Twenty-first International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Nnedi Okorafor’s “Nsibidi Scripts” trilogy centers on a young girl named Sunny Nwazue, who moves with her Nigerian family from New York to Aba, Nigeria, and discovers that she belongs to a magical secret community known as the Leopard People. Through Sunny’s adventures, Okorafor’s trilogy makes clear that war and climate crisis stem from the legacy of colonialism and unfettered capitalism, both of which view the world solely in terms of resources to be exploited. This paper focuses primarily on Akata Woman (2022), the third book in the series, in order to demonstrate how Okorafor’s speculative YA fictions intervene in global conversations about climate crisis and the Anthropocene. The novel centers on African rather than the Western history and emphasizes the importance of being a nimble, sophisticated reader, as necessitated by the enchanted object at the center of the novel—an iridescent Möbius-strip ghazal written by the giant spider Udide. As readers we are challenged to relinquish antiquated conceptions of nation and to re-imagine our relationship to the planet. Building from the discussion of Akata Woman, this paper also suggests that YA speculative fiction more generally offers essential guidance for navigating this moment of Anthropocenic crisis. YA speculative fiction is generally ignored by theorists of the Anthropocene but these novels perform—and often anticipate—precisely what these theorists call for: a reconceptualization of the human relationship to the planet, a willingness to embrace the nonhuman, and a cosmopolitan imagination that challenges orthodox narratives.