One of the frames of the Women on Aeroplanes project is Woman of the Aeroplanes, the novel. Women of the Aeroplanes is Bernard Kojo Laing’s second book, written in 1988. It’s a science fiction novel that puts extreme pressure on the conventions of science fiction. In Laing’s novel, qualities, predicates, attributes, none of these are possessed by a person or a self. They move around and do things. A predicate that moves out of its place: that is one way of understanding the grammar of independence. For the French, independence was as unacceptable as a Moroccan girl pilot. The idea of a girl pilot is as upsetting as the idea of a predicate that is not in its place.

Kodwo Eshun, Specific Grammars of Intricate Displacement, 2018

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The Aeroplanes they travel with are real.

But sometimes they stand still or land themselves. 

Kojo Laing, Woman of the Aeroplanes, 1988