Black Atlantis: Fluid Remediations, Spatiotemporal Reverberations, and Afrofuturist Re-Storying in Drexciyan Mythology | Vortrag von Julia Gatermann auf der DGfA 2024: American Soundscapes | 22.-25. Mai

Black Atlantis: Fluid Remediations, Spatiotemporal Reverberations, and Afrofuturist Re-Storying in Drexciyan Mythology

Julia Gatermann at the annual conference of the German Association for American Studies: “American Soundscapes”
May 22-25, 2024
University of Oldenburg

In 1781, the crew of the English slave ship Zong threw their slaves overboard, calculating that the insurance money for their death was worth more than the profit from selling their lives, following a common practice for slavers to jettison ‘cargo’ in storms.

“Could it be possible for humans to breath underwater?” This is how Drexciya introduce their 1997 album The Quest. Drexciya, a second-wave electronic duo based in the post-industrial homeland of Detroit techno, built a posthuman Black Atlantis with their sonic fiction:

During the greatest holocaust the world has ever known, pregnant America-bound African slaves were thrown overboard by the thousands during labour for being sick and disruptive cargo. Is it possible that they could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air? Are Drexciyans water- breathing aquatically mutated descendants of those unfortunate victims of human greed? Recent experiments have shown a premature human infant saved from certain death by breathing liquid oxygen through its underdeveloped lungs (Drexciya, 1997: n.p.).

Central to the Drexciya myth is a temporal fluidity that regards history, in Afrofuturistic manner, as much in flux as the oceans that has become their home, and to look at the middle passage and its afterlife from a futuristic perspective of survival and thriving. Their sonic fiction remains open and somewhat elusive which allows for a multiplicity of subjective identifications.

Drexciya’s oeuvre, however, is only the first step of what Navah Wolfe has described as “a game of artistic Telephone”[1] across the Black Atlantic that was continued with an album called The Deep by the LA experimental hip hop group clipping. in 2017, and then was picked up by Rivers Solomon who turned the Drexciya myth into their eponymously named novella The Deep in 2019. Radically breaking with (hetero-)normative social scripts, Solomon’s protagonist Yetu struggles with the role that their people, the merfolk wajinru, have burdened them with. They are their people’s historian, sole holder of their collective memory, speaker for the dead – a traumatic past that would overwhelm the individual to remember. But is also does overwhelm Yetu who breaks free from their duties – accidentally unleashing the pain of the past on their community and abandoning them to their downfall into catatonic madness. Pain is the catalyst for transformation, and a loss of identity is the result. But in Solomon’s The Deep memory, pain and identity are complexly layered and stand in a complicated relationship: pain is an inherent part of the wajinru’s existence and it needs to be experienced and shared to become productive. Yetu’s story is about the shedding of an overwhelming traumatic heritage, followed by a more intentional engagement with the past, one that is shared with one’s community and therefore can bring about healing - and a reclamation of a more authentic voice.

All these texts, following an Afrofuturist approach, collectively renegotiate trauma by looking at history not as something fixed but fluid. By responding to and communicating with each other across time and space, they constitute a re-storying of survival, a re-inscription of life.

[1] clipping. “Afterword.” In The Deep, by Rivers Solomon. New York: Saga Press, 2019. 157.