*This review contains major spoilers. The book is worth the read nonetheless, but if you really don’t like knowing what happens, go read it first.
Who pays the cost for advancements in green tech? Who benefits? What do we co-sign when we accept the pervasiveness of big businesses in the overall management of our lives? I was left pondering these questions after finishing Nnedi Okorafor’s Noor, which follows the story of AO, who only prefers AO and not her birth name Anwuli Okwudili, a young Black woman in a near-future Nigeria who is mostly human but also very cybernetic. That is, many of AO’s limbs and internal organs have been fitted with technologically advanced metal and man-made parts that saved Noor’s life, improved her quality of life, and as she later finds out, came at a hidden high cost.
Over 211 pages we follow AO and her new friend and fellow fugitive DNA as they race across the desert, fighting for their lives and seeking refuge in an elusive community of outcasts that survive at the center of a famed ongoing natural disaster. As the story unfolds, we learn that the Ultimate Corporation manufactured AO’s cybernetic parts - an expansive global conglomerate company with its hands in goods, transportation, energy, agriculture, and nearly every other industry that props up society. Immediately, the ubiquity of companies like Amazon, Meta, and Musk’s slate of enterprises come to mind. While we’ve seen what happens when companies over-promise the potential of medical technologies 1 , we’re not too far off from a world where we get to pick and choose which parts of ourselves to replace for efficiency’s sake. Meticulous build-a-baby genetic counseling that currently only the wealthy can afford when family planning is just one step in that direction we’ve already seen. After all, disability justice advocates have long been ringing the alarm for a long time alerting us that capitalism uses not just race and gender, but also ability (among other things) to determine who deserves to live and who deserves to die or be discarded. While at first I was struck by AO’s stern belief that her cybernetic attachments are what make her life worth living and make her a superior human form to others, in fact she is just hyper-aware of the way she would’ve been discarded by society in her original form, as her disabilities meant she would be less than a perfectly productive worker under capitalism. Most disabled people turned down the cybernetic transplants due to the excruciatingly painful healing process, but AO embraced the ability to build a body that worked better than her organic human form ever could. She braved months of pain and years of being treated as a strange less-than-woman cyborg, all the while still believing whole-heartedly that she’d made the right decision. The choice between beauty and ability, being outcast based on disability or based on not fitting the ideal image of a Nigerian woman, was a heavy choice to make.
“So I saw the Red Eye close from above, and I zoomed the satellite image into the storm, and that’s how I saw what no other human being could see. As the sands fell, so did the bones. Finally, those people whose lives had been taken by the Red Eye in the most brutal way—stripped of life, then all flesh—and left to fly and fly, they fell to the ground. All those people could rest . . . Those bones saw the sun for the first time in a long long time.”2
The theme of choice comes up again and again throughout the story as AO and DNA find themselves with few options for survival or refuge. Everywhere they turn, AO learns more about the pervasive nature of Ultimate Corporation and how deep their power runs and how little the Nigerian government cares about keeping them in check. As our fugitive crew comes to discover that the massive disaster overtaking much of Northern Nigeria was in fact also fabricated by Ultimate Corp, I found myself reflecting on our current narratives around natural disasters. Like in this story, the damage caused by modern natural disasters - at least in the U.S. - is often due not just to the strong winds and rains. Instead, years of discriminatory housing processes, the herding of poor people of color into particularly vulnerable parts of town, and the intricate trappings of poverty together result in much avoidable destruction. The rich, the landowners, those who want their cities “clean” and free from the stains of Black life often turn a blind eye when the same folks they’ve discarded are then practically sacrificed to natural disasters. In Noor, the outcasts who chose to leave behind the costly luxuries of city life propped up by Ultimate Corps found refuge in the eye of the great storm. As a turn on the routine abandonment that often occurs during disaster times, these folks instead created a thriving, connected community in isolation from the rest of the world and out of reach from the company.
With striking descriptions of a recognizable near-future Nigeria ripe with possibility and thought provoking meditations on surveillance and consumer capitalism, Okorafor is a part of a cannon within afrofuturist writings that encourages us to look beyond what the false options presented by dominant systems of power and instead search for other ways of living and relating to one another. In the case of AO, only through shedding her belief that she ever truly had a choice in her own design did she come to realize the ways that Ultimate Corp had gone beyond life-affirming technology and had taken up unchecked violence to eradicate any threats to their power. In a last-ditch hail mary to expose their exploitative ways to the world, AO pulls back the veil and forces everyone basking in comfort to face the uncomfortable truth of what everyone’s favorite big business was doing right under everyone’s noses. In the end, I was rooting for AO as she developed into a revolutionary poised to tear down the facade created by the rich and powerful to divide those without, no matter the cost.
See Elizabeth Holmes and the rise and fall of her medical technology company, Theranos.
Excerpt From Noor, Nnedi Okorafor. This material may be protected by copyright.