Woman of the Aeroplanes & the Prediction of theFuture

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Among many writers and critics, there is almost a unifying phraseemployed in describing Kojo Laing, that is that he wasunderappreciated while alive (Obi-Young ‘Is He AfricanLiterature's Greatest Linguistic Innovator?’; Ryman ‘100 AfricanWriters of SFF – Part Fifteen’). Geoff Ryman described the newsof Laing's death thus: ‘The Ghanaian press were curiously silentat first about the death of this great writer’. This chaptersuggests that the reason Laing's work was underappreciated whilehe was alive was due to it being misread as magical realism andthus classified as ‘hard to understand’. Since his writingresisted the imposition of a magical realist framework, it waspushed to the margins and relegated to the realm of the obscure.Laing's marginalization in the canon was exemplified by thelukewarm way the academic community reacted to news of hisdeath. This chapter will first show how Laing's work has beenmisread as magical realism, by using his novel Woman of the Aeroplanes (1988) as acase study. It will then employ a ‘political futurist’ frameworkin order to analyse the text, centring an improved politicaleconomy between global South and global North. ‘Politicalfuturism’ can either be dystopic or utopic. It positions itselfagainst the scientism and progressivism inherent in some‘technocultures’ that are underpinned by capitalist ideologywith a naïve faith that progressiveness or superiority intechnology will end inequality and environmental problems.‘Political futurism’ looks at societal webs or what Arne JohanVetlesen calls ‘exchange and mutual dependency’ (Cosmologies of the Anthropocene Panpsychism,Animism, and the Limits of Posthumanism: 59). Itsdystopia is where this exchange and mutual dependency isfraught, while its utopia presents a society without gender,race or class oppression and of equality and in which theenvironment is adequately protected. This paper makes the casethat ‘futurism’ in speculative fiction is not exclusive to‘technoculturism’ just as dystopia is not only technologicallyoriented. For example, 1984 byGeorge Orwell (1949) or The Handmaid'sTale by Margaret Atwood (1985) are two works ofpolitical dystopia in the Western canon. Woman of the Aeroplanes (1988) is their oppositeas a novel of political utopia.