations of personal empowerment and social change for each of her central characters. Okorafor's worldbuilding is particularly rich because she "grew up with no clear cognitive boundaries between the magical and the mundane, " resulting in "an ingrained acceptance of and interest in the Other and a blurring of boundaries between human, plant and animal" (Lindow 9). Her characters navigate spaces that are sensory, magical, and mundane fusions of African pasts, presents, and futures that allow them to challenge the status quo of colonial capitalism, particularly in relation to the impact they continue to have on women's identities and on the environment. Chapter one addresses the moral development of girls in Okorafor's YA fiction. In Zahrah the Windseeker (2005), The Shadow Speaker (2007), the A kataseries (2011-2022) and the B intitrilogy (2015-2017), the protagonists initially find themselves entangled in oppressive cultural, familial, and social structures, but eventually grow to trust their own experiences as opposed to their socially determined realities. As Lindow argues, Okorafor adapts Joseph Campbell's archetype of the hero's journey to portray how young girls find themselves as they navigate the dangers of the world. Yet, as Okorafor shows, this moral development is a quest to go beyond being "good"—instead, they use and master anger as a critical tool for social justice and personal transformation. Lindow shows how these protagonists are positioned as cultural outsiders because their traits and talents make them subject to ridicule, but Okorafor's magical intervention "interrupts the status quo of the mundane and allows a new set of rules to emerge" (20) such that deficiency is reframed as newfound personal agency and collective power. A further unpacking of these characters' magical talents takes place in chapter two. Looking primarily at Okorafor's Windseekerstories, Lindow highlights the persistent motif of flying in Okorafor's work. She argues for it as a symbol of transcendence and "the ability to rise above repressive attitudes and stereotypes to become one's truest self" (41). Careful not to romanticize this phenomenon, Lindow shows how representations of flying are often related to a psychological struggle with racial and cultural trauma, but through character development flying shifts from personal escapism to a magical vehicle that helps people fight for the freedom of others. A second but weaker strand of this chapter involves an attempt to position Okorafor within feminist frameworks. Though the inclusion of Black feminism seems piecemeal (and there is no mention of how Okorafor's work might read in relation to African feminism), the identification of Okorafor as a third-wave sf author is nevertheless useful. In comparison to second-wave authors such as Ursula Le Guin and Joanna Russ, Okorafor imagines worlds in which "women have a right to empowerment and that empowerment can be self-defined" End Page 315 (48). Unlike the timidity of generations prior, Okorafor's protagonists can express strength that celebrates their difference as power, but also intimacy and interdependence as part of their need for community and care. Chapter three examines how Okorafor's Who Fears Death (2010) interrogates mythmaking as a particularly powerful (and thus problematic) ideological weapon of. . .