Things I Imagined

Octavia Butler, Ravyn Lenae, and Black imagination

Saw things I imagined.

I saw things I imagined.

Solange’s 2019 album, When I Get Home, opens with the singer repeating one line for nearly two minutes: 

I saw things I imagined.

A prayer answered and a dream manifested, Solange imagined everything around her into existence. 

Still from Solange’s music video Things I Imagined / Down With the Clique

But what does it mean to start an album about home with a meditation on imagination? When displacement is almost inextricable from your being (and if you are Black, it is), imagination affords you a certain kind of power. It allows you to conjure up the worlds from where you may have originated and enables you to fantasize about futures to come. To start from, and within imagination, is to begin from a point of possibility: if you are able to see a new world in your mind’s eye, who’s to say you cannot realize it?

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Last Wednesday, I won tickets to see Ravyn Lenae perform at an intimate show in the city. In a small club tucked away in a hotel in Midtown, two of my best friends and I had a magical night. The venue was perfectly suited to Lenae’s ethereal vocals, physically transporting us to the sonic worlds created on her debut album Hypnos.

Ravyn Lenae performing in NYC | Image taken by me!

Hypnos has a futuristic, and occasionally psychedelic sound, that is amplified by some of its otherworldly content. Lenae takes listeners on a journey through space and time to other worlds and galaxies. The singer’s grandmother and younger sister both make appearances on the album to describe planets they would create, if only they had the power. At the end of “Inside Out” (a personal favorite of mine), Grandma Lenae says:

If I could create my own world or planet, I would call it ‘Harmony’

My world would look like a place where people take good care of creation

And look out for the wellbeing of others perfectly

Their energy will derive from God's love in their hearts

Our God's love working in their hearts

On “Higher”, Lenae’s sister creates a world that is “half-sun and half-moon” but still “rotates like the Earth.” At a time when many artists in RnB and hip-hop are embracing the integration of skits and interludes into their projects (see Wasteland by Brent Faiyaz or Earth Gang’s Ghetto Gods), the sparsity of these features on Hypnos stands out. To dedicate the only spaces on the album where there isn’t singing to Black women developing their own worlds emphasizes the centrality of imagination to Hypnos. Listening to Lenae’s grandmother and sister fashion their own planets always makes me wonder how different the world would look if the fantasies of Black women were our reality. What would it mean to have the world in our hands?

Ravyn Lenae joins her grandmother and sister in the practice of imagination and world-building on “Deep in the World”, where she sings about an alternate universe in which she is a bionic girl with the ability to breathe underwater. 

I am a firm believer that albums should never be played on shuffle during a first listen (or the second or third or fourth listen honestly) and in light of this I think it’s significant that “Deep in the World” occurs right after “Where I’m From”. At the show, Lenae dedicated “Where I’m From” to all of the Black fans in the crowd. The song’s chorus makes it clear why:

Thinking of where I'm from deep in the night

Dreaming of where I'm from all my life

Watching who I've become, who's my tribe?

The song is about a longing for a home that’s unknown but deeply felt in one’s bones, a yearning for a sense of belonging that’s been taken from you. To transition from singing about an erased, obscured past to a future where a Black woman has extraordinary abilities encapsulates the magic and power of Black imagination: to imagine has so often been a way for Black people to conceptualize visions of liberation. While the world we inhabit looks one way, birthrights denied and history hidden, imagination reminds us that alternate ways of being, of living, may be possible, if only we lean into our wildest dreams. 

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Ravyn Lenae’s performance could not have been timelier. Earlier that day I had finished Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, my second book of hers this year. In January I bought a copy of Butler’s Bloodchild, a collection of short stories, to keep me company on my vacation. Octavia Butler was the first Black woman science-fiction writer to gain prominence on an international scale. Her works feature everything from vampires to time travel to alien invasions and nearly always have a woman protagonist of color. 

Parable of the Sower was different from the stories in Bloodchild in that it didn’t feature aliens or magic or parapsychological abilities such as telekinesis. It is the story of a United States not unlike our own, ravaged by climate change, hunger, drug abuse, and violence (the book is eerily prescient, Octavia Butler knew where we were headed). The protagonist, Lauren Olamina, is a teenager who invents (although she would prefer the term ‘discovers’) a religion called Earthseed to guide her through this post-apocalyptic world. Parable of the Sower is ultimately the coming-of-age tale of a young girl forced to face impossible circumstances and the religion she imagines in order to save herself and her friends.

Octavia Butler’s notes on Parable of the Sower | ca. 1989. Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. © Estate of Octavia E. Butler

There are two things to know about Earthseed: first, the religion’s god is not a person or deity but the idea of Change and second, the ultimate Destiny of Earthseed is for humans to end up in space. The world that Olamina lives in is all but destroyed and in her mind, space offers the only chance of survival and relief. Getting to space however, is seemingly unachievable. 

“Right now, it’s [going to space] also impossible. The world is in horrible shape…No one is expanding the kind of exploration that doesn’t earn an immediate profit, or at least promise big future profits…I don’t know how it will happen or when it will happen. There’s so much to do before it can even begin. I guess that’s to be expected. There’s always a lot to do before you get to go to heaven.” 

Despite the impossibility of this goal, Olamina stands firm in the idea that “taking root among the stars” is Earthseed’s ultimate destiny. Where her imagination leads her, she resolutely follows. The limitations of reality do not discourage Olamina’s vision of the future because to kill her dream is to kill herself. The alternatives to space are all bleak: starvation, slavery, prostitution, and inevitably death. Saidiya Hartman, writer and academic wrote in her book Lose Your Mother:

“An imagined place might afford you a vision of freedom, an imagined place might provide an alternative to your defeat, an imagined place might save your life."

 In Parable of the Sower, Olamina’s imagination quite literally keeps her and (most of) her friends alive to see another day and perhaps make it to another world. 

Photograph of Octavia Butler | ca. 2001. Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. © Estate of Octavia E. Butler

I see much of Butler in Lauren Olamina’s character. Both used their imagination to escape the restraints reality attempted to put on them, their lives, and their possible futures. In a 1996 interview featured at the end of my edition of Parable of the Sower, Butler says she started writing science fiction and fantasy because she wanted to get away from the real world:

“I was never interested in fantasizing about the world I was stuck in. In fact, I fantasized to get away from that drab, limited world. I was a little ‘colored’ girl in that era of conformity and segregation, the 1950s, and no matter how much I dreamed about becoming a writer, I couldn’t help seeing that my real future looked bleak…I fantasized living impossible, but interesting lives–magical lives…” 

For Butler, and Olamina, imagination was not a luxury but a necessity. Black people, and Black women in particular, have been imagining and fantasizing and speculating about alternate futures and pasts for forever. We have to. In a world where your options are few and grim, what choice do you have?

The power of imagination is not lost on the powers that be. A key mechanism of all the oppressive systems we live under, from capitalism to imperialism to patriarchy, is to constrain our ability to think beyond them. The minute we begin to imagine any world other than this one, any ways of being other than those we have been forced into, there is pushback. You can see it in everything, from the backlash to Halle Bailey’s casting as the Little Mermaid to criticisms that prison and police abolition are ‘not feasible’. Our reality is the product of the white imagination. And the white imagination is boring and limited because it seeks to maintain claims of superiority; it does not and cannot think beyond sustaining the status quo. 

Black imagination has been on my mind for the past few years now, mostly because of all the turmoil the world’s been going through. There’s a new piece of bad news everyday and it becomes very easy to give in to despair. But thinking about imagination, listening to musicians like Ravyn Lenae and Solange, and reading works by writers like Octavia Butler reminds me that Black women have been imagining whole other universes for decades. We have always fought to realize our fantasies. 

So maybe one day I will be able to sing along with Solange in praise and triumph:

I saw things I imagined

Maybe one day imagined Black futures can be realities. And maybe that day will come sooner than we think.

Thanks for reading and talk soon,

-Yeaye

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Marginalia

1. If you want to hear Ravyn Lenae talk more about Hypnos, she released a video giving more context and background on her inspiration and the album-making process

2. Saidiya Hartman is a brilliant scholar and writer and if you are at all interested in imagination/archival work/feminist histories I suggest reading this New Yorker article about her and her practice of “critical fabulation” as a start

3. Fun fact about Octavia Butler: she wrote copious notes and affirmations (she’s just like me fr). The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens has them in their possession and some online images are available to look at. See one of my favorites below:

   

   Octavia Butler notes on writing | ca. 1988. Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. © Estate of Octavia E. Butler