Category Archives: Roundtables

Pattern Flattener

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This is part of a roundtable on the work of Octavia Butler. The index to the roundtable is here.
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Most of the posts in the Octavia Butler roundtable (including my earlier post) have been fairly laudatory of Butler’s work. And there’s certainly a lot to like in Butler’s novels. She tackles complicated themes in imaginative ways and manages to be quite repulsive while doing so. Not many folks out there walk the line between slavery narratives and tentacle sex. Hard not to cheer for that.
 

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But, while I like Butler quite a bit, I do have some reservations. The main one being that she’s not a very good writer.

Of course, Butler is a good writer in some ways. As I said, she’s very inventive and thoughtful; she has lots of ideas; and she explores them in interesting ways. Still, reading her, you can’t help but notice that her prose rides a fine line between uninteresting and actively insipid. Yes, there’s tentacle sex, but it’s tentacle sex described with all the fever and poetry of a long, leisurely session at your tax accountant’s. Mutant eternal killer demons speak from out the ages with the somnolent laconic lack of affect of a Calvin Coolidge. Apocalypses of multivariant forms all land upon an unsuspecting earth like wire service news bulletins. Characters of diverse class, race, and ethnicity, whether blood-sucking vampires or gelatinous fern assemblages, all speak with a default mid-range vocabulary, eschewing figurative language for bland glops of transparent earnestness.

Here, for example, is Mary, a troubled young African-American girl who is coming into her own as a massively powered telepath who can read the minds of hundreds and hundreds of other psis all bound to her will. She has just defeated her only rival for power. It’s an emotional moment. Right?

Not so much.

They cremated Doro’s last body before I was able to get out of bed. I was in bed for two days. A lot of others were there even longer. The few who were on their feet ran things with the help of the mute servants. One hundred and fifty-four Patternists never got up again at all. They were my weakest, those least able to take the strain I put on them. They died because it took me too long to learn how to kill Doro. By the time Doro was dead and I began to try to give back the strength I had taken from my people, the 154 were already dead.

he sentences sit there in a Hemingwayesque funk, desperately hoping that the short. simple. structure. will lead you to think that the passage is economical, even though she keeps repeating the same not especially revelatory information with a distant, feeble ruthlessness. They were the weakest, and they could not take the strain; they were dead, and then they were dead, and at the end of another sentence, they’re still dead.

Perhaps you could argue that Butler is deliberately using a simple voice to convey Mary’s consciousness here — but, again, Mary is supposed to at this point be an incredible mutant superconsiousness. What is it like to be inside the head of someone who is inside the head of hundreds of other people? How must it feel to know all those other people’s lives and vocabularies? If Samuel Delany or Gwyneth Jones or Joanna Russ or any number of Butler’s compatriots in the realm of gender-bending avant sci-fi art were writing this, Mary’s consciousness would be multi-vocal and strange — it would mirror alienness in its syntax and grammar and language. Mary wouldn’t just say, “Hey! I’m different! How about that?” Her voice would be part of the meaning of the novel. But it’s not, because it can’t be, because Butler has no interest at all in language, the supposed tool of her trade.

There are times when the lax limpidity of the prose does work thematically, at least up to a point. “Dawn” and “Fledgling” can both be read as coming-of-age novels, with the protagonists growing up to discover their true selves as tentacled imperialist monstrosities and vampiric incestuous slaveholders, respectively. In these books, you could argue, the flatness of the prose (and as a result of the affect) has an almost satirical fillip; the default of bland genre becomes a patina of normalcy over a pit of perversion and alienness. The nice, easy story isn’t so nice and easy — or possibly vice versa.

Still, it seems pretty clear that, in many respects, better prose would in fact result in better books. In “Wild Seed” and especially in the earlier “Mind of My Mind”, Butler creates careful moral dilemmas, only to have them sag beneath the damp uselessness of her style. Doro, the eternal mutant who survives by jumping from body to body and killing his hosts, is, as I’ve said, completely unconvincing; when he speaks he sounds not like an all-powerful parasite, but like mid-range science-fiction narrator explicating.

Even worse is the fact that the rest of the characters are equally indistinguishable and bland. Doro is supposed to be a monster, destroying person after person — but the people he destroys aren’t real. We never feel any deaths, because the characters are just chits Butler moves around the page. It’s almost as if Butler is Doro; he sees humans mostly as personality-less puppets to manipulate through his plots, and Butler treats the humans as personality-less puppets to manipulate through her plots.

This is especially painful in “Mind of My Mind” where Butler switches point of view characters repeatedly, in an effort (presumably) to have us get to know each one. But instead, what we get to know is that they’re all the same. In theory, if we actually could tell one from the other, we might feel some sort of loss when Mary pulls them into her pattern, and they abandon their independence. But it never happens, because they were never individuals to begin with. Similarly, the Patternists take over the minds of normal humans (mutes) and enslave them. But it’s hard to much care when the humans are blandly uninteresting before being slaves, and then blandly uninteresting afterwards. How can you provide a moral meditation on human individuality when you’re unable to create an even passable representation of an individual human?

In her post on Butler and empathy, Qiana Whitted says that she is impressed with the way that Butler creates repulsive insect-like aliens as a barrier to empathy. It’s true that Butler’s aliens can be squicky, and that can in some cases be a way to withhold empathy, or insist on difference. But those insisted-on differences in Butler’s work rarely go more than squick-deep. Bodies in Butler may be wildly heterogenous and imaginative, but her language is always the same untrammeled non-thing, scooping up tentacle creature and vampire alike in its unwavering similitude. Everybody thinks alike and talks alike, which means that on the level of the prose, which is the essence of the book, Butler often seems unable to think difference at all. Maybe that’s why her books can seem oppressive — not because she has a bleak vision of human intolerance for strangeness, but because the pattern in her books is too flat to allow the strangers called humans any life of their own.

The Body Envisioned: Octavia Butler

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This is part of a roundtable on the work of Octavia Butler. The index to the roundtable is here.
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The MacArthur Foundation concisely explained Octavia Butler’s impact on science fiction in 1995. Popularly referred to as “Genius Grants,” the program “awards unrestricted fellowships to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.” In describing Butler, the foundation said simply, “Octavia Butler, a writer of science fiction, brought elements of African and African-American spiritualism, mysticism, and mythology to her novels and stories.”[1] The direct and simple description is both accurate and jarring. Butler’s identity as a woman of color in a genre long dominated by white men made her a unique figure, but more importantly her identity informed her work. Talented by any measure Butler’s career placed her at the center of ongoing debates about the U.S. experience linked to questions of identity and power.

To think about Butler’s contribution and status, I complied a list of scholarly articles based on search queries on Butler. From that body of material I utilized Paper Machine, a plug-in for Zotero, the bibliographic and research software created by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media to get a snapshot of how researchers approach Butler.[2] This approach does not take the place of the critical assessments of Butler work that we have seen in the roundtable. There are limitations to this approach based on the tool and my use of it. A more compelling analysis would be gained by exploring patterns in Butler’s published works or perhaps an examination of African-American authors writing speculative fiction in the twentieth century.

What Paper Machine facilitates for me is to understand how a select body of material shifts over time and visualize those changes quickly. I added about 340 articles to my Zotero library from academic databases using Butler and related search terms. Most people who know what they are doing will point out that I need a bigger corpus. My goal is more exploratory (weak defense) and frankly I had time constraints (weaker defense). Using Paper Machine, I was able to take this collective material to create several visualizations. The first figure is a DBpedia visualization of the corpus. DBpedia is a crowd-sourced effort to create systematized information from Wikipedia and make it available on the web. Paper Machine uses the name entities mentioned in the corpus and scaled those entries according to the frequency of their occurrence to create this visualization. Naturally, the author’s name is featured prominently along with terms such as parasitism, race, and utopia.

Figure 1: Butler Scholar DBpedia

Butler Scholar DBpedia

Perhaps more interestingly, Paper Machine can pull text from PDFs and use bibliographic metadata to create visualizations. This allows the program to create topic models via text mining. Paper Machine finds and clusters the words in the corpus based on the pattern of occurrence. The result is a steam graph of topics determined by the corpus. I sorted the output by the 20 “most coherent ” and “most common” topics. While Butler is the author of several noteworthy works, this modeling demonstrates that research has greater focus on Kindred (1979)and ideas such as reproduction and slavery.

Figure 2: Butler Scholar 20 Topic Most Coherent

Butler Scholar 20 Topics Most Coherent

Figure 3: Butler Scholar 20 Topic Most Common

Butler Scholar 20 Topics Most Common

In addition to topic models, Paper Machine can generate a phrase net that gives a sense of the order within the entire corpus. The images below are phase nets for ‘x of the y’ and ‘x and y’ in the corpus. The direction of the arrow tells us how to read the connection, and the thickness indicates the relative frequency of the phase within the corpus.

Figure 4: Butler Scholar-Phase Net x of the y

Butler Scholar-Phase Net x of the y

Figure 5: Butler Scholar-Phase Net x and y

Butler Scholar Phase Net x and y

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The trends within the corpus display a pattern of analysis that parallels the topic. Phrases such as anxieties of the society or slavery and reproduction are to be expected in the corpus based on Butler’s work. Ultimately, this exercise in visualization highlights Butler’s status has grown over time as scholars discuss Butler work with greater emphasis on race, gender, and society.

This result is no surprise. As a historian, my fascination with Butler has always been rooted in this collective recognition of her as signifier. As the corpus indicates, she is often mentioned, along with Samuel R. Delany as an African-American literary pioneer. The historical reality is more complex. Authors of African descent have imagined circumstances that challenged the reality of the dominant culture for decades. Martin Robinson Delany (1812-1885), abolitionist and the first African-American field officer in the U.S. Army wrote the serial adventure of Henry Blake, an escaped slave who travels throughout the southern United States and Cuba to plan a large slave insurrection. Published in the Anglo-African Magazine in 1859 and the Weekly Anglo-African in 1861-62, the story was a response to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott v. Sanford decision. Delany’s story offered a militant protagonist that challenged southern and northern expectations.[3] In a similar vein, Edward A. Johnson’s utopian novel Light Ahead for the Negro (1904) imagined a protagonist transported to a future socialist United States free from racial strife.[4] Surprisingly, W.E.B. Dubois’ 1920 short story, “The Comet,” featured a black bank messenger and the white daughter of a wealthy businessman as the only survivors in a city ravaged by the toxic effects of a passing comet.[5]

Science-fictional approaches to race continued into the mid-century. As society became more mediated, science fiction was an integral part of speculating on the implication of a rapidly changing world.[6] For creators committed to challenging stereotypes, memorable efforts on television such as Twilight Zone (1959-1964) and Star Trek (1966-1969) reflected the broader societal dialogue connected to racial equality. Imaginative and provocative, what these stories share is the author’s use of speculative fiction to explore their world and challenge limiting expectations. Each narrative is reacting to contemporary debates and offering ideas and actions that point to new social and political circumstances.

First published in 1971, Butler emerged as the United States struggled to reconcile the promise of the postwar liberalism with reality of a functional society that balances individual agency against communal upset. As historian Bruce Schulman explained, “In race relations, religion, family life, politics, and popular culture, the 1970s marked the most significant watershed of modern U.S. History, the beginning of our own time.”[7] An African-American female in a field associated with white men, Butler’s emergence gave voice to the challenging intersectionality linked to race and gender. For all the possibilities associated with science fiction, Butler’s work and our collective recognition of it emphasizes this struggle is ongoing and unresolved. Butler recognized the clash between ideas and actions and made her writing about, “… when you are aware of what it means to be an adult and what choices you have to make, the fact that maybe you’re afraid, but you still have to act.”[8] Working through the lens of her identity within two marginalized groups, her vision has grown in importance as the wider society moves these questions to the center of our public discourse. No longer in an era of pioneering firsts, debates about equity and representation in science fiction have grown in importance as imagined and real landscapes converge. It is too much to suggest understanding Butler means unraveling this problem, but her advice to aspiring writers highlights why the effort bears worthwhile fruit–“I’ve talked to high school kids who are thinking about trying to become a writer and asking ‘What should I major in?’, and I tell them, ‘History. Anthropology. Something where you get to know the human species a little better, as opposed to something where you learn to arrange words.”[9]
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[1] “Octavia Butler,” www.macfound.org, (July 1, 1995), http://www.macfound.org/fellows/505/.

[2] “Zotero | About,” www.zotero.org, accessed July 5, 2014, https://www.zotero.org/about/.

[3] Katy L. Chiles, “Blake; or the Huts of America (1859–1861),” Encyclopedia of Virginia, (September 24, 2012), http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Blake_or_the_Huts_of_America_1859-1861.

[4] Maryemma Graham, The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 42–43.

[5] W.E.B. Dubois, “Darkwater: Voice From Within The Veil,” Archive, www.gutenberg.org, (1920), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15210/15210-h/15210-h.htm.

[6] J. P. Telotte, The Essential Science Fiction Television Reader (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 3.

[7] Bruce J Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (Cambridge, MA.: Da Capo Press, 2002), xii.

[8] “Octavia E. Butler Interview (excerpts),” Magazine, Locus Online, (June 2000), http://www.locusmag.com/2000/Issues/06/Butler.html.

[9] Ibid.

When Loss Becomes You

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This is part of a roundtable on the work of Octavia Butler. The index to the roundtable is here.
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When I got into college, Pasadena City College,…I heard some remarks from a young man who was the same age I was but who had apparently never made the connection with what his parents did to keep him alive. He was still blaming them for their humility and their acceptance of disgusting behavior on the part of employers and other people. He said, “I’d like to kill all these old people who have been holding us back for so long. But I can’t because I’d have to start with my own parents.” When he said us he meant black people, and when he said old people he meant older black people. That was actually the germ of the idea for Kindred (1979)

I’ve carried that comment with me for thirty years. He felt so strongly ashamed of what the older generation had to do, without really putting it into the context of being necessary for not only their lives but his as well. I wanted to take a character, when I did Kindred, back in time to some of the things that our ancestors had to go through, and see if that character survived so very well with the knowledge of the present in her head. – Octavia Butler

First, a spoiler-free refresher on Kindred if you haven’t read it, or if you can’t remember it: On July 9, 1976 (which was contemporary when it was written), Dana feels dizzy, and then collapses, while unpacking in her new house. She comes to on the banks of a river she has never seen before. Luckily, space and time travel have a short jet-lag period in this world, because almost immediately after she arrives 161 years in the past, she saves the life of a little red-haired boy drowning in the river beside her. We later learn that the boy is Rufus, her great-grandfather. Rufus will grow up to have several children by one of his future slaves, Dana’s great-grandmother Alice. But for now, he is a boy who needs saving, and so she saves him. Dana continues to save him over the course of the story, because consanguinity has bestowed upon Rufus the ability to call Dana into his time when his life is in danger.

Now, a spoiler free plot point: Dana loses her left arm on her way back from the last of these travels. It has to be amputated in the present-day, as a result of an injury she sustains while coming back. She also sustains a permanent scar on her face from being kicked by a slave-owner after falling down.

Amputation and scarring are permanent, and should not be the metaphor to represent the injuries that slavery has caused to those racialised-as-Black in this day. This isn’t to say that there are people racialised-as-Black living outside of structural racism, or that if you ignore reality, injustice goes away. Rather, what I want to hold up for scrutiny is the notion that injury and impairment are necessarily and perhaps even inevitably, a part of identity for descendants of slaves and those who look like them in contemporary America.

If you’ve read Wendy Brown, you’re probably familiar with what I’m getting at. If not she’s a political science professor at University of California, Berkeley, and my question is related to the one Brown poses in States of Injury. That is, “how does a sense of woundedness become the basis for a sense of identity?”, but my response is different. Brown argues that its the capitalistic superstructure that we need to jettison in order to bring about liberation. You see, by getting mad that the path to your piece of the pie is unjust, you maintain that the pie really is the thing you value. “The reviled subject becomes the object of desire,”she warns.

The horrors of the slave trade seem to lend its support for her proposition. What were the slaves doing? They were making things for people to buy while keeping the cost of production minimal. They were working on sugar plantations so the land owners could have cookies, and cakes, and boiled sweets. They were working on cotton plantations so the land owners could look fashionable. They were building Georgian colonial homes to shelter the plantation owners from the brutal southern heat and the back-breaking work of beating people within inches of their lives. Though slavery is not capitalism proper, it has the capitalist’s existential project at its core: that the making and buying of things for profit, determined by membership in stratified social classes, should be the primary preoccupation of state and society. All the while, the slaves wanted what the slave owners had- the spoils of the American Dream, despite the fact that it was the Dream that justified their enslavement. We still do this in various forms today.Many groups and movements criticise the state as a monolithic site of oppression qua unjust dominance, but then seek its protection under the logic that state dominance is only unjust if its dominating the wrong demographic.

I’m not convinced that capitalism is the problem though, or that anarchy or communism are potential solutions. Perhaps domination is inextricable from capitalism, but domination doesn’t belong to any particular political economy any more than religion has monopoly on morality. Yes, her experience of enslavement permanently impairs Dana. But let’s not elide over the fact that her impairment would not be a disability if her society did not make safety and self-actualisation a two-handed commodity.

So that’s why I loved Kindred, but am also a little wary of it. I loved that it shows so vividly the kinds of things that happen when you put ego and profit above universal human dignity and justice. But it also seems to suggest that injustice is primarily a problem of unjust commodity distribution, rather than a problem of us valuing a questionable set of social goods. It also reifies various forms of injustice by suggesting that we need to expand the class of people who can afford freedom, rather than question why freedom is so closely tied to desert and not something else. Do we really want to say that freedom is a cookie given only to those who have worked hard enough at the right things? Perhaps so, but then we’d need an account that can explain why freedom’s metaphysics only kick in after you’ve joined the right social club. If you’re really free, you need to be free from the start, not after conquering (or being born having conquered) a set of social ordeals.

“I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery,”Dana thinks to herself, after a few travels back into the past. I now think to myself, “You can make a person accept nearly anything, if you tie acceptance to their livelihood”. The characters in Kindred that question slavery either attempt to run away, or hope to one day get their free papers. I sympathize with the characters who tried to run away, but I’m sympathetic of the stance of waiting and hoping. It’s just that, waiting for your free papers suggests that you really are property (as many slaves had been convinced), and continues to hold the plantation owner as the ultimate arbiter of freedom. If we untie our livelihood from needing to dominate others, we can start to live differently, and oppression becomes a social condition, rather than a permanent personal injury.

No, oppression is not an amputation, but a sign that you want to use that two-handed tool too. Whether or not that’s a bad thing is perhaps another conversation. What’s important though, is that we distinguish between “I want to be free”and “I want what those who deem themselves free have”. Pursuing the latter has the unfortunate and pernicious effect of stopping the conversation about whether self-professed free people are really any freer than those they dominate. There’s no need clamouring over one another for pie when what you really want is chocolate cake anyway. The metaphor might be trite, but you’d miss it if you took the injustice-as-amputation metaphor at face value.

 

Kindred-octavia-e-butler-124291_408_600

When Goddesses Change

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This is part of a roundtable on the work of Octavia Butler. The index to the roundtable is here.
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One summer, Octavia Butler came to me in a dream. There were black feminists and ice sculptures everywhere. And a porch. It must have been heaven. Octavia walked up to me and tilted her head. She lovingly said “I hate you.” And laughed. And played a little bit with my hair, her hands as gentle as humidity. Then she went on to explain something important about mosquitoes that I can’t remember now.

Sweet ancestral hate. That’s a new one.

As a self-identified Black Feminist Love Evangelist, my relationship to chosen black feminist ancestors has been one of love and affirmation. Mostly, I identify with the black women writers and activists whose words I read, reread and chant and sing. They offer affirmation for who I am and for the world that I believe in. One January I even found myself receiving urgent love letters (motherourselves.wordpress.com) from the internalized voices of the likes of Audre Lorde, Ella Baker, June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara every morning. And at the end, when I had thanked my grandmother and declared the project complete…I got this letter from ancestor-trickster Octavia:

Alexis,

Ha! Didn’t think I would show up, did you? Here I am, making room for the difficult, the unsatisfied, the restless creator in you. She is the one that will make the hard choices and the new worlds to live on. She is the one who will question everything, down to how life appears.

With all this loving you are doing, and which you must do, don’t disdain your opposition. You would call it the queer thing, the part of you that just wont fit into the terms of this world. It deserves to grow and to shatter everything, even your sense of who you thought you were.

I know I came in and messed up the whole coherence of the project, your whole timeline and pretty picture. And I know you trust me less than the others, that you have never been seduced by my narrative voice.  That is why I showed up here anyway.

 

What your life and work will be will exceed your expectations, your invitations, your affinity. Life is stranger than anything you would want to imagine, and that’s the good news. Wake up to the reality that survival is a sharp thing, full of edges and decisions and sacrifice. And while you believe in abundance, I will stay here, insisting that everything here is a shell that still needs to be broken through. Acceptance is not what you think it is. Remember me while you learn that the boundaries will not hold, and whatever safety they provide is strategic at best, but usually false, usually lazy, usually a trick for evading breakthrough.

I do not rest because this world does not warrant it. And it is the restlessness in you that will knock things out of place that should not be set up how they are.

Don’t forget that even your crankiness is bigger than you. And make room for me and for knowing that some things must be destroyed.

Here, watching and waiting, undoing the neat package you thought you had. Remember, gifts are messy.

Octavia

Right.   The thing is, unlike other chosen ancestors, I don’t particularly identify with Octavia Butler. I don’t see justification of who I am. I define myself by my unconditional (and possibly undeserved) love for our species. I truly believe that we can come into alignment with our planet and stop killing ourselves and each other, and I am disturbed by what happens to our species in all of Octavia Butler’s stories. My interpretation of Butler’s work is that she believed that our species and this planet were fundamentally incompatible. There is no future where humans and Earth work it out. Through disease or through the interventions of another species, humans in Butler’s body of work must give up on being human or get the hell off this planet. It is never going to work. Humans will always use their intelligence for hierarchy which will breed destruction.

What a depressing thesis. But of course it is more than justified. Our species has a drastically abusive relationship to the resources of the planet, the other life-forms on the planet and to ourselves and each other. And Butler’s experiences on this planet would not necessarily lead to cuddly feelings about this species.

I remember watching a video of Octavia Butler sitting awkwardly in a circle of black women writers gathered in the Bahamas at a 1988 retreat coordinated by Cheryll Y. Greene, executive editor of Essence Magazine and late great hero of my soul.  Octavia was explaining to the pantheon of writers (including Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, Lucille Clifton, Toni Cade Bambara and many more) that there was no reason that she should be the only Black woman science fiction writer. It was lonely. She encouraged them to start writing science fiction and gave them some tips. She also explained some of the struggles she had faced in deciding to be a writer at all.

She described when she first moved out of her mother’s house. She was in her twenties and she got her own first place. A cheap apartment. And she had a dog. And she worked all the time. And one day the children in the neighborhood tortured and eventually killed her dog. She told this story to the gathered women writers and she laughed as if it still hurt. What kind of a species is this, where children kill a dog because they can?

In that moment I had to acknowledge that the futures we imagine are based on our lived experiences and what we can possibly extrapolate from them. I did not come to adulthood welcomed by dog-murdering children. In fact, I came through childhood and into adulthood with my own hardships, but also with the irreversible impact of Octavia Butler and Black women writers and thinkers in and beyond that circle lifting me up. I was six years old when Butler spoke those words and when the recorded image reached me I was sitting comfortably and gratefully in Cheryll Greene’s living room where she was actively transferring legacy and love.

In the finding aid to Octavia Butler’s archival papers there is not very much mention of correspondence with other known black women writers who were in that circle or who were her elders or contemporaries. There is testimonial and archival evidence that she took care to mentor younger black women science fiction writers like Nalo Hopkinson and Nnedi Okorafor, but who was there for her?

In Toni Cade Bambara’s papers at Spelman College I read some letters from Octavia Butler to Toni Cade Bambara and was surprised and not surprised that her letters to Toni felt as abrupt as her surprise ancestral letter to me.   She bluntly told Toni Cade Bambara that her handwriting was terrible and that she really couldn’t be expected to read her letters unless she evolved to the use of a typewriter. And maybe that, and her rigorous book production schedule, had something to do with the fact that it had taken her almost a year to write Toni Cade back. Bambara and Butler stayed somewhat in touch, but they also had very different theories about the species. Bambara’s Salteaters offers the proposition that the life of an individual human, the organism of her family, the ecology of her community, the vibration of the species, the synchronicity of the environment and the ringing of the solar system were all the same thing on different relevant and interconnected scales. The thesis was that if people could heal themselves and each other, the imbalances (many of which were/are human made) in the environment and the society could be healed. Not that they would be healed, but that they could be.  Whereas Butler’s humans seem to be hopelessly out of sync with this planet and any other planet that they journey to (as evidenced by Survivor…the out of print novel in the Patternist series that she didained and repressed…and the recently written about drafts of the unwritten books in the Parable series…), Bambara’s humans are one with everything, for better and for worse.

I would love to be a mosquito near the blood of their living conversations. I wonder if there was hair-touching or any sweet declarations of hate.

Recently on a visit to Los Angeles I had the honor of being taken on a tour of Octavia’s first world and the general setting of some of her novels (Pasadena, CA) by Dr. Ayana Jamieson, founder of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy network and brilliant scholar on the psychological, literary, spiritual and historic impact of Butler and her work. We went to places where Butler used to live, the libraries she devoured as a child, what used to be her elementary school and at the end of a transformative day where I learned so much about Octavia Butler we went to pay our respects at her grave.

Ayana, guardian and generous distributor of so much about Octavia Butler’s legacy had been holding birthday celebrations and remembrance rituals in honor of Octavia Butler at the gravesite in order to bring visibility to the fact that she was home and as a marking point for the work of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network which brings together people whose activism and creativity is inspired by the models that Butler created.

She had been to the grave many times and had brought other colleagues to pay their respects as well.

I was excited and nervous to visit Octavia’s gravesite. But when we arrived at the spot…she wasn’t there.

That’s right. I went to visit Octavia Butler at her grave, and she stood me up. But as Ayana’s dissertation explains, graveyard hi-jinks are well in Octavia’s wheelhouse. The Yoruba goddess/orisha Oya, is a key figure in Butler’s Parable Series. The protagonist is named Lauren Oya Olamina, after the orisha who is most associated with change. It is no coincidence that Lauren Oya Olamina creates a religion and movement called “Earthseed” based on the premise that “God is Change.”   Oya is also understood to be the guardian of the graveyard and the double-helix whirlwind that connects the living to the dead, because the change between life and death is one of the most mysterious changes we know about.  Ayana explains it much better in her dissertation, but in that moment of being stood up and engaging the employees at the cemetery (who didn’t know about Butler’s literary fame) we both knew that if anyone could hide in a graveyard…it was Octavia Butler.

Ultimately it turned out that initially Octavia Estelle Butler’s black gravestone (which reads “All that you touch you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is Change.”) was stacked on top of her mother’s gravestone. Her mother’s name is also Octavia Butler. (Her pink gravestone reads “God is love.”)  The mistake had been intact during all the birthday celebrations and previous visits. But before I got there it was corrected. Octavia’s stone was moved to where her body was actually buried, but at the time we had no idea where that was and neither the find-a-grave computer at the cemetery or the nice workers there could help us find her.

Like every troublesome experience I have had with ancestor Octavia, this left me thinking. What happens when the dead move? What happens when the dead move us? Is this a sign from the black and humid universe that because of the work of people like Ayana Jamieson and Adrienne Maree Brown (who bases emergent strategy workshops on the visionary models in Butler’s fiction and is co-editing with poet Walidah Imarisha a collection of visionary fiction short stories by social justice activists) Octavia is shifting her position? Does she believe in the species again? Or did she believe in us all along, and just offer drastic critiques and bleak futures in order to motivate those of us who legacy has afforded love to act immediately on our love for the species and the planet?

&Maybe both. Maybe all of it. I love your sweet and smirking face Octavia. You confuse the best out of me. Thank you for being who you are. (And hating me so good.)

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Wild Seed: A Curious Love Story About Family

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This is part of a roundtable on the work of Octavia Butler. The index to the roundtable is here.
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The premise is simple:

Anyanwu is a woman who can shift her physical form into any shape. She is a healer, she is feminine, and she is by nature immortal.

Doro is a man whose spirit moves from one body to another, thereby destroying the host’s spirit and eventually the body. He is a killer, he is masculine, and he is by nature immortal.

Wild Seed is about their relationship. Mother and father to generations. Wife and husband. Ally and enemy. Lover and beloved.

*

The book begins in 1690.

Doro has been alive for thousands of years, and he whiles away the time by collecting people with special powers and breeding them.

Doro can use any body, but bodies of people with special powers last longer. He is also painfully lonely, as the lives of everyday humans flash by in the blink of an eye. He’s stopped seeing people as individuals and begun to see them as a people, a group, a line of descendants. In regards to individuals, Doro is casually cruel, but in regards to the entirety of a people, he is both caring and loyal, expending significant time, energy, and resources to assure his people are safe and cared for.

The story starts when Doro finds Anyanwu, who is living as an old woman in a town made up of her descendants. She is the resident witch, a healer and a priestess. When Doro meets her, Anyanwu has lived through many cycles where she taken on a youthful body, married, born children, and allowed her body to age, before repeating the process.

The story draws sharp parallels between Doro, who is creating descendants and villages and peoples, and Anyanwu, who is creating descendants and villages and peoples.

Doro breeds his people, sometimes demanding sisters and brothers or daughters and fathers breed, but he’s set himself apart from them, as though the people are toys.

Anyanwu bears her children herself, bringing them into the world from her own body. She is a part of the process, a living member of the peoples she creates.

The book has a number of themes, including slavery, the shifting nature of morality, the ability to mimic gods, the nature of marriage.

What I found absolutely fascinating was the author’s ability to shift my perspective on Doro, from monster to person, and back again, and how his relationship with Anyanwu changes them both over time.

I’ve read many books about antiheroes, including stories where the antihero is the lover-hero-husband archetype. I’m sure most people have read some version of the misunderstood-but-sexy vampire romance.

Those stories often have a redemption storyline, but Wild Seed is not that story. Frankly, I find that refreshing.

Doro is a monster, and he remains a monster.

The first time we (and Anyanwu) see Doro body-hop, he kills a child. Does Doro do this to save his own life? No. He does it because a ferry owner is annoying him, and he’s going to teach the obnoxious upstart a lesson.

Doro ends up killing both the child and the ferryman, and he doesn’t feel anything but a bit of pleasure because taking over the ferryman’s body means he’s no longer suffering a cold.

There is no redemption, at least in my book, for random child-killing to teach others lessons. There just isn’t. Doro is a really awful person, full-stop.

The way Butler arranges this story, Doro has the power to kill Anyanwu, to hurt or manipulate or enslave her children. That puts a lot of power into his hands, and she must learn to accept and live with his terrible nature, or die and leave her children at risk.

Doro has been using terror, killing, threats, to order his people around for literally millennium, and he’s quite good at it. I was nervous for Anyanwu–“Don’t make him angry, Don’t make him angry,” I chanted at her, as I read.

In the first part Anyanwu is appalled by Doro’s actions, but she remains able to accept him, as a lover and husband. The world is a harsh place, and Anyanwu’s cultural background (exposing children born with birth defects, killing in self-defense, war, slavery) makes her acceptance of Doro both understandable and plausible.

She is in a terrible position, and that, I think, is the crux of this story.

If Anyanwu agrees to Doro’s demands, he will not harm her children. But if she agrees to his demands, she will also have more children–more hostages to fate. His power over her will increase.

The one temptation, the one benefit instead of threat, that Doro offers Anyanwu is that someday, he will give her children who will not die. No mother, Doro says, should have to watch her children die.

And so Anyanwu says yes.

But the story does not make the yes easy, because monsters are still monsters. This is not a sulky emo vampire story, where brooding under a window is the worst that the antihero gets up to. No.

Doro keeps killing people.

Deliberately. Casually. Cruelly.

And yet, he also, in his own way, cares about Anyanwu, and with the help of his son Isaac (who he marries to Anyanwu, because this story is just full of that kind of thing), Doro slowly begins to see that Anyanwu holds power over him, just as he holds power over her.

The one thing that Doro tempts Anyanwu with is the one deep desire he has–to have someone who will not die, who is not gone in the blink of an eye. Anyanwu is the only person who can challenge him, because she is the only one who is not ephemeral.

Doro’s plight, the plight of being alone for three thousand years, is made more real by the shifting nature of the narrative. Anyanwu’s early husbands are nameless, her children also nameless, sons or daughters, nearly placeholders. One husband, Isaac, is bright and shining and individual, but most of her lovers or husbands are not.

The lack of names struck me as a curious choice for a spec fic writer, for in my misspent youth, I certainly read many stories that had long involved cross-referenced name glossaries in the back.

But I think the choice was deliberate and meaningful.

A few months ago, I had a conversation with my sister in law. She was going to a wedding out of state. “Oh, a friend?” I asked. “No, my cousin. So of course, I had to go.”

I said something like, “Oh, you’re particularly close?”

No, she said, but it was her cousin. Of course she had to attend the wedding of a cousin.

Ah, I thought, and I asked, “How many cousins do you have?”

Two, it turned out. One on one side, one on the other.

Me? I’m not sure, actually, but we passed a hundred a while ago (yes, my family is Catholic).

I think Butler, regardless of her own family’s personal size, must have been acquainted with the sort of sprawling-family-induced mental flailing that I do when asked how many cousins I have.

The kind of close kin relationships that are often depicted in fiction is not necessarily inherent in blood-tie based relationships. With ten siblings, it’s possible to be closer to some than others, and I suppose the same would be true with successive husbands or children, if one had (literally) hundreds of years of living.

The marvel of Butler’s world was that I felt it, that she brought about in me a kind of mental shift, the idea that loved ones would be transitory, that descendants could be ‘sons’ instead of named individuals, that husbands could be so frequent as to be more of a job than a loved one.

But Doro.

Doro was the most surprising part of all.

So there I was, reading along, as the monster begins to realize that without Anyanwu (who leaves him), he will be truly and completely alone. Doro begins courting her, and, to please her, he chooses the body of a small man like those of her people.

Aw, I thought, that’s very sweet.

Then I stared at myself in horror, because killing someone so you can wear their dead body to please a lover is more, you know, sociopathic than sweet. And yet, I can see why he’d think it was a good way to woo Anyanwu. He has to take bodies anyway, might as well pick a pretty one, right?

Such is the power of fiction to play mind-games and what-ifs.

*

Isaac, Doro’s son and Anyanwu’s named husband, is the one who convinces Anyanwu to bow to Doro’s will, and I think it is his wisdom that the story most effectively explores.

For Isaac, there is no escape from Doro’s power. He is mortal, he is comparatively frail. What Isaac tells Anyanwu is that Doro is a monster, he will be terrible whether Anyanwu bows to his will or not. But, if Anyanwu stays, if she tries, she might mitigate some of the casual cruelties Doro commits.

And, in the story, this does eventually come to pass.

It takes a couple hundred years for Doro to realize that he is terribly lonely, that he loves Anyanwu for her own sake (and not just for the power of her bloodlines or use as a broodmare). There is a beautiful, moving scene where Anyanwu has decided that she is done with life, and that she will leave Doro, and to do that, she will go into her own body, turn it off, kill herself.

Doro lays on her breast, weeping, and he begs her to stay.

She does, in the end, agree to stay, to live. Anyanwu chooses life. And Doro agrees to some of her demands, reduces his casual killing, is less monstrous, but that doesn’t change that he is a monster. A monster who has killed some of Anyanwu’s friends, descendants. Anyanwu is perfectly well aware of this, she hasn’t somehow decided he’s gotten better or become redeemed.

Their story doesn’t end with some kind of pure reconciliation, although there is reconciliation, there is hope. It’s more of a carefully negotiated truce.

Anyanwu understands Doro, as I think the reader is intended to understand Doro, without approving of him. He’s really quite an awful person, even as he has moments of care and tenderness.

I dipped my toe into some of the criticism surrounding this book, and much of it involved the dichotomies Butler creates. (Certainly there are plenty.)

What I found to be satisfying in this story was the unflinching portrayal of living with a devil’s choice, handed to you by a monster. Many of us in the world have been handed a less than square deal–is it better, for instance, to stay in a corrupt system and try to help, or is it better to just get out? At what point does the world become too hard to bear? Is it possible to love someone with compassion, to see the good in them, while also being fully aware of their awfulness?

I think there are never any easy answers to these questions, and in fact, I think universal answers are not helpful, but this story was a particularly beautiful exploration of them.

 

How Do You Say “Love” in Alien, or Vice Versa?

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This is part of a roundtable on the work of Octavia Butler. The index to the roundtable is here.
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In her short story “Speech Sounds”, from the Bloodchild collection, Octavia Butler imagines a world in which a mysterious plague has robbed most people of language — both speech and written. The story opens as the protagonist, a former freelance writer who can still speak but not read, sees a dispute on a bus.

People screamed or squawked in fear. Those nearby scrambled to get out of the way. Three more young men roared in excitement and gestured wildly. Then, somehow, a second dispute broke out between two of these three — probably because one inadvertently touched or hit the other.

The first time you read this, it’s not especially clear that the combatants can’t talk to each other; their screams and squawks, gestures and roars, seem figurative — a description of chaos, in which communication becomes irrelevant because of anger and fear and violence. It’s only as you go along that you realize the description is literal; people are really screaming and squawking inarticulately, because no one can speak. A scene that seems familiar is actually strange. The people who we think we recognize as ourselves, under stress, are actually separated from us by an insurmountable barrier; we think we understand them, but we don’t; we think they are speaking to us but they aren’t. Through a trick of language, a realist anecdote becomes science fiction, and the world, and those in it, become more alien than we thought.

In her historical romance, Flowers From the Storm Laura Kinsale’s hero, Christian, the wealthy powerful rakish Duke of Jervaulx, suffers a brain hemorrhage which robs him of the power of speech. He ends up in an insane asylum, where he is cared for by Maddy, a Quaker and coincidentally the daughter of a friend. Jervaulx’s loss of speech seems like it should put him beyond communication, or shut down his ability to communicate with Maddy. But instead, somewhat miraculously, it makes it possible for them to love each other, both because his illness is the cause of bringing them together and by making her understand him better.

She lifted her head. He wasn’t a two-year-old. He had not lost his reason.

He isn’t mad; he is maddened.

The thought came so clearly that she had the sensation someone had spoken it aloud….

Jervaulx had not lost his reason. His words had been taken away. He coulcn’t speak,and he couldn’t understand what was said to him.

Christian’s silence enables Maddy to hear something which Kinsale strongly suggests is the voice of God. And what the voice tells her is that the stranger she thinks she sees is not actually a stranger. Through a trick of language, the other, beyond reach, becomes an intimate, and tragedy moves towards romance.

For both Butler and Kinsale, then, genre is built around language and the loss of language. And if both depend for genre on who understands what, it seems like you could understand them both as part of the same genre, depending on how you listen to them.

It’s not too difficult to see “Speech Sounds” as a thwarted romance; the main plot of the story involves the protagonist, Rye, tentatively falling in love with a man she calls Obsidian; they have sex, decide to stay together, and he is then suddenly killed. If the story starts by making you perceive the everday as alien sci-fi, it moves on to contact between stranger’s, a quick flowering of love from the storm.

By the same token, Flowers From the Storm can be read as science-fiction. It’s set in the Regency period, with rules and customs which are certainly as alien to the contemporary reader as Butler’s familiar post-apocalypse. A good bit of the story is told from Christian’s perspective, and so you see the alien world speak to him in an alien language. “Weebwell,” she whispered. “Vreethin wilvee well.” The Quaker woman, with her rituals and strange taboos (no lying, using “thee” and “thou”) is seen by Christian, too, as other and distant; he becomes the readers’ point of identification, a stranger in a strange land.

Both Butler and Kinsale are writing in a genre of difference — a genre that can broadly encompass both sci-fi and romance. This focus on difference is also, as Lysa Rivera says of Butler’s work, a focus on marginalization. Those who are seen as different are also marginal. When everyone else loses language, Rye, who retains it, becomes a potential target of jealousy and violence. Christian is rich and powerful, but when he loses language he becomes a madman, marginalized and subject to arbitrary imprisonment and punishment.

It’s significant that these differences and marginalizations are, literally and figuratively, a byproduct of language. This is true on multiple levels. Both Rye and Christian are marginal, or marginalized, because of their relationship to speech, or words. But they’re also marginalized because of their positions within an arbitrary fiction. Butler has created a future world, and placed Rye on the margins within it; Kinsale has created a past world and placed Christian on the margins within it. The characters’ struggles with language could be seen then as a kind of awareness of their own status as subjects to, and objects of, language. Their speech is wrong because they’ve been spoken wrong.

If the characters are positioned through language, the same can be said of the authors. As Rivera pointed, out, Butler’s work can be seen as marginal in many ways — it’s by an African-American woman, which is a marginal identity within science-fiction; and it’s science-fiction, which is a marginal genre in terms of literary credibility and academic interest. In comparison to Laura Kinsale, though, Butler is certainly more centrally positioned in numerous ways; sci-fi has more credibility than romance, and Butler is fairly well-established as an object of academic inquiry in a way Kinsale certainly isn’t (there’s a lengthy entry for “Speech Sounds” on Wikipedia; none for “Flowers From the Storm”). Marginalization and difference, for both authors, isn’t an absolute, but a function of their relative position to genre and to speech. Who is different, and from what, depends on what, or how, you’re talking about, or to.

So who is the person talked to? Arguably it’s you, the reader. In both Butler and Kinsale, language positions you as other, trying to understand, and as intimate, comprehending and empathizing. Language alienates and seduces; it conveys the terror of difference and the joy of bridging it — or, alternately, the joy of difference and the terror of bridging it. Language, that intimate betrayer, makes you each book’s monstrous invader, and each book’s lover.

Octavia Butler — Best and Worst

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So we’re in the middle of an Octavia Butler roundtable, I thought it’d be fun (maybe) for people to talk about which of her works are their favorites and which are their least favorites.

My favorite book of hers is Dawn, from her Xenogenesis series (which I’ve written about here among other places.) I just love the way it presents a standard aliens-as-colonizers narrative in such a way that the colonizers are both repulsive and sympathetic. The flatness of her prose here feels like it both conceals and accentuates the complexity of what she’s doing with empathy. It’s an interesting comparison with Gwyneth Jones, who touches on many of the same themes and ideas in a more knowing, ironized, and deliberately academic way. I love Jones, but there’s a lot to be said for Butler’s approach too, which presents everything almost transparently; it feels almost like a YA novel about growing up to be a tentacled sex monstrosity.

As for my least favorite….I read “Wild Seed” a long while back, but I found its presentation of gender difference (male, bad! female good!) to be pretty irritating. I just read Butler’s short story collection “Bloodchild”; the last story, “Martha”, in which a black female sci-fi writer is asked by God to save the world through vivid dreaming seemed both overly cute and nakedly self-aggrandizing.

For the rest of her books I’ve read, I quite like Kindred, didn’t like Fledgling much, and I think that’s all I’ve read.

So what about you all? What’s your favorite and least favorite Butler?