Consequence, Harmony, and Afrofuturism in Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti: The Night Masquerade

Consequence, Harmony, and Afrofuturism in Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti: The Night Masquerade

1    Consequence

In a February 2017 interview with Weird Fiction Review, Nnedi Okorafor notes that the interstellar-traveling Binti, the Himba title character of Binti, Binti: Home, and now Binti: The Night Masquerade (I won’t call it a trilogy, in the hopes that readers will hear more from Binti in the future), has deep-rooted cultural connections with her people. Okorafor says, “Culture is very deep, it can’t just be shed just as you can’t shed what is part of your DNA. But culture is also alive and can incorporate things, it blends, shifts…and there are always consequences to change” (WFR). From the very first book in the series, we see Binti confront these consequences through loss. When she decides to enroll in Oomza University, she loses her daily family connections, as well as the love of her best friend and possibly future husband, Dele. On the ship on the way to Oomza, she witnesses the slaughter of all her friends aboard the ship. She even loses her otjize-covered hair that recorded her family history in twenty-one braids of “tessellating triangles” (22).

In Binti: Home, her loses continue. She loses her chance to go on her culture’s traditional pilgrimage. She loses her sense of being pure Himba, when she realizes that she now has Meduse DNA and family ancestry with the so-called Desert People. The Desert People are actually the Enyi Zinariya, who have alien nano-technology flowing through their blood. Binti: Home ends with Binti’s fear that her Himba homeland is under attack.

Binti: The Night Masquerade intensifies this sense of consequence and loss, as it opens with the line “It started with a nightmare” (9). In The Night Masquerade, Binti fears the death of her entire family. She risks her own life to try to end a war between the Khoush and the Meduse. She even loses the use of her astrolabe, which ceases to function after Binti activates the Zinariya technology that flows through her body. Binti had crafted the astrolabe herself over many hours of highly intricate, technical work; it had contained her whole history. The importance of this loss cannot be overstated. In Binti’s world, an astrolabe “carried the full record of your entire life on it—you, your family, and all forecasts of your future” (44). When her astrolabe stops working, Binti thinks, “I’d just lost my entire identity” (45). Binti’s original decision to leave her Himba family, to leave Earth, leads directly to her total loss of familial connection and self-identity. Binti pays a high price for her decisions. But these consequences are only a part of her story.

2     Harmony

Readers of Binti and Binti: Home will know that Binti is a master harmonizer, a person capable of negotiating peace between warring factions, such as the Meduse and the Khoush. As a master harmonizer, Binti also communicates across spirit and technology, using “deep mathematics” to create useful currents and flows. In Binti: Home, her father tells her “It’s the job of the master harmonizer to make peace and friendship” (63). Through the first two books, Binti brings peace to the warlike jellyfish creatures, the Meduse. As this peace falls apart in The Night Masquerade, Binti reaches for an even deeper level of harmony. With her identity lost with the destruction of her astrolabe and the ending of the peace treaty between the Meduse and the Khoush, Binti turns inward to forge a masterful new identity. I cannot think of much other science fiction (or any other kind of fiction, really) that examines so closely, and with such care, the creation of a complex, interstellar, hybrid identity. The Night Masquerade shows us how Binti risks her Himba identity to form a self that is completely new. Toward the end of The Night Masquerade, a doctor tells Binti “there is no person like you at this school” (216). Remember, Oomza University brings in students from galaxies across the universe. If there is no person like her at the University, there is probably no person like her in the whole universe.

To be brief, Binti is Himba by birth. She becomes part Meduse, when she is stung by a Meduse in the first book (she loses her hair, and grows okuoko, Meduse-like tentacles, in its place). She learns that she is part Enyi Zinariya through her father’s mother. When Binti activates this part of her identity, she loses the use of her astrolabe, but gains a much deeper and stronger form of communication. Finally, (for reasons I will not spoil in this review), she absorbs DNA and microbes into her being from a living space ship known as “New Fish.” To assert this four-fold identity, Binti proclaims “my name is Binti Ekeopara Zuzu Dambu Kaipka Meduse Enyi Zinariya New Fish of Namib.” And while The Night Masquerade starts as a nightmare, and while many people in the novel try to discount or destroy Binti’s newly-made identiy, the nightmare becomes a dream, and Binti gains control over every aspect of her identity. She harmonizes herself. To use a word that she is fond of, she survives.

3      Afrofuturism

According to the Namibia Tourism board, there are 20,000-50,000 Himba people in Northern Namibia. Okorafor’s Binti books are far-future science fiction. Interstellar space travel is taken for granted. Thousands of species of living beings interact at Oomza University. The books never tell us about Earth history from the 21^st century to the present day of Binti’s world. We do not learn what has happened on Earth or how interstellar travel has affected the universe. What we do learn is that a small group of people survive with their cultural traditions intact across thousands of years. All of the Binti books’ scenes on Earth takes place in Africa. The final part of Binti’s name, “of Namib” still signifies in this future. I cannot think of a better definition of Afrofuturism—a future where the people and places of what 21^st century Earthlings call the African continent take center stage. Contemporary writers like Deji Bryce Olokotun have given central importance to Nigerian characters in science fiction. N.K. Jemisin has shown that questions of race and racism will persist on Earth in her far-future Broken Earth Series. Okorafor gives us a single person, Binti “of Namib” who literally embodies, in her DNA, a multispecies identity that keeps both its roots and its branches. Binti travels to the rings of Saturn (no spoilers, so I won’t say why) and Okorafor beautifully captures the freedom that Binti feels. “I moved through Saturn’s rings of brittle metallic dust . . . It felt pleasant . . . This was my mission. My purpose. And it was fantastic” (188). The fact that “it was fantastic” is what makes The Night Masquerade fantastic. In Binti, Okorafor has made someone new and fantastic. “Space is the place”[1] for Binti. The Night Masquerade earns the hope that it offers readers.

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[1] “Space is the place” is the title of chapter 8 of The Night Masquerade, borrowed from Sun Ra, who famously declared he was from Saturn.