Tag Archives: Kindred

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.

 

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Ugliness, Empathy, and 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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How do critiques of identification complicate Western models of empathy? What might empathy look like, and produce, when it doesn’t require identification? What about more difficult cases in which the reader is required to empathize with the oppressor, or with more complicated protagonists? – Megan Boler, “The Risks of Empathy”

She was not afraid. She had gotten over being frightened by “ugly” faces long before her capture. The unknown frightened her. The cage she was in frightened her. She preferred becoming accustomed to any number of ugly faces to remaining in her cage. – Octavia Butler, Dawn

I didn’t agree to participate in this roundtable on Octavia Butler because I enjoy her writing, but rather because I don’t. My admiration for her storytelling is nothing short of begrudging; I have to work at it. And I’ve always been careful to attribute my resistance to matters of personal taste. Butler is, after all, a beloved award-winning writer in science fiction, a pioneer who helped open a space for communities of black speculative fiction writers that I adore, including Nnedi Okorafor, N.K. Jemison, Tannarive Due, and Zetta Elliot. So if I find the slug-like aliens in Dawn nauseating or if the pedophilic undertones in Fledgling nearly keep me from finishing the novel, then I assume that’s my problem.

My displeasure doesn’t prevent me from recognizing Butler’s importance in my African American literature courses and I teach her fiction whenever I can, with her 1979 novel Kindred being the most popular. Students are eager to embrace the story’s invitation to see the interconnected perils of slave resistance and survival through Dana’s modern eyes, grateful that the narrative’s historical corrective comes at the comfortable distance of science fiction tropes. The book raises provocative questions for debate, although I admit to being troubled by how often readers come away from Kindred convinced that they now know what it was like to be enslaved. Too often, their experience with the text is cushioned by what Megan Boler characterizes as “passive empathy”: “an untroubled identification that [does] not create estrangement or unfamiliarity. Rather, passive empathy [allows] them familiarity, ‘insight’ and ‘clear imagination’ of historical occurrences – and finally, a cathartic, innocent, and I would argue voyeuristic sense of closure (266).

Much of Butler’s fiction doesn’t work this way, however. Estrangement and unfamiliarity, particularly in relation to ugliness and the repulsiveness of the alien body, are central to her work. And this is what gets me. The non-human creatures she imagines make me cringe and their relationships with humans in her fiction are even harder to stomach. My first reaction to the Tlic race in Butler’s 1984 short story, “Bloodchild,” was disgust, made all the more unnerving because of the great care Butler seemed to take in the description of the strange species; the serpentine movements of their long, segmented bodies resemble giant worms with rows of limbs and insect-like stingers.
 

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It doesn’t matter to me that the Tlic can speak English and feel pleasure and build governing institutions, not when they look like that. In the story, they use humans of both sexes to procreate in what initially appears to be a mutually beneficial, parasitic relationship, at least until the main character, a young human male named Gan, begins to question the status quo. Butler’s description of Gan curled up alongside T’Gatoi, the Tlic who has adopted him and his family, is not really an image I want to grapple with for long:

T’Gatoi and my mother had been friends all my mother’s life, and T’Gatoi was not interested in being honored in the house she considered her second home. She simply came in, climbed onto one of her special couches, and called me over to keep her warm. It was impossible to be formal with her while lying against her and hearing her complain as usual that I was too skinny.

“You’re better,” she said this time, probing me with six or seven of her limbs. “You’re gaining weight finally. Thinness is dangerous.” The probing changed subtly, became a series of caresses. (4)

T’Gatoi uses her authority as a government official to protect humans (called Terrans) in exchange for the use of their bodies as reproductive hosts. The balance of power between the two species tips back and forth in the interest of self-preservation and free will. Gan isn’t sure he wants to be impregnated – is he a partner or a pet? – but he ultimately submits under the terms of a negotiated relationship that takes into account both his discomfort with the T’Gatoi’s rules and his reluctant longing for her affection. T’Gatoi, too, has desires and cares for Gan. She also wants her Tlic children nurtured in a loving home if they are to survive. And while I admit that I can relate to these feelings and conflicted needs, this is a kind of intimacy that I’m willing to share with a pregnant man, not with a bug.*

Boler asserts that Western models of empathy are based on acts of “consuming” or universalizing differences so that the Other can be judged worthy of our compassion. Despite our best efforts, we end up using the Other “as a catalyst or a substitute” for ourselves in order to ease our own fears and vulnerabilities, rather than actively working to change the assumptions that shape our perspective (268). I’m in awe, then, of the way Butler’s science fiction heightens readers’ physical discomfort with characters like the Tlic in order to rebuff passive empathy and other modes of identification that absolve us of the need for critical self-reflection. T’Gatoi is the Other that I can never fully know. I can’t easily reduce her experience to my own, but I also can’t deny the prickle of recognition that comes from the emotional struggle between the Tlic and the Terrans. When Gan’s mother jokes, “I should have stepped on you when you were small enough,” I recognize her bitterness as a survival strategy, an attempt to upset a social hierarchy and dissociate from the Not Me.

So when I recoil at every reminder of T’Gatoi’s “ugliness,” I wonder what this emotion says about my approach to difference in society and in myself. How does my reaction to the unfamiliar outside the story, my unwillingness to engage the socially embodied strangeness of 2014, compare to the blustery panic of creepy crawly things I want to step on because they are small enough? (And what about those times when the bug is me?)

“Bloodchild” turns my personal readerly aversion into an ideological dilemma and advances the more challenging work of what Boler describes as “testimonial reading”:

Recognizing my position as ‘judge’ granted through the reading privilege, I must learn to question the genealogy of any particular emotional response: my scorn, my evaluation of others’ behaviour as good or bad, my irritation – each provides a site for interrogation of how the text challenges my investments in familiar cultural values. As I examine the history of a particular emotion, I can identify the taken-for-granted social values and structures of my own historical moment which mirror those encountered by the protagonist. Testimonial reading pushes us to recognize that a novel or biography reflects not merely a distant other, but analogous social relations in our own environment, in which our economic and social positions are implicated. (266-7)

Boler’s work on emotion and reading practices draws on her experience teaching Art Spiegelman’s Maus and other fictional works about historical events to make her case. But Butler’s science fiction thought-experiments also provide a framework for a mode of bearing witness that is just as complicated .
 

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In the 1987 novel, Dawn, the first book of Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy (retitled Lilith’s Brood), the main character models the task of testimonial reading against the “affective obstacles” that hinder awareness of “the power relations guiding her response and judgments” (265). These obstacles initially come in the form of extraterrestrials called the Oankali whose bodies are entirely covered with writhing, grayish-white sensory tentacles. They have rescued groups of human survivors, including a black woman named Lilith, in the wake of nuclear destruction on Earth. Awakened on their ship years later, Lilith is required to remaining in her room with one of the ugly creatures until she can look at them without panic. The aliens know that before Lilith can interact with their society without harming herself or others, she must grapple with her revulsion at their physical appearance:

[The Oankali] walked across the room to the table platform, put one many-fingered hand on it, and boosted himself up. Legs drawn against his body, he walked easily on his hands to the center of the platform. The whole series of movements was so fluid and natural, yet so alien that it fascinated her.

Abruptly she realized he was several feet closer to her. She leaped away. Then, feeling utterly foolish, she tried to come back. …

“I don’t understand why I’m so… afraid of you,” she whispered. “Of the way you look, I mean. You’re not that different. There are – or were – life forms on Earth that looked a little like you.”

He said nothing.

She looked at him sharply, fearing he had fallen into one of his long silences. “Is it something you’re doing?” she demanded, “something I don’t know about?”

“I’m here to teach you to be comfortable with us,” he said. “You’re doing very well.”

She did not feel she was doing well at all. “What have others done?”

“Several have tried to kill me.”

She swallowed. It amazed her that they had been able to bring themselves to touch him. “What did you do to them?

“For trying to kill me?”

“No, before – to incite them.”

“No more than I’m doing to you now.” (16-17)

Entire chapters are spent detailing the process through which Lilith learns to view the Oankali named Jdahya without fear. Their exchange invites comparisons with the xenophobia and prejudice of our own world, of course; Lilith’s dark skin could easily elicit similar reactions. Untangling the “genealogy” of her emotional responses becomes even more daunting once she learns that the aliens have three sexes and the ability to manipulate the genetic material of other beings. She is repulsed one moment, curious the next. Unable to look away, she demands answers from Jdahya until her body’s refusal to accept what he is becomes physically and emotionally exhausting. It is then that she begins to ask questions of herself. “God, I’m so tired of this… Why can’t I stop it?” (26).

Butler turns Lilith’s reactionary apprehension into a more productive space for her and for us as readers so that we may all think more critically about the larger forces at work in our judgments of others. To me this is what makes Butler an exceptional storyteller, whether I like her writing or not. Equally important is the fact that Lilith’s encounter with this single Oankali is only a first step. She’ll have to leave the room, meet others, apply what she has learned. For my own part, I’m now half way through Adulthood Rites, the second book in Lilith’s Brood and it is slow going, but I want to finish. The story has been difficult and deeply rewarding for me in a way that I’ve come to expect from Octavia Butler, a reading experience not unlike the probing of limbs that turns to a series of caresses.

 

*Nnedi Okorafor also explores dynamics of power through human companionship with an insect-like robot in her terrific short story, “Spider the Artist.”

Works Cited

Boler, Megan. “The Risks of Empathy: Interrogating Multiculturalism’s Gaze.” Cultural Studies. 11 (2) 1997: 253-73.

Butler, Octavia. Bloodchild and Other Stories. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1996.

—–. Lilith’s Brood: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago. New York: Warner Books, 2000.

Alien Narratives

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139906In Gwyneth Jones’ White Queen, a near future earth is invaded by a handful of aliens, called Aleutians. The Aleutians look almost exactly like humans. This results in confusion. On the one hand, the Aleutians themselves — who all share a kind of genetic consciousness with each other and their ancestors and their tools — assume that humans, too, are part of the one collective, and so are beings exactly themselves. On the other hand, the humans assume that the Aleutians are radically different from themselves — super-powered conqueror-saviors.

In Decoding Gender in Science Fiction, Brian Attebery argues that this split is indicative of, and thematizes, two of science-fictions strongest tendencies. On the one hand, science-fiction projects the self onto the cosmos — it turns space and time, future and past, into human metaphor. At the same time, science-fiction is built out of separating the self and the other, human and alien. The genre is therefore both obsessively totalizing and obsessively binary.

What Attebery does not say, but which seems clear upon reading White Queen, is that the misunderstanding between Aleutian and humans is deliberately replicated in the experience of reader and text. Attebery’s description of the book, his isolating of its metaphors and themes, is very lucid — but reading the book is anything but. Rather, both Aleutians and humans remain, throughout the course of the novel, a mystery, or a riddle, or often a joke. Both Aleutian and human society come into focus to some extent — you realize that Agnes, the first alien we see, is not actually a girl, for example; you learn more or less the nature of Johnny Guglioli’s disease. But is the Aleutian homeworld a ship behind the moon? Does that question even make any sense? Why in the last pages of the book does the human diplomat Ellen but on fake breasts and buttocks when she last meets with Agnes (now named Clavel) and why does he take that as a reprimand? What does happen to Braemar and Johnny after their first faster than light trip? Did they even go on a faster than light trip? What is the deal with the alien’s sanitary pads? And so on and on; like the aliens, or the humans, the book seems to tell you things only to emphasize its unknowability.

Eve Sedgwick argues that realist novels function as a kind of bargain of knowledge and power. The author reveals the world to the reader; in exchange for the reader’s belief in the authors knowledge, the reader is granted the same omniscience, the same sense of knowing. If that’s the case in realist fiction, it seems even more the case in sci-fi. You enter Jones’ novel knowing nothing; your map of the world is useless and even, in terms of the aliens, worse than useless. But as you read you know…and even the not-knowing is a kind of guarantor of knowing, the way that the photograph cut off by the frame is a guarantor or earnest that the rest of the world must be there. The Aleutians are more real because they are strange and you can’t know them; which is to say your not-knowing ensures the worth of what you know. The totalizing experience of the fiction is made more total because of the bifurcated strangeness; or, if you prefer, the bifurcated strangeness is enabled by the illusion of totality.

You can see this mechanism at work, too, in stories with what you might call meta-frames. The film John Carter is one; the hero flies across the cosmos to another body and another world of adventure, leaving behind only a diary to be read by his mousy relation. Octavia Butler’s Kindred is another; a black woman in the 1970s inexplicably finds herself falling backwards in time to the early 1800s, called back to involuntarily help her white slave-owning ancestor. In both these cases, the protagonist’s journey enacts both the immersive experience and the alienating strangeness of narrative; the sense of exhilarating, horrified disconnection (as when John Carter discovers his jumping ability on Mars), and the sense of exhilarated, horrified belonging. (as when Dana realizes she is beginning to think of the slave plantation as home.)

It’s perhaps telling that one of the last things Jones tells us about the aliens in White Queen is that we don’t know how they read.

Whatever the Aleutian did to serve as “reading,” it didn’t work like the human version. Perhaps his eyes sent out little mote to reconstruct, chemically, the ur-hieroglyphics behind the letters: something mind-boggling like that. Their physiology, especially the neurological part, was a bizarre mystery.

The joke (and Jones is almost always joking) perhaps being that human neurology is, also, pretty much a bizarre mystery — in describing their unlikeness to us, she is describing their likeness — and doing it even as we, Aleutians and non, read and understand, and don’t understand our understanding (or, for that matter, our not understanding.)

Not understanding the Aleutians reading is very similar to the way that the humans do not understand the Aleutian telepathy — a telepathy which Jones suggests may be more like non-verbal cues, or plot devices, or watching a silent movie, than like actually reading thoughts. Perhaps, too, as I’ve suggested, telepathy might be like reading, or any other entertainment delivery system, where another’s thoughts become your thoughts in a sharing of the minds. Such sharing can be a radical, totalizing sameness, or a radical recognition of difference and alienation. The two consciousnesses become one, or the unified one recognizes its own internal difference. The alien is recognized as the self, and/or the self is recognized as alienated. Every fiction is an Aleutian, the us that is and isn’t.