By Christopher Borrelli
Chicago Tribune
WWR Article Summary (tl;dr) Nnedi Okorafor may not be a household name, but eventually, you’ll probably learn to say it. Okorafor is the author of young-adult fiction, adult fiction, science fiction, fantasy fiction, Marvel comic books and a new memoir, “Broken Places & Outer Spaces.”
FLOSSMOOR, Ill.
Not long after Nnedi Okorafor finished her freshman year at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1993, she came home to Flossmoor and played tennis. She played daily, she played for hours. That had always been the plan. She had been playing tennis since she was 9. She was nationally ranked; a few years earlier, she helped win the state championship for Homewood-Flossmoor High School, and now she was playing in college. All of which was expected. She and her sisters, Ngozi and Ifeoma, dominated HFHS tennis for years. Nnedi had been the scrappiest and most physical. She would be taunted with the N-word, she would hear “Go back to Africa,” and she would think: It doesn’t matter how racist people can get, she would find a way to win anyway.
But she came to hate high-school tennis (“When you play so many bad players, your own game goes down”); then in college, she didn’t really like anyone on that team.
So by the end of freshman year, she was quietly harboring a plan to quit the game and gravitate toward track, with the Olympics in mind. Which didn’t sound unattainable: Her father was a cardiovascular surgeon, her mother a health administrator, both came from Nigeria, both had doctorates, and both demanded their four children stand out.
The only hurdle was Okorafor and her sisters had been diagnosed years earlier with scoliosis, to varying degrees of severity.
Nnedi wore a back brace and would remove it before matches; she had always played through the pain. But that summer, when Nnedi returned to Flossmoor and her parents brought her to the University of Chicago Medical Center for a regular round of X-rays, her spine appeared to be getting worse. The doctor recommended surgery. Because her spinal cord was involved, there was a small chance of paralysis, but the alternative was that her organs would compress, she would be disabled before 25 and most likely, her life would get significantly shortened.
She was 19.
After the surgery, Okorafor woke up paralyzed.
Helen, her mother, recalls: “The family was shocked, devastated. I mean, we knew (the surgery) wasn’t simple, but Nnedi was a big athlete, and now she couldn’t stand?” The surgery had been elective, and Ngozi remembers her parents looking riddled with guilt.
As for Nnedi, she lay in bed in Hyde Park, unable to turn.
She was unsure if she would walk again. She swung from depressed to panicky. At night, when her family left and the room darkened, praying mantises and grasshoppers climbed her walls. She swore they were real. The bird, too. She saw a crow slamming into her hospital windows. She doesn’t know if it was the medication, or her imagination.
A friend left her a paperback of “I, Robot.”
She didn’t read it, not for many years. Instead, she wrote in its margins. She had never written much for fun, but that summer, stuck in bed, wondering if she would walk again, she started to learn how to make up her own stories.
And now 25 years later, Nnedi Okorafor is the future of science fiction and fantasy.
Today, at 44, Okorafor is successful, honored and in constant demand. She is a friend and collaborator with George R. R. Martin, and either the Next Big Thing or the Best New Old Thing You Still Haven’t Heard Of.
She is a lifelong Flossmoor resident and a literary shape-shifter, author of young-adult fiction, adult fiction, science fiction, fantasy fiction, Marvel comic books and a new memoir, “Broken Places & Outer Spaces.” She is a self-defined Africanfuturist, and a TED talker, and at least for the next couple of years, the developer of more TV shows than you have streaming services to watch them on.
What she is not is a household name.
Eventually, you will probably learn to say it. Her last name is pronounced o-CORE-a-FOUR. Her first name is NED-dee. Not NEEDY. She hates when people call her Needy.
She walks now, but a bit mechanically, and stooped; she’s called herself robotic. Yet there’s a forward momentum, and a self-possession, in that way she carries herself. This is, after all, a person secure enough to dedicate “Binti,” one of her best-sellers, to a jellyfish that she once admired. And that was before HBO and Martin began developing her 2010 novel “Who Fears Death” as a series. Last year, the “Game of Thrones” creator even escorted her to the Emmys. “To raise my profile,” she said with air quotes.
Martin, for his part, suggests she’s destined to be a force, regardless of powerful friends. “I think Nnedi has emerged as one of the most distinctive voices in science fiction we’ve seen in years,” Martin said. “There’s an eloquence and intelligence that’s not like a lot of writers who do this. It’s an entirely new worldview that’s she’s reflecting.”
Go beyond Martin and HBO, there’s Marvel, for whom Okorafor has become one of its primary writers of Black Panther comics. Go beyond Marvel, there’s Viola Davis and Amazon, for whom Okorafor and Kenyan filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu are creating a series adapted from the Octavia Butler novel “Wild Seed.” “When (Davis’ production company) asked who I most wanted to work with, Nnedi was the obvious choice,” Kahiu said. As with Butler _ arguably the most celebrated black woman writer of science fiction _ Kahiu sees in Okorafor a fascination with gender and identity, but also “with the politics of immortality, and what it means to be a male or female shape-shifter.”
And those are just projects Okorafor discusses on the record.
She calls her work “Africanfuturism,” as opposed to the more common “Afro-futurism.” The difference, she says, is her books, sometimes with aliens, sometimes with witches, often set in a recognizable, future Africa, with African lineages, are not cultural hybrids but rooted in the history and traditions of the continent, without a desire to look toward Western culture (or even pop culture). If that makes her work sound a touch polemical, understand: Her writing voice is accessible, and as harrowing and bracing as her stories often are, “Who Fears Death” is set in a violent, future Sudan, about a child born from rape with supernatural abilities, the pace is borderline breezy.
In February, Okorafor spoke at the Homewood Public Library; she pulled a crowd of more than 200. “The truth is adult programs here normally draw about 20, maybe,” said Kelly Campos, the librarian who asked Okorafor to appear. “And I get why she’s getting huge. I’m a black woman. When I was younger, you didn’t see black or brown faces on covers of (sci-fi and fantasy) books. Her characters have core things about them that are there because of an ethnic or marginalized background. And she’s not straining to do that, she’s telling science fiction and fantasy from a point of view.”
Again, Okorafor is far from the first black woman to write science fiction and fantasy from a distinctly black-female perspective.
Go slightly beyond Butler, barely scratch the surface, and you find N.K. Jemisin waiting, whose “Broken Earth” novels have won the prestigious Hugo Award for best science-fiction novel the past three consecutive years.
“But when many people think about the history of science fiction and fantasy writing, they tend to think of a certain Jules Verne kind of writer from England perhaps,” Martin said. “That’s because this is a world that’s been dominated by Americans and Brits, and we might be talking about alien planets or a 100 years in the future, we might be talking about Middle-earth, or we might be talking Westeros, and as far apart as those may seem, there are similarities, because the people who have written those books came from the same cultures, read the same classics.”
Aliens travel light years only to land in front of the White House.
“There’s always a Western point of view,” said Gary K. Wolfe, a science-fiction editor and professor emeritus at Roosevelt University (who writes occasional science-fiction reviews for the Tribune). “Then you get to Nnedi, who wrote a (2014) novel called ‘Lagoon,’ which in many ways is alien-invasion stuff. Except the aliens arrive in Lagos, in Nigeria. Science fiction has ignored a continent. And it’s a gold mine of ideas for a smart writer, and of course, there will be people to exploit that gold mine. But an approach to a genre from the point of view of people who were enslaved and forcibly moved? That’s a necessary place for this to go.”
But it’s not an easy trip.
Okorafor bristles at the inevitable suggestion “that all this is happening now because of the success of ‘Black Panther,’ when some of us were planting those seeds long before anyone had heard of Wakanda.” Because she is working with Martin, she anticipates the assumption they are making an African “Game of Thrones.” Or that her excellent “Akata Witch” books, about a Nigerian American girl who discovers a heritage of magic, are African Harry Potter. “I’ve heard it, and I get the appeal of easy marketing,” she said, “but I don’t want my work to look as if it’s standing on the foundations of white writers. I intend my stuff to be here for a while, not riding anyone’s coattails, but built to last.”
One hint at how awkward all of this might look to traditional bookselling is that Okorafor has had about a half dozen publishers for her dozen or so books so far, including Penguin, Houghton Mifflin and Simon & Schuster. Even Betsy Wollheim, publisher at DAW, which bought “Who Fears Death,” said the book, which has child soldiers, rape, female genital mutilation, and fantasy and magic, was deemed such an improbable sell that Nnedi’s agent was “flabbergasted” when she bought it.
Naunihal Singh, a friend of Okorafor’s who teaches African politics at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., said, “Having lived in West Africa I see the impulse, and she’s right, the everyday in Africa is somewhat fantastical, the spiritual does sit alongside the everyday, the architecture has science-fiction elements, the people talk a lot about the future. But I don’t think publishers understand how to present that, or sell a writer who doesn’t care about labels on her work or hard lines between reality and fantasy.”
“I’ve known this area my whole life,” Okorafor says as we drive around Flossmoor and Homewood on a chilly day. She moved to the south suburbs as a child and never left. She has internalized the place, as you would expect a master builder of worlds might do. She knows every set of train tracks, and every viaduct they cross; she knows that storefront still occupied by the same real-estate office, and the church once bought by a famous football player that now sits empty and decaying. She has internalized every dip in the landscape and every rise. She can see where things are new, and where things never changed, and not just what is there now but the decades that came and went.
Passing a tennis court unlocks memories of a coach who would not stand up to the people who didn’t want black girls playing on it; passing a funeral home, “I try not to look”, she says that after father died at 63 in 2004 and she left the wake that day, she went home and began writing “Who Fears Death.” And it reads raw, like it was soaked in an ache.
She notes her longtime gym.
She points to the resilience of her Family Video store.
We turn into her childhood subdivision. She holds a hand to face and lightens, and you can see in her expression how this neighborhood, 40 years ago, once seemed new and never quite lost its charm. You see a sledding hill in a cul-de-sac, and leafy shade that can hide deer, pheasants and an occasional coyote. “Spielbergian,” she says, and it is.
Okorafor lives in an unremarkable apartment building in Flossmoor. She often writes at a thick wooden dining table, and behind her, on the wall, there’s a patchwork of Post-Its from a recent “Wild Seed” development session with Kahiu.
“No Time Travel,” warns one.
There’s not much else on the walls but a poster from her “Shuri” comic for Marvel. The place feels like both an anchor and steeped in transience. “It’s where I hide,” she says. “It’s homey, it’s where I grew up, it’s quiet and I don’t want a lawn.” From here, she spins multiple plates, leaving for days of meetings and speaking gigs. She says her mother lives four minutes away (conveniently, because Nnedi also has a 15-year old daughter), then adds in the next breath she only recently left her mother’s house, at 38. It’s a Nigerian thing, she says, to stay close to family. Her sisters and brother, all with Ph.D.s and impressive-sounding careers, Ngozi, a lawyer, spent years in the Illinois governor’s office; Ifeoma is a chiropractic physician; and Emezie, her brother, an MIT and University of Chicago graduate, is an animator, live only a short drive away.
Their parents met in Nigeria, came to the United States, started the family, then moved around the country with her father’s medical residencies. Sometimes, as in South Holland in the 1980s, the Okorafors were one of the first black families in a white town.
They had buckets of paint dropped into their swimming pool; Helen, their mother, said that her children first heard the N-word while riding a South Holland school bus. Though by the time they arrived in the Homewood-Flossmoor area, the sisters’ reputation was preceding itself. Ngozi said, “We were already ranked when we arrived (at HFHS). Mom saw tennis was a practical way to pay for college, and it was our lives. We traveled with the National Junior tennis circuit, at the same time as Jennifer Capriati and Lindsay Davenport. And we would get hate mail at home. People complained about our eligibility.”
“They were pre-Venus and Serena,” remembered Tanya Harry, a Los Angeles schoolteacher who has stayed close friends with Nnedi, “and they could be a fearsome sight. These three black sisters who just walked in their power. They played so determined.”
But Nnedi, she said, was a target.
“Kids made fun of her appearance, and she was chased in hallways, I remember being settled into a class and these kids burst into the room to taunt her. She was tall, skinny and dark-skinned, so people expected to her to get shy and nerdy, but she was not embarrassed about herself. It intimidated the people who wanted to pick on her.” In fact, Ngozi said that Nnedi grew so exhausted of the abuse, and the air of resentment she felt on the tennis team, “that when they tried to demote her to (second string), she just quit. And two days later the principal is at our house apologizing, to get her playing.”
The paralysis came about two years later.
Nnedi recalled: “I might have lost it completely, just go into some dark place. And then, I just started writing.” She was always a reader, “but it never crossed my mind to sit and write.” She loved Stephen King, and thought of science fiction as mostly cold and inaccessible. So she didn’t think of her first stories as science fiction, but pulling from life, and the surreal sights she remembered from family vacations in Nigeria. She wrote another story about a track match, and the way she saw stars the harder she pushed.
Except in her story, the character breaks through into another dimension.
“I think that act of pulling whatever was going on inside me and focusing it took me out of myself,” she said. That summer, she alternated physical therapy with writing. She started using a walker, then decided to return to Urbana-Champaign for her sophomore year. Ngozi drove her. “We dropped her off at her dorm. She was on a cane. It was tough to see. I doubt I’d have returned like that, but Nnedi, she pushes through.”
The least interesting thing about Nnedi is her success. Yet she sold her first book, “Zahrah the Windseeker,” about an African child outcast with special powers, before she finished her Ph.D. in English at the University of Illinois-Chicago. She turned down a job writing HBO’s “The Leftovers” to teach creative writing at the University of Buffalo. She wrote five books before she sold one, and Roosevelt’s Gary Wolfe was on her Ph.D. committee at UIC because the program didn’t have anyone “who knew enough about science fiction literature.” Her parents were horrified she wanted to be a writer, not a scientist. But that’s less surprising than that her mother then demanded Nnedi get a master’s degree in journalism, for career insurance. (She did, from Michigan State.)
“I would wonder where she gets her stories,” her mother said. “She was definitely more interested in her (Nigerian) background than we were, but then we took it for granted. Now I just think sometimes you don’t see the same things your children do, you know?”
The first time I visited Nnedi in Flossmoor, there were white-out conditions and her daughter’s school was on lock-down; the second time, April rain soaked the neighborhood and there was a walk-out at the school because of a black-face video. Both times Okorafor seemed in a heightened state of anxiousness, the kind that infects the overly busy and overly committed. She runs her mini-empire from this small space, she explained, “and there is a lot of interest in (adapting for TV and movies) almost everything I have written, but I am concerned about it being done properly, and because I won’t option anything that I don’t get some say in, I can only allow so much. I am one person. I can’t co-write everything.”
She sighs.
Martin said “Who Fears Death” is still in the script stage; it’s too early to say where it’s headed. In the meantime, Okorafor’s profile rises. Her health is fine, but the bottoms of her feet feel “eternally numb.” So she drives with a flashlight. She does it to see her legs in the dark. “You rely on perception, but me, it’s like my feet aren’t there. If I flip on the light and see my feet, I’m OK. Which is a mental thing, but it’s a physical thing too.” And so she goes to the gym, the same gym that she has been going to since she was 11. They all know her there. “People recognize me, then they ask, ‘Whatever happened to tennis?'”
