Sarah Olutola is a writer and academic. She currently teaches creative writing, critical race studies and postcolonialism at Lakehead University. She is also a freelance columnist and has written for online and print publications such as Zora Magazine and The Conversation. she has published speculative fiction for a young adult audience under the pen name Sarah Raughley.
My name is Dr. Sarah Olutola and I’m proud to be a part of the Worker as Futurist project. Dr. Max Haiven reached out to me to join this initiative around the same time I was hired to be an assistant professor of Writing at Lakehead University. While I had many roles in the project, my main job was to put together several weeks’ worth of creative writing craft workshops for the rank-and-file Amazon workers participating in the project, to aid them in producing their speculative fiction (SF) short stories.
I had lots of experience to draw from to build these workshops. I don’t just teach writing; I’m a writer myself. Under the pen name Sarah Raughley, I’ve written several speculative young adult books: the Effigies series and The Bones of Ruin trilogy. As a published writer, I’ve had many different opportunities to deliver creative writing workshops all over Canada to middle school, secondary, and postsecondary students, as well as to adults and even other teachers.
I’ve been trying to think about what this particular initiative has in common, on a philosophical level, with all the creative writing programs I’ve participated in. Of course, you teach people how to use good words to tell a tight narrative. You impart to them the importance of strong characters that drive action. You teach them the versatility of sentence structure and the importance of finding one’s unique voice. But philosophically, what ties the Worker as Futurist project to my creative writing classes at Lakehead University or to the workshops I’ve held for kids in schools and libraries?
Power. No matter how long I contemplate the question, that’s the word that crops up, again and again.
In “Criteria of Negro Art” published in the 1926 edition of The Crisis, African-American scholar and civil rights activist W.E.B Dubois wrote that “all Art is propaganda and ever must be.”
This sentence struck me the first time I read it in graduate school. I never forgot it. And the first time I recited it to a fellow scholar who viewed art through a humanist lens, he was horrified. He perceived the word propaganda in a negative sense, the kind familiar from its use by wartime governments and repressive regimes, as in the example of Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels’ Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, which was created to valorize antisemitism and swell German national pride through literature, theatre, music, and film.
My colleague didn’t consider that, even in grim examples like these, we must follow Dubois’s invitation to consider the link between storytelling and power. To tell stories is to create knowledge. And those in power have had the means, resources, and opportunities to create knowledge that benefits them on the largest of scales. European white supremacist imperialism used the connection between art, knowledge, and power to create stories about the racialized Other. By telling stories about Africans, Muslims, Jews, and so on, it produced and entrenched racist discourses that continue to pervade common attitudes today.
In the twenty-first century, massive corporations, which are in many ways empires in and of themselves, also have the means, resources, and opportunities to shift discursive frames. We are in an age dominated by the neoliberal atomization of humanity, the apparent inevitability of monopoly, the seemingly inherent right of men like Amazon founder and current executive chairman Jeff Bezos to control the course of the future through the exploitation of marginalized communities.
But if art carries with it the potential for producing knowledge, then what can art become in the hands of those who have been marginalized? What happens when the powerless speak back?
This question has been at the heart of the Worker as Futurist project. But others have dwelled with it before. Dubois sought to answer it in “Criteria of Negro Art” when he proudly proclaimed:
I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent.
When the powerless speak back through art, the truth that they are not powerless becomes clear and felt, materially and viscerally.
When someone can sit down and write a story that challenges the neoliberal ethos that would leave them stripped and silent, that act in and of itself becomes a form of resistance against the powerful actors that have long sacrificed them in the pursuit of power.
To me, it never mattered whether or not the stories written by the workers in this project would be considered “good” by the well-read literary elite. To me, it only mattered that those who took up the challenge wrote. And by writing, and by speaking their truths, they exploded the paradigm that would render their subjectivity nonexistent.
Be shameless as you read through these stories. Storytelling involves imagining the present and, in doing so, creating the future. What possible futures do these imaginative stories point toward? Behind every piece in this book is a rank-and-file Amazon worker who decided to sit down and tell you a story. Let go of convention and let that very act become a strong reminder of the power of one’s voice in shaping destiny.