Blog Post #1

"I have no idea where, in Africa, my black ancestors came from because, when they reached the slave markets of New Orleans, records of such things were automatically destroyed. If they spoke their own languages, they were beaten or killed. The slave pens in which they were stored by lots were set up so that no two slaves from the same area were allowed to be together. Children were regularly sold away from their parents. And every effort conceivable was made to destroy all vestiges if African cultural remnants."


I chose this quote because I feel that it embodies exactly how tarnished most African American's histories and ancestries are. I kind of wanted to choose the Alain Locke quote at the beginning of Mark Dery's piece, but I felt that was kind of a cop out so I will use it in my response as it relevant:

"There is nothing more galvanizing than the sense of a cultural past."

In all of the stories we have read for this week (well, at least the two that I have read so far), have to do with the protagonist and the group that they belong to being persecuted in someway in terms of their background, past, and/or ancestry. In Nisi Shawl's Deep End, this is most prominent physically: the story takes place upon a prison ship, wherein all the prisoners are bodies who have been uploaded with a criminal's mind. While their memories and mind are intact, they have lost all physical sense of the self: they are literally thrown into someone else's body without choice, rhyme, or reason. Whether or not these people deserve to be imprisoned...they are being persecuted in some way, and it is somewhat unclear in the story itself.

This has nothing to do with anything, I just wanted a picture to break up the text and the name "Deep End" reminded me that I was an avid Weird Al fan when I was in fourth grade.

Darryl Smith's The Pretended relates to the passage more specifically: the story features a robot named Mnemosyne, who over the course of the story we find out to be (what I interpreted as, at least), as an android in the form of a black person. Dictionary.com defines android as "an automaton in the form of a human being," and there is a distinction between the two because a robot could really be in the form of anything.

Later in the story, we find out that all black people were wiped out (reasons unknown), and then androids were made in the form of black people because of this. You really can't take culture away from someone any further than wiping out the culture itself.

At first, it is not explicitly stated that the androids are black. This quote is about as close as we get to it being explicitly stated: "the naked, shuffling brown slush of bodies."However, prior to knowing this, we are provided with what one could argue to be foreshadowing, but it is at the very least analogous with some of the struggles the black community went through throughout the history of the United States.

Specifically, the description of the boxcar in which the robots were being transported reminded me descriptions of the African slave ships in the 1600-1700s:

"Inside it was hot and overcrowded. Robots of all ages were crammed in from floor to roof, practically; the glistening deep blackness of their polyderm making darkness itself seem to crowd the car all the more."

Admittedly, Mnemosyne and Diva Eve's Boxcar escapades sounded slightly less fun than that of the Boxcar Children.

Anyway, as the story goes on, we come to realize that the robots are not just analogous with the plight of black people throughout the history of the United States...in The Pretended, the robots literally ARE an extension of the plight of black history and their plight, as we see through Mnemosyne and Diva Eve's back and forth discussion as to whether or not white people viewed them or the actual, live black people that predated them, as human beings. And sadly, in the end, their culture is literally obliterated once more as the robots are put into an incinerator.


Questions:
1. I had a bit of trouble putting into words how The Pretended was reminiscent of the passage in the Dery article. In what other ways is what happens in The Pretended an extension of the plight of black
history?
2. How do you interpret the following quote in terms of race relations? The piece is too analogous for it to not mean something.
"Mnemosyne sometimes thought that humans could not have made robots any more than the color white had made the color black."