The space machine: Baraka and science fiction.

Music is the weapon of the Future. (Fela Kuti)

Space is black. Check out any episode of Star Trek. When Captain Kirk and his faithful crew boldly go where no man has gone before, it's a journey into blackness, punctuated with a few bright and shining stars. Maybe that goes without saying. Since Sputnik popped the top of Earth's prophylactic atmosphere, everybody knows the color of space. There are myriad pictures to prove it. But forget pictures for a minute. Approach the question culturally, and it becomes obvious that space is more than just a transparent black background for the space race and its colonialist Enterprise. When Sun Ra, the great theorist and master mage of astro-black mythology, says, "Space is the Place," he means that it's the place of blackness: black space. What, then, is the relationship between space and race? A question for science fiction, that vernacular idiom of cultural imagination and critique.

While most science fiction remains at best complacent in examining the role of race in techno-scientific culture and its possible futures (having been produced for an adolescent, white middle-class consumer), an insurgence appears to be occurring in the creation of black science fiction, or what a recently published anthology calls "speculative fiction from the African Diaspora." That anthology, Dark Matter, gathers together an impressive array of black writers who are producing a distinguished body of black science fiction. Samuel Delaney is no longer the sole brother writing scifi on an otherwise white planet, nor is Octavia Butler its Hottentot Venus, curious queen in foreign climes. From George S. Schulyer to Nalo Hopkinson, from Charles R. Sanders to Tananarive Due, a renaissance--or, maybe better, a naissance--of black science fiction is under way that augurs unimagined possibilities.

Walter Mosley suggests why in "Black to the Future," a brief commentary that appears in Dark Matter:

   The genre speaks most clearly to those who are dissatisfied with
   the way things are: adolescents, post adolescents, escapists,
   dreamers, and those who have been made to feel powerless. And this
   may explain the appeal that science fiction holds for a great many
   African Americans.... Through science fiction you can have a black
   president, a black world, or simply a say in the way things are.
   This power to imagine is the first step in changing the world.
   (405-06)

Black science fiction begins by affirming the blackness of space, the material space of social life rather than the transparent space of imperialist expansion. It's the space of this world, and not of the galaxy, that needs a change. Black science fiction dares to imagine such possibilities. In this regard, Amiri Baraka becomes one of its forerunners, and his inclusion among the writers in Dark Matter proves instructive. While accounting for only a small part of his astonishing body of work, Baraka's science fiction asserts the reality that space is black, or will be. Working in close concert with Sun Ra's astro-black mythologizing, but toward even more physical ends, Baraka imagines a future in which space materializes a previously transparent blackness. And his means for pursuing this future is music. Black music is the doomsday weapon of Baraka's science fiction.

Although it would be overstating the case to call Baraka a science fiction writer, he makes it clear in his autobiography that the genre constitutes part of his cultural heritage as a twentieth-century city kid. Growing up in Newark meant listening to the radio and imagining life's possibilities in the terms it provided. "The radio," he says, "was always another school for my mind" (26). The shows that captured his imagination conjured up adventure and strangeness: The Shadow, I Love a Mystery, Inner Sanctum, Escape. The last was particularly influential. It broadcast stories by famous writers, stories of fantasy and science fiction by the likes of H. Rider Haggard and H. G. Wells. Baraka mentions Wells's "The Valley of the Blind" in particular. But the real lesson of these radio shows was that the enemy to human happiness, whether the cold-blooded killer or the invading alien horde, could be identified, opposed, and maybe even defeated. As Baraka puts it, those shows "taught us that evil needed to be destroyed," a lesson he took to heart and made the driving force of his life as a writer (27). So clear and so compelling was the moral charge of this material that Baraka included the motto of that close cousin of science fiction, the superhero Green Lantern, in his collection of poems entitled The Dead Lecturer: "In Blackest Day / In Blackest Night / No Evil Shall Escape My Sight! / Let Those Who Worship Evil's Might / Beware My Power / Green Lantern's Light." Popular pulp fiction and radio sow the seeds of resistance to social injustice.

And that's something of an irony, given that such stuff was produced and promoted to sell products, circulate images, and promote satisfactions in keeping with the comforts of majority culture. It would be wrong, therefore, to conclude that the kind of science fiction Baraka heard on the radio as a kid was very subversive in the way Mosley imagines for contemporary black science fiction. With the important exception of Wells, who was British and openly socialist in his politics, science fiction before World War II--and long after as well--largely participated in the cultural project of imagining the future in the image of a perpetual American present. Call it a cosmic liberalism tricked out in the latest techno-scientific gadgetry: The scifi of the pulps and the radio shows launched the politics of possessive individualism into outer space. Maybe it was an inevitable move, culturally speaking. The disappearance of the American Frontier and the eradication of "the native problem" rendered obsolete the wild-west mythology of manifest destiny. So manifest destiny builds a rocket and blasts off.

With the help, of course, of the latest advances in science and its fictions. Hugo Gernsback and John Campbell, the godfathers of American science fiction, both helped cosmic liberalism get off the ground in the fledgling popular genre. Both were influential editors, Gernsback of a slew of pulps beginning with Air Wonder Stories, Campbell of its later avatar, Amazing Stories. Both set and policed the standards that qualified writing as science fiction, not only openly stated scientific standards of plausibility and extrapolation, but also unstated cultural standards of appropriateness and legitimation. Science fiction stories had obviously to invoke plausible science, but less obviously to legitimate culture as well. Their cosmic liberalism saturates space with the values of individuality, acquisition, and perpetual progress.

In this regard, Stanley Weinbaum's landmark story "A Martian Odyssey" (1933) proves representative. Its title makes the cultural agenda of it and so many other scifi stories unavoidably clear: to boldy discover Western culture where no man has gone before. And that is pretty much what happens. A diverse crew of "true pioneers" (a German, a Frenchman, an Englishman, and of course Our Hero the American) brave the deeps of interplanetary space to become "the first men to feel other gravity than earth's" (13). On Mars a scout ship piloted by the American breaks down, forcing him to brave the elements (which are nasty), the natives (who are nastier), and the moral dilemma of whether or not to steal a sacred crystal that also happens to cure cancer--which turns out, of course, to be no dilemma at all. The American returns to the mother ship a hero, having survived alone and swiped the crystal. Thanks to the wonders of science, the possessive individual triumphs again (with the help, it must be admitted, of an eight-foot Martian that looks like a duck but fights like a man). There's no need to belabor the whiteness of "the famous crew" or the Eurocentrism of their space-cowboy beliefs. But it is worth noting that when race becomes an issue around the apparent humanity of the eight-foot duck, the deciding criterion is the limited, primitive intelligence of African "Negritoes." Unlike the duck, they "haven't any generic words, ... no names for general classes" (22). The cosmic liberalism of pulp scifi legitimates beliefs that promote racial exclusion.

As a popular genre, science fiction from its inception until the work of Samuel Delaney remains, in the worst sense of the phrase, pretty much colorblind. Even when race is its explicit subject, as in Ray Bradbury's famous story "Way in the Middle of the Air" (1950), the ideological imperative of cosmic liberalism renders it transparent to majority culture. Bradbury's story, for all its humanity, is a neocolonial fantasy of racial justice that directs the historical longings of black separatism toward the distant shores of colonized Mars. Simply put, the story's African Americans, "every single one here in the South," abandon the earth for Mars, having secretly arranged rocket passage (90). Although Graham Lock makes the useful suggestion that Bradbury's description of black emigration to another planet might have in some way influenced Sun Ra's astro-black mythology, it's important to realize that "Way in the Middle of the Air" never really solves the problem it raises. Yes, African Americans vacate this planet, propelled by the dream of a better world in the sky. And Bradbury unflinchingly depicts the racism they leave behind. Asked what to do about the loss of a young black clerk, the protagonist replies, " 'Kill that son of a bitch' " (100). Earth is no world for African Americans. But neither, it appears, is Mars. For although Bradbury depicts them leaving this planet en masse, he never shows them arriving anywhere else. Blacks abandon Earth to land--nowhere. They simply disappear into black space, as if the logic of cosmic liberalism can make no room for them in the known universe. Sun Ra had other plans for African Americans--and other planets, too. But the space of cosmic liberalism is a place only for possessive individuals and neo-colonial heroes. Black is the color of its transparent background, the meaningless backdrop of really heroic acts--like imperialist expansion. Way up in the middle of the air, Bradbury's black emigres get lost in space, absorbed into the emptiness between worlds.

What would happen if black space were a place and not a transparency? That's the question that drives Sun Ra's astro-black mythologizing, and in a different way it drives Baraka's science fiction, too. In raising the question of space so directly in terms of place, Sun Ra and Baraka both disrupt the ideological superstructure of cosmic liberalism and the kind of science fiction that promotes it. Science fiction, after all, is the great genre of temporal speculation. Time travel is one of its foundational tricks and favorite tropes because time is what happens in the space of transparent blackness. The apparent inevitability of its passage opens the future to speculation too, so that a characteristic gimmick of science fiction is the story set in some time yet to come. Distant or near, utopian or dystopian, terran or transgalactic, the relationship of that future to the reader's present foregrounds the all-too-simple fact that time passes. This investment in time as a medium for human life and speculation is one of the ways classic science fiction advances the agenda of cosmic liberalism. It thereby participates in a larger cultural project coincident with the emergence of capitalism that prefers time to space and history to geography, as ways of valuing life and making it meaningful. To live temporally, in this view, is to exist individually, in ultimate relation to death. It is to live and die in time, without particular reference to the spatial locations, the physical geographies of that mortal span. A science fiction that takes time for the main theater of its speculations, even when staged against the backdrop of whole galaxies, helps make space innocuous, a place only of possible fantasy, not political reality.

In this, science fiction perpetrates what Edward W. Soja calls the "illusion of transparency." Like many another cultural practice characteristic of modernity, it "dematerializes space into pure ideation and representation, an intuitive way of thinking that equally prevents us from seeing the social construction of affective geographies, the concretization of social relations embedded in spatiality, an interpretation of space as a 'concrete abstraction,' a social hieroglyphic similar to Marx's conceptualization of the commodity form" (7). The space of cosmic liberalism and the science fiction that circulates it are transparent in just this way. Its blackness is merely a medium for pure ideation and representation, the pervasive trace of social relations that such a conception of space arises to occlude. Space in this sense, the sense of a thousand space operas and a hundred episodes of Star Trek, becomes an empty medium through which the heroic adventurers of science fiction fly to discover the strangeness of aliens or the weirdness of time. Lost to such adventures are the less sublime, more material spaces of social life, and with them the awareness that, for all its apparent vastness, space is socially produced. For Soja, this loss proves useful to a capitalist social order, in which that production involves domination and unequal distribution of wealth and power. That is why he so urgently advocates another way of approaching space, "one which recognizes spatiality as simultaneously ... a social product (or outcome) and a shaping force (or medium) in social life" (7). Making this move from transparent to productive space recovers what modernity on Soja's reading has worked so hard to occlude, a sense of personal responsibility for space as a collective production--even the empty space of cosmic liberalism. Not time but space becomes the medium of life's changes, and the best means of forecasting them: "Prophecy now involves a geographical rather than historical projection; it is space and not time that hides consequences from us" (23).

In this sense Baraka is a prophet in three dimensions, and his science fiction is a space machine. It projects and produces other spaces, not in some distant future, but right here, right now. That at least is the aim of the most obvious instance of science fiction among his many works, the triumphant short story entitled "Answers in Progress" from his 1967 collection Tales. Its scenario is as simple as it is funny: Spacemen arrive on Earth in search of Art Blakey records. But it's not this scenario so much as the social transformation it augurs that makes "Answers in Progress" an instance of Baraka's space machine. The first thing to notice about the story is how deeply grounded it is in its historical moment. Unlike myriad tales of space invaders flung across the interminable pages of the pulps, Baraka's has a setting that is socially palpable, historically concrete, and menacing: the Newark of 1967, on the brink of the rebellion that would erupt that July. But what is interesting about Baraka's treatment of this reality is the way he transforms it. Part future history, part utopia, and pure science fiction, "Answers in Progress" envisions black rebellion against the white establishment as a victory for the oppressed. Their triumph transforms spacial possibility. Spacemen arrive in New Ark, as Baraka is fond of calling it, as harbingers of this victory and the ensuing transformation of social space.

Baraka's descriptions of the rebellion in The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones make it clear that, when it did occur, the stakes were higher--or maybe lower--than abstract principles of justice and equality: At issue was the possession and configuration of space itself, the social space in which black people lived and moved in Newark. Himself locked up on the first night of the rebellion, Baraka sums up its historical outcome: "In its entirety the rebellion went on for six days or so. Thousands of blacks were arrested and thousands more were injured. The official score was 21 blacks killed and 2 whites, a policeman and a fireman. But there were many more blacks killed, their bodies on roofs and in back alleys, spirited away  and stuck in secret holes. It was no riot, it was a rebellion" (371). This distinction is important, because as a rebellion the unrest aimed not simply at damaging property and the space it configured but seizing that space and transforming it radically. Hence Baraka's understanding of its political implications in terms of warfare: "It was a war, for us, a war of liberation. One had to organize, one had to arm, one had to mobilize and educate the people. For me, the rebellion was a cleansing fire" (375). And as in conventional war, but without its usual termination, taking and occupying material space were the major objectives, which is why Baraka sees this pattern continuing throughout America even to this day:

   So the Newarks of the U.S. still exist
   like they did in 1967, trying to drive
   the blacks out to the hopeless exurbs,
   so that the whites can urban renew,
   having found out the ancient teaching
   of Ibn Arabi is true, that the cities are
   the chief repositories of culture and the
   highest thrust of human life. Or having
   read Mao they know that the socialist
   revolutions in the Western industrial
   countries will begin in the cities and then
   move out to the countryside. (371)

Space, the social space of contemporary urban life, becomes for Baraka the only space that, materially speaking, really matters. His science fiction is a space machine that actively promotes its transformation.

"Answers in Progress," then, transforms the coming event of the Newark rebellion into a spacial triumph for the black populace. In other words it spatializes that temporal event, reconfiguring the relations of power that turn Newark into a battlefield. That is why, after a harrowing account in verse of the violence that attends such change, the story begins so abruptly: "The next day the spaceships landed. Art Blakey records was what they were looking for" (Fiction 219). Paul Gilroy views this visitation as testimony to the obsolescence of racial identity, arguing that, "because race consciousness is so manifestly arcane, its victims and others who perceive the open secret of its residual status must be closer to advanced interplanetary travelers than they are to its deluded earthly practitioners" (344). But Baraka's visitors are space men in an even more literal sense than Gilroy's investment in consciousness can account for. They appear, literally and materially, in the new space produced by the rebellion. These spacemen inhabit a social space materially transformed by black power. Not consciousness but three-dimensional mobility determines their appearance in this world. That's why they react the way they do when stabbed and bleeding whites stagger out of a department store: "The space men thought that's what was really happening. One beeped (Ali mentioned this in the newspapers) that this was evolution. Could we dig it? Shit yeh. We were laughing" (219). What's really happening, what the space men have the capacity to think and to live, is an evolutionary transformation of space and reconfiguration of power that opens New Ark up to new forms of life.

Baraka's opening lines continue: "We gave them Buttercorn Lady and they threw it back at us. They wanted to know what happened to The Jazz Messengers" (219). The space men are pursuing the great drummer Art Blakey, whom they also call by his Muslim name, Buhainia. Their appearance is a material response to the call of Blakey's Jazz Messengers. Here's a new version of the old scifi close encounter salutation "Take me to your leader." But in this case the leader is a musician whose authority is the music he plays. Baraka makes music a primary means of achieving the evolutionary advance his story describes. Jazz, or a particular instance of it, becomes his weapon of the future. It explodes upon the scene, reconfiguring social space in new ways and toward new ends. Jazz in this sense is much more than either entertainment or even art. It becomes a vital force that participates directly in the material transformation of space and the power relations that sustain it. The new world that "Answers in Progress" depicts would be impossible without the force of black music to open social space up to new possibilities.

Baraka describes this effect more directly in an essay first published in 1966 entitled "The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music)." Discussing the new music then emerging under the banner of "free jazz," he repeatedly stresses its spatial location. At its broadest, jazz bespeaks place, at least until its appropriation by majority culture: "The direct expression of a place ... jazz seeks another place as it weakens, a middle class place" (Black Music 180). It is against this weakening, this suburbanization, that Baraka directs his commentary on the new black music, or free jazz. This music amounts not to a mere appeal for a place in America, but more menacingly to the production of other spaces within it. Free jazz is space music. It powers Baraka's space machine. As he puts it, "The new music began by calling itself 'free,' and this is social and is in direct commentary on the scene it appears in. Once free, it is spiritual" (193). The last remark will require further treatment, but for now the thing to notice is that the freedom of free jazz occurs only in the material surround of a social scene.

Free jazz materializes freedom, rendering it socially practicable, at least in terms of its occurrence as music: "There are other new musicians, new music that takes freedom as already being. Ornette was a cool breath of open space. Space, to move. So freedom already exists" (198). Ornette Coleman's free music transforms space. It literally, materially produces space to move, places where freedom already exists. Something similar occurs in the music of Sun Ra, whose astro-black mythologizing is too often taken for otherworldly speculation. Baraka knows better. Affirming the obvious, that Sun Ra is spiritually oriented, Baraka emphasizes the materiality of his orientation, given that Sun Ra "understands 'the future' as an ever widening comprehension of what space is, even to 'physical' travel between the planets.... It is science-fact that Sun-Ra is interested in, not science-fiction. It is evolution itself, and its fruits" (198-99). Space in Sun Ra's mythologizing cannot be dissociated from place, the place of blacks in a universe saturated by the facts of science. Sun Ra's music opens space to a blackness cast into the background by science, producing new relationships (the Arkestra) and realities (its communal living). Social space becomes accessible to freedoms hitherto unavailable, which is why Baraka can assert that "Ra's music changes places" (199). The spiritual valence of that change involves the production, socially speaking, of a new unity that conflates spirituality and materiality. "What will come," says Baraka in a prophetic idiom, "will be a Unity Music.... The consciousness of social reevaluation and rise, a social spiritualism. A mystical walk up the street to a new neighborhood where all the risen live" (210). Right here. Right now. The new music will produce new spaces, new neighborhoods where dead freedoms live again and spiritual aspirations take material shape.

Baraka projects such a space in "Answers in Progress." That black music produces it is part of his point. It ruptures the space of white domination and lets in the cool blue space men, homing in on a beam of Blakey. "The space men could dig everything" (Fiction 219). In such new spaces, everything is diggable. With the rebellion taking a victorious turn, the insurgents pipe music through the streets, songs of new unity, circulating sentiments such as those expressed in the poem at the center of the story: "Walk through life / beautiful more than anything / stand in sunlight / walk through life / love all the things / that make you strong, be lovers, be anything / for all the people of / earth" (220). Social space changes and with it the apportionment of power: "Boulevards played songs like that and we rounded up blanks where we had to." Songs now promote new values, not unrequited love but "the beauty of the whole" (221). The effect ideologically is to promote an awareness of changed social circumstances, the world of new possibilities brought to life by black music: "We thought about the changing reference, of our new world. As it stood already in the old ruins. And we all felt like Bird." And the space men, those forerunners of a new, blue kind of free black people, hear the music opening new spaces, and respond accordingly: "But when the Sun-Ra tape came on this blue dude really opened up. He dug the hell out of it. Perfect harmony these cats had too. Boooooo--Iiiiiiiiiooooooooooooo ... daaaaa ahhhhhhhh aaaaahhhhhh ... boooooOOOOOOOOOOOOO oooooooooaaaaaaaaaoooaaaaa" (222). The freedom of these sounds materializes new spaces.

Black music reconfigures social space: That is its most menacing legacy. It shares with science fiction the capacity, as Mosley puts it, to let African Americans have a say in the way things are. Baraka's science fiction, in contrast to the sort that serves the ends of cosmic liberalism, develops this capacity through music: Not techno-science but cultural politics provides the best weapons for building new worlds. In this Baraka's work intersects with the brazenly scifi elements of free jazz, from Sun Ra's astro-blackness to Ornette Coleman's Science Fiction Sessions. In the hands of these black artists, science fiction gets "musicked," to apply a phrase Baraka uses to describe poetry that recapitulates the disruptive sounds of bebop. If what Baraka says of poetry, that "the fact of music was the black poet's basis for creation" (Autobiography 337), can be said too of science fiction, then the kind he writes, and that black musicians play, has more to do with politics than science, with social than outer space. Music becomes a means of materializing new spaces, producing the future, not as some distant never-never land, but in (the) place of today. Science fiction musicked advances this project in the idiom of dominant culture, but toward the end of transforming it--like the Black Arts Movement from which it derives much impetus--by "daring to raise the question of art and politics and revolution, black revolution!" (299).

Baraka pursues this project in more recent works of science fiction too. The anthology Dark Matter contains a short but provocative story called "Rhythm Travel" that assimilates the idiom of science fiction to the tradition of black music. What makes "Rhythm Travel" a science fiction story is the development of the peculiar new technology at its center, the "Molecular Anyscape" or "RE soulocator." What makes "Rhythm Travel" a black science fiction story is the ultimate identification of this technology with music: Says its inventor, " 'I can dis appear, dis visibility. Be un seen. But now, I can be around anyway. Perceived, felt, heard. I can be the music!'" (113). Baraka reconstitutes the old trope of black invisibility in auditory terms. Music allows what is dis-visible to persist materially, producing an alternative dimension for living. By becoming the music, this mad scientist inhabits space in unprecedented ways, ways easily overlooked by eyes accustomed to conventional dimensions:

      Your boy always do that. You
   knock, somebody say come in. You
   open the door, look around, call out,
   nobody there. You think!

      But then, at once, music come on. If
   you watching, there's a bluish shaking
   that flickers--maybe "Mysterioso" will
   surround you. The music is wavering
   like light. The room seems to shift to
   step.

      Then you recognize what you hear:
   yo' man.... I roiled my eyes as he
   materialized before me, dissing the Dis
   Report on Appearance. (113)

Music here is a means of inhabiting space, a way of investing it, living it, claiming it, changing it. This disappearing person materializes to give the lie to his apparent invisibility.

But more is at issue here than mere (dis)appearances. For this inventor has perfected a new form of space travel. The music moves him into other spaces, or rather reconfigures space by way of other locations: "I pushed the anyscape into rhythm spectroscopic transformation. And then I got it tuned to combine the anywhereness and the reappearance as Music" (114). The result is Rhythm Travel. "You can Dis Appear and Re Appear wherever and whenever that music played" (114). The trick is simple: Rhythm Travel lets you go, physically, to the place a particular tune is being played, without regard to where or when, or rather with regard to all wheres and whens. Baraka reconfigures space along lines of musical force. During Rhythm Travel "here" is not a place so much as a constellation of spaces. The traveler's life becomes spatially redistributed, organized no longer by a master narrative of linear time but by a simultaneity of different spaces linked together by the common force of a particular tune. Like this:

      "If I go into 'Take this Hammer,' I
   can appear wherever that is, was, will
   be sung."

      "Yeh, but be that song you be on a
   plantation ..."

      "I know." He was smilin. "I went to
   one." (114)

Rhythm Travel turns history into a geography of force, as the experience of the plantation proves, with its overseers and its slaves. The point is to inhabit these multiple spaces rather than simply dismissing them as historically past or yet to come. Black music invokes not just the memory of historical suffering but the reappropriation of the spaces in which it occurred, toward the end of shifting relations of power and multiplying freedoms. Rhythm Travel transforms social space by showing that it is never a historical given but a constellation of material events subject to change. Science fiction once again serves Baraka as a space machine, materializing space as a multiplicity wherein the dis-visible move about freely. Or in the traveler's words, "'Man the stuff I seen!' 'You mean you been rhythm traveling already?' 'Yeh. I turned into some Sun Ra and hung out, inside gravity'" (114). Space travel becomes rhythm travel as black music remakes science fiction.

And always, for Baraka, under the auspices of Sun Ra. Sun Ra, Sun Ra. The original interplanetary black man, Sun Ra. The musical space traveler, Sun Ra. The abductee, the philosopher, the poet, the activist, Sun Ra. "We Travel The Spaceways, from planet to planet," Sun Ra. "Some space metaphysical philosophical surrealistic bop funk. Some blue pyramid home nigger southern different color meaning hip shit. Ra. Sun Ra" (Eulogies 171). Baraka's science fiction would, to say the least, be different without the example of Sun Ra. So would black music. Sun Ra puts them together so completely in order to demand and to produce a transformation of social space of the sort Baraka describes. Sun Ra's astro-black mythologizing is not the folk art of a marginalized dreamer. It is a sophisticated political response to a techno-scientific culture he viewed as primitive, destructive, benighted (see Szwed). Music was the weapon he directed against that world. That he believed it could achieve the impossible was the crux of his politics. As he put it, "The impossible is the watchword of the greater space age. The space age cannot be avoided and the space music is the key to understanding the meaning of the impossible and every other enigma" (qtd. in Lock 26). In Sun Ra, music becomes a material means of changing space.

Put differently, Sun Ra's music materializes black space. It rescinds the transparency of blackness posited by cosmic liberalism and asserts, simply and boldly, that space is the place for black people. Says Baraka, "Ra was so far out because he had the true self consciousness of the Afro-American intellectual artist revolutionary. He knew our historic ideology and sociopolitical consciousness was freedom" (Eulogies 171). Consciousness of freedom moved Sun Ra to demand and produce new social spaces for African Americans. Hence his involvement in the initial stages of the Black Arts Movement. "For some, Sun Ra became our resident philosopher," Baraka writes, telling too of the march of the Myth Science Arkestra across 125th Street in Harlem the summer the Arts opened (Autobiography 298). The place of Sun Ra's space may involve interplanetary (rhythm?) travel, but its social location remains emphatically terrestrial, the material place of African American life: "No matter how 'far out' the insiders said Ra was, in the Harlem streets he was a rare treat" (Eulogies 172).

That's the point of Baraka's tour de force of science fiction, the poem or rather performance entitled "When Sun Ra Gets Blue," currently available only on a recording made with trumpeter Hugh Ragin called An Afternoon in Harlem (1999). Ragin's title locates socially Baraka's amazing performance with musicians of a poem that enacts the return of Sun Ra's astro-black mythology to planet Earth. Sun Ra left this planet when he died in 1996, but he returns in Baraka's poem like some black messiah materializing out of dark matter. He returns to communicate a message, one that involves music as much as poetry and effects the transformation of social space. Working with musicians allows Baraka to materialize his earlier thematic treatment of music in prose, which remains limited by the fact that, however radical in content, it falls subject to the politics of print. As a performance, a speech act somewhere between recitation and song, Baraka's delivery of "When Sun Ra Gets Blue" eschews the apparent fixity and finality of a poem printed in a book. Compared with a poem like "In the Tradition," also a favorite for performance but often reprinted, "When Sun Ra Gets Blue"--at least until it gets transcribed--remains an event with a communal dimension. One man may have written it, but a group of musicians (including Baraka playing language) performs it. These musicians are tops, some of them early practitioners of free jazz: Andrew Cyrille on drums, David Murray on bass clarinet, Hugh Shahid on bass, and Craig Taborn on piano. In its occurrence as music among this community of players, "When Sun Ra Gets Blue" turns science fiction into something more than a literary practice, transforming its formerly transparent black spaces.

That's the gist of the message Sun Ra returns to deliver to this backward planet: You gotta change. That's the meaning of the poem that Baraka and the other musicians perform. Ragin's recording of "When Sun Ra Gets Blue" opens with a lone thumb piano plucking a vagrant melody, which is soon eclipsed by as series of block chords gesturing toward the popular idiom of "space music" and parodying the opening statement of Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra. Stanley Kubrik turned this statement into the scifi soundtrack cliche by using it during the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey. "When Sun Ra Gets Blue" musically contests the space of cosmic liberalism by parodying that opening, suggesting that evolution, at least for humans, is a planetary matter, not the odyssey into outer blackness that Kubrik imagines. Sun Ra brings that blackness back to this planet and materializes it here. Hence his message: "The world is in transition, your world and your condition." It is a message, says Baraka, specifically "for niggers," those who are socially subjected but remain defiant. And it is a message that is less meaningful than material. "The world is really matter independent of your mind," Baraka says late in his performance. It is black matter urging toward transformation: "Inside the world is blackness--everything is dark as sky." Sun Ra comes to work that change, materially and socially. "I am nothing but a color, nothing but a name, nothing but a flash of daylight, nothing but an x-slave." This color/name/flash/x-slave comes to reconstellate space, figured in the force of pronouns: "The world is everything, the world is every where. Whatever is said and done is just a description of the there.... Everything is the same. Here is there and there is here." Troubling reference reconfigures the here, makes it a space related to other theres. And as space changes, so too does blackness: "From black to ultraviolet to indigo to soulful blue--take me, take me, take me, take us altogether." Changing color bespeaks changing space, an other-worlding that turns the planet toward new life. Baraka's performance builds to the thundering exhortation, "All you different colored niggers, live and live and rebuild a dying world." Here. Now. Space is the place. Material, planetary, social space to fulfill Baraka's closing imperative--"live, live, live, live, live, live...."

But it is important to remember that science fiction as Sun Ra announces it and Baraka practices it in this poem involves music. Its "here" configures the listener's "there," the space(s) of new musical occurrence. Put another way, the "here" of playing and the "there" of listening coincide, at least for a time, to transform social space. It takes space to stage such a performance. It takes space even to listen to it, if only at home on the stereo. Once assimilated to music, science fiction invests space in three dimensions. What opens up is the possibility of collaboration among a community of musicians and of participation with a company of witnesses. To the extent that it occurs as music in a particular place, the performance of "When Sun Ra Gets Blue" exceeds even its message, exceeds it by enacting it. Space becomes a place of collective improvisation. Baraka cedes the traditional priority of words over music to allow his language to interact freely with other sounds. While the freedom he realizes in performance doesn't drain his words of meaning, it reconfigures that meaning in relation to the collective event of its performance. Music transforms language, turning what was meaning into the architecture of the space that opens with performance. As "When Sun Ra Gets Blue" proceeds, collective improvisation among the musicians increases until what began as chordal statement becomes a collaborative freakery that affirms--in the social space of performance and participation--the practice of freedom. And as Baraka punctuates his performance with the words "Sun Ra," variously declaimed, chanted, and sung, they acquire material persistence in the space that collective improvisation opens and maintains. Sun Ra returns. Sun Ra, Sun Ra.

In a performance such as this one, science fiction turns space machine, as black music freely freaking reconfigures social space. Doing so it produces new futures, but in the material terms of this (new) world. That's how Baraka's science fiction differs from the kind that recapitulates cosmic liberalism. It rhythm travels with Sun Ra: "The evolution of humanity was his theme. From revelation to revelation, immeasurable, revolution to revolution, like heartbeats of truth.... The destiny, but as a constant character of motion and change" (Eulogies 174). Here. There. In Baraka's black/science/music/fiction, space is the place.

Works Cited

Baraka, Amiri. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1997.

--. Black Music. 1967. New York: Da Capo, 1998.

--. Eulogies. New York: Marsilio, 1996.

--. The Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka. Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 2000.

--. "Rhythm Travel." Thomas 113-15.

Bradbury, Ray. The Martian Chronicles. New York: Bantam, 1977.

Gilroy, Paul. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.

Lock, Graham. Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton. Durham: Duke UP, 1999.

Mosley, Walter. "Black to the Future." Thomas 405-07.

Ragin, Hugh. An Afternoon in Harlem. Justin Time 127-2, 1999.

Soja, Edward J. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso, 1989.

Szwed, John. Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra. New York: Da Capo, 1998.

Thomas, Sheree R., ed. Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. New York: Warner, 2000.

Weinbaum, Stanley. "A Martian Odyssey." 1933. The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. I. Ed. Robert Silverberg. New York: Avon, 1970. 13-39.

Paul Youngquist is Associate Professor of English at The Pennsylvania State University. He writes on science fiction, black music, and British romanticism.