SPECULATIVE SANKOFARRATION: Haunting Black Women in Contemporary Horror

Fiction
Author(s): Kinitra D. Brooks, Alexis McGee and Stephanie Schoellman
Source: Obsidian , 2016, Vol. 42, No. 1/2, Speculating Futures: Black Imagination & the
Arts (2016), pp. 237-248
Published by: Board of Trustees of Illinois State University

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44489515

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 SPECULATIVE SANKOFARRATION
Haunting Black Women in Contemporary Horror Fiction

Kinitra D. Brooks, Alexis McGee S Stephanie Schoellman

In a powerfully short blog post celebrating Black women in horror,

poet Linda Addison traces the origins of the very first appearance of
horror published by a Black woman.1 Addison encounters what she
considers the origin of Black women's horror in the folktales found in
Every Tongue Got to Confess (2001), a collection of stories painstak-
ingly recorded - in early twentieth-century Southern Black dialect - by
then-budding anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston: "Besides themes
of religion, family and other social concepts I also found two sections
named: 'Devil Tales' and 'Witch and Hant Tales' (Hant means 'haunt'
or 'ghost')"2 (Addison).3 Hurston's work highlights Black interest in
horror as a long-established reality in its communal literature - the rich
oral folk culture and tales passed down through familial generations. In
Cultural Hauntings (1998), Kathleen Brogan notes that ghosts or the
"belief in ancestor spirits" have a long history in African diasporic lore
and that these ghosts have a "communal nature," exploring "a people's
historical consciousness" (2-5). Hurston's records demonstrate that
horror discourse is an established tradition in the Black community;
yet there remains a dearth of critical recognition and literary scholar-
ship. Bonnie Barthold connects Black folklore and literature by insisting
that today's "teller of tales [is] no less than the contemporary novel-
ist" (3). Here, we focus on contemporary horror writers - particularly
Black women - and build upon the foundation of criticism previously
explored in the scholarship of Harry Benshoff, Kinitra D. Brooks, and,
most extensively, Robin R. Means-Coleman. Their work highlight-
ing Blackness and gender in horror media brings us to an important

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crossroads where we can begin assessing and articulating a means to
move forward in scaffolding a Black women's horror discourse.4
In the parlance of Mae G. Henderson's work in Black cultural stud-
ies, we are both supplementing the perceived "lack" of Black women's
horror discourse and simultaneously displacing its perceived "absence"
(64). This piece is meant to set "methodological direction" for a racially
gendered horror discourse (62). It is necessary to note that we are not
setting an oppositional discourse; rather, we find it necessary to call
upon the Ancestors, guided by their ghosts in shifting and redefining
boundaries by articulating a discourse that is centered on "sankofarra-
tion."

Sankofarration: "It is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot."
John Jennings coined the term "sankofarration" and defines it as a con-
flation of Sankofa5 and narration, a cosmological episteme that centers
the act of claiming the future as well as the past.6 Jennings specifically
expands upon a central notion of Afrofuturism - that the Western con-
struct of time as linear is a fallacy. In sankofarration, time is cyclical:
"[metaphysically, being was equivalent to duration: each moment em-
bodied a recurrence of a past moment, and implied was a potential
future recurrence" (Barthold 10). This piece builds upon Jennings' con-
cept by exploring its potential literariness within a critical horror frame-
work. We push sankofarration into the realm of the speculative, to fetch
a discourse of horror buried and unacknowledged in the folklore and
literature of the African diaspora. Our more expansive theory of specu-
lative sankofarration actively claims literary hauntings as interstices of
resistance and becomes a crucial framework in reading contemporary
horror literature written by Black women such as Phyllis Alesia Perry
in Stigmata (1998).
Speculative sankofarration clears a space for exploration of com-
posite traumas in the symbolic form of ghosts and hauntings. A Black
women's horror discourse grounded in sankofarration effectively liber-
ates Black horror from necessitating its need to derive mainly from the
trauma of enslavement, allowing the concept of horror to move toward
a more creative and artistic construction and, in the process, provid-
ing us with "an ordered reconstruction of history" that is not linear
in nature (Henderson 632). The privileging of sankofarration does not

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exclude enslavement as a topic for creative horror exploration; rather,
it simply rejects the idea of enslavement as the primogenitor of Black
horror. Thus horror becomes begotten and beholden to complex and
nuanced sources. Speculative sankofarration distills the natural horrors
of the Black experience (chattel slavery, Jim Crow, police brutality, etc.)
and pushes the discourse closer to what horror critic Noël Carroll con-
ceives of as "art-horror" but within a specifically Black Feminist frame-
work.7

Haints S Haunting: Conflating Linear Timelines

through Ghostly Embodiment
Ghostly embodiment expresses how heretofore intangible elements
such as trauma and its multiple, integral origins are tangibly rendered.
Still, within a Black women's horror discourse, ghosts and the act of
haunting are not innately negative. Haints occupy "animated states" of
being, denoting "a something-to-be-done[ness]" by the haunted (Car-
roll xvi). In Ghostly Matters (2008), Avery F. Gordon defines haunting
as the re-visitation and reclaiming of "something lost, or barely visible,
or seemingly not there," which "makes itself known or apparent to
us" (8). These entities become signifiers of oppressions and/or repres-
sions, of "abusive systems of power make themselves known and their
impact felt in everyday life" as well as other lost or forgotten compo-
nents of identity (xvi). Ghosts are the agents of haunting and the act
of being haunted becomes a psycho-sociopolitical state of awareness
in which the haunted is forced to consider the signifiers, or ghosts, and
the oppressions and/or repressions they represent (xvi). Gordon asserts:
"[following the ghosts is about making a contract that changes you
and refashions the social relations in which you are located" (22). Fur-
thermore, the relationship between the ghosts and their haunted is fluid,
forever in a state of flux; "the ghost registers and it incites" and has
"real presence and demands its due, your attention" (xvi, 207). Hence,
specters and their haunted are framed as active, transformative events
in which we suggest Black women horror writers render using sankofar-
ration in a sustained effort to capture their positionality and purpose.
The act of haunting provides a methodology of resistance and trans-
formation for Black women in horror. There exists a mutable tension
between Black women's bodies of literature and their horror discourse in

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which both are "worrying the lines" of each other's constructed bound-
aries. Such tensity demands that Black women's ontologies be com-
plexly considered in the construction of a racially gendered episteme.
As Joy DeGruy asserts, the ability to utilize such fluidity throughout
the horror discourse stems from the preservations of past and present
hauntings continually coming in contact with Black women's presence.
Black women's texts possess the potential to simultaneously act as both
the ghost and the haunted since they proleptically symbolize physical,
emotional, and psychological traumas across space and time (DeGruy
25). Gordon concurs, purporting:
a ghost registers the actual 'degraded present' in which we are inex-
tricably and historically entangled and the longing for the arrival of
a future, entangled certainly, but ripe in the plenitude of nonsacrifi-
cial freedoms and exuberant unforeseen pleasures. (207)

The act of haunting conflates and confuses linear time, disrupting and
opening a space for concurrent time existence with the ghosts acting
as "agents of cultural memory and cultural renewal" (Borgan 6, 12).
Thereby, the ghosts of speculative sankofarration enact what Brogan
terms "cultural hauntings," in which Black "histories [...] are recu-
perated and revised" (2). Speculative sankofarration's articulation of a
Black women's horror discourse allows for a simultaneity in the roles
ghosts and the haunted ultimately reflect in terms of parallel oppres-
sions - race, gender, class, and sexuality - that haunt Black women's
own identities.

Natural Horror vs. Art-Horror: Rupturing S Resisting Dichotomies

of Horror Discourse

Following in this same line of reasoning, Carroll's philosophies of main-

stream horror prove insufficient in extrapolating how Black women's
horror discourse utilizes haunting as resistance. Carroll and many of
his subsequent philosophical acolytes limit their rhetorics of horror to
Eurocentric dichotomies, segregating natural horror from art-horror. In
The Philosophy of Horror: Or ; Paradoxes of the Heart (1990), Carroll
vaguely defines natural horror as horrific, "natural" occurrences, such
as an ecological disaster, the Holocaust, or the threat of nuclear war
(12). Art-horror, on the other hand, is "cross-art, cross-media genre,"

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such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818)8 and Stephen King's The
Shining (1977), choreographed in such a way as to produce a defini-
tive effect on the reader or viewer - though Carroll consistently fails to
specify the finer details of this effect (13-4). The distinction between
natural horror and art-horror cleaves to the reader's subjective emo-
tional response, and Carroll insists the reader simply knows the differ-
ence between the two types of horror because the distinction resides
in the different experiences of horror, whether natural (reality based)
or art-horror (fabricated for effect). How then should Toni Morrison's
Beloved (1987) be categorized as it fuses the raw, confining, literal hor-
ror of natural horror (chattel slavery) with the transcendent terror of
art-horror in the presentation of the characters and the characters' re-
sponse to the natural horror? Hence, speculative sankofarration inte-
grates both natural horror and art-horror in Black women's writing in
a manner privileging the spectrum of these elements at work, ultimately
syncretizing the aesthetics of a racially, gendered horror discourse.
Carroll asserts that the "attitude of characters in the story [liken] to
the monsters they encounter" creates art-horror's affect (16). However,
Black women horror writers deploy ghosts with a different affectation.
Their creative texts purposely collapse natural horror and art-horror
in a manner complicating responses beyond mere titillation toward
possessions of polemic agency (17). Black women horror writers' pre-
carity is wrought with intersectional trauma, thus their construal of
being through horror discourse eschews linearity and one-dimension-
ality.9 The writers demonstrate the myriad of possibilities for interpret-
ing spectral entities and trauma, forging new epistemologies to resist
and disrupt the hegemony. Black women horror writers' incarnation
of speculative sankofarration complicate the representations of trauma
and resist easy solutions in potentiality of healing through horror. The
presence of haints emphasizes a methodology of resistance that defines
speculative sankofarration; for it is an intransigence that remains sus-
tained, dynamic, multi-dimensional, and typified in Perry's Stigmata .

Haunted Black Women: Sankofarration in Stigmata

Black women have been writing horror since the latter half of the twen-
tieth century. Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), Octavia Butler's Wild
Seed (1980), and Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories (1991) remain

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primary texts for the development of Black women's horror discourse.
Yet this piece is also about expanding notions of Black women's hor-
ror - highlighting lesser-known writers to inform the creation genera-
tions of horror literature in Black women's texts. Phyllis Alesia Perry's
Stigmata is the story of three generations of Black women and their
journey to rescue a fourth, lost generation through speculative sanko-
farration. The novel manifests repeated acts of time collapse as well
as a collapsing and fluctuation of identities as the three women - Liz-
zie DuBose; her grandmother, Grace; and her great-great-grandmother,
Ayo - occupy the roles of both the ghostly ancestor and the haunted.
The novel is composed of two complexly interwoven storylines: the first
begins in the summer of 1994 and follows Lizzie as she leaves the men-
tal hospital and reintegrates with her family; the second storyline begins
in the spring of 1974 and portrays Lizzie's initial contacts with Ayo and
Grace in which she begins to manifest stigmata, profusely bleeding from
her wrists, ankles, and back. Finally, Perry specifically interweaves nat-
ural horror and art-horror in a marked act of resisting the delineations
of the mainstream horror discourse to reflect the simultaneity of Black
women's identities.

Sankofarration, or the collapsing of the linearity of time, is a cen-

tral theme of the novel. Lizzie becomes possessed by her grandmother,
Grace, as well as her great-great-grandmother, Ayo, and begins to ex-
perience moments from their previous lives. Lizzie introduces herself
to the reader after over a decade in a mental asylum with the procla-
mation: "I come from a long line of forever people" (Perry 7). Lizzie
is initiated into her maternal line at fourteen when she receives a trunk

of artifacts from her grandmother Grace, who also possessed her as a

young woman, and a diary written by Lizzie's great-grandmother, Joy -
who is Grace's mother and Ayo's daughter. The first night Lizzie sleeps
under the quilt she dreams she is in Africa and being admonished by an
older Black woman - presumably Ayo's mother - about the long and
necessary journey ahead: "We have a long way. We must start" (24).
That morning she awakens with dust at her feet marking her first jour-
ney into the past, initiated by the quilt (25). Lizzie ultimately enters a
cosmological space in which the past, present, and future exist simul-
taneously. Her aunt, suspicious of Lizzie's growing difference, advises:

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"The past - that's what you call it - is a circle. If you walk long enough,
you catch up with yourself" (117). The literary act of sankofarration
highlights Lizzie possessions: "The power of time folded back onto
itself" but this awareness only occurs with the simultaneous collapse
of identities as her ontological status grows from an individual teen
to what horror critic Kinitra D. Brooks refers to as a "communal T"
( " Maternal Inheritances "21).
Literary sankofarration's collapse of time is only possible through
the distortions of identity through Lizzie's possession by Ayo and Grace.
Ayo's line begins with her kidnapping and enslavement in the antebel-
lum American South, and she is adamant that her story be told and
passed down through her maternal line. Though illiterate, Ayo retains
her power to act as a revised obange spirit,10 choosing to haunt and
eventually possess the oldest daughter of every other generation. Yet
by possessing Grace, in privileging the telling of her story over the lives
of her other descendants, Ayo forces Grace to abandon her family and
most especially her toddler daughter Sarah, who grows up to have a
daughter of her own, Lizzie. Ultimately, the possession of Lizzie is a
rescue mission, to bring the lost Sarah back into the maternal fold and
to give Grace and Sarah an opportunity to reconnect and enhance their
mother/daughter bond beyond the limits of time and death.
Lizzie's possession comes as a result of a specific manifestation of
speculative sankofarration for each member of the maternal line em-
bodying both the ghost and the haunted. Ayo, the primordial ancestor
spirit of the maternal line, is haunted by her kidnapping, enslavement,
and the mental, physical, and emotional trauma she undergoes - shack-
led and transported across the Atlantic Ocean and horribly lashed
across her back by her mistress whose only reaction to the violence
she imparts is to change her blood-soaked pink ensemble to a blue one
and continue about her social outing. Here, Perry manifests another
aspect of speculative sankofarration with the character construction
of Ayo, the blending of natural horror - her forced enslavement - with
art-horror in which her status as a ghostly ancestor and her haunting of
her chosen female descendants are used as a literary device act racially
gendering the horror genre. Ayo's trauma also haunts Grace and Lizzie:
"Ayo is there, reminding us of who we are" (57). Ayo possesses Grace,

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a married mother of three in the early twentieth century, forcing her
to experience the physical effects of her grandmother's haunting, stig-
mata, in secret. Grace's precarity as a possessed family woman during
a time that had no value for Black women undergoing what was then
read as a mental breakdown - bleeding profusely from her wrists and
ankles due to the slave shackles and experiencing Ayo's pain under the
lash - in a secret hideaway on her family's land. It is this final incident
that convinces the haunted Grace she must leave her family for Detroit
to finish the quilt of Ayo's story and, most importantly, to protect her
family from the agony having to lock her away in a mental asylum in
the Jim Crow South.
Concurrently, Grace also haunts, first her granddaughter, Lizzie, by
possessing her along with Ayo - forming a revised trinity in which three
women are living in one body. Lizzie speaks of her grandmother thusly:
"Grace always speaks loudly, her memories hissing insistently inside my
head" (87). Grace also haunts her own daughter Sarah through Lizzie,
as Lizzie is bequeathed the trunk of Grace's possessions. Sarah becomes
frustrated as she recognizes that she has again been denied access to her
mother as her daughter, Lizzie, is chosen to receive Grace's quilt: "Sarah
had cried. And she had looked at this thing [the quilt] and cursed her
own mother and put it as far away from her as possible" (46). Again
we see Perry worrying the lines between natural horror - Grace's men-
tal disintegration and harrowing choice to leave her husband and chil-
dren - with art-horror - Grace's ghostly ability to return through her
granddaughter, Lizzie, and incorporate her abandoned daughter, Sarah,
back into the family fold, for "every woman needs her mother" (153).
Likewise, the characterization of Sarah's natural horror - the trauma
from maternal abandonment as well as bearing witness to the men-
tal disintegration of her daughter - allows her the art-horror device of
haunting her very own mother even though Grace herself is an appari-
tion. Her memory of the little toddler girl at her feet as she packs her
suitcase to run away pushes Grace's need to return. Her sister, Eva,
recognizes the necessity as she acknowledges the reality that Lizzie is
also Grace: "when something needs doing, you don't let it go. Never
have. That's why you're here now. Because you left something unfin-
ished" (49). Sarah is also haunted by her own daughter Lizzie as she

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is unable to fully come to terms with her mental crisis and subsequent
hospitalization. Sarah is unable to visit her daughter in the facility for
the longest time. Lizzie's father, Dr. DuBose, constantly apologizes for
her mother's absence on the days he visits her in the facility.
In the end, Lizzie pays the ultimate price of speculative sankofar-
ration. Her embodiment as the haunted costs her a marked time col-
lapse - she spends thirteen years in a mental asylum stuck in a cycle
of reliving the past as her grandmother and great-great-grandmother:
"I have the eerie feeling that I'm living life in re verse... Every bend in
the road seems ancient... Old and young. Old and young at the same
time" (27, 44-45). It is only in the final few months at the facility that
she regains the ability to act in the present and move toward reclaiming
her future: "I wouldn't change anything. I feel like I had to go through
it all to be safe... from fear" (154). She is also a haunted entity, rec-
ognizing the vulnerable position in which this places her: "Everybody
else would have called her haunted or something" (117). Lizzie is in
the unique position of being doubly-plagued by her familial ghosts and
forced to relive the natural horror-based trauma that haunts both ances-
tors through possession, a manifestation that is purely art-horror. She
experiences Ayo's journey through the Middle Passage as Ayo: "Blood
drowns everything. Blood and water and brown bodies falling down
and never landing" (145). All the while, she is also experiencing Grace:
" Your time here just like it was for me that night... I was in bed , unable
to sleep and in pain, trying not to scream out... and then I was... on the
ship. Couldn't get off. Water everywhere. Lord I wanted to jump " (145,
emphasis original). Though Lizzie's journey is the most harrowing, she
is also the character experiencing the closest manifestation of peace
by accepting who she is: "And Bessie [Ayo] became Grace, and Grace
became me. Me, Lizzie" (47). Lizzie portrays the greatest potential in
breaking the cycle of ghostly haints and being haunted that plagues the
women in her family: "I am free, I remember. These things can't hurt me
anymore... My memories live somewhere spacious now" (46).

The Timely Need for Black Women's Horror Discourse

It is the study, theorization, and recognition of Black women's horror
that creates a vital literary voice continuing the Black Feminist proj-
ect of acknowledging Black women's complex humanity. Though brief,

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this piece has advanced the development of a racially gendered horror
discourse, speculative sankofarration, a Black women's philosophical
schema highlighting and analyzing horror texts through the disruptive
act of haunting to disturb and expand academia's Black Feminist liter-
ary canon, to unsettle and amplify staid concepts of mainstream horror
discourse and the dichotomies traditionally expounded therein and, fi-
nally, to displace and extend limits of Black women's literature. As the
horror genre reveals itself as a discourse of cultural anxieties, we move
forward by presenting the question: What residual cultural anxieties
are Black women horror writers - in a marked act of haunting - reveal-
ing in mainstream horror and how are they accomplishing this through
speculative sankofarration?
Black women's literal bodies and Black women's figurative bodies
of literature haunt the literary imagination, rupturing and resisting Eu-
rocentric tropes and topoi in the coalescing of a horror discourse. We
move to push conversations of haunting as resistance forward in Black
speculative women's literature. Ultimately, we contend that there re-
mains critical literary potential in applying horror frameworks to Black
women's speculative literature. Therefore, while trauma and terror in
realistic fiction have been extensively covered, we demand progress in
building a multidimensional Black women's horror discourse ground-
ed in the complex construct of the haunt. We end this essay with a
call to expand Black women's horror discourse, specifically how Black
women writers are "bristling" the smoothed down tropes and themes
or "standing on end" the accepted rhetorical and literary practices of
mainstream horror.11

ENDNOTES

1. Zora Neale Hurston is the first Black woman to publish horror. Charles
Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman (1899) is the earliest known published
work of Black horror beyond slave narratives.

2. Hant, haint, and ghost will be used interchangeably in this essay.

3. See Linda Addison's blog entry, "Genesis - The First Black Horror
Writers/Storytellers," on Horror addicts, net (blog), February 10 2016.

4. See Harry Benshoff's "Blaxploitation Horror Films: Generic

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 Reappropriation or Reinscription" (2000), Kinitra D. Brooks's "The Im-
portance of Neglected Intersections: Race and Gender in Contemporary
Zombie Texts and Theories" (2014), and Robin R. Means Coleman's
Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Pres-
ent (2011).
5. The concept of "Sankofa" derives from King Adinkera of the Akan
people of West Africa. "Sankofa" is expressed in the Akan language
as "se wo were fi na wosan kofa a yenki." Literally translated, this means
"it is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot." http://www.uis.
edU/africanamericanstudies/students/sankofa/

6. Sankofarration is a working theory constructed by John Jennings of

the University of Buffalo discussed at the Planet Deep South Conference
at Jackson State University (Jackson, Mississippi) on 24 February 2016.

7. Carroll distinguishes between art-horror and natural horrors, saying

that art-horror is a "relevant sort of horror found in fine art [...] cross-art,
cross-media genre" whereas natural horror is the colloquial term used to
express being horrified over an event, such as ecological disasters (12).

8. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein ; Or ; The Modern Pro-

metheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley . ProjectGutenberg.org, 2016.
Html, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/41445

9. Trauma being "an injury [physical, emotional, psychological, and/or

spiritual] caused by an outside, usually violent, force, event or experi-
ence" (DeGruy 13).
10. An ancestral spirit.

11. Carroll describes the word horror as meaning to "bristle" or "to

stand on end" (24).

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