I Made It Up: Polaris Manifesto Part 6

I am a commitment to visions of new worlds

Greetings! This is Part 6 in a series about myth, speculative fiction, and social change. Catch up on the rest of the series using the links below.

• Part 0: Introducing the Polaris Manifesto (article)

• Part 1: Starshine and Clay (article) (audio)

• Part 2: God is Change (article) (audio)

• Part 3: Your Fav is Woo (article) (audio)

• Part 4: Mythic Critique (article) (audio)

• Part 5: Suspend Disbelief (article + audio)

"What is your dream reparations package?"

That is one of my favorite icebreaker questions because big, existential questions like it help me practice the skill of radical imagination.¹ One short question about reparations opens up a conversation about unfettered, boundless dreams of a world that has acknowledged and atoned for the suffering of our ancestors, especially for Black folks.

How people respond to that question teaches me a lot about their values and vocations. With a spark of imagination alight in their eyes, most people share dreams of free education, high-quality healthcare, that forty acres we never got, student debt forgiveness, and guaranteed basic income. These dreams point to an unconquerable collective imagination, wrested from the clutches of colonization and captivity. Our dreams are the building blocks of new, thriving worlds where we are free to create, learn, breathe, grow food and homes... In those dreams of reparations packages I hear the longing for safety and freedom.

That we can imagine worlds otherwise is the crux of my argument today, and the main point of the Polaris Manifesto: we don't have to live like this.

“i made it up / here on this bridge between / starshine and clay” | Photo by Davide Vattuone on Unsplash

In What it Takes to Heal, Prentis Hemphill describes visions as the ability "to conjure something that sits outside of your time and circumstance while being firmly rooted in the moment. To listen for the calls of what is not yet here but is waiting just in the wings" (11). This imaginative, forward-facing capacity Hemphill says is necessary to transform ourselves is also at the heart of speculative, or visionary, fiction.

Speculative fiction invites us to ask a what-if question and project its response either forward or backward in time. So underneath a question like the dream reparations package icebreaker lies a bigger speculation: what if countries who were involved in the Atlantic Slave Trade were accountable for the harm that still reverberates from that time and attempted to repair the damage? "What if" is no small matter because it encourages people “to use their imaginations in service of positive social change that challenges the prevalence of [images of] dominance, death, and destruction in contemporary popular culture" (Gilbert 107).

The speculative fiction subgenres of sci-fi, horror, fantasy, and historical fiction ask me to question the world as it exists. "What if" begs me to speculate on worlds otherwise, and in so doing, I see that the lines between fiction and possibility shift as a matter of perspective. Generally, I have been the most familiar and fascinated with dystopian versions of the speculative. For example, what would happen if a small town cop woke up alone in a hospital after being in a coma to a city overrun by zombies (The Walking Dead)? What would it be like if an extraterrestrial being took the lives of nearly an entire crew, fresh out of cryo-sleep, while they were traveling in deep space (Alien)? My favorite and oft-cited example of post-apocalyptic speculative fiction is Octavia E. Butler's Parables series, which people have heralded as prophetic for predicting recent political and environmental events about twenty years before they happened. I've written about Butler's prophetic, or HistoFuturist, skills twice on this platform, and am showing no signs of stopping.²

You Don’t Need Another Octavia Butler Think Piece

God is Change: Polaris Manifesto Part 2

If I'm being honest, though, my appetite for stories about The End of the World™️ has waned a bit as of late. An ongoing life-threatening virus that snatched the lives of millions of people and drove the world into isolation for months has the power to do that... The what-if questions I'm curious about are different now. What if humans recovered from climate collapse with the help of other beings like robots, as in Becky Chambers' Monk and Robot series? What if the ultra-wealthy elite abandoned earth to go live in space and left the rest of us here to heal ourselves and the planet like what happens in "Emergency Skin" by N.K. Jemisin? These kinds of stories urge me to sharpen and use my visionary capacity to imagine worlds where we are free and whole. They are stories that help me see new possibilities for being, which is important because what we believe is possible is the very blueprint of our world.

Creative Prompts

Use these prompts to pull a new world from your imagination. Whether you're a writer, a visual artist, a musician, or something in-between, use that spark of imagination to invite us into your creative vision.

• What is your dream reparations package? If you're not Black, try asking this question to one of your loved ones who is. Not a stranger on the internet. Don't be weird.

• What does freedom look like to you?

• Compare your current world to your favorite sci-fi, fantasy, horror, or historical fiction story in any medium. What are the key similarities and differences?

• If you're not familiar with any of those genres, ask a loved one or a librarian for a recommendation based on your favorite genre.

CEUs

It's important to me to share other audio, text, and video resources that may help you tap into the wave of wisdom that informed this part of the Polaris Manifesto. I've curated several free resources on Are.na for you to enjoy, and a shorter list of pdf and epub materials for paid subscribers below. Enjoy!

Note: This post contains affiliate links. If you choose to purchase books using my Bookshop affiliate links, I will receive a small commission on your purchase.

• Jasmyne Gilbert, “From The End to Eden: Exploring Myth and Literature for a New World” journal article

• Jasmyne Gilbert, “mythic visions” Spotify podcast playlist

• Angela Glover Blackwell, Radical Imagination podcast

• Ruha Benjamin, Imagination: A Manifesto book

• Prentis Hemphill, What it Takes to Heal book

• Becky Chambers, Monk and Robot novella series

• Octavia E. Butler, Parables novels

• Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination book

• Wakanda Dream Lab and PolicyLink, Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Memories of Abolition Day video

For paid subscribers