As well as being a captivating read, TadeThompson’s 2016 science fiction novel Rosewater
has a awful lot to offer scholars interested in the zombie narrative and
horror studies, as well as philosophers interested in ethics and what it means
to be human.
Set in the “near future,” Thompson’s Rosewater follows the career of a
psychic named Kaaro who has been recruited by “Section 45,” a secretive branch
of the Nigerian government whose purpose is to gather information on an alien
“entity” known as “Wormwood” that has literally invaded the planet. The
narration begins years after the alien had in 2012 crash landed upon Hyde Park
in London before burrowing into the depths of the planet where it would, like a
cancer, metastasize throughout the planet’s mantle before sprouting, plantlike,
in Nigeria—not far from the nation’s most populous city Lagos. This alien
cancer metastases aboveground, as well. “It turned out this sentient being had
seeded the entire biosphere with new macro- and microorganisms as a result,
although it took decades for us humans to find out” (75). The alien forms an
impenetrable biodome, around which grows the titular city of Rosewater. Within
the dome are a host of alien species—Wormwood is not a single creature, but an
entire biosystem of flora and fauna—and humans who have been caught within this
strange alien colony.
If this is an extraterrestrial invasion
narrative, the invaders seem rather benign and quite in contrast to the
standard alien conquest narrative established by H.G. Welles’ War of the Worlds. The dome built by
Thompson’s aliens provide Rosewater with an abundant supply of electrical power
and a miraculous “healing” of the sick and injured who flock to the site for an
annual-but-brief opening of a door into the alien territory. Like the faithful
in attendance at Christian evangelical tent healings, the crowds that encircle
the Wormwood dome are rapt with an awe that is best described as religious,
although the dome is, “as always, indifferent to their reverence or sacrilege”
(12).
It is the gradual unraveling of the
perception of the outside invader as a beneficent force that gives Thompson’s
novel much of its narrative thrill, even as the ongoing rendering of Kaaro and
his journey from street thug to high-performing secret agent embodies the book
with a ceaselessly enjoyable narrative direction. Much of the pleasure is
available thanks to Thompson’s sensitive caricature of Kaaro as a selfish and
inconsiderate youth who slowly grows into a generous and compassionate adult.
Thompson gradually reveals Kaaro’s weaknesses as his strengths, highlighting
his protagonist’s tumble into a curmudgeonly cynicism that is halted by the
arrival in his life of the charming Aminat, who would become his first
encounter with the commitment of loving someone else. Through his love of
Aminat, Kaaro would discover the heroic quality of self-sacrifice. “Aminat is a
change in the equation an imbalance” (108).
Thompson also energizes the narrative flow
by shifting between “then” and “now” as various (mis)adventures and encounters
shape Kaaro’s life story and drive him to shed his selfish hedonism and take on
the mantle of compassionate heroism.
Kaaro is a uniquely powerful “sensitive,”
or psychic. His special ability—in addition to mind-reading, psychic control,
and occasional glimpses of the future—is as a “finder” who can locate lost
objects. “I begin to find things for people,” Kaaro says. “It is an obsession,
compulsively done, with a strange, erotic need for completion. I find car keys,
memories, heirloom brooches, squirreled-away money, PINs, mobile phones,
photographs of loved ones, mathematical formulae, and spouses” (49).
But this
street-smart Saint Anthony uses his abilities to not only find lost things, but
to uncover hidden treasures as well as safe avenues of entry—and escape. “I do
not plan to become a thief. It just happens naturally” (49). The teenaged Kaaro
enjoys his ability to steal hidden treasures from any home because “I can buy
things without having to ask or justify to my parents.” Kaaro uses his
ill-gotten money “to purchase junk food, premium pornography, alcohol, lap
dances, drugs, alcohol, clothes, shoes, alcohol and other dissipations.” The
ability to steal is “sweet and fulfilling,” Kaaro notes. “Until you get caught”
(50).
Families in the small Lagosian suburb
around the teenaged Kaaro’s house wonder how the thief has been plundering
their carefully concealed hiding places stuffed with jewels and cash. They eventually discover Kaaro, and attempt to
bring upon him the mob’s justice in the smoking shape of the burning auto tire
necklace. “No thief ever believes this is their destiny until there is a tyre
around their neck and the petrol is wetting their hair, fumes choking their
ability to cry out for mercy” (51). But even from this Kaaro can find the way
out. His “sort-of-girlfriend” Fadeke is less fortunate. Wrongly assumed by the
mob to be in partnership with Kaaro’s criminal acts, the vigilante mob turns on
her as an outlet for their fury. Scholars interested in a psychoanalytical or
even ethical reading of Kaaro have a source of study in this incident, as
Fadeke’s death and Kaaro’s broken relationship with his family will become a
source of emotional trauma and actual danger for the middle-aged psychic.
His
regrets become both a weapon his enemies can use against him and a source of
psychological self-healing. In an encounter awash with a sense of karmic
justice, Kaaro becomes aware for the first time how his early life as a thief
and hustler had ruined, even killed, a number of his victims. It will be his
first real experience of guilt (228).
What Kaaro the youthful street hustler
doesn’t expect is to be recognized as a “finder” and recruited by the
government’s “S45” program, which trains him in how to use his psychic
abilities for espionage, interrogation, and state security.
As noted above, this novel has a good deal
to offer scholars eager to dive into the intricacies woven together by
Thompson’s craft as an artist. Scholars of the Zombie Narrative may find
interest in the phenomenon of the reanimates that wander the streets of
Rosewater following the annual opening of the alien biodome’s portal. Not only
is healing brought to the chronically ill and wounded who gather around the
portal—though held back from entering the alien zone by soldiers who are more
than willing to shoot to kill—but the dead are literally brought back to life. “Most
of the graves around the camp are shallow,” and after the opening they empty
themselves and send forth reanimated corpses. “Healed, hearts beting, eyes
open, bodies warm, but no … life. No memories, no soul, no recognition of what
they used to be” (87).
These alien-revived zombies roam the
streets of Rosewater, even finding their way into distant cities. Most are
harmless, but some reanimate with a chip on their shoulders. “When the dome
brings a body back to life, sometimes it simply drools. And sometimes … it
wakes up angry.” Filled with a rage that they then direct to everyone around
them, these reanimates violently attack any and all who fall within their
sight. “Scientists haven’t worked out what makes them go one way or the other,”
Kaaro says. “I think it might have to do with temperament, some people being
more aggressive than others. Or maybe … how they die” (33). The police and
military are busy for weeks attempting to hunt down and “kill again” these reanimates,
though many of the mindless undead elude capture and roam the back alleys of
Rosewater for months after the opening.
It is the alien entity’s ability to “heal”
and raise the dead that provides a source of thought for Zombie Narrative
scholars. This healing comes about through the invasion and replacement of
damaged human tissue with alien bioforms that replicate the human biology at
the cellular level. This alien “invasion” is taking place at the cellular
level, much like the various biological agents that zombify and drive the
undead (or the living “infected”) in popular zombie fictions and films such as
Mira Grant’s Feed, Mike Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts, or Robert
Kirkman’s The Walking Dead. Literary
scholars and philosophers alike will be inspired by the idea of cellular
invasion and the location of subjectivity. At what point does a re-constructed
individual tip from being human and becoming alien? What does the individual’s
willingness to partake of this cellular transformation suggest about self-consciousness?
Thompson generously nourishes Rosewater with an abundance of ideas and
arguments that deserve academic contemplation and comparison. For example, Thompson
adopts George Romero’s willingness to set aside the abject aspect of the zombie
and allow a sympathetic glimpse of the reanimated corpses that are set upon to
satisfy the violent pleasures of street gangs and professional practice experiences
of aspiring boxers.
Through the narrative voice of Kaaro, the
author expresses a stronger astonishment or even contempt for the body horror
of those who “experiment” with the healing powers of the biodome by
“transforming” their own bodies. These
are “the reconstructed.” They differ from “the deformed,” those who have
attended the opening seeking healing but have been “incorrectly” stitched
together. One such example is a man with a “gigantic” goiter who had gone to
the opening expecting it to shrink, but the healing alien forces incorrectly
enlarge his goiter, accidentally striving for “bigger and better.”
“The healed are miraculous, the deformed a
tragedy and the reanimates a horror, but the reconstructed are perhaps comedy
or … whatever” (123). The reconstructed are those who seek to modify their
normal human bodies, such as the man who “has latched hawk wings to cuts in his
back,” which were then healed with muscle and blood vessels enough to allow the
wings to function with life. “The wings are unimpressive but the man seems
elated” (124). Many attempts at reconstruction end up in bizarre, even
nightmarish forms. “There are men and women with multiple and displaced
orifices, like a girl with two mouths, one above the other” who “tried to
remodel her lips” (124). Such are the reconstructed who carry their bodies as evidence
of “the grotesque changes they have brought upon themselves” (124).
Thompson flirts with this form of body
horror enough to allow comparison with author Jeremy Robert Johnson who first displayed
a fascination with the “altered” body horror in his debut novel Extinction Journals (2006) and continued
to caress self-transformation as body horror in various disturbing ways
throughout his dozen years of publication—most especially in his short stories
“When Susurrus Stirs” and “The League of Zeroes” as well as within his 201
novel In the River. (It should be
noted that Tade Thompson had garnered attention for his ability to write body
horror with his 2017 novel The Murders of
Molly Southbourne—though I’ve not yet read that text and will save it for a
future review.)
Thompson’s novel Rosewater also provides a deep and dark pool within which scholars
of Postcolonial Studies can dip their toes. The fertile source of this approach
comes not only from the alien invasion narrative, but from the author’s
placement of the plot in Nigeria. References abound to Nigeria’s experience as
a former colonized nation and the nation’s contemporary infection by alien
ideas such as rabid homophobia inspired by a Christian faith brought in by the
former British colonial powers. Thompson also exposes structural remnants of
imperial rule, from the potential despotism of the chief executive to the
inequalities advanced by the upper echelons of a society shaped by class
differences—including the violence of the elites as paralleled at the local
level by the criminal class. Indeed, as
a nation that can still feel the former chains of colonization; the citizens of
Nigeria are quick to become “unimpressed” by the idea of Wormwood as an
invading power. “We’ve seen colonizers before, and they are similar, whether
intercontinental or interplanetary” (225).
As a psychic, Kaaro is especially attuned
to the lingering ghosts of Nigeria’s history as he navigates the “detritus of
the nation’s communal consciousness.” He can almost feel history: “The blood and sweat of slaves in a stew of their own
anguish … the guilt of slavers, the prolonged pain of colonization, the riots,
the CIA interference, the civil war, the genocide of the Igbos, the tribal
pogroms, the terrorism, the killing of innocents, the bloody coups, the rampant
avarice, the oil, the dark blood of the country, the rapes, the exodus of the
educated class …” (225).
Scholars interested in Game Theory, Virtual
Reality, Hypnosis, and Dream Vision Narratives will also find in Rosewater a
treasure of inspiring ideas worth pursuing. This comes through the novel’s absorbing
exposure of Kaaro’s abilities as a “sensitive” and the connection between this
psychic powers and the alien entity. Wormwood has infected the entirety of the
earth’s atmosphere with “alien fungilike filments and neurotransmitters” that
enmesh the earth and create a single communications platform—a spiderweb that
sends signals back and forth around the world. “It is everywhere” and forms
“multiple links with the natural fungi on human skin,” showing a special
affinity for nerve endings that provide access to the human body’s central
nervous system. “Everybody linked to this network of xenoforms, this
xenosphere, is uploading information contantly, passively, without knowing”
(76). Those with special abilities—“adepts” such as Kaaro—are able to access
this “worldmind” (76).
The xenosphere, that “worldmind” or neural
net, is similar to the contemporary realm of social media, where critical
authority is too-often abandoned for a zombielike state of unquestioning
acceptance. It is also a space of tremendous potential, “a psycho-field, a
thoughtspace, essentially unstable” It is a space where “every notion can
potentially become reality” (224). Is this similar to the “alternative facts”
and conspiracy theories that find nourishing compost in our modern age of
social media domination?
As Kaaro enters into the depths of this
constructed space, going beyond his normal zone of comfort and protection, he
witnesses the minds of “hundreds, thousands of people suspended unmoving … eyes
rolling here and there or not at all.” This “school of human souls” is composed
of “everybody who carelessly thinks or does not think.” They exist in the realm
of the xenosphere “in the unprotected state, passive, oscitant, uncritical,
naïve” (224).
One of Kaaro’s roles as a secret agent is
the interrogation of “criminal” suspects, a task he approaches much like a
modern-day Internet thieves and hackers engage in “phishing” methods to attain
private data. Using spoken trigger
words, Kaaro remains open to the resulting thoughts and images flowing from the
subjects of his interrogation. “My questions are racist, homophobic, and
offensive in every way. This is my job” (110). Kaaro also holds a part-time job
in bank security, using his abilities to “confuse” the xenosphere with his
thoughts (while reading a novel) and muddy the water enough so that “wild”
psychics are unable to pick up the passwords and data of bank customers.
Kaaro
can also heal those suffering from self-inflicted “attacks” of guilt within
their subconscious. In one instance he deals with a woman whose “mind is a
decaying temple” in which her deceased husband suffocates her with a vampiric grip
that is anything but a lover’s embrace (155). Those who are unfamiliar with
this method of healing see what Kaaro does as “a kind of exorcism,” imbuing him
with a fearful mystical authority. The “religious people” dislike psychics such
as Kaaro “because you challenge the concept of their various gods” as only
deities can possibly “know the hearts of men” (275).
But this connection with the idea of
supernaturalism is not the only reason why “adepts” are unpopular with even
those in the highest levels of government. “Nobody should be able to do what
you do,” Kaaro is told. “The mind is supposed to be the last sanctuary of a
free human. Even prisoners are not meant to give up the sanctity of their
thoughts. …There is bound to be resentment” (275). Here, then, may be another
area of interest for scholarship and critical review of Rosewater. Scholarship in the philosophy of horror is richly
interested in the human experience, consciousness, and what it means to “be”
human. To that end Rosewater offers
an intriguing starting point for this discussion, as both the connection of all
minds to the alien xenosphere and the alteration of human bodies at the
cellular level call into question the point at which the human ends and the
alien begins.
Rosewater is meant to be a trilogy, to be
followed by The Rosewater Insurrection
and The Rosewater Redemption—this
last being a turn against alien imperialism.
Rosewater, meanwhile, ends with
the ongoing, slow “invasion” of earth, a terraforming of sorts that may well
result in humanit becoming “full xeno.” But much like the great majority of
citizens in today’s developed nations who see Global Warming as a crisis that
is either unstoppable or best left for later generations to deal with, the
citizens of Thompson’s Rosewater
likewise “think we’ll be dead and gone by the time the carnage begins.” But
then again, that may be wishful thinking. As Kaaro considers the future
conquest of earth, he intuits that “we will all have front row seats” (390).
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