Sentient Potential

Abstract

The novel’s speaker is a mid-twenties man, Miguel, who lives in the technologically advanced, magically empowered Society of the Potent. Miguel’s power is sentience: he senses the feelings and emotions of people in proximity. Miguel struggles with his power, feeling it is a violence on his mind and body. His gay identity is a further complication, embraced in his home community but suspected outside of it. His fears are compounded when he runs into an old colleague and scion of a major political dynasty, Taye Velox, and experiences an instant and intense Sentient connection, far stronger than anything he has encountered before. Taye is now understood and seen by Miguel more radically than anyone else in his life, and this heady, imbalanced bond becomes the novel’s driving force. The men are pulled into a complex of political intrigue and familial drama that is influenced by the Veloxes’ unusual rise as black Kinetics in an otherwise homogeneously white class, and Taye’s mother’s struggle to reconcile her love for her family and the tenuousness of hard- won power. As the Society’s hierarchies fracture under political contestation and social tension, Miguel must navigate his relationship with Taye and his complicity in the political fallout. The novel explores the complexities of a burgeoning bond in which one person accesses emotional world and soul of the other, the fuzziness of selfhood in this context, the boundary between autonomy and passivity, and the dynamics of a connection between a gay man and a straight man in a society that imposes conflicting expectations on masculine love. The reflective essay explores the contributions and challenges of queer theory to fictive portrayals of queer characters in non-normative relationships, such as the ambiguous connection between Miguel and Kehinde in the novel, and the author’s parallel journey as a gay man with a non-linear and disappointing path that collides with narratives about progress ‘out of the closet’. While queer theory allows for antinarrative explorations and a focus on characters’ agency, the author proposes ‘agentive passivity’, the idea that queerness – and therefore queer fiction – can highlight the employment of agency to ease into and accept uncontrollable forces, narratives and expectations, such as queerness and queer loving. This idea is explored through contemporary literature, the creative project and the author’s experiences in finding that his own queer journey fails the linearity of coming out narratives and expectations for queer joy in liberal popular culture.