Untold African Narratives Through Chisom Umeh’s Speculative Fiction

Yinka Olatunbosun

African speculative fiction is alive and well in the hands of writers like Chisom Umeh. Chisom, who was recently announced the winner of the Nommo Award for Best African Speculative short story at the Ake Books and Arts Festival in Lagos, is one of the trailblazers of the genre. Speculative fiction, a broad term encompassing writings that lean towards the supernatural or unusual, covers categories such as science fiction, fantasy, horror, magical realism, weird fiction, and more. The African brand of this genre, often overlooked by a majority of readers even though very popular in the West, has in recent times begun to draw interest from a global audience, especially since the release of blockbuster movies like Black Panther.

Quite a few advocates have emerged speaking boldly and representing the continent, defining what speculative fiction means to us here and how it aligns with our realities. Writers like Wole Talabi, Nnedi Okorafor, Tade Thompson, and more have stood strong on this front, and Chisom Umeh, with his recent Nommo-winning work, has become a part of that number.

His short story, “From Across Time,” a time travel story that shines a light on what the far future could look like for us, is inventive and poignant. In the story, we find the protagonist in a sort of one-sided communication with an unnamed character on a screen. The woman on the screen seems to be knowledgeable about the protagonist, Adaeze, even though Adaeze doesn’t remember ever meeting her before. In the course of the story, we learn that the woman on screen is a time traveler who came from the future to Adaeze’s time and that they’ve both had a relationship. But, due to the illegality of this relationship, the time traveler has gone back in time to change the moment they met, so that, from Adaeze’s perspective, the meeting never happened.

From the time traveler, we learn of what the far future looks like and the politics of that time. In this story, Chisom explores memory, power, sexuality as well as the intersection of personal love and duty to one’s country or state. The story situates Nigeria and Africa in a global picture that extends into the far future. Often, science fiction works are written by Westerners and handed to us to digest. These stories often do not include Africans or the African perspective in any way, but writers like Chisom are changing that narrative with pieces that reflect the untold, albeit forbidden, African stories.

Another important speculative story of Chisom’s that does well to centre the African narrative is “Ancestor’s Gift,” an African futuristic climate fiction piece. In this story, we see a country that is hundreds of years away from the present, and climate change has caused the environment to look radically different from what we know. People now live in small communities and depend more on the earth for their food and sustenance. We learn from the imaginative prowess of the author just what Africa can look like if we ignore present-day climate change warning signs. The story, though ending on a somewhat hopeful side, is not to be mistaken for a casual narrative and should be viewed as a wake-up call to everyone who cares about our environment and hopes that further generations will live well in it.

In “Ancestor’s Gift,” Chisom makes a commentary on the layers of smell, colonialism and environmental degradation. This politics of smell constitutes a part of the public consciousness. A seemingly gray area in public discourse, it falls under the scope of environmental justice as it connects with the socio-economic realities of the underserved. The writer’s encounter with ‘The Colonial History of Climate’ as a student largely inspired his interrogation of politics of air and smell in the framework of his narrative. Hence, the veranda in this story serves a metaphoric function of explaining the air of classicism using visual elements and graphic language.

With speculative stories like these, African readers get to not only imagine our futures, but to partake in the shaping of our own narratives with post-colonial perspectives as backdrop. Speculative fiction is a sharp tool to wield, and Africans like Chisom Umeh using it to tell great stories is a good sign that our literature is on the right path.