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isabelleverdino 's review for:
Life on Mars
by Tracy K. Smith
Here is a paper I wrote about this collection for my Literature class on Afrofuturism. I figured I should post it here:
The Importance of the Past in Our Future: Discussing Tracy K. Smith’s
Rightful Place in Afrofuturist Discourse
Tracy K. Smith’s poetry collection Life on Mars explores both the complexity and nuance of envisioning potential futures beyond Earth especially for black people. This work enters an academic conversation about Afrofuturism; a theoretical perspective that is used to analyze and identify the complex relationships between Black identities, existing and imagined technologies, and the future and all it can offer. This discourse is already populated with conversations about prominent Afrofuturist texts like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Sun Ra’s life and music, and Janelle Monae’s exploration through her persona Cindi Mayweather. Within these conversations, Tracy K. Smith’s work is often absent. What conversations about Life on Mars that do exist center around Smith’s face-value investigation of faith and grief. They delve deep into the nuance of her more religious poems and the ones where she grapples with the passing of her father. However, they don't look closely enough at her poems that combat our idea of the perfect, utopian future and those that force us to acknowledge the issues with our past and present that would inspire these futures. I want to analyze how Smith's portrayal not just of dangerous speculative features like the one described in “Sci-Fi” but also the weight and gravity of our actions and choices on the Earth itself illustrated by “Ransom” make Smith's contributions to the academic conversation of afrofuturism more significant than most scholars give her credit for.
Despite Life on Mars’ impactful, thought-provoking scenarios, the academic conversation surrounding Smith’s collection has been severely limited. This is, in part, because Smith’s exploration of black science-fiction strays from the avant-garde approaches of more popular creators like Sun Ra and Janelle Monae. In an article by Margaret Ann Greaves titled “Vast and Unreadable”, she talks about Tracy K Smith’s selection of poetry and how it looks at the world through a lens that is absent in a lot of other poetry collections. The poems themselves have accessible language but their theoretical meaning is sometimes unfathomable or at the very least open to a lot of diverse interpretations. The poems navigate politicize radicalized and gendered language expectations and while other academic Scholars look at the collection and claim that it doesn't do enough to represent Afrofuturist discourse, Greaves asserts that this black quiet can be confused for apathy but it isn't and, in fact, “Smith’s ‘quiet’ is socially determined and politically responsive” (Greaves, 3). This idea of Black quiet aptly summarizes Smith’s exploration of black speculative futures in Life on Mars. I believe that quiet is often confused with weakness. That’s why a lot of the current academic conversation revolves around this idea of confusion; because Smith didn’t undoubtedly represent her assertions about what a black future should look like, scholars are hesitant to analyze her many potential futures at all. I think it‘s an extreme oversight for us to believe that black creators need to produce a certain level of response that we deem appropriate or worthy. These creators don’t need to do any of this work in order to justify their existence or be able to make their viewers or listeners or readers more comfortable. Afrofuturist creators like Tracy K Smith, Janelle Monae, and Sun Ra, are creating these spaces because they are trying to figure out their own continued existence in our world and in our space moving forward. There is no right or wrong way for them to do that.
One of the first poems in Life on Mars is the widely discussed “Sci-Fi”. This poem poses a potential future where human beings have evolved beyond the species and live in a kind of utopia. Academic scholars have centered a lot of their observations on whether Smith views this utopia as something to strive for or something to avoid. I think that by her language choice and the dialogue she continues throughout her collection her opinion is clear: “Sci-Fi”s future is not one we want to reach. To start, the poem talks a lot about refining the human and removing the parts of us that don’t need to exist anymore. It suggests that “Women will still be women, but the distinction will be empty. Sex, having outlived every threat, will gratify only in the mind, which is where it will exist” (Smith, 7). These lines are saying that while we may still use the word women, the importance and meaning behind it won’t exist. The biggest distinction with this line is its grand sweeping assumptions about gender being unnecessary. People who are non-binary could read this and believe it to be a positive potential future, one where we have the power to define our own gender and sex as we see fit and not have to conform to the rigid definition about what a woman is supposed to be. However, I believe Sci-Fi is imagining a potential future where we are not allowed to have gender or explore ourselves within it. This future is a sterile one where everything that makes the human race up is sort of washed away and erased because those traits and qualities aren't seen as desirable anymore. If our present was one where all human beings were equal regardless of the labels society has saddled them with, then this wouldn’t be a necessary conversation. But by imagining a future where these idiosyncrasies, these oddities, and this queerness is written out of us because it’s seen as not appropriate anymore is just a signal that those people have remained on the outskirts of society. It is one thing for a straight, white, cishet man to say that we're not going to use any of these qualifiers anymore than it would for a queer, non-binary, black person because being able to identify with those things is a rebellion and itself. In this way, “Sci-Fi” serves as a warning about abolishing all identity and a reflection of our current society and its biases.
Similarly, “Sci-Fi”s utopia has moved beyond refining the human and also decided to refine human history. Specifically, “History, with its hard spine & dog-eared corners, will be replaced with nuance” (Smith, 7). This is a clear indicator that something about this ideal future is extremely wrong. You cannot replace history with nuance. It would be appropriate to introduce nuance to history and have them work together; that’s how people decide what narratives to include in history books. That’s not without its drawbacks, but at least then they’re working together. If you have only nuance without history, it’s purposeless. You are erasing the context and leaving the future with nothing real to look back on. I believe that this part of the poem is referring to a rewriting of history that has been spun into an entirely new and falsified plane of existence. If we don't have the history to compare the nuanced version to, then replacing history is the same as erasing history and thus we end up living in this place where we can't even link to our own cultural past. In addition, who exactly will be doing the erasing? This links to a larger discourse about power dynamics and who has the ability to decide what will stay in our history and what needs to be filtered out. This also ties into larger Afrofuturist discourse and understanding that created knowledge has evolved on the backs of people of color. They are the ones who would suffer in this future: a clean, white, sterile place where difference and struggle doesn’t exist. Suggesting that the future needs to be this clean white cultureless space negates everything that the human race is.
The future suggested by “Sci-Fi” does not exist in a bubble. It is contextualized and complexified by our present and the timeline that we’re moving along currently. In an article comparing Tracie Morris and Tracy K. Smith, Erin Ranft, a professor at The University of Texas San Antonio, Ranft emphasizes the importance of poetry as a format through which to evolve Afrofuturist conversations and evolve them to the next level. She emphasizes that Smith “does not directly address racial identity within the realm of the “safe” future through her construction; as a result, readers may strain to view Smith’s examination of Black identity in the future through an Afrofuturist lens” (Ranft, 81). This analysis aligns with a lot of the other academic discourse surrounding Smith’s Life on Mars: that “Sci-Fi” is written as an ideal that we should aim to achieve and that her choice to leave things out signifies something about her ability to interact with Afrofuturist discourse. While I agree with some of Ranft’s points, I think that she also falls victim to analyzing “Sci-Fi” in a positive way. Or, rather, analyzing Smith’s view of “Sci-Fi” in a positive way; one where harmony exists between all people after some contemporary revolution. I obviously differ on this point, but why is it so commonly promoted amongst scholars?
Understanding why Smith’s “Sci-Fi” critiques a raceless, genderless, humanless future is imperative to understanding why the arc of the collection moves in the way it does. Alondra Nelson explores the myth that is the raceless future paradigm in the work “Introduction: Future Texts”. She explains that “the technologically enabled future is by its very nature unmoored from the past and from people of color” (Nelson, 6). This says that this narrative of color-blind, bodiless utopias have been so perpetuated by advertisements and popular media that they limit what people are able to imagine about potential futures. These false ideas have built the foundation from which people can form their own ideas and opinions, so it makes sense that we are more willing to accept Smith’s “Sci-Fi” as something potentially good or neutral at first glance. However, we can’t move into a future while abandoning what makes us human. Because then, we’re not human at all. I think this thread of logic is imperative in discussing Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars because you cannot have a future without a past. There is no way to separate those two things and still retain who we are. Some may wish to move on to some entirely new plane of existence so they don’t have to face the consequences of the trauma that people of color have endured for years and years, but that would stagnate the human race to a degree that we can’t even comprehend. That’s why it’s important not only to acknowledge Smith’s work with black speculative futures, but pay attention to the poems that ground this speculation in our past and present.
The poems in the last two parts of Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars remain curious, otherworldly, and ethereal, but they don’t exist as explicitly in their relation to the future and Afrofuturist texts. Many of these poems seek to draw you back down to Earth after the exploration of the previous parts, but that doesn’t mean the conversation about the dangers of utopia and erasing identity abruptly ends. In an interview Tracy K. Smith was asked why the tone of the book was “so sweet and carried a shining hopefulness about the future”. She counters that she doesn’t know how hopeful she is in real life and that “some of the poems linger in a dark or unresolved place” (Klein). “Ransom” is an example of a brief poem that doesn’t try to fix anything, and that registers dissatisfaction with the kind of easy solution that has been posited for a complicated problem like that of piracy. I think that the interviewer’s belief that this poetry collection is entirely optimistic and sweet echoes a lot of the academic discourse in the way it ignores the complexity and nuance of Smith’s poetic exploration. Gathering up the entire collection and summarizing it as something happy and optimistic is a gross oversimplification. But, to reintroduce Greaves’ idea of Black quiet, Smith’s collection is easy to overestimate. While I agree that there are poems that work through the idea of death and space in a comforting way, there is a lot of exploration into ideas of grief and grappling with humanity’s past, present, and future.
On a surface level, “Ransom” is a poem about Somali pirates and sea pollution. However, this poem actually tells a story of the state of the world and how humans play a political and physical role in it. One line says “They know the sea like she is their mother, and she is not well” (Smith, 47). This characterizes the earth as a woman who is angry and hurting in the face of such brutality against her and her creations on this Earth. These pirates have been forced into this profession because there’s no way for them to continue surviving on this planet without taking drastic measures. I think this raises a question about what humans have driven other humans to with their negligence and with their choices. If we believe that humanity’s next step has to be abandoning earth because we destroyed it, that pessimistic understanding will fuel the future. It’s also crucial to recognize that the relationships that build and divide humanity won’t disappear if we try to escape to a world like the one in “Sci-Fi”. The politics and the nature to change our relationship with our natural environment will still be there, just different.
Along this vein of space existing simply as a place where we expand our current exhibition of humanity, in the article “Space is the Place: Afrofuturist Elegy in Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars”, James Edward Ford III emphasizes that the question he saw as forceful animating this poetry is “what forms of ethical connectedness must be thought and expressed, based on the phenomena we witness in the universe” (Ford, 162). This quote illustrates Ford’s assertion that these poems use space and the universe as metaphors for American life and infinity that frames this life from a new perspective. He also suggests a link between these new ideas, African American tradition, and African diasporic participation in technology. He insists that Smith’s poems take this diasporic participation in technology for granted; as in, it is considered a given in her speculative futures. So, to expand our conversation about “Ransom” further, we can use Ford’s analysis to highlight the power dynamics at play again. Technology and its presence in science fiction is racialized. But almost all science fiction speculative futures, especially in Afrofuturism, are engrained deeply within threads of technology. This poses the same question we face even today in confronting the racial biases present in the structures that build our society: can a system that was designed in a racist manner ever be enforced neutrally? My answer is almost immediately no. So, what changes would a utopia have to make (if any) to our systems of power in order to enforce this future entirely separated from these identities? It’s something to consider, but not as important to consider as to why these conversations aren’t happening organically in sci-fi spheres?
To answer that, I believe we don’t have these conversations because we hope that science fiction and fantasy will be places we can escape from all of the bad parts of humanity. Take, for example, the conflict resolution in “Ransom” and how it says something significant about the current state of humanity and how we use technology to shape our histories. Smith writes, “when the pirates fall, the world smiles to itself, thanking goodness. They show the black faces and the dead black bodies on TV” (Smith, 47). This line highlights a lot of different assumptions about humanity. First, the world is something entirely different from what we perceive it to be. If the sea is the pirates’ mother, and that mother is an extension of Mother Earth, then the “world” referenced here is not the Earth itself. It also isn’t all of humanity because the pirates and the other people who rely on the sea for their livelihood aren’t looking at the bodies of their protectors and feeling relief, I’m sure all they feel is deep-rooted sadness. The inclusion of dead black bodies on TV illustrates how we have used technology up to this point as a tool through which to distance ourselves from each other. It introduces an idea of privilege: that only those with privilege can be invested in a situation like this from a distance over their TVs. The idea that anyone could see a dead body, even through something that obscures it, and not feel anything about it but generally positive feelings, what kind of future can that lead to?
The field of Afrofuturism is still growing and developing, more black artists offer meaningful contributions to it as a field of academic study every day. These creative contributions interact with greater discourse about post-humanism and speculative futures for the human race as a whole. Tracy K. Smith is an Afrofuturist scholar whose collection Life on Mars has been notably absent from most conversations, whether because of her poetic format or her quieter approach to the subject matter. Regardless, her poems explore race and gender in science fiction and they grapple with the impacts of humanity on our current world. It’s imperative that we give Smith and other creators like her the space they deserve to work through their own understanding of black speculative futures. All in all, it’s clear that we use fictional texts, especially otherworldly fiction like sci-fi and fantasy to escape from the drastic questions of ethics and morals that are posed to humanity every day. It’s nice to think that we could evolve to a world where these questions wouldn’t need to be posed at all, but Tracy K. Smith illustrates the truth: there is no such thing as a utopia. Nothing is perfect. Especially not humanity.
The Importance of the Past in Our Future: Discussing Tracy K. Smith’s
Rightful Place in Afrofuturist Discourse
Tracy K. Smith’s poetry collection Life on Mars explores both the complexity and nuance of envisioning potential futures beyond Earth especially for black people. This work enters an academic conversation about Afrofuturism; a theoretical perspective that is used to analyze and identify the complex relationships between Black identities, existing and imagined technologies, and the future and all it can offer. This discourse is already populated with conversations about prominent Afrofuturist texts like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Sun Ra’s life and music, and Janelle Monae’s exploration through her persona Cindi Mayweather. Within these conversations, Tracy K. Smith’s work is often absent. What conversations about Life on Mars that do exist center around Smith’s face-value investigation of faith and grief. They delve deep into the nuance of her more religious poems and the ones where she grapples with the passing of her father. However, they don't look closely enough at her poems that combat our idea of the perfect, utopian future and those that force us to acknowledge the issues with our past and present that would inspire these futures. I want to analyze how Smith's portrayal not just of dangerous speculative features like the one described in “Sci-Fi” but also the weight and gravity of our actions and choices on the Earth itself illustrated by “Ransom” make Smith's contributions to the academic conversation of afrofuturism more significant than most scholars give her credit for.
Despite Life on Mars’ impactful, thought-provoking scenarios, the academic conversation surrounding Smith’s collection has been severely limited. This is, in part, because Smith’s exploration of black science-fiction strays from the avant-garde approaches of more popular creators like Sun Ra and Janelle Monae. In an article by Margaret Ann Greaves titled “Vast and Unreadable”, she talks about Tracy K Smith’s selection of poetry and how it looks at the world through a lens that is absent in a lot of other poetry collections. The poems themselves have accessible language but their theoretical meaning is sometimes unfathomable or at the very least open to a lot of diverse interpretations. The poems navigate politicize radicalized and gendered language expectations and while other academic Scholars look at the collection and claim that it doesn't do enough to represent Afrofuturist discourse, Greaves asserts that this black quiet can be confused for apathy but it isn't and, in fact, “Smith’s ‘quiet’ is socially determined and politically responsive” (Greaves, 3). This idea of Black quiet aptly summarizes Smith’s exploration of black speculative futures in Life on Mars. I believe that quiet is often confused with weakness. That’s why a lot of the current academic conversation revolves around this idea of confusion; because Smith didn’t undoubtedly represent her assertions about what a black future should look like, scholars are hesitant to analyze her many potential futures at all. I think it‘s an extreme oversight for us to believe that black creators need to produce a certain level of response that we deem appropriate or worthy. These creators don’t need to do any of this work in order to justify their existence or be able to make their viewers or listeners or readers more comfortable. Afrofuturist creators like Tracy K Smith, Janelle Monae, and Sun Ra, are creating these spaces because they are trying to figure out their own continued existence in our world and in our space moving forward. There is no right or wrong way for them to do that.
One of the first poems in Life on Mars is the widely discussed “Sci-Fi”. This poem poses a potential future where human beings have evolved beyond the species and live in a kind of utopia. Academic scholars have centered a lot of their observations on whether Smith views this utopia as something to strive for or something to avoid. I think that by her language choice and the dialogue she continues throughout her collection her opinion is clear: “Sci-Fi”s future is not one we want to reach. To start, the poem talks a lot about refining the human and removing the parts of us that don’t need to exist anymore. It suggests that “Women will still be women, but the distinction will be empty. Sex, having outlived every threat, will gratify only in the mind, which is where it will exist” (Smith, 7). These lines are saying that while we may still use the word women, the importance and meaning behind it won’t exist. The biggest distinction with this line is its grand sweeping assumptions about gender being unnecessary. People who are non-binary could read this and believe it to be a positive potential future, one where we have the power to define our own gender and sex as we see fit and not have to conform to the rigid definition about what a woman is supposed to be. However, I believe Sci-Fi is imagining a potential future where we are not allowed to have gender or explore ourselves within it. This future is a sterile one where everything that makes the human race up is sort of washed away and erased because those traits and qualities aren't seen as desirable anymore. If our present was one where all human beings were equal regardless of the labels society has saddled them with, then this wouldn’t be a necessary conversation. But by imagining a future where these idiosyncrasies, these oddities, and this queerness is written out of us because it’s seen as not appropriate anymore is just a signal that those people have remained on the outskirts of society. It is one thing for a straight, white, cishet man to say that we're not going to use any of these qualifiers anymore than it would for a queer, non-binary, black person because being able to identify with those things is a rebellion and itself. In this way, “Sci-Fi” serves as a warning about abolishing all identity and a reflection of our current society and its biases.
Similarly, “Sci-Fi”s utopia has moved beyond refining the human and also decided to refine human history. Specifically, “History, with its hard spine & dog-eared corners, will be replaced with nuance” (Smith, 7). This is a clear indicator that something about this ideal future is extremely wrong. You cannot replace history with nuance. It would be appropriate to introduce nuance to history and have them work together; that’s how people decide what narratives to include in history books. That’s not without its drawbacks, but at least then they’re working together. If you have only nuance without history, it’s purposeless. You are erasing the context and leaving the future with nothing real to look back on. I believe that this part of the poem is referring to a rewriting of history that has been spun into an entirely new and falsified plane of existence. If we don't have the history to compare the nuanced version to, then replacing history is the same as erasing history and thus we end up living in this place where we can't even link to our own cultural past. In addition, who exactly will be doing the erasing? This links to a larger discourse about power dynamics and who has the ability to decide what will stay in our history and what needs to be filtered out. This also ties into larger Afrofuturist discourse and understanding that created knowledge has evolved on the backs of people of color. They are the ones who would suffer in this future: a clean, white, sterile place where difference and struggle doesn’t exist. Suggesting that the future needs to be this clean white cultureless space negates everything that the human race is.
The future suggested by “Sci-Fi” does not exist in a bubble. It is contextualized and complexified by our present and the timeline that we’re moving along currently. In an article comparing Tracie Morris and Tracy K. Smith, Erin Ranft, a professor at The University of Texas San Antonio, Ranft emphasizes the importance of poetry as a format through which to evolve Afrofuturist conversations and evolve them to the next level. She emphasizes that Smith “does not directly address racial identity within the realm of the “safe” future through her construction; as a result, readers may strain to view Smith’s examination of Black identity in the future through an Afrofuturist lens” (Ranft, 81). This analysis aligns with a lot of the other academic discourse surrounding Smith’s Life on Mars: that “Sci-Fi” is written as an ideal that we should aim to achieve and that her choice to leave things out signifies something about her ability to interact with Afrofuturist discourse. While I agree with some of Ranft’s points, I think that she also falls victim to analyzing “Sci-Fi” in a positive way. Or, rather, analyzing Smith’s view of “Sci-Fi” in a positive way; one where harmony exists between all people after some contemporary revolution. I obviously differ on this point, but why is it so commonly promoted amongst scholars?
Understanding why Smith’s “Sci-Fi” critiques a raceless, genderless, humanless future is imperative to understanding why the arc of the collection moves in the way it does. Alondra Nelson explores the myth that is the raceless future paradigm in the work “Introduction: Future Texts”. She explains that “the technologically enabled future is by its very nature unmoored from the past and from people of color” (Nelson, 6). This says that this narrative of color-blind, bodiless utopias have been so perpetuated by advertisements and popular media that they limit what people are able to imagine about potential futures. These false ideas have built the foundation from which people can form their own ideas and opinions, so it makes sense that we are more willing to accept Smith’s “Sci-Fi” as something potentially good or neutral at first glance. However, we can’t move into a future while abandoning what makes us human. Because then, we’re not human at all. I think this thread of logic is imperative in discussing Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars because you cannot have a future without a past. There is no way to separate those two things and still retain who we are. Some may wish to move on to some entirely new plane of existence so they don’t have to face the consequences of the trauma that people of color have endured for years and years, but that would stagnate the human race to a degree that we can’t even comprehend. That’s why it’s important not only to acknowledge Smith’s work with black speculative futures, but pay attention to the poems that ground this speculation in our past and present.
The poems in the last two parts of Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars remain curious, otherworldly, and ethereal, but they don’t exist as explicitly in their relation to the future and Afrofuturist texts. Many of these poems seek to draw you back down to Earth after the exploration of the previous parts, but that doesn’t mean the conversation about the dangers of utopia and erasing identity abruptly ends. In an interview Tracy K. Smith was asked why the tone of the book was “so sweet and carried a shining hopefulness about the future”. She counters that she doesn’t know how hopeful she is in real life and that “some of the poems linger in a dark or unresolved place” (Klein). “Ransom” is an example of a brief poem that doesn’t try to fix anything, and that registers dissatisfaction with the kind of easy solution that has been posited for a complicated problem like that of piracy. I think that the interviewer’s belief that this poetry collection is entirely optimistic and sweet echoes a lot of the academic discourse in the way it ignores the complexity and nuance of Smith’s poetic exploration. Gathering up the entire collection and summarizing it as something happy and optimistic is a gross oversimplification. But, to reintroduce Greaves’ idea of Black quiet, Smith’s collection is easy to overestimate. While I agree that there are poems that work through the idea of death and space in a comforting way, there is a lot of exploration into ideas of grief and grappling with humanity’s past, present, and future.
On a surface level, “Ransom” is a poem about Somali pirates and sea pollution. However, this poem actually tells a story of the state of the world and how humans play a political and physical role in it. One line says “They know the sea like she is their mother, and she is not well” (Smith, 47). This characterizes the earth as a woman who is angry and hurting in the face of such brutality against her and her creations on this Earth. These pirates have been forced into this profession because there’s no way for them to continue surviving on this planet without taking drastic measures. I think this raises a question about what humans have driven other humans to with their negligence and with their choices. If we believe that humanity’s next step has to be abandoning earth because we destroyed it, that pessimistic understanding will fuel the future. It’s also crucial to recognize that the relationships that build and divide humanity won’t disappear if we try to escape to a world like the one in “Sci-Fi”. The politics and the nature to change our relationship with our natural environment will still be there, just different.
Along this vein of space existing simply as a place where we expand our current exhibition of humanity, in the article “Space is the Place: Afrofuturist Elegy in Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars”, James Edward Ford III emphasizes that the question he saw as forceful animating this poetry is “what forms of ethical connectedness must be thought and expressed, based on the phenomena we witness in the universe” (Ford, 162). This quote illustrates Ford’s assertion that these poems use space and the universe as metaphors for American life and infinity that frames this life from a new perspective. He also suggests a link between these new ideas, African American tradition, and African diasporic participation in technology. He insists that Smith’s poems take this diasporic participation in technology for granted; as in, it is considered a given in her speculative futures. So, to expand our conversation about “Ransom” further, we can use Ford’s analysis to highlight the power dynamics at play again. Technology and its presence in science fiction is racialized. But almost all science fiction speculative futures, especially in Afrofuturism, are engrained deeply within threads of technology. This poses the same question we face even today in confronting the racial biases present in the structures that build our society: can a system that was designed in a racist manner ever be enforced neutrally? My answer is almost immediately no. So, what changes would a utopia have to make (if any) to our systems of power in order to enforce this future entirely separated from these identities? It’s something to consider, but not as important to consider as to why these conversations aren’t happening organically in sci-fi spheres?
To answer that, I believe we don’t have these conversations because we hope that science fiction and fantasy will be places we can escape from all of the bad parts of humanity. Take, for example, the conflict resolution in “Ransom” and how it says something significant about the current state of humanity and how we use technology to shape our histories. Smith writes, “when the pirates fall, the world smiles to itself, thanking goodness. They show the black faces and the dead black bodies on TV” (Smith, 47). This line highlights a lot of different assumptions about humanity. First, the world is something entirely different from what we perceive it to be. If the sea is the pirates’ mother, and that mother is an extension of Mother Earth, then the “world” referenced here is not the Earth itself. It also isn’t all of humanity because the pirates and the other people who rely on the sea for their livelihood aren’t looking at the bodies of their protectors and feeling relief, I’m sure all they feel is deep-rooted sadness. The inclusion of dead black bodies on TV illustrates how we have used technology up to this point as a tool through which to distance ourselves from each other. It introduces an idea of privilege: that only those with privilege can be invested in a situation like this from a distance over their TVs. The idea that anyone could see a dead body, even through something that obscures it, and not feel anything about it but generally positive feelings, what kind of future can that lead to?
The field of Afrofuturism is still growing and developing, more black artists offer meaningful contributions to it as a field of academic study every day. These creative contributions interact with greater discourse about post-humanism and speculative futures for the human race as a whole. Tracy K. Smith is an Afrofuturist scholar whose collection Life on Mars has been notably absent from most conversations, whether because of her poetic format or her quieter approach to the subject matter. Regardless, her poems explore race and gender in science fiction and they grapple with the impacts of humanity on our current world. It’s imperative that we give Smith and other creators like her the space they deserve to work through their own understanding of black speculative futures. All in all, it’s clear that we use fictional texts, especially otherworldly fiction like sci-fi and fantasy to escape from the drastic questions of ethics and morals that are posed to humanity every day. It’s nice to think that we could evolve to a world where these questions wouldn’t need to be posed at all, but Tracy K. Smith illustrates the truth: there is no such thing as a utopia. Nothing is perfect. Especially not humanity.