Tag Archives: Octavia Butler

Ancillary Imperialism

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Screen Shot 2016-05-22 at 10.00.12 PMI’m currently whipping through Ann Lecki’s Ancillary series. It’s great fun; page turning space opera adventure with twisty plots and thoughtful meditations on justice, identity and gender along the way. I love the LeGuin/Butler/Russ/etc. tradition of feminist sci-fi, and Leckie does too, so that makes me happy.

I can’t really recommend this as highly as LeGuin/Butler/Russ, though, nor with the enthusiasm I have for more contemporary writers like N.K. Jemisin and Gwyneth Jones. Leckie has plenty of smarts, and she writes well, but she’s just too…cheerful.

Some might be taken aback at the idea that the Ancillary series is cheerful. The central event of the books is when the main character—a spaceship, with connected ancillary human bodies—is forced to kill its captain, the love of its life. The ship is then dismantled, and one escaped ancillary body, now calling itself Breq, fless across the universe, consumed with sorrow.

That sorrow never goes away, nor really gets revenged (at least not after the first two volumes) which is why some folks might not immediately see the books as particularly happy. In fact, though, Breq’s personal pain becomes a kind of guarantor of a broader, more thoroughgoing justice. Breq in fact functions as a kind of superhero. She (most people in the novel default to the pronoun “she”), as a former ship’s ancillary, is incredibly physically adept, ancient and knowledgeable, and, as a former slave-body, uniquely attuned to the trials of the marginalized and oppressed.

In the second book, Ancillary Sword, especially, Breq’s unique qualifications and sympathies become a literal social justice deus ex machina. Dispatched as a powerful commander to Atoehk Station in the wake of a chaotic breakdown of the empire, where Breq encounters fairly transparent analogues of earth prejudice, ghettoes, and slave plantations. With vast political and personal abilities and an infallible sense of morality, Breq swoops in to show the locals the error of their ways. She orders repairs to the ghettoes, sparks wage negotiations on the plantations, and forces the recalcitrant citizens to confront their unjust preconceptions every one.

Part of the problem is that, as ship’s captain, Breq has access to instantaneous information from her ship which allows her to function as a semi-omniscient narrator; she knows what other characters are doing, and, often even what they are thinking and feeling. With this kind of panoramic view, Breq and the voice of the novel become almost simultaneous; Breq might as well be the author, which means that the book feels like Leckie setting up the other characters as problems to be solved by Breq. “Everything necessitates its opposite,” Breq says. “How can you be civilized if there is no uncivilized?” She’s reprimanding the Radchaai for their imperial ways…but she could be talking about the structure of the book itself, in which a plentful of foils are presented as less civilized so that Breq can show them the way.

There’s an instructive parallel here with the Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, in which creepy tentacled alien things descend from the sky after earth has destroyed itself to heal the humans and show them the path to happiness, great sex, and the acceptance of difference. The thing is, though, that Butler’s Oankali have their own selfish motivations—and also don’t exactly have the readers sympathies. The aliens are more noble and smarter than the humans—but they’re also imperial invaders, and since the reader is human, this imperial conquest comes across in sharp relief, even though in other respects the Oankali are clearly superior (morally and in other ways) to the folks they conquer.

Imperialism in, say, Afghanistan is often launched in the name of justice and mercy. If the imperialists impose women’s rights, is the imperialism justified? Isn’t there a problem with even phrasing the question that way? Butler’s novels are about this…but the Ancillary series is not, really. Leckie deals with many issues of injustice and marginalization, but she never really confronts the imperial implications of an outsider swooshing in to solve all of some backwards planet’s problems. Breq sees the problems with other power disparities, but her power as an occupier is never effectively interrogated or questioned. As a result, the problems the novel raises are resolved with an unconvincing neatness. The emperor is just a little too wise, a little too strong, and a little too good to be true.

Is Survival Always the Best Option? Pessimism, Anti-Natalism and Bloodchildren

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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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If we count not only the unusually severe harms that anybody could endure, but also the quite routine ones of ordinary human life, then we find that matters are still worse for cheery procreators. It shows that they play Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun — aimed, of course, not at their own heads, but at those of their future offspring. – David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been, p. 92

Benatar’s anti-natalism is not likely to capture the popular imagination any time, soon; probably never, I’d wager. What kind of person accepts that it would be for the best should humanity stop reproducing? But a few metaphysical defeatists do indeed take some solace in it, at least by discovering a comrade in bleakness who attempts rational arguments for our shared existential plight – justifications that aren’t reducible to some mere psychological fracture. The psychologistic dismissals of pessimism are widespread, most recently and disappointingly exemplified by writer Nic Pizzolatto in his TV series, True Detective. Disappointing, because Pizzolatto clearly shares my love for the most ontologically downtrodden horror author working today, Thomas Ligotti. Nevertheless, after 7 hours of episodes that dismantle straight guy Marty Hart’s ideas of family, hard work and law as delusional distractions which keep him from confronting the abysmal punchlines consistently delivered by pessimistic funny man Rust Cohle, and despite having the latter nearly quote Ligotti verbatim at times, Pizzolatto betrays all of this with a denouement that makes the show into little more than religious propaganda hidden in a blighted form. Rust has a metaphysical conversion in the finale after a near death visitation by his dead daughter and father: he begins to see little rays of hope peeking out of the darkness of the nighttime sky. Turns out it was the trauma of losing a child and of not having reconciled with his father – genetically, a future deadend and an unresolved past – that lead to those previously expressed dark thoughts, and not, say, facing the objective ramifications of the eternal perspective, or sub specie aeternitatis, which can only reveal an end to humanity, its concerns and all its artifacts. Rust and the audience need no longer worry about such ramifications with the hope of continuing as an immortal soul. Ligotti refers to such pessimistic flimflam as a “façade of ruins, a trompe l’oeil of bleakness.” (Ligotti, p. 147)

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Another shell game with hope is played out in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men where an inexplicable apocalyptic plague has resulted in universal infertility. Regarding anti-natalism, Peter Singer naïvely wonders, “If we would all agree to have ourselves sterilized then no sacrifices would be required — we could party our way into extinction!” Instead, the film offers a more psychologically plausible scenario: With humanity facing its true endgame, the last generation behaves like a coyote chewing through its ensnared limb, only to realize that each of its limbs is equally trapped. There’s no shared hedonistic spirit, where the world turns into one big Burning Man festival, rather the state (England) erects more barriers, whereby the more privileged, based on the same old fears of class and race, try desperately to reduce the possibilities of the less fortunate ruining whatever pleasures are left in the one thing everyone is forced to share, a moribund genetic fate. Shit never stops running down hill. What the film suggests is that thanatopobia is part of our psychological foundation. “To subdue our death anxiety, we have trumped up a world to deceive ourselves into believing that we will persist – if only symbolically – beyond the breakdown of our bodies.” (Ligotti, p. 159) When we can no longer postpone reflecting on the nothingness of the final true death to some future progeny, we can no longer rely on the comforts of a symbolic immortality. The film suggests we would behave like caged animals. But, then, one of those rays of hope shows up in the form of a pregnant woman, suggesting the human race isn’t finished yet. After which, the story becomes one of a formerly defeatist protagonist making sacrifices for the benefit of some future society that he hopes (with his re-discovered faith) will be better than the current one. The ending is ambivalent enough that the materially inclined need not feel betrayed like we were with True Detective, but it still gives the viewer an emotional escape hatch (unsurprising, I suppose, if you already knew that the book on which the movie was based is by a devout Anglican).

Likewise, thanatophobia – the maternal instinct being the relevant strain here – is the structuring motivation running through Octavia Butler’s tale of survival at any cost, Xenogenesis (aka Lilith’s Brood). After a nutwing contingent of ideologues wipes out most of the life on Earth with nuclear bombs, the few remaining humans are “rescued” by the Oankali, a parasitical species of date-raping colonialists with grotesque worm-like sensors all over their bodies who solve most of their problems with the evolved ability of genetic manipulation, a biologically inherited eugenics. Their means of survival is, like capitalism or the culture industry, to consume qua incorporation all the different beings and materials they find across the universe into their own genetic history, making the new more of the same.

What’s particularly interesting about Butler’s take on the alien invasion trope is that she focuses on a human collaborator, Lilith, and not the heroic figure of the resistance fighter. Not that there’s much possibility for resistance once Lilith is awakened from her stasis, hundreds of years after the nuclear winter. The aliens have rebuilt much of the Earth’s topography and restructured the humans to suit their expansionist goals, which amount to serving the Earth as food to their massive living spaceships and propagating a new strain of the Oankali species using the human gene pool as a reproduction machine. Use it all up and move on. The only two forms of rebellion left to the humans are bitching a lot among themselves and a noncompliance that will result in an eventual death that’s not much more than long-form suicide. Lilith chooses the symbolic immortality of humanity by helping her fellow Terrans accept the idea of humanity becoming one more admixture to the collective genetic memory of the Oankali.

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But I doubt Butler would agree with my negative description of the Oankali, since she rationalizes most of their oppressive behavior as the story progresses.  However objectionable they may at first seem, they look much more like a perfectly harmonic anarchy of superheroes by the end of the series. Thus, what begins as the subjugation of humanity turns out to be its salvation. The Oankali understand each other, other living beings and the world around them on precognitive levels, genetically and materially. They don’t need the muddying mediation of language, since they can objectively tell if no means yes. Humans might be cognitively confused, but the Oankali can see the essential truth underneath. Butler is clearly sympathetic to their collectivism, setting it up as a utopian vantage point, her sub specie aeternitatis, from which to critique what she considers humanity’s defining problem, the human contradiction. That is, humans have a biological characteristic for being hierarchical, which is seen in many other animals, too, but it results in stuff like nuclear warfare when reinforced – rather than, as Jdahya explains, “guided” – by the other major human feature, intelligence. (p. 41, Xenogenesis)

There’s a good bit of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s early pessimism in how the Oankali (and Butler, evidently) perceive humans. His version of our fall from grace: When humans were closest to our animalistic predecessors, as natural man, lacking reflection, we simply existed in the present, moment to moment, like all animals. Even though there was a natural hierarchy, some serving as food for others, all animals, including early man, remained in a satisfied state of blissful ignorance. Worms don’t think about how awful their lives under the domination of birds; both simply do what they do. But once self-consciousness set in with the development of language, humans were capable of considering whether we’re better off now than previously and of making plans. This is time consciousness, which meant that we began to think about what things were like and what they may be like in the future, providing us with the faculty of perfectibility. Perfectibility relies on a perpetual dissatisfaction with our present situation based on comparisons to our past and imagined future selves and to other humans. This alienation from the present is what led, on the one hand, to the development of, say, moral thought or imagining a better polity, and, on the other, to the fear of death, or “our subjugation to the opinion of others [that] paves the way for direct political subjugation.” (p. 69, Dienstag, whose interpretation of Rousseau I follow here)

Rousseau mused about utopian arrangements that would help shelter modern man from time consciousness, where we might rediscover the authenticity of natural man, no longer feeling enslaved to the opinions of others. But, because we can’t forget all the knowledge that’s been acquired over our history, nor can we rid ourselves of temporality, he was highly doubtful that that we could ever return to primeval happiness. But aren’t the Oankali just such a fantasy of an advanced civilization that lives in an animalistic present? Their genetic telepathy makes language otiose while giving them a complete awareness of everything around them. Because of that link, they exist in a natural collective state that is inherently cooperative and anti-competitive. They don’t use tools, but they’ve plenty of organic technology, which is capable of the most advanced scientific feats, such as space travel. And because of their genetic memory across generations as well as a control of aging, they have no anxiety about death. Perfectibility is a matter of adapting to and merging with the surrounding organic forms – of tuning into their present environment, not being alienated from it.

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Using the Oankali as an impossible fantasy for perfecting humanity seems to me at odds with the story’s other major theme, moral responsibility for the subjugated. This is why the trilogy begins to lose ideological steam as Butler becomes increasingly interested in the alien culture itself (focusing on Lilith’s brood and Oankali politics) in lieu of how the humans behave under its dominion. Making substantive points about collaboration becomes difficult when human survivors ultimately should be thanking Lilith for being their Moses to an eternal Oankali paradise. Consequently, I prefer the short story, “Bloodchild,” which Butler wrote while doing research for the trilogy. It explores many of the same themes without the wish fulfilling distractions: The Tlic, an intelligent insect-reptile hybrid with scorpion tails bond with human boys early in their life as a way of preparing them to be symbiotic incubators for the alien species’ vein-munching larvae. (Males are used as hosts, because females are needed to birth enough males to meet Tlic demand.) Humans have once again fucked up everything sometime in the past – this time, by making Earth into some slave-based dystopia. So some refugees found their way to the Tlic’s planet, where the master-slave relation proved more agreeable than back home. As in Xenogenesis, the humans survived only through a diminishment of their humanity. However, there is no potential for perfectibility by becoming part of the Tlic’s reproductive process. They have pretty much the same contradiction that we do.

It’s a coming of age story in which the adolescent Gan is getting ready to have T’Gatoi, an important Tlic bureaucrat and longterm family friend, implant her larval eggs into his bloodstream. His mother, Lien, agreed to this long ago, his father was a host before him (he carried T’Gatoi), and Gan has been raised to accept it as his purpose. The family gets plenty of food and privileges through their relation with T’Gatoi. Gan only begins to question his fate after witnessing the way the little Tlic grubs, ready to be delivered, begin to feed on their host until they can be moved to the corpse of an indigenous beast. This bloody act of physically substituting one body for another helps him realize that his existence is reduced to being a host animal. He seriously considers suicide to prevent himself from being either a mere means for T’Gatoi or the living dead existence of his brother, Qui, who’s resigned to wandering about the preserve on which they live, high on the narcotic egg juice that the Tlic supply to keep the humans living long and pacified lives. But if he doesn’t serve as host, his sister Hoa will; in fact, she even wants to. To save his sister from such a fate, he recommits himself to the task. However, he doesn’t explain it (in first person) as a mere sacrifice on his part, but as a personal desire: “[T’Gatoi:] ‘But you came to me … to save Hoa.’ [Gan:] ‘Yes.’ I leaned my forehead against her. She was cool velvet, deceptively soft. ‘And to keep you for myself.’” (Loc 340) Despite Butler’s insistence in the afterword (Loc 364) that this is a story about love, not slavery, the differential power involved makes her interpretation about as reasonable as a non-ideological romance between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson.

Similarly, when Lien shows signs of depression at having provided her children for Tlic reproduction, T’Gatoi responds by drugging her, using a sting of the Tlic’s tail and insisting that she drink more egg juice. No matter that T’Gatoi and Lien grew up together, the friendship, just like all forms of love between the two species, is corrupt and not to be completely trusted, regardless of how either side might interpret the relation. The dominating to dominated class hierarchy won’t allow anything more. Hardly limited to a slave economy, Butler makes a much better case against hierarchical discrepancies in this short story than she manages in the entire trilogy that followed. That’s because without a utopian interpretation of the alien superiors here, subjugated choice (qua love) is potently problematized, and the effects of domination are critiqued.

Although “Bloodchild” is a perfectly miserable gem that encourages a properly depressive reaction, it still focuses, just like every other example discussed so far, on the will to survive through a high sacrificial cost of some sort (in the case of Gan’s family, basic human dignity). When it comes to sowing the seeds for the future of humanity, our moral options, in fiction and for most people, are limited by a perverse optimism, which Ligotti (p. 154) summarizes as Frankenstein’s Oath: “We, as licensed protectors of the species and members in good standing of the master-class of the race, by the power invested in us by those who wish to survive and reproduce, vow to enforce the fiction that life is worth having and worth living come hell or irreparable brain damage.” As the aforementioned Benatar suggests, this Pollyannaism is justified by the low expectations of humans, sub specie humanitatis. We’re quite good at adapting to suffering and, like Gan, accommodating oppressive beliefs as our own when we have so little real choice. As he puts it, “we would not take slaves’ endorsement of their enslavement as a justification for their enslavement, particularly if we could point to some rationally questionable psychological phenomenon that explained the slaves’ contentment.” (p. 100, Benatar) He argues for another moral possibility, which should come as no surprise if you read the epigraph.

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Regarding future-life cases 1 – i.e., the potential lives of people yet to be born and who are presently non-existent – Benatar makes the case for a fundamental asymmetry in how we evaluate whether it’s good or bad to bring them into existence such that the moral view is that we never should. In one scenario, Lilith brings X into existence, in which case we would say that X experiencing pain is bad and X’s experiencing pleasure is good. That’s agreeable enough, I think, but the problem comes in when we consider what happens should Lilith choose to not bring X into existence. The absence of pain is good even without X to enjoy it. That is, independently of any pleasure, it’s better to not have X than to have X in pain. However, pleasure doesn’t work out in an equally symmetrical fashion. The absence of pleasure isn’t bad unless X exists to be deprived of it. And since X doesn’t exist in this scenario, there’s nothing bad (but nothing good, either) about non-X not experiencing pleasure (since no one’s missing anything). It would be neither better nor worse to not have X who will experience no pleasure than to have X will experience some pleasure. Because it’s good to avoid bringing into the world whatever inevitable amount of suffering that will befall X by not having X, and nothing bad (nor good) would occur should Lilith not have X, she shouldn’t have X, nor should she ever have an X or Y or Z. The same goes for all of us humans, as well as the Tlic, but probably not for the Oankali, since pain isn’t really such a bad thing for them. Therefore, the collaborators in Xenogenesis and “Bloodchild” are not doing humanity any favors by doing whatever’s necessary to survive. They’re actually bringing unnecessary harm into the world, particularly since humanity continues only under the “thumb”/tentacle/tarsus of alien oppressors.

Benatar’s argument isn’t likely to convince the optimistic majority as it leads to some really uncomfortable positions, such as a pro-death view of abortion (women shouldn’t just have a legal right to choose, but should always use that right to abort) and that we should let the species die out even in the absence of extraterrestrial domination. And it has received some stiff philosophical challenges. However, he does offer intuitive support for his asymmetry by showing how it provides a basis for other more commonly accepted asymmetries. For example, most people probably share the view that we have a duty to not bring babies into the world that we know will greatly suffer (such as a fetus that tests positive with an incurable degenerative disease), but not the inverse duty to bring happy people into the world (there’s certainly nothing immoral about a kind and caring couple deciding to not have children). Benatar’s asymmetry provides a possible reason: It’s good not to have children with incurably painful diseases, but neither bad, nor good for children who don’t exist to not experience happiness – i.e., the couple who decides to not have a child isn’t depriving a non-entity of happiness. But, even if that doesn’t sound plausible, the argument is refreshing just because it runs counter to the popular temptation to justify whatever moral position one has with a just-so story from evolutionary psychology. Could there be an ethical view less biologically adaptive than anti-natalism? If for no other reason, I appreciate the effort.

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Showing sympathy for Benatar’s conclusion is Joanna Russ’ heroine, Elaine, in the relentlessly anti-utopian We Who Are About To …. With no hope of being rescued, she lets her fellow castaways know what she thinks about their plan to rebuild civilization on the planet where they’ve crashed:

All right, so you think you have the chance of a snowball in hell. Maybe you do. But I think that some kinds of survival are damned idiotic. Do you want your children to live in the Old Stone Age? Do you want them to forget how to read? Do you want to lose your teeth? Do you want your great-grandchildren to die at thirty? That’s obscene. (p. 14)

Taking a poke at stories like “Bloodchild” where humans fleeing from Earth always manage to discover advanced alien civilizations on other planets, this new planet is a barely hospitable environment with no signs of mental life, civilized or otherwise. There are so few women and men that all the others are not going to allow Elaine (or anyone else) to opt out of reproduction. The central struggle in the book is, as Samuel Delany discusses in his introduction, whether quality of life or reproduction provides purpose to our existence. Insisting on a right to die, she’s forced to kill all but two of the group, because they chose suicide. Elaine isn’t just skeptical like Rousseau that we could revert back to the state of natural man, she has no desire to do such a thing, fearing what a return to a natural hierarchy would likely mean:

You must understand that the patriarchy is coming back, has returned (in fact) in two days. By no design. You must understand that I have no music, no books, no friends, no love. No civilization without industrialization! I’m very much afraid of death. But I must. I must. I must. Deliver me from the body of this. This body. This damned life. (p. 21)

Once alone, Elaine records her final thoughts into a recorder (the narrative conceit of the book) as she starves in a cave, waiting for the proper moment to use a poison capsule. In place of the thanatophobic maternal instinct or Stockholm syndrome as love or a utopian dream that justifies a suffering existence, this is a violent stand for human and, more specifically, female dignity.

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Footnotes:

1. Present-life cases involve the continuance of a life, the cessation of which involves a different threshold for suffering from the one regarding whether a life should never be started.

References:

Benatar, David (2008), Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. Oxford University Press.

Butler, Octavia (1996), Bloodchild and Other Stories. Open Road Integrated Media.

Butler, Octavia (1987, 1988, 1989), Xenogenesis. Guild America Books.

Dienstag, Joshua Foa (2006), Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit , Chapter 2. Princeton University Press.

Ligotti, Thomas (2010), “Sick to Death” in The Conspiracy against the Human Race, p. 147-167. Hippocampus Press.

Russ, Joanna (1976), We Who Are About To …. Wesleyan University Press.

Other Notes:

Children of Men poster is by Noah Hornstein.

Benatar diagram was borrowed from here, which also has a summary of the argument should mine not be sufficiently clear.

Finally, ‘Loc’ refers to the location in a an ebook edition I have of Bloodchild. This is different from the page numbers.

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.)

Octavia_Butler-02

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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200px-Wildseed1001

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.