Obruni, o del ritorno. Simpoiesi ambientali nella fantascienza africana di oggi

In the development of African identities, deportation and colonialism draw fracture lines – «cracks», as per Nigerian philosopher and «resident provocateur» at the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley Bayo Akómoláfé (2023) – endowed with an extraordinary potential as political devices. They can, and normally do, awaken the transformative potential of cultures that have been violated and progressively erased for centuries (2022). Forced to «become foreigners», the exiled and oppressed are obruni (Hartman 2007, 3), creatures in-between – to use Homi Bhabha’s definition – who, even upon their physical and/or symbolic return to their homeland, will forever be out of place. As such, however, they possess the «potentiality of the cracks»: a stubborn generative will that is combined with the renunciation of centrality as a vital resource for making peace with the environment and with the scars that imperialist policies in Africa have littered. The idea of a possible way back – anomalous, hybrid, non-linear and entangled – is a significant marker of the transformative condition that defines much African science fiction. It contains combined forms of consciousness, in a game of reciprocity that makes the Western tendency to binarism useless and ineffective. It is about proposing a different perspective, or rather, a multiplicity of perspectives, all marginal and for this very reason fertile and generative. Obruni is the world described in many contemporary African and African-American science-fiction narratives, that at the same time recover a Western and African-American heritage to combine it, in a glittering aesthetic and thematic sympoiesis, with unprecedented environmental symmetries.