Nalo Hopkinson’s 2005 short story “Message in a Bottle” is a fable about art, communication, and futurity. It was originally written for Futureways, a multi-authored volume described by its editors as
a faux science fiction novel … Futureways is the story of an art exhibition in the distant future, the biennale of a future civilization … each chapter deals with the transport of art objects to the venue of the biennale, a task difficult enough in the modern era but even more tenuous in the imagined futures of the writers.
(McBride and Rubsamen 2005)
Hopkinson later republished the story in two of her own collections: first in the chapbook Report from Planet Midnight (Hopkinson 2012), and then in her short story compendium Falling in Love With Hominids (Hopkinson 2015). As these republications suggest, “Message in a Bottle” is legible outside of the occasion for which it was initially written. Indeed, although the story ultimately concerns “the transport of art objects” into the distant future for an exhibition, it tells us very little about this presumptive future. Instead, it is recognizably set in something like the present moment. The prompt for the story suggests a movement through space (“transport … to the venue”) unfolding in an “imagined future” time. Most of the stories in the Futureways anthology follow this conceit (though little attempt is made to place all the stories in a common future world, or to have the same future art exhibition as the destination for all of them). But Hopkinson inverts the entire premise. She imagines the difficulties of transport through time instead of through space, and she evokes a strange, distant future only in terms of the ways that, via time travel, it reveals itself in advance to us in the present.
Indeed, the notion of a future art exhibition is only mentioned explicitly at the very end of “Message in a Bottle” – though it then becomes apparent that this prospect has structured everything in the story from the beginning. The retrospective narrative structure gives the story an odd, shifting emotional tone. For most of my first reading, “Message in a Bottle” seemed light and humorous. Then, when I got to the end, I was thrown for a loop – because things had suddenly turned weird and outrageous. It was only on rereading the story that I grasped how twisted and distressing the situation it describes really is. “Message in a Bottle” sneaks up on you, and leaves a disturbing aftertaste.
If the story at first seems cute and funny, this is largely due to the charm of its protagonist-narrator Greg. He is an installation artist, living in present-day St. John’s, Newfoundland. He identifies himself as a heterosexual man of Indigenous origins. His friends and lovers tend also to be nonwhite people, like his “lush and brown” girlfriend Cecilia. Greg is insightful and conscious about racial and post-colonial issues, and the politics of art and culture; though perhaps less so about gender and sexuality.
Greg explains his cultural politics by telling us about
this bunch of Sioux activists, how they’d been protesting against a university whose archaeology department had dug up one of their ancestral burial sites … When the director of the department refused to reconsider, these guys had gone one night to the graveyard where his great-grandmother was buried. They’d dug up her remains, laid out all the bones, labelled them with little tags. They did jail time, but the university returned their ancestors’ remains to the band council.
The action was effective, in other words, even though the activists paid a price for it. The white archaeologists were forced to acknowledge the gross asymmetry between how they treat the cultural values and material traces of other (supposedly “ancient”) peoples, and how they treat their own. What deserves reverence, and what can be taken as mere data for analysis? Why do archaeologists and anthropologists consider some groups of people to be “primitive,” even though we are all living in the same highly technologized present moment? Greg’s anecdote recalls the actual case of Kenniwick Man, a 9,000-year-old skeleton dug up by archaeologists in 1996, subjected to multiple tests, and only returned to the Umatilla people for proper burial in 2017 (Thomas 2000).
Greg’s own gallery installation, “The Excavations,” which he describes in the course of the story, is about the social roles played by physical stuff. It takes the form of a mock archaeological site. Greg packs the art gallery with “half a ton of dirt,” in which he buries such objects as “a rubber boot” that has been cast aside by the person who wore it, “a large plastic jug that used to hold bleach, and that had been refitted as a bucket for a small child to tote water in,” and “a scrap of hand-woven blanket with brown stains on it.” When visitors enter the gallery, they “get basic excavation tools. When they pull something free of the soil, it triggers a story about the artifact on the monitors above.” The exhibition thus calls our attention to “the kinds of present-day historical artifacts” that actual archaeologists “[toss] aside in their zeal to get at the iconic past of the native peoples” they are studying.
In this way, Greg’s installation undermines notions of the ahistorical authenticity of Indigenous peoples, such as well-meaning white Westerners are all too likely to project upon them. It points out – just as the Sioux activists’ action did – how Indigenous peoples, no less than white Westerners, inhabit the same present moment; and that this present itself is deeply historical, inflected by the intertwined histories of all the peoples involved in it. That is to say, the lived and experienced present, no less than the reconstructed past, is deeply contingent, embedded in stories and processes, and open to contestation and change.
In “The Excavations,” Greg acquaints his viewers with the actual, present-day material culture of the Indigenous people of (in this case) Chiapas, Mexico. The exhibition shows how this culture is multiple and heterogeneous, and how it is rich in meanings despite economic poverty. This living culture bears the traces both of colonialist oppression and of the native people’s resistance to this oppression. Indigenous peoples, with their histories, their political struggles, and their values, must be seen as actors in the present. We cannot relegate them (as anthropologists all too often have done) to the status of human relics, stuck in ways of living that belong to the past.
The installation itself is self-consciously shaped by the historical contingencies of its own creation. Greg notes that the soil he uses for the exhibition is
left over from a local archaeological dig. I wish I could have gotten it directly from Mexico, but I couldn’t afford the permit for doing that.
This reminds us that art-making is not just pure and unfettered expression. For it is never free from economic, legal, and bureaucratic constraints. But even the artifacts in the installation that actually do come from Chiapas do not simply “speak for themselves.” Objects are shaped and given meaning by the ways that they have been used, and by the narratives that take them up. We can only really understand an artifact when we grasp its history and its context. We need to know who wore that particular boot, and what was carried in that particular plastic jug. Now, any use to which an object is put leaves traces behind on the object itself. But these traces are generally incomplete and fragmentary. The challenge of archaeology is to reconstruct a fuller history from the insufficient traces that it leaves behind. This is always a difficult, perilous act of interpretation. It’s an uncertain and unfinishable task in both directions. On the one hand, an object, in its palpable physical presence (this plastic boot, this stained fragment of blanket), is always more that the stories that can be told about it. But on the other hand, and at the same time, these stories extend beyond what any particular artifact can ever contain; they encompass more of the world than what is immediately present.
This doubleness is expressed in the very shape of Greg’s installation, which pairs material artifacts with video clips that tell their stories. Neither half of the exhibition would work without the other. It is equally important that we actually find these physical objects by digging them out of the soil, and that we learn the stories of their provenance and their many transformations. “The Excavations” is a complex assemblage, networking cheap technologies (boots, buckets, and blankets) with expensive ones (computers, video monitors, and digital recordings), physical objects with streams of images and sounds, Mexican artifacts with Canadian replicas, and objects that work to tell stories with objects about which the stories are told. The installation also points up its own inevitable incompleteness; however much we get from it, we must also realize that there is always more. For this reason, not everything in the exhibition is given an explanatory narrative. Greg has carefully “videotaped every artifact with which I’d seeded the soil that went onto the gallery floor,” but “some of the artifacts are ‘blanks’ that trigger no stories” on the video monitors.
Greg’s personal life, like his art, is inflected by his experiences as a nonwhite man in a racist society. He is proud of his Indigenous heritage, but he rejects the clichés that white people all too frequently believe about what the life of a person with that heritage is supposed to be like. For instance, even though Greg covers his installation in half a ton of soil, he is far from being a traditionalist whose primary tie is to the land. Rather, Greg is a techie, an urbanite, and sex-positive. He and Cecilia “geekspeak at each other all the time. When we’re out in public, people fall silent in linguistic bafflement around us.” He gleefully tells us how he and Cecelia will go “shopping for a new motherboard” in the morning, then “hump like bunnies till we both come screaming” in the afternoon.
Greg also describes himself as something of a bricoleur (though he doesn’t actually use this word). He gathers all sorts of miscellaneous stuff, and ends up using it for his art. Indeed, he is really a hoarder; he accumulates and keeps whatever odds and ends and pieces of junk he happens to find:
My home is also my studio, and it’s a warren of tangled cables, jury-rigged networked computers, and piles of books about as stable as playing-card houses. Plus bins full of old newspaper clippings, bones of dead animals, rusted metal I picked up on the street, whatever. I don’t throw anything away if it looks the least bit interesting. You never know when it might come in handy as part of an installation piece. The chaos has a certain nestlike comfort to it.
I think that Greg’s sense of “nestlike comfort” is the key here. His accumulations, with their mild but not unmanageable disorder, make for a relaxing sense of repletion. This offers a sharp contrast to the uptight, obsessive neatness of normative white bourgeois suburban life. No matter what physical object Greg needs, he is likely to be able to find it somewhere or other, in one of his piles of stuff. The “chaos” that always surrounds him marks his home as being really his. He finds it familiar and relaxing, all the more so in that outsiders cannot make heads or tails of it.
There is one vitally important thing I haven’t mentioned yet. This is that Greg’s description of his homely mess, and his anecdote about the Sioux activists, both come up in the course of his riffing on what seems to be his favorite subject, which is how he doesn’t particularly like children. This complaint runs through the entire story, as a sort of obsessive refrain. Indeed, Greg gives us a whole comedy routine – although he is largely serious – about how children make him feel uncomfortable; or to put it more bluntly, how “children creep me out.” At one point, he tries to explain himself, defensively:
I truly don’t hate children. I just don’t understand them. They seem like another species. I’ll help a lost child find a parent, or give a boost to a little body struggling to get a drink from a water fountain – same as I’d do for a puppy or a kitten; but I’ve never had the urge to be a father.
The comparison of kids to puppies and kittens is indicative; Greg is not a mean person, but I take it that he is not particularly fond of dogs or cats either. Greg is perturbed by the sheer alien difference of children; it seems to him that their values and desires bear no relation to his own. He doesn’t “really know how to talk to kids” — or how to approach them in any other way, for that matter. With their magical beliefs – such as the fact that they “don’t yet grok that delicate, all-important boundary between the animate and inanimate” – children strike him as dangerous and untrustworthy. And with their intense “single-mindedness” and their sense of “enfranchised hauteur,” they make far too many absolute demands. Once they “latch on to an idea,” they never let go. “Before you know it, you’re arranging your whole life around their likes and dislikes.”
Greg is especially upset at the way that children seem to suck up all of their parents’ focus and energy. His art-school pal Babette and her husband Sunil “have looked tired, desperate and drawn for a while now,” ever since they adopted their daughter Kamla. Even when Babette is cuddling Kamla, Greg says, her “eyes look sad,” and her “expression … blends frustration with concern.” For her part, Babette often complains to Greg that the little girl is “making our lives hell” with her incessant clamoring and complaining. Greg laments that Babette “used to talk about gigabytes, Cronenberg and post-humanism”; but now that she is a mother, she finds it “perfectly normal to discuss [her] child’s excreta with anyone who’ll sit still for five minutes.”
Greg’s tirades about children are funny, if one-sided. He is not wrong to object to those people he calls “the righteous breeders of the flock”: the ones who “spawn like frogs in springtime – or whenever the hell frogs spawn,” and insist that everyone else ought to do the same. He is exasperated when friends and prospective lovers pepper him with stock questions like, “Don’t you care about passing on your legacy?”, and, if you don’t have kids, “what are you going to do with your life, then?” Sometimes, he responds to these questions with irritated humor: “I guess I’m going to go home and put a gun to my head, since I’m clearly no use to myself or anyone else.” At other times, he is breezily sarcastic about the idea that children are “supposed to be your insurance for the future; you know, to carry your name on, and shit.” At still other times he says, reasonably enough, that
my life has tons of value. I just happen to think it consists of more than my genetic material … I’m making my own legacy, thank you very much. A body of art I can point to and document.
None of this changes when Greg and Cecilia themselves become parents. It happens “by accident”: when Cecilia gets pregnant despite their precautions, “we sort of dared each other to go through with it.” Greg and Cecelia find themselves “curious” about “how our small brown child might change a world that desperately needs some change.” For the time being, however, “baby’s not about changing anyone’s world but ours.” In the present moment of the story, Greg and Cecilia have a two-and-a-half-year-old boy, named Russ; Greg refers to him, only half humorously, as “our creepy little alien child.” Greg mentions how he and Cecilia “learned the real meaning of sleep deprivation” when the child was born; and he is now forced to acknowledge that “poo and pee are really damned important, especially when you’re responsible for the life of a small, helpless being that can barely do anything else.” Greg is already “freaked that” Russ has “begun making poo-poo jokes”; he absolutely doesn’t want to consider that, “in a blink of an eye, barely a decade from now, [Russ’] body will be entering puberty. He’ll start getting erections, having sexual thoughts.” For the time being, Greg is just relieved whenever his mother is able to keep an eye on Russ, so that he can return attention to his art.
We might say that Greg is resisting what Lee Edelman denounces as reproductive futurism: “the pervasive invocation of the Child as the emblem of futurity’s unquestioned value,” and the use of this figure to consolidate the “ritual reproduction” of the normative heterosexual order. This “coercive belief in the paramount value of futurity” is central to liberal society. In the logic of reproductive futurism, everything is always and only “for the sake of future generations”; the present is systematically deprecated in favor of the future. But this exalted future never actually arrives; rather, it is interminably deferred. Whatever we do for the sake of our children, those children themselves will end up having to do for the sake of their children. Caught in such an endless cycle, futurity never generates anything new or different. All we do is to “reproduce the past, through displacement, in the form of the future” (Edelman 2004).
Though Greg is straight, his rejection of the mystique of childhood is not altogether different from Edelman’s queer refusal of normative futurity as figured in the ideal image of the Child. When Greg says that his “legacy” is his art, rather than his “genetic material” or bloodline, he is twisting the word legacy (which is breeder-code for family inheritance) to refer to the present instead of the future. Greg sees his art as something that matters, or makes a difference, here and now, rather than as something to be left to the appreciation of future generations. Work like his – processual and site-specific, and not designed to outlast the circumstances of its installation – has little to do with the classical Western ideal of “building a monument more lasting than bronze.” It is worth noting, as well, that Greg is proud of “supporting myself sort of decently” through making art. His career is an accomplishment in itself; he has no expectation of getting wealthy from it, or starting a dynasty:
I’m not a king and I’m never going to be rich. I’m not going to leave behind much wealth for someone to inherit. It’s not like I’m building an empire.
My comparison of Greg’s petulant complaints to Edelman’s radical polemic might seem hyperbolic. But in fact, “Message in a Bottle” is literally about its narrator’s confrontation with a futurity that comes to him embodied in the form of a child. Everything in the story ultimately turns upon Greg’s fraught relationship with his friends’ daughter Kamla. The girl is unusual, to say the least. Even at a very young age, when Babette and Sunil first adopt her, Kamla has an “outsized head” that looks “strangely adult.” Indeed, “the bones in her skull are fused” already, which is something that is only supposed to happen to us “once we’ve stopped growing.” Kamla’s otherwise child-sized body is barely able to support this head, leaving her “prone to painful whiplash injuries” – not to mention that she often finds herself being ridiculed by other children as a “bobble-head.” Kamla also “speaks in oddly complete sentences” for a child, saying things that are “too grown up” and too complex for her age. And it’s not just her words; “something about Kamla’s delivery” also “makes it easy to forget” that she’s a child.
But there’s more. The rest of Kamla’s body, aside from her head, seems to develop very slowly. She looks far younger physically than her presumptive chronological age: “We figure she’s about eight,” Babette says, “but she’s not much bigger than a five-year-old.” Two years later, “at ten years old, people mistake her for six.” Eventually, Kamla is diagnosed with Delayed Growth Syndrome (DGS), a mysterious condition shared by other children around the world who came up for adoption at the same time as she did:
It’s a brand new disorder. Researchers have no clue what’s causing it, or if the bodies of the kids with it will ever achieve full adulthood. Their brains, however, are way ahead of their bodies. All the kids who’ve tested positive for DGS are scarily smart.
Kamla seems out of phase with her time; she doesn’t properly belong to the present moment. She is both too immature physically, and too mature mentally, for someone her ostensible age. She doesn’t conform to normative expectations about child development – or indeed, to our ideas about growth and transformation more generally. Kamla’s parents “send her for test after test” without learning anything new. Kamla “seems to be healthy … Physically, anyway.” But “her emotional state” remains puzzling. It is telling that Kamla cannot get along with other children her own apparent age; she gets “frustrated” and “angry” when she tries to play with them, and she complains that “I bloody hate being a kid.” Even worse, she tends “to smartmouth so much at school and in our neighbourhood that it’s become uncomfortable to live there anymore.” Kamla and her parents are repeatedly forced to move to escape the trouble.
At one point, Greg tries to overcome his fear of children, and of Kamla in particular. He expresses the hope that,
as I watch [Kamla] grow up, I get some idea of what Russ’s growing years will be like. In a way, she’s his advance guard.
But he is quickly disabused of this illusion, the very next time he sees Kamla. This strange girl, with “her head wobbling as though her neck is a column of gelatin,” cannot provide a model for Russ, who is “a perfect specimen; all his bits are in proportion.” Greg admits to feeling “guiltily grateful that Russ, as far as we can tell, is normal.” It’s a bit disturbing to see Greg here retreating into an ableism – an uncritical valuing of whatever is developmentally “normal” – that he would otherwise almost certainly reject. It shows us just how unsettled he is.
We might say that Kamla fails the test, or refuses the demands, of reproductive futurism. Rather than promising to carry on her adoptive parents’ “legacy,” Kamla threatens to undermine it. And rather than figuring what Edelman calls “an insistence on sameness that intends to restore an Imaginary past” (No Future), Kamla’s aberrant growth pattern – not to mention her all-around freakishness – disrupts this illusory continuity. With her perpetual anger and complaining, and her refusal or inability to fit in, Kamla seems to embody all our anxieties about difference, radical otherness, and massive social and technological change. As she herself finally puts it to Greg,
Human beings, we’re becoming increasingly post-human … Things change so quickly. Total technological upheaval of society every five to eight years. Difficult to keep up, to connect amongst the generations. By the time your Russ is a teenager, you probably won’t understand his world at all.
Greg has been complaining all along that children are weirdly different from “us” (the adults). But Kamla makes him realize that he cannot expect things to return to normal, even when Russ grows up and becomes a functional adult in his own right. Such would be the resolution offered by reproductive futurism. Instead, Greg is forced to admit that what “really scares me about kids” is not the creepy reproduction of white bourgeois order, but its opposite, the threat of radical, irreversible change:
This brave new world that Cecilia and I are trying to make for our son? For the generations to follow us? We won’t know how to live in it.
This is the point at which “Message in a Bottle” flips over into explicit science fiction, with its story of a future art exhibition. What finally happens is that Kamla explains everything to Greg, by giving him information about the future. She makes sense of all the anomalies of the story – if only Greg is willing to believe her. Science fiction writers are often criticized for their use of infodumps: long expository passages that explain the unfamiliar presuppositions of the world of the story. Such passages are often disparaged for telling instead of showing. Ideally, you are supposed to just drop readers into the world of the narrative, giving them enough clues to figure out for themselves how everything works. However, this is not always possible: you already need some understanding of a context, in order to infer other things about that context. Imagine a person from the European Middle Ages, trying to make sense of electricity and fossil fuels entirely through offhand references and contextual clues. Infodumping is often impossible to avoid, given that the whole point of science fiction is to present a world that differs in significant respects from the reality that the reader takes for granted.
Hopkinson brilliantly resolves this difficulty by making the infodump into an event within the story – indeed, it is the story’s dramatic climax. Kamla calls Greg at three in the morning, and he takes her for a ride and listens to her story, despite his justified fear of encountering cops who will “think I’m some degenerate Indian perv with a thing for little girls.” Kamla has to tell him the truth, because the story is “all over Twitter and YouTube already,” and in the tabloids as well. Instead of having the author or narrator give the reader information about a future state, Kamla reveals the future to Greg, and therefore indirectly to us. Since the story is set in the present, Greg is in the same position relative to what Kamla tells him, as science fiction readers in general are relative to any text’s depiction of a future world. “Message in a Bottle” can therefore be regarded as a meta-science-fiction story: it dramatizes the way that science fiction as a genre is based upon the estranging irruption of futurity into the present moment.
Kamla explains to Greg that she is in fact an art curator from the future. She and the other “DGSers” have been sent to our present moment – which for them is the past – in order to collect artifacts that have not survived until their own time:
Our national gallery is having a giant retrospective; tens of thousands of works of art from all over the world, and all over the world’s history. They sent us back to retrieve some of the pieces that had been destroyed.
The differences between Kamla’s time and our own are so great that the DGSers “have all become anthropologists here in the past, as well as curators.” They find our early twenty-first century world strange, and generally feel that “your world stinks.” They have trouble relating to things they regard as “ancient tech,” like Greg’s “video monitors.” But it would seem that Kamla’s era has not only more powerful technology than we do, but also a more comprehensive and enlightened understanding of culture. These future people are apparently no longer Eurocentric. They do not privilege one particular period, one particular region of the world, and one particular race and gender over all the others – as we are all too often still prone to do, even though in theory we know better. At least in this regard, Greg is on the cutting edge. Kamla somewhat condescendingly tells him that “your installation had a certain antique brio to it, Greg. Really charming.” Though she also tells him that “in my world … what you do would be obsolete.”
On the other hand, some aspects of Kamla’s future world seem to be very little changed from conditions that we are all too familiar with today. Kamla notes that “arts grants are hard to get in my world, too.” Apparently, neoliberal economics and neoliberal governmentality are still in place several hundred years in the future. Our descendants still haven’t attained a society based on abundance, instead of scarcity and austerity. This leads to reduced ambitions and diminished plans:
They wanted to send us here and back as full adults, but do you have any idea what the freight costs would have been? The insurance? … The gallery had to scale the budget way back.
So instead of sending the arts curators themselves back in time, the future national art gallery sends clones – genetically engineered “small people … children who [are]n’t children” – to go back in their place. All the DGSers are in fact far older than they appear; Kamla, who looks like she is six, and whose adoptive parents think she is about ten, is in fact 23 years old. Not only is she a genetic clone of the curator whose interests she represents; in addition, the curator’s actual memories have been “implanted” within her as well. But her chromosomes have been altered, given extra telomeres in order to “slow down aging.” As a result, Kamla says, “my body won’t start producing adult sex hormones for another 50 years. I won’t attain my full growth till I’m in my early hundreds.” She will physically bring her artifacts into the future by living through the entire span of several centuries from our time until then. It is
expensive enough to send living biomaterial back; their grant wasn’t enough to pay for returning us to our time. So we’re going to grow our way there. Those of us that survive.
“Message in a Bottle” doesn’t spare us any of the grotesque and horrific consequences of this deeply compromised technological strategy. Kamla and her cohort find themselves having to spend all their time and energy in strenuous forms of pretense: “Do you know what it’s like turning in schoolwork that’s at a grade-five level, when we all have PhD’s in our heads?” Their double consciousness on a sexual level is even worse:
The weird thing is, even though this body isn’t interested in adult sex, I remember what it was like, remember enjoying it. It’s those implanted memories from my original.
Some of the seeming-children from the future have an even harder time than Kamla does, because they get abused, just as actual children sometimes do; or they find themselves constrained as a result of “living in extremely conservative or extremely poor places”; or they fail to get adopted, and have to “make [their] own way as street kids.” In any case, these people from the future have no legal rights, because in appearance they are “never old enough to be granted adult freedoms.” Some of them have already died, Kamla says; and she and the rest will suffer other forms of coercive medicalized discipline: “they’re probably going to institutionalise me. All of us.” Such suffering, all for the sake of an art retrospective! “This fucking project better have been worth it,” Kamla says.
All this is extraordinarily harsh. On first reading, it caught me entirely unawares. I had to go back and re-evaluate everything I had read up to that point. Kamla’s account of time travel makes sense of all of the story’s odd details – but at the price of making both Greg’s discomfort with children and his pride in his art seem less innocuous and more troubling than they did previously. Unsurprisingly, Greg himself has difficulty accepting Kamla’s story; after all, he does not know that he is caught in a science fiction narrative. He tries to tell himself that Kamla is “delusional … Barmy. Loony”; or that she is “as mad as a hatter”; or that she’s “been watching too many B-movies” for her own good. And yet, Greg is forced to admit that “a part of me still hopes that it’s all true.” It’s the only resolution that he (or we) can get.
By radically revising itself with this climactic infodump, “Message in a Bottle” stages a confrontation between two different ideas about futurity. Greg is rightly irritated at the breeders who seek to replicate and perpetuate themselves in their offspring, by projecting – in the words of Jacques Derrida – “a future which is predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable” (Dick and Ziering 2002). Such is the vision of what Edelman calls reproductive futurism (Edelman 2004). It is also the vision of what Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism: “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (Fisher 2009).
Although their theoretical starting points are quite different, both Edelman and Fisher diagnose the ways in which contemporary neoliberal society presents itself as inevitable and unsurpassable. Neoliberal culture projects a particular idea of the future – with its calculable risk, and incessant but superficial novelty – in order to avert the possibility of any deeper disruption. Breeders investing in their kids in all the ways that irk Greg, and bankers investing in exotic financial instruments created by hedge funds, are equally involved in colonizing the future, making it commensurable with the past and present, and thereby securing it as a continuing source of profit. This is the continuing logic that leads to future art galleries scaling back their plans, and employing grotesquely unpleasant means, in order to achieve their objectives while remaining within the limits of their budget.
However, Kamla’s story also opens up the prospect of another sort of future: one that is – to quote Derrida again – “totally unexpected … totally unpredictable” (Dick and Ziering 2002). This is the future in which “things change so quickly” that we of the present moment “won’t know how to live in it.” Someone like Kamla, who travels back in time from such a future, might well strike us as so alien as to preclude any possibility of our being able to understand her. If the regulated, controlled-in-advance futurity of reproductive futurism and speculative finance is commonly figured in the normative form of the Child, then this other sort of futurity might well be figured instead as the wrong sort of offspring – or what Derrida evokes as the “birth” of a “formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity” (Derrida 1978).
Of course, this is Derrida’s language, and not Hopkinson’s. Kamla and her fellow DGSers are indeed quite disturbing, not only to Greg, but more generally to our entire society. That is why the best that these visitors from the future can hope for is to be institutionalized, and studied as medical anomalies. Still, it is only from a particularly narrow Eurocentric point of view – from the perspective of “a society,” as Derrida is careful to say, “from which I do not exclude myself” (Derrida 1978) – that any such difference must be seen as formless monstrosity, or that the only alternative to a programmed and normative future is the absolute negativity of “no future.” The stark alternative we find in Derrida and Edelman is something like the philosophical equivalent of H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmology, in which a flimsy veneer of white European order is our only bulwark against the chaotic horror of the inhuman Elder Gods. This makes for a woefully impoverished choice – even if it is to the credit of Derrida and Edelman that, as opposed to Lovecraft, they are more than willing to side with Dagon and Cthulhu.
But “Message in a Bottle” suggests – as do many other works of Afrofuturism, not to mention Indigenous, queer, and other futurisms – that Derrida’s monstrous deconstruction of order, and Edelman’s “radical challenge to the very value of the social itself,” are not the only frameworks in which to conceive of alternative futurities. Kamla tells Greg that he would find her future world almost as oppressive and unpleasant as she finds his (and our) present one; but she still tries to assure him that, although “ours is a society that you would probably find strange,” nonetheless “we do have moral codes.” She warns Greg that politics and social values, no less than technologies, will be radically different in the future from what they are now; but “art helps us know how to do change.” This is why she is a curator, and why she was “excited by the idea, the crazy, wonderful idea” of going back in time to recover lost works of art – despite all the difficulties and dangers involved.
Greg tries to get a modicum of comfort from this by thinking that at least Kamla is interested in his art. Indeed, he is vain enough that his “heart’s performing a tympanum of joy” at the very suggestion that “The Excavations” might appear in a distant-future art retrospective. In spite of everything, Greg is still excited by the thought that his “legacy” might “get to go the future” after all.
But alas, this is not to be. Greg’s hope turns out to be yet another misconception. In one final twist of irony, Kamla tells Greg that she isn’t interested in his installation itself. Rather, she has come back in time to recover a seashell that she finds buried in the dirt covering the floor of the gallery. Greg himself can “barely remember putting that in there”; it is one of the “blanks that trigger no stories.” The shell is only part of the exhibition by chance, because “the dig where I got it from used to be underwater a few centuries ago.” Greg has no idea that, in the future, this seashell will be regarded as a greater work of art than anything he or his contemporaries have made. As Kamla explains to him,
Human beings aren’t the only ones who make art … Every shell is a life journal … made out of the very substance of its creator, and left as a record of what it thought, even if we can’t understand exactly what it thought … Of its kind, the mollusc that made this shell is a genius. The unique conformation of the whorls of its shell expresses a set of concepts that haven’t been explored before by the other artists of its species. After this one, all the others will draw on and riff off its expression of its world. They’re the derivatives, but this is the original.
Greg finds this difficult to accept. It is “familiar territory” for him to concede that “bower birds make pretty nests to attract a mate. Cetaceans sing to each other.” But he still insists on human exceptionalism: “we’re the only ones who make art mean; who make it comment on our everyday reality.” Kamla, however, denies this. Other animals also have values, express meanings, and comment upon the realities they encounter. The poignancy of this claim for a nonhuman aesthetics rests upon a new, expanded understanding of the limits of communication. We need to respect the artistic creations of other entities, Kamla says, even though
we don’t always know what they’re saying, we can’t always know the reality on which they’re commenting. Who knows what a sea cucumber thinks of the conditions of its particular stretch of ocean floor? … Sometimes interpretation is a trap. Sometimes we need to simply observe.
This is not inconsistent with the mainstream of modern (post-Kantian) Western aesthetics. Kant poses a paradox at the heart of what he calls “aesthetic taste.” On the one hand, each instance of beauty that we encounter is unique; it is irreducible to, and incommensurable with, any other. On the other hand, and at the very same time, my ability to find something beautiful implies a certain “universal communicability”: that is to say, my encounter with an instance of beauty is not a private, inner experience, but something that I can point out and describe, and share with others (Kant 2000). In other words, we can recognize the beauty and power of an aesthetic expression, even though “we don’t always know what they’re saying, we can’t always know the reality on which they’re commenting.” Aesthetic experience allows us to approach points of view that aren’t our own, and that are strange to us; we can appreciate these other perspectives, even though we cannot adopt them, or even fully understand them. Such is the basis of Kamla’s work as a curator (or perhaps we should say, of the work of her “original,” Vanda, whose memories as well as genes she shares).
The real question for Western aesthetics is how far this process of recognition – even in the absence of comprehension – extends. Up through the mid-twentieth century, the circle was fairly small: recognition was only accorded to a small number of elite European and North American works, usually created by white men. Over the past half century, the circle has greatly expanded. This is due to two developments: first, the increased recognition of works by white women and by people of color; and second, the breakdown of the once rigid boundary between “high” and “mass” culture.
“Message in a Bottle” suggests that aesthetic recognition will continue to widen in the years to come. Kamla explains to Greg how “the nascent identity politics as expressed by artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,” such as Greg himself, “was the progenitor of current speciesism.” This latter term seems to designate the “defining concept through which we understand what it means to be human animals,” by grasping the parallels, as well as the differences, between our own aesthetic expressions and those of other organisms. The expansion of our own ability to recognize the “universal communicability” of the works of many cultures, not just the white European one, leads ultimately to a still broader recognition of aesthetic works and processes across the species barrier.
What are we to make of this extension? Addie Hopes, commenting on another text by Hopkinson (her 2007 novel The New Moon’s Arms), points to a tension between Black Studies and what has come to be known as the “nonhuman turn” in the humanities (cf. Grusin):
Black studies scholars have long been suspicious of (white) scholars’ attempts to break down the lines between human and the nonhuman, particularly as black humanity has only recently begun to be seen as such within the academy and is still, politically, a fight far from won.
(Hopes 2018)
But Hopes notes how Hopkinson conciliates this opposition with her mythical invention of the “sea people” (or “black mermaids”) in The New Moon’s Arms. These people are the descendants of kidnapped Africans who escaped the Middle Passage by jumping off slave ships and adapting to life in the ocean. They are web-fingered, and they have the power to transform themselves at will into seals. In this way, the sea people both assert their humanity against a racist system that denied it to them, and cross the species barrier that would estrange human beings from all other forms of life. Hopes reads this double movement in terms of Sylvia Wynter’s notion of genres of the human:
Hopkinson’s mermaid maroons inspire readers to do as Katherine McKittrick asks us to do: to “recognize ‘human genres’ other than those of Man … and open up the possibility for … imagining alternative forms of being” … and becoming-with: intimate and co-constitutive relations between humans, monk seals, gods, red snapper fish, and toxic pollutants …
Here, recognizing other genres of humanity is continuous with recognizing nonhumans as well, and establishing “intimate and co-constitutive relations” with them. The crucial move is to reject the hegemony of capital-M “Man,” which is an exclusionary, white European concept. An opening to other genres of the human is also an opening to many sorts of nonhumans, and to futures (in the plural) outside the purview of capitalist realism and reproductive futurism.
“Message in a Bottle” also offers us such a prospect: a future that exceeds the boundaries of our conventionally humanist understanding, and that may thereby allow for hopeful developments that we are not currently able to imagine. Instead of bringing Greg’s artistic “legacy” into a future that would just be another expanded repetition of the past and the present, Kamla charges Greg with the responsibility for nurturing a different future, an odd future, one that he does not and cannot ever experience for himself. Kamla is all too oppressively aware of the horrors – institutionalization or worse – that our current society has in store for her. She is still a small person, without the rights and powers of an adult, regardless of what is in her head. She knows that it won’t be forever; as she defiantly says, “we’re going to outlive all our captors.” But she also knows that she is in for a lot of grief along the way. At the very end of the story, she begs Greg to keep the seashell safe for her in the meantime. “It’s your ticket to the future,” she tells him. Greg for his part resents this. He ends the story with a zinger: “I lied. I fucking hate kids.” But I am inclined to think that he remains bound, nonetheless, by Kamla’s charge to him – or, to put it differently, by the promise he did not give.