Using Massas Tools Female Shapeshifting and the Decolonisation

‘Using Massa’s Tools’: Female Shapeshifting and the Decolonisation of Fantasy Thomas Brassington / Lancaster University / @Tom. WBrass

Fantasy’s Colonial History • ‘a number of fantasies from the 1970 s and 1980 s drew on Hindu or Afro. Caribbean or Australian Aboriginal traditions, responding to a sort of imaginative manifest destiny. ’ - Brian Attebery, Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) p. 73. • Sinbad Trilogy (1958 -1977) • Orcs • ‘to be a person of colour writing science fiction is to be under suspicion of having internalized one’s colonization. ’ - Nalo Hopkinson, ‘Introduction’, in So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004) p. 7.

Bruce Lincoln, Emerging from the Chrysalis Enclosure Metamorphosis Emergence • ‘women do not have open to them a variety of sociopolitical statuses which they may pass by means of initiation. ’ - Bruce Lincoln, Emerging from the Chrysalis: Studies in Rituals of Women’s Initiation (Cambridge, MA, & London: Harvard University Press, 1981) p. 101. • ‘the general tendency in women’s rites seems to be toward an additive process’ - Lincoln, p, 103. • ‘initiation changes their fundamental being, addressing ontological concerns rather than hierarchical ones. ’ - Lincoln, p. 103. • ‘women’s initiation offers a religious compensation for a sociopolitical deprivation […] it is an opiate for an oppressed class. ’ - Lincoln, p. 105. • ‘the desired result of the ritual is to make a girl ready and willing to assume the traditional place of a woman as defined within a given culture. ’ - Lincoln, p. 106.

David Punter, Postcolonial Imaginings Native • ‘to assimilate the “native” to the “animal” is, as it were, to “clear the ground”, [… which] serves the purpose of extending domination, and in turn reinforces the dominators’ claim to be extending civilisation. ’ - David Punter, Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 200) p. 146. • ‘The goal of the colonial desiring machine [is] to pretend that the land that is so obviously and ubiquitously populated is in fac empty of human life […] a cultural logic […] that sequesters the notion of the “human”, [and] places its definition at the service of the colonial administrator. ’ - Punter, p. 146. Animal • Shapeshifters possess ‘multiple imaginaires [sic], imposed in shifting variations and subject to polyvalent (and frequently subversive) interpretations […] playing as much on (and with) the expectations of other as with the objects of the material world. ’ • Michael Bathgate, The Fox’s Craft in Japanese Religion and Folklore: Shapeshifters, Transformations and Duplicities (New York & London: Routledge, 2004) p. 31.

Enclosure • For successful resistance, a Fantasy ‘should be, at least at the beginning, more recognizably grounded in the biological and social reality of a woman’s life, but in the course of events it should somehow transcend that reality. ’ - Brian Attebery, Strategies of Fantasy (Bloomington & Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992) p. 91. • The eleventh year ritual in Who Fears Death. - ‘a two thousand-year-old-tradition held on the first day of the rainy season. ’ Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death (New York: DAW Books, Inc. , 2010) p. 34. • Zamia’s first encounter with Mouw Awa in Throne. - ‘the tribeswoman had been bitten, but not so badly as to be life-threatening. But within the wound, it was as if the girl’s soul had been poisoned. ’ Saladin Ahmed, Throne of the Crescent Moon (London: Gollancz, 2013) p. 91.

Metamorphosis • ‘ in this liminal period, an unstructured community emerges in which social structures can be challenged and subversive acts can take place. ’ - Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo and Gina Wisker, ‘Introduction’, in Rites of Passage in Postcolonial Women’s Writing, ed. Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo and Gina Wisker (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2010) p. x. • Onyesonwu’s Circumcision. • Zamia losing her ability to shapeshift.

Emergence • Due to Onyesonwu’s brief slip into the Wilderness during her circumcision, her emergence is opened up to the potential of an ontological reality greater than the ritual’s intent. • Through shapeshifting, Onyesonwu embodies the decolonisation of Fantasy by asserting agency through corporeal control, and creating her own ontology. • Zamia’s emergent state uses her corporeal agency to demonstrate the fragility of the discourses that usually determine women of colour’s ontology, by blurring the usually strict gender divides present in Fantasy texts.

Conclusion – Towards Postcolonial Fantasy? • ‘Overturning colonialism, then, is not just about handing land back to its dispossessed peoples […] it is also a process of overturning the dominant ways of seeing the world, and representing reality in ways which do not replicate colonialist values. ’ - John Mc. Leod, Beginning Postcolonialism, 2 nd edn. (Manchester& New York: Manchester University Press, 2010) p. 25. • ‘The narrators and characters in these stories make the language of the colonizer their own by reflecting it back but speaking unpleasant truths, by expanding its vocabulary and changing its syntax to better accommodate their different world-views, and by ironically appropriating its terms for themselves and their lives. ’ - Uppinder Mehan, ‘Final Thoughts’, in So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004) p. 270.

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