McCoy Game

 Elizabeth Thompson

Dr. Ellis

EN 376

30 October 2023

Ancestral Knowledge and Space

            B. B. Alston’s “The McCoy Game” looks at Afrofuturism on the ancestral and familial levels as Dre and Jamal are forced to work together using Big Mac’s wisdom to find the key to their inheritance.

            In her article on an Afrofuturism exhibit in the Smithsonian, Shantay Robinson explores the historical inspirations for Afrofutures such as the Dogon tribe in West Africa’s advanced knowledge of astronomy and a Sankofa figure of a bird with its neck turned backward representing the concept of looking back at the past as one moves forward into the future. Alston uses these concepts in their story when Jamal recalls the stories Big Mac told him of space saying, “Big Mac had this theory that there are these really cool caretakers that look out for all life in the universe. Humanity was born in Africa, and Grandad said those caretakers stopped by early to on to teach us stuff like math and science… Said they even took some of us up on their ships to see the galaxy” (45). In Alston’s narrative, space is an integral part of Jamal’s ancestral knowledge through Big Mac that helps him navigate his present and future. As for the ambiguous “caretakers,” they seem like deities in the fabric of Big Mac’s mythology. This creation story originating in Africa is empowering and similar to God’s choosing of Israel as His people, a group divinely gifted yet oppressed in the world. Like Israel, there is a need to be reconnected with the deity. For Israel, it is the wait for the Messiah; for Big Mac, it is reaching the galaxies where the caretakers live. Alston’s future of space exploration, agency, and mobility also empowers people who have historically been colonized, forced from their lands, and disconnected from their respective deities and cultures.

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