
What Gifts Do We Already Have?: adrienne maree brown and Speculative Fiction
Writer, activist, and facilitator adrienne maree brown’s literary works are often influenced by the pioneering science fiction author Octavia E. Butler and Afrofuturism. This summer, brown is the guest curator of the film series Compelling Speculations on Human Survival, which looks through and beyond dystopia to narratives that imagine compelling scenarios for what human life could look like if we find a way to persist on Earth.
In the run-up to the series launch, brown sat down with interdisciplinary artist Za’Nia Coleman to discuss hope in the face of dystopias, what stories can be found in our DNA, and the potential that speculation has for making the world a better place.
Za’Nia Coleman
You have said that science fiction is where you do some of the most honest thinking. How did your relationship to sci-fi shape the curation for this series?
adrienne maree brown
I was pretty excited when the invitation came in. I thought, “Ooh, I’ve always wanted to do something like this.” Part of why I’m interested in science fiction is I believe that all organizing is science fiction. I believe that the future could be better and different than what exists now. Science fiction is always troubling the water and trying to figure it out. This led me to ask myself: What are works that present compelling speculations on what human survival could look like out ahead of us? Who has been thinking of it?
One of my favorite things are images of the future from the past. I love looking back and asking, What did people think the world was going to be like? Was it going to be The Jetsons? Or humanity in outer space, like Star Trek? I love how people imagined what fashion was going to look like in 50 years. The films I selected tie them together by this speculating.

ZC
My first encounter with something utopian was when there was a lot of talk that the world was going to end in 2012 because of the Mayan calendar. I was in middle school at the time, and many of us were thinking: We don’t have to do homework? But then, we woke up the next day, and it was back to normal. Back to school. Because nothing happened.
You’ve described dystopias as not the end, but a beginning point. How can dystopias or ideas of the end of the world help us shape what the future does look like? What role does speculative storytelling play in helping us reimagine how we engage with our present?
amb
Sometimes when things are peaceful, good, and abundant, there is not a sense of: We’ve got to fight to make sure this continues to be good. As things get harder, people realize there’s something to lose. Unfortunately, that fear of a worse tomorrow is often what motivates us.
Speculative fiction becomes a place where we talk about the struggles we’re facing in a way that cathartically helps us process being inside such hard times. It also allows us to talk about what makes us want to change the conditions we’re in. In every generation, there are handfuls, clusters, and groupings of people who see what’s happening and say, “I’m going to try to make a way forward for my people, myself, family, loved ones, and my species.” That’s how we’ve always done it. Humans change because their lives have become untenable.
We hear that a lot right now. People keep saying, “This is not who America is.” That debate is based on the question: What history? Our history is who we are, but it’s not who we have to be. The fact that we want to identify as something other means that we can be something else.
The stories in each film I picked don’t have a singular hero who’s able to tackle the challenges alone. These tales focus on relationships between a group of people that become meaningful. A lot of the characters who become important are people who didn’t think of themselves as important. They didn’t recognize that they had one of the key elements or gifts needed. The character might be a kid, a whale, or a ghost, but they have a vital role to play in changing the future.
I love that because you can reflect on your own life and ask, “Am I taking myself seriously as one of these people who could change things? Who are my scrappy crew of survivors who have gifts to offer?”

ZC
What are the differences between folklore and science fiction? Where do you think they overlap?
amb
I think of folklore as stories we have been holding for a long time. Stories that got passed on orally and might change. The details might change.
One of the things I’ve always loved about being multiracial and multicultural is that I’ve traveled a lot and been in a lot of different communities. That has allowed me to hear folklore from various places and discover the same story exists in multiple places on earth. The details might differ slightly because you’re in a different context. For instance, the tree is a different kind of tree, or the animal might be a different kind of animal. But the wisdom remains the same. Often, we create stories filled with wisdom that can help warn or teach each other.
Folklore and science fiction are actually very similar; they just look in different directions on the timeline from where we are. Folklore are stories that have been around for a long time. Science fiction is how we tell the stories of humanity in the future. What are the wisdoms, warnings, and directions we want to offer today based on what might be in the future?

One of the big differences is that folklore is working with the materials we know so far, and sci-fi has the potential to add or extrapolate on what we have. For instance, in Black Panther, there is the fictional metal vibranium. It doesn’t really exist, but [the notion] allows us to begin to discuss about how an unknown, yet-to-be discovered resource could change our entire world.
Another example is Interstellar. Right now, we can’t actually explore other planets, but at some point, we will be able to. When that happens, we will have to figure out how space travel will change humanity. We’ll be problem-solving emigrating from this planet to others. In a way, Interstellar is not so different from any migration story. The situation in the place you are from has become either dysfunctional or dangerous, so we have to set off and migrate from this place and find a new home. Interstellar is a futuristic story of doing the same migration that humans have done for millennia.

ZC
That reminds me of stories I’ve heard about my great grandma, who I never got to meet. How she loved to walk in her garden barefoot. That she smoked cigarettes, drank gin, and loved collard green patches. I always envision a more expansive storyline of who she was and how it connects to who I am.
amb
I love that. Just looking through our own families and history, we discover things about today and the future. That their DNA is tied to mine and, maybe, somewhere in my body, I know more of the story. I live in a Black and white family, so I think about my white ancestors. If I go back far enough, there were slaveowner ancestors. That makes me consider how I can fill in the gaps of what happened between those slave-owning ancestors, my mom’s generation, and her choice to marry my dad.
Something happened in each generation along the way, and there are parts of the story that I don’t know. I get very interested in those pieces of history that weren’t written down or documented, but we can feel them. They had to have existed because we can see the results.

ZC
The film series asks, “What does it mean to survive?” as well as “How to persist?” What does persistence mean to you? How do these films help us practice it?
amb
One type of persistence is against the propaganda that dystopia is inevitable and that mass suffering is inevitable. That there always has to be some suffering underclass, some forgotten or destroyed people, in order for everyone else to exist. For me, this type of persistence is just holding in my mind that there’s another way that’s possible.
Another persistence is staying in relationship with people who also believe something other than what we have now is possible. Perhaps the longest-held kind of community is intergenerational persistence, that those of us who come from peoples who have experienced genocide, apartheid, enslavement, or displacement.
Most of the time, I’m looking around and thinking: We are the survivors. Our people are the survivors. Maybe the tale of a people’s oppression is so old that we don’t know it anymore, and they don’t identify it with it anymore. But almost everyone comes from some struggling people somewhere if you look back down the line.
There is also the persistence of, when faced with what seems like certain death or extinction, saying, “I think there might still be a way, but I’m going to have to change.” That is the persistence to survive in order to make the necessary changes. I’m always paying attention to that for myself.
In each one of these movies I picked, there is some sort of outlandish solution. With Interstellar there is the question of if it’s love that’s creating the portals. Contact is also a love story while also being a story of family and spirit. For Star Trek, humanity needs to time travel to save the whales because the whales can communicate with the aliens. Black Panther has a whole hidden nation that has to grapple with questions of isolationism versus opening up to the rest of the world.

The NeverEnding Story focuses on the persistence of being a dreamer and the ways you can persist against a nothingness that’s coming for you. I love that because it succinctly encapsulates survival.
Take what trans people are facing today, as an example. No matter how much someone tries to erase you, you exist. You exist now and you will exist as a trans person. You persist because you claim yourself fully. To me, persistence is so important, but there’s an aspect of it that is internal. There has to be something in you that’s still seeking life in the face of despair. When you are facing the mouth of an apocalypse, despair is a reasonable emotional reaction. You have to connect with the internal part of yourself that says, “I’m not just going to lie down on the tongue of this mouth. I’m going to try to get out of this mouth, or I’m going to try to stab this beast from the inside. I am going to do whatever it takes.” It is so important to preserve and protect that will to survive. Persistence is one of our most sacred qualities.

ZC
This series feels like a love letter to a radical act of reimagining. What do you hope audiences feel, remember, or question as they experience the series?
amb
I love that. Each film in the series includes moments where the viewer feels the smallness of their own life in comparison to the awe of the universe. When we think about the vastness of the universe, we think about the improbability of our existence and how complex it all feels. I want people to feel that. Look at all these beautiful humans deciding there’s something worth fighting for. In each of these stories, there is a victory. The victory can be having some small spark of hope.
I’m really hoping that, as people watch these movies, especially if people see the whole series, they discover victory doesn’t always come as something massive or dominating. Victory is really about what small work we can do to transform ourselves and the world.

ZC
You are also a scholar of the work of pioneering sci-fi author Octavia Butler. Given the state of the world today, have you discovered something new in her work recently?
amb
Octavia Butler wrote a series called Pattern Master that starts with the book Wild Seed. In Wild Seed, there is this seemingly immortal healer named Anyanwu and an immortal body thief named Doro, who jumps from body to body in order to live forever.
Every time I’d ever read that story before, it was clear to me that Doro is bad and dangerous. Doro is a narcissist and sociopath who doesn’t value life, whereas Anyanwu is life. A few years ago I was having a discussion in Oakland about this, and someone asked, “Did Anyanwu ever try to heal Doro? She’s a healer.” In the next book in the series, Mind of My Mind, Anyanwu does try to rope Doro into a networked, interconnected humanity, but it doesn’t work. It overwhelms Doro, and he doesn’t know how to exist in a collective in a way like that.
I thought about that question a lot and kept asking myself: What are the words I use to allow me to see someone as impossible to save, heal, or even try to help? What do I do then? I realized the only option when you see anyone as impossible to help is to build a wall between us. I’ve accepted the narrative that the only way I can be safe is to build a wall to protect myself.
Right now, we’re caught in a whole world of those kind of walls. People have dehumanized each other to the extent that they say, “I’m not even going to try.” These kinds of narratives lead to genocide and apartheid. Multiple genocides are happening right now based on that fundamental inability to see the humanity in another person.
Once you start deciding some people are sociopathic or psychopathic, it’s very easy to be like: Nothing can be done for these people. We can’t even try. We have to be so wary, so careful about that. Returning to Butler’s book, I saw that Doro also wanted companionship, connection, and love. He didn’t know a different way to do try to get those things. I was able to see for the first time that he has been traumatized into existing like this. He doesn’t start jumping bodies just for fun. He jumps because his entire family is murdered, and he jumps out of his body to survive. That is how he discovers he has this ability to jump bodies.
Discovering this made me realize just how brilliant Octavia Butler is. In this work she presented how trauma disconnects us from our very selves and makes us try to be all these other people that can do great harm. That made me ask: Is there a way to return to ourselves?
A lot of times when I imagine the future, it’s not flying cars—it’s healed people. Can you imagine what it would be like if we were able to create a network of love, care, attention, and space for the people we think of as so far gone. Maybe this could even allow those people to recover.▪︎

Experience the films of Compelling Speculations on Human Survival and hear from adrienne maree brown in person this summer at the Walker. Learn more and get tickets here.