Today I’m kicking off “Five Ingredients that Make up Rosewater with Tade Thompson – starting with Aliens, Tade tells us a little about all the elements making up the novel.
Visit Vicky at Off The Shelf Books tomorrow to find out a little more…
Kaaro is a government agent with a criminal past. He has seen inside the biodome, and doesn’t care to again—but when something begins killing off others like himself, Kaaro must defy his masters to search for an answer, facing his dark history and coming to a realization about a horrifying future.
Aliens
Aliens are outsiders.
Whether we believe in life on Mars or not, we will always enjoy alien narratives because they allow us to project otherness and engage with it. That doesn’t mean we will engage well, or even meaningfully, but we will at all, and that’s worth something.
I don’t want to tell anyone how to read ROSEWATER but for me aliens represent the cultural imperialism of western civilisation, a continuation and descendant of colonisation and the scramble for Africa.
This colonisation of the mind attempts to homogenise us all, on one hand, and tell us who we are or ought to be on the other. This seems relentless, like an armada of alien space ships covering the sky, itself reminiscent of the blitzkrieg of Nazi Germany.
Rosewater doesn’t have spaceships. Or rather, it does, but it’s of the blink-and-you-miss-it variety. I am concerned not with space battles and lasers, but what the invasion means metaphorically, what aliens are to humans. And so, in ROSEWATER, you’re more likely to see the effects of the invasion than little green men.
