Fish out of water : black superheroines in Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon

Abstract

Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon opens with a swordfish narrator who watches aliens while they populate the Nigerian waters. Unlike the narrator, who is entirely at home in the ocean, the aliens cannot breathe water with the same ease because, like the two black female protagonists in the novel, Ayodele and Adaora, the aliens are amphibian-like in nature. As the novel proceeds, Ayodele and Adaora’s amphibian bodies become increasingly suggestive of the tentative navigation of spaces that they do not necessarily inhabit. My sense is that this oxymoronic habitation of an “alien home” alludes to that which is both strange and familiar, and so performs a metatextual mapping of the precarious space that black women more generally occupy in science fiction.