T.L. Huchu’s Speculative Fiction Corpus

Abstract T.L. Huchu’s Edinburgh Nights Trilogy, namely, The Library of the Dead (2021), Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments (2022), and The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle (2023), features Ropa, a teenager who has the ability to speak to the dead of post-apocalyptic Edinburgh. We know that it is post-apocalyptic Edinburgh because it is a world constructed after what the omniscient narrator calls ‘the event.’ We also know that Ropa is a descendant of Zimbabwean migrants because of her Shona name and Shona musical rituals which were handed down to her by her grandmother. However, the trilogy is also a deliberate attempt by Huchu to go beyond the lexicons of Afrodiasporic writing in English. Because of the inherent assumptions of diaspora, the study of Afrodiasporic Literature has inordinately focused on typical themes in the study of diasporic literature. These include, for instance, clash of cultures, culture shock, a search for identity, alienation, rootlessness, nostalgia, location, dislocation, relocation and so on; all of this based on the uprooting of characters from their homeland. T.L. Huchu ignores all these lexicons; after all, the world of his characters is post-apocalyptic, which portends the destruction of the old order at both the literal and symbolic levels. I want to posit that Huchu’s post-apocalyptic world allows Ropa to be a postdiasporic citizen. I use post-diaspora as a disarticulation of diaspora. Here, instead of viewing the term ‘diaspora’ as enriching our understanding of Afrodiasporic literature, I view it as limiting precisely because it is based on a reading of literary texts that ignores the more transnational, trans-ethnic and transcultural nature of human experiences captured in a variety of literary texts from the Afrodiasporic canon. Thus, my proposition of postdiaspora is made from a transcultural perspective. The most important questions to ask are: what happens to ‘diaspora’ when it gets so far behind that we no longer see ourselves as ‘diasporic’? How do we describe the experiences of characters like Ropa who do not regard their encounters in the context of a home left behind? In proposing the deployment of this term, I am not suggesting a rupture from diaspora. Disarticulation, therefore, does not mean the negation of diaspora but its complication or even enrichment.