Power in Taínofuturism: A Talk With E.G. Condé
Interview by Sophia Gutierrez
Sophia G.
With the release of your debut novella, Sordidez, you coined the term Taínofuturism. How do you define Taínofuturism and how does the genre affect the current literary landscape?
E.G. Condé
I’m not sure if I’m the one who coined the term, but I am certainly among the first people to use it in a literary capacity. There has been a lot of interesting art along this wavelength of Indigenous futurism that centers the concepts, mythology, cosmology of the Antillian world, and the Indigenous Caribbean world. For me it is exploring a future where Indigeneity is recovered, remixed, reformatted. It’s a future that is inspired by the past, but also that has a mind to the present and the future. And it’s a bit messy. In a way, this is a kind of Indigenous futurism that is also entangled with and celebrates the kind of messiness that is the Caribbean experience. That is, being a part of a world that is influenced by a lot of different continents and communities. So, this is also a form of African futurism and there’s dimensions of European culture that are also woven into this meshwork of stories.
Sophia G.
Your work takes inspiration from environmentally conscious and sustainable practices, multicultural and Indigenous perspectives, political power structures, specifically in Puerto Rico but across the world, decolonial ways of thinking, and much more. What empowered you to write this story, and at what point did you feel ready to take on writing it?
E.G. Condé
Most authors draw from their personal experience and are compelled to write a story because some piece of them is caught in the telling; that there is some part of their own life experience that must be processed and that they feel compelled to create some kind of art from that foundry of lived experience. For me, it’s no different. Being a Puerto Rican and growing up in the diaspora in the United States for most of my life, but also having this strong foundation of Puerto Rican culture and identity connected to the land and to the community, having this sense of longing my entire life to return to my homeland and being caught between two identities—one Puerto Rican and the other being an American citizen, and experiencing the disconnect between those two identities—was really what pushed me to start thinking about the decolonial politics of the future of Puerto Rico and the different movements for liberation.
What really connected me to the decolonial movement was the way that people living in Puerto Rico are building this future for themselves, free from US imperial rule, and have looked at cases that are in the similar dynamic of colonial struggle. For me that was really key, linking the story of Puerto Rico with others.
On the point about environmentalism, if you live in Puerto Rico, if you’ve lived in the Caribbean the last ten or so years, you know that regular storm and climate systems have really intensified as a result of global heating. It’s really hard to ignore that the climate is changing when you live on these islands. So, there is a sense that change needs to occur at a global scale, but also the micro scale. How can you build a future, a world that is decolonized, but also a world that is more in tune with nature? The Spanish saw vast swaths of jungle. They saw a wilderness and people who lived, in their minds, like animals, in perfect harmony with the wilderness. But now we know that wilderness was not a wilderness. It was a garden and these were cultivated lands. The forests were not random acts of nature. They were planted. They were deliberately shaped by human hands through controlled burning, through seeding of certain species, planting certain kinds of plants together. These were methods that they brought from the Orinoco basin where they originated. So going back to that, this environmental challenge that we now face in the 21st century is something that I want to take on in my stories. I am inspired by the solar punk movement, by biocomputing, for instance. I’m very inspired by the solar energy movement on the island (Puerto Rico), specifically in Adjuntas and Casa Pueblo. An energy revolution, or energy insurrection, is happening on the island in the face of these severe issues with access to electricity and power infrastructure through Luma energy and a failing electrical grid.
Sophia G.
In this novella, conflict comes from removing a certain level of autonomy. Your characters begin the story feeling powerless. What are your thoughts, not just about how they gain power, but the ways that they fight for power and can’t achieve it because power is not handed freely and power is taken away? How do you translate that to your characters?
E.G. Condé
These are characters that have had their power taken away, and in all three cases, this is not voluntary. This was not a choice. Maybe the power is not really about being in charge of somebody. It might be being in charge of your body. It might be being in charge of your own self-image and how people perceive you. And I think in some ways, all three of them are prisoners to their memory.
I think of the land itself. In the case of, specifically, the Yucatan, the chemical weapons of the dictator, the Caudillo, unleashed the hydrophage that desecrated the land and turned it into a desert. That land has forgotten how to be green and it has to remember how to do that. In a way, even the land has its power taken away from itself. I think that’s another way to think of it; the land, too, as a character that also has lost its power. What’s at stake is not only whether or not a group of people live or have power, it’s also living with land in a specific way. It’s an important blueprint to think about what Taínofuturism could be, at least in the stories that I’m telling. I think it would be wrong to take the Taíno aesthetics of cybernetic cemís and put them in cities and call it Taínofuturism. That could be, but that’s not my version of what it is. My version is firmly tethered to the land, to nature, and in the same way that the animist belief system of the Taíno does this. It infuses vitality into the land, into the soil, into the rock, into the water, so that these things that are nonliving are just as alive as living things like frogs and people and so on. That’s the part that I love so much about these ancestral cultures. It’s this deep reverence for all things. This sense of unity and wholeness with all things. A lineage.
Sophia G.
Your novella contains generational and global themes throughout, while also narrowing in a very new and niche genre. How did you go about managing the scale of your story, and from a craft perspective, what were some obstacles you came across?
E.G. Condé
I think scale is always important for any story. You really have to know: where do you begin and end? Who are the characters? What is the plot? What is the story you want to follow? But the problem with scale in science fiction is that, historically, especially during the Golden Age of science fiction, you have mostly white men writing in this time where they have the audacity to write a character that represents Humanity and what is happening to this character that you may or may not be emotionally invested in. Character development was not as important in those days. It was more about the idea or concept. And so, science fiction in its earliest inception was not very grounded. It was actually zooming out as far as possible to make a gigantic statement about humanity in its future and current time.
And then there were a lot of amazing feminist interventions into science fiction that also asked the important question: Where the hell are the women? Why are the women not in this distant future that you’re imagining? Or why are they still performing the same roles and doing the same things that they were doing at the time that Isaac Asimov was writing, for example? I think they really brought science fiction back home, back to the Earth, back to specific characters and communities and really made the scale of it more manageable. That’s the kind of story that I wanted to tell. I wanted to tell the story from a limited point of view. You have a sense of what’s happening in the world beyond the Yucatan and the Caribbean, but not that much. You know that there is a conflict raging between China and the United States. You know that there are possibly other things going on, but there’s not that much. It’s leaving it open to mystery to some degree. People don’t always know what’s going on in the world. We can think of today; how informed is everyone about what’s happening in the world at any one time? Your point of view also matters in how you see the rest of the world. So that was important to me.
And also relativizing the apocalypse. In many science fiction stories, especially this post-apocalyptic strand of science fiction stories, the idea is that when white, western Christian-dom collapses, the entire world collapses. But as we’ve seen in many cases, many Indigenous peoples have gone through the cataclysm. They have survived this apocalypse; they’ve survived the I am Legend post-nuclear fallout. They lived through it, and they’re still here. It was important for me to leave it open that maybe in the US everyone is doing great during the time of Sordidez. Maybe in China it’s a paradise. I'm not interested in answering that question, but I am interested in leaving it open to say that in the context I’m talking about, these are the conditions. To not say that just because Puerto Rico is in ruins, the rest of the world is. Because I think it’s really important to decenter the West and also to tell a story that is accountable to a community and accountable to a place.