ABSTRACT
This essay analyses Nnedi Okorafor’s novel The Book of Phoenix (2015), the prequel to her much acclaimed Who Fears Death (2010), focusing on the potential of female rage to generate active hope and trigger a collective utopian movement. Drawing on Kim Stanley Robinson’s idea about a current shift from the old structure of “knowing-but-not-acting” into a new one, this essay interprets the protagonist Phoenix’s rage as part of the new hope-charged “feeling-what-we-know-and-acting.” Okorafor’s multilayered dystopia makes visible parallels between colonisation and slavery and large corporations’ exploitation of human resources, including atrocious biotechnological experiments and forms of discrimination and violence against women, mainly in the politics of commodification of the human body and the space it inhabits. In The Book of Phoenix, the relationship between utopia and dystopia displays a clear spatial dimension; hence the analysis of patterns of appropriation and control over space reveals how these distort people’s perception of reality and their capacity to react to corporate violence. Like a variety of mythical aerial women, Phoenix’s flight, powered by her rage at the sight of injustice, symbolises her freedom from any biological and normative boundaries, and together with her “feeling-what-we-know-and-acting,” is the expression of Okorafor’s feminist utopianism.
