This short story collection by James B. Haile III—an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Rhode Island—is part exploration of the speculative fiction genre and part treatise on Black identity. It is completely fascinating in terms of structure and presentation, content and concept. It made me think deeply about race and identity. It also meant a fair bit of research along my reading journey.
The book is divided into two parts, bookended by an extensive preface and a substantial epilogue. Each of the parts contains three stories. Each story, as Haile explains in the preface, has significant context (the “philosophical prose” and endnotes”), and a relevant image (with one exception, the fifth). Each story is referred to as a chapter/story. The fact that the collection has this structure and parallel materials is explained by its origins as a “traditional philosophical project” which sought to address “black existential theory.” Haile says that the act of writing it turned that project into this particular fiction-based outcome. He calls it the “realization of my own authentic voice.” It begins with a poem entitled “My House” by Jamaican poet Claude McKay (known for his part in the Harlem Renaissance), which contains the line “I know the dark delight of being strange.”
As I read the preface, I was distinctly aware of my own existence in this world and wondered what I was going to get from this book. I was, for example, confronted with my own prejudice of what science fiction and speculative fiction are: the preface addresses the thesis that science fiction is a white European project which is something that Black speculative fiction is completely separate from, coming from a different tradition. Haile uses a specific definition of science fiction from aesthetics professor Enrico Terrone of which I wasn’t previously aware, and with which I don’t necessarily agree. But there are as many definitions of science fiction as there are commentators and readers of the genre, and Haile’s approach is demonstrably academic. Pushing my own thoughts of speculative fiction from Asia aside, the premise that there is a clear ancestral division between European and Black speculative fiction is clearly sound. They have differential starting points, experiences, and goals. The Black tradition, Haile explains when discussing an interview with Professor Reynaldo Anderson, is a response to “antebellum slavery, scientific racism, imperialism and colonialism.” The two traditions do, of course, share the commonalities of all fiction, which Haile explains and can be expressed as “telling ourselves about our world.”
As I hope I’ve demonstrated, the preface is an academic starting point to a fiction collection like no other I’ve read. Helpfully, Haile has a section entitled “How to read this book.” The Dark Delight of Being Strange is a collection of fiction, an alternative history, a book about Black political thought; Haile is arguing that Black speculative fiction is Black political thought, something from outside of the white gaze—it reimagines the history and memory of Blackness. As part of this effort, the fictive chapters/stories refer to real people and real events that have shaped Black identity.
Part one is entitled “Of the Door of No Return to the Stars” and begins with the story of Henry Box Brown, following the famous quote from Arthur C. Clarke on the nature of advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. Haile muses on space and time being analogous to Black freedom in their ambiguity. The chapter/story’s image is of a playbill from 1878 announcing a show by “Prof. H.B. Brown.” The fiction begins with a family visiting a museum dedicated to the Underground Railroad. There is a film being shown that explains Brown’s place in history and asks the audience to imagine being enslaved. After the film, a couple of museum guides smilingly engage with the audience, although one among them starts to question the story of Brown hiding in his famous box. Perhaps Brown lied? Unseen, one of the family members, Henry Jr., sneaks into Brown’s box, which subsequently disappears. Twenty years later, the box reappears and the young boy is found inside; curled up, asleep. Did Brown create something that can transcend space, time, and freedom? Is the box magic or technology? Haile uses the exchange between the audience and the guides—and then the box itself—to question the assumptions we make about history, geography, and freedom, and about easy explanations of concepts like slavery and reality. It definitely makes for a thought-provoking start to the collection.
Throughout this collection, in fact, what made me think more than perhaps I usually do when reading fiction was Haile’s use of familiarity in juxtaposition. For example, next up is a story that begins with both the phrases “Journey to the Centre of the Earth” and “The Time Machine.” As in the previous chapter, Haile is deliberately framing his fiction around the notions of white European science fiction. This second chapter/story concerns a Black History Month speech in front of a mixed cohort of students at a prestigious university. This one feels a bit autobiographical: The speaker reflects on his recruitment to the institution, when he was referred to as a “rare creature” and the “rarest of phenomenon,” as an African American scholar. This fictional academic is not a historian but is expected by those around him to know all Black history. The chapter/story in this way comes to be about how Blackness is used and accessed by non-Blacks.
Haile spends most of the time in the head of his speaker, but also brings in characters such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. I found this mechanism to enhance my understanding of Haile’s writing as in most cases I had to look up the figures from history. This led to a sort of grounding in the reality of the speculative fiction, something I felt was essential to apprehend the context of this work. Had these fictions been pure fantasy with all made-up characters, I’m not sure it would have been as impactful. The speculative element comes from tokens that may be magical or may be technological but which either way permit transportation to another dimension that has long been used by Africans, including the Underground Railroad. Likewise, there are nautical references in this story—sea turtles and sharks for example—that bind the book together when they appear again later. The concept of a “pelagic hell” of Black characters develops, swimming free like a turtle but always in danger from the shark. Different dimensions in space become crucial to the collection. Haile speculates that being Black equates to being interdimensional. (He also asks, “Did other cultures have their own interdimensional spaces on Earth?”)
Story three begins with a poem by, and a picture of, Henry Dumas, while Haile writes about Black speculative fiction as a “haunt.” The fictive element concerns the shooting of Dumas in a New York subway station by a police officer (this really happened) and how author Toni Morrison talked about how it was more than just “misidentification.” The narrator here focuses on this concept of mistaken identity and Blackness. The narrator has replicated Dumas’s journey many times, and suddenly finds he has the ability to move through time and space to witness what happened to Dumas. Of course, he sees the truth, not what was reported. This story is relatively short and explores, successfully, perceptions of reality brought on by media reporting, about how language can shape reality—and about the questions this reporting should raise.
The collection’s second part is entitled “On the Transformation of the Spirit” and opens with the chapter/story “Theft.” This features more references to sea beasts, starting with “the mimic octopus.” The narrator is watching a TV show about the creature. The narrative explains the evolution of the octopus. The chapter/story’s image is of Louis Armstrong. The story moves on to explain that there is a global viral outbreak and that Blacks are disproportionately frontline workers during a pandemic that affects people of colour at a higher rate. There is a TV debate about wearing face masks and how that might be perceived as threatening if you are a Black man. So of course, the TV show broadcasts footage of a Black man entering a store wearing a face mask and being challenged by police. As he is challenged, he transforms into a “winged creature” and flies off—and yet the reporter and the narrator watching this unfold on TV are more concerned with the man’s Blackness. The comparison to the mimic octopus is emphasised: Is metamorphosis conscious choice or instinctive protection? On entering the store, that man was only after coffee, juice, and cake. He wanted more than anything to not attract attention. But in that he failed.
Chapter/story five is called “Tathagata” (an honorific title in Buddhism) and launches straight into the story of a man who has just quit his job. Or was he fired? We sit in on a very corporate meeting and the theme is about being on the margins. The narrator has issues with fitting in with those around the meeting table. This story is, perhaps, Haile’s most lyrical work, which I enjoyed. In “Theft,” for example, the prose is far less lyrical, with the insistent repetition of the phrase “I thought …” for me coming to distract from the message of how to survive as a Black man in the “pelagic hell.” But here the voice is haunting in its own way. The plot focuses on the narrator visiting an art gallery after finding a card on his desk reading: “the future is black.” The exploration here is of identity, memory, and thoughts of the future.
A recurring theme in all of these is the tension of being Black and living in a non-Black world. The final story, for example, is entitled “Appetite/Fever/Consumption” and has a long preamble about the recent Boots Riley film Sorry to Bother You (2018). In this movie, the protagonist is told to use his white voice in order to make money; whilst about race this is also, of course, about American consumerism. There is an absurdity about this world, and Haile also refers to James Baldwin’s open letter to his nephew in which he expresses Black identity as essentially surreal. This chapter/story like the others has opened with a poem, this time referring to Black Lives Matter, and the first section of the fiction opens with a nod to Trayvon Martin’s death and the social movement that followed it. The chapter/story ends with a “postpreamble” in the form of a hypothetical letter to a “White Citizens Council” from “Still your only black professor.”
As previously described, the collection closes with a long epilogue recapping Haile’s themes of speculative fiction, the notion of freedom, the human spirit, the ironies of slavery, the Great Dismal Swamp, and the colonial world. It ends on a folklore tale of a mythical bear and how it might bring people together. This is a truly thought-provoking and unique collection worthy of anyone’s time. The fiction mostly works on its own as well (especially in part one) although on occasion is a little heavy-going in its first-person style. Haile has opened further doors of exploration for this reader, at least. At one point in the final chapter/story, a man on stage reads out a disturbing letter which generates a visceral reaction in his white audience. It might be the least speculative of all this collection’s scenes, but it leaves many questions for the white reader, most of which remain unanswered. But then, as a white man, I shouldn’t be looking outwards for those answers in the first place. Haile rightly centres not my needs or questions, but his own—and those of his Black characters.