SWERVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (22)

By: Christopher-Rashee Stevenson
September 13, 2021

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite unfinished masterworks, legendary obscurities and cherished almost-weres.

FLEDGLING

I really love working in genre. The structure it gives. Its rules. And ultimately, the permission it gives to joyfully distort and evolve them. I’ve been working in the cosmic horror genre, the vampire horror genre more specifically (my favorite). Using as source material many floating pieces. Mainly the mother of black science fiction, Octavia E. Butler’s final 2005 novel, Fledgling. In which these creatures are presented less as diminutive Bela Lugosis, and more as ancient displaced tribesmen/women, or aliens beamed down from another world completely. In Fledgling, vampires and the humans they feed on dwell together in idyllic polyamorous tribes, in which their mutual symbiosis is the wellspring that ultimately keeps them all living. Depicted here as natural as the circle of life, or the changing of seasons. Where instead of cinematic/literary painful bites on the neck, the bites here bring intense orgasmic sensations. The protagonist, Shori, because of the melanin in her skin can walk out in sunlight easily without being harmed. Butler makes blackness a superpower; the fact that Shori is indeed also a vampire (the only black vampire) is completely incidental.

Theater felt like a wonderful opportunity to bring awareness in some way to this biblical artifact of a book. As well as to go further down the rabbit hole of my curiosity into a more personal interest in “green horror” (or in this case “red horror”) — how humans deal with a very living environment and the things within it that cannot be explained or controlled. The theatrical events of this piece would be told through the structured lens of a lecture in which a mysterious Hematologist (Dracula in human form) would address the audience on the evolution of the vampire, as well as an interactive study of real diseases in the blood and how they’re formed. Their effects on the human body over time or in the instant.

In Fledgling, Butler is spinning a yarn about Heritage; literal and figurative DNA. And the psychopathic (and very American) desire to destroy the black body at every cost. The protagonist is on a spiritual quest to retrace her roots; not a path of vengeance, though there is plenty of that to be had. That, along with lots of graphic sex and even implications of incest, and the protagonist’s overall cool, self-possessed, surgical nature and way of speaking, may all be factors that have contributed to the book’s obscurity. All the taboos that push the kind of boundaries that only theater can and should push. Revealing those black primal layers of potentiality, urgency, immediacy. On the page and in this subjective reading. If nothing else it will be a rich explorational mashup of cosmic horror and social justice. And will do what Afro-futurism, at its highest, does best: use the past and present as gateway or spaceship for pilgrimage to new future, possible worlds.

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MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

SWERVE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (22)

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