Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements

by Walidah Imarisha

  “I know all that.”

  Luis looked at her over the plate. “So when are you going to do something with it? You’re her daughter.”

  Go up.

  Your mom did all those somatics and trauma weekend intensives in the Bay in the early 2000s, back before so much horrible, back when friends of hers still had that exotic thing called jobs. The workshops that left you tender and spent, ripped open and new. Back when life was still on that cusp of bougie organizer. Broke but organic honey fig lavender ice cream in Rockridge and shit on your EBT. Back before more horrible things than you could imagine happened. Nuclear warheads going off under Antarctica, no salmon for a decade and a half, the beautiful, raging, dead ocean. You did all those courses and what you knew a little bit of in the women’s therapy collective of El Cerrito in 2010—feeling warmth in your belly like tiger lilies smeared with yellow pollen from love and safety and sex, the stank meat-locker chill of cold blood when you leave through your left armpit—you know how to do it when you want to now. You close your eyes and envision those tiger lilies in your belly, the wet smell of that pond in Princeton, Massachusetts, nature sanctuary 1995, that secret Detroit river fold where you took your lover summer of 2012, yes, at the Allied Media Conference, sticky mango yellow tube top over browning humid skin, how happy you always were at that confluence of river bend, Rust Belt city, and revolutionary holiday. You can call those memories and you come rushing back, but you can also call them up, go deep inside the gut, and then spiral out through the ladder of your breath. All those years post you know how to leave your body. Now go up.

  The Piepznas, the long-lost Ukrainian roots of Kumari’s family, have always been psychic when it comes to heartbreak and disaster. Great-great-grandma Pat woke up in the middle of the night and walked down to where the pilot light had gone out and the gas was leaking in 1975 Watertown, Massachusetts, and turned it off before it could kill her daughter and husband. Screamed and threw her arm in front of her husband just before the pickup-driving drunk barreled out of the hidden driveway and would’ve killed them all. Amma knew when she was about to get dumped via text message in the middle of her fifteenth underfunded queer and trans people of color art tour, 8 a.m. in Los Angeles. Told a lover she dallied with one fall that he would hurt his new lover badly in the fourth month, that the lover would move to New York and break his heart in the ninth month. She waited to see if you would get the gift.

  Kumari, she can’t see everything, but she can see some things.

  There’s a whole grip of kids sitting on the pier, cross-legged, waiting. Some wear filter masks; some wear nothing. There are jagged blocks of ex-highway stone and pavement, all tore up.

  A lot fell apart. Some people are lucky and live in places that are too toxic to be valuable, but not enough to kill you. Not yet.

  All the parents are dead. Mostly. Plutonium leaking. Bombs set off. A weakened ozone shield. The highest concentration of all the cooperative economics and passive solar and transformative justice healing circles in the world can only do so much. War and plague and all those translucent immune systems. All those 2000s thirty-year-olds, they got sick in their forties. Died in their late fifties after a lot of community acupuncture.

  The parents died, but left them this.

  They nod and circle. Grasp hands. Close eyes. Length, width, depth. Go down. Root. Breathe.

  They don’t have a lot left, in these zones. Akwesasane, Detroit, the remnants of the East Bay, the fractured necklace of outposts, the care webs, were almost destroyed when everything was almost destroyed. They have backyards. Each other. Big bags of hoarded grains in the pantries. Mushrooms for toxins and tinctures out of looted vodka. What they have always had. And they have this. This is what is working, more than guns or negotiation, to win the war that is left.

  Amma, thank you for teaching me.

  Kumari closes her eyes, and her spirit leaves her body like all those years ago, but on purpose this time. All the way out her right foot. She can see it trickle out, on purpose. Not gray dead meat. Orange tiger lilies, smeared pollen. She is on the ceiling of the sky, watching. It is so effortless, delicious. She can taste the colors her spirit hovers in. The tongue tip of that lavender cloud, the ways all the colors taste and smell when there are no words to bind them. She can feel it. Then she moves.

  It’s corny, right? The spirit plane. But really, it’s just familiar. The place you go every night when you dream. The place you go when you get on your knees, to that rickety little fruit crate altar, all splintery with cloth from a thrift store called Courage My Love in Kensington Market, Toronto, and an assembly of brown girl, corner-store botanica saints and novelties.

  She feels them too. Not alone. The difference with this one is that no one is alone. Some were raped. Some were just taught how to do this. Maybe the weakened ozone shield, the radiation, all the planet’s open trauma, has been birthed in them too. It is so much easier than it used to be to come out the top of the forehead.

  There are still kids being raped. There are still prisons, functioning in the middle of the gaping maw of utter disaster. There are still bombs being made.

  This is what they have.

  Back in 2010, Morgan aunty wrote that article for Amma’s book, about telling a story that was still being written. It is. Still being written.

  Cleveland? Someone thinks or feels toward her. She experiences it as peacock feathers, azure breath, the ghost of a word.

  Yes, she feels back. Lavender simple pulse of yes from breastbone.

  They move.

  Star Wars and the American Imagination

  Mumia Abu-Jamal

  When Star Wars premiered, in 1977, it swept the nation like a fever.

  Lines circled blocks, and before long it was more than a movie—it was a craze.

  TV commercials hawked wares emblazoned with Star Wars figures, available from McDonald’s—“Get yours now!”

  Before all was said and done, the movie grossed nearly half a billion dollars. That’s “billion”—with a “b.”

  I was, however, out of the loop.

  In 1977, I was in my twenty-third year of life, and the targeted demographic was preteen and teen, rather than post-teen.

  Besides, I was more of a Star Trek guy (and it didn’t hurt that one of the stars of the Trekkie universe was a Black beauty who blazed the screen like a dark, luscious comet every time she appeared).8 That said, I watched with fascination as the lines grew, and other film companies tried to copy the moneymaking magic of the Star Wars franchise (they usually failed miserably, however).

  Why did Star Wars strike such a deep and jangling nerve? Why did it become a craze, one that seemed to surprise everyone—critics, the movie’s executives, all, it seemed, except producer George Lucas?

  The nation had just recently been forced to submit to a seemingly uncivilized (as in low-tech) enemy, and it faced the generational rebellion of the ’60s.

  Vietnam syndrome permeated the entire culture, not just the political elites.

  The younger were virtually uniformly antiwar in their orientation, and a counterculture was sweeping the nation, changing dress, hairstyles, sexual mores, food consumption, and the way national minorities were perceived and perceived themselves.

  In short, the land was in the midst of a cultural and political rebellion, sparked, in large part, by resistance to an unpopular war.

  An American president (R. M. Nixon) had recently resigned several months after his vice president, and some of his top aides (including Attorney General John Mitchell) were sent to prison, the human detritus of the Watergate scandal.

  In this context, why would a movie, even one set in another world, find appeal when the heroes were a ragtag bunch of rebels, decidedly low-tech, fighting against a fearsome, militarily invincible empire?

  Part of the success of Star Wars was its undeniable youth appeal, yet there must be deeper reasons for its cultural resonance.

  America, the Empire, didn’t like its role
(at least among its young). It wanted to reimagine itself as the ragtag band, fighting against great odds, against an evil empire.

  It imagined itself as it wanted to be, as it had claimed to be in its infancy against a cruel and despotic king in the late eighteenth century.

  It reshaped itself into the rebels, not the imperial overlords.

  It shaped itself as oppressed, fighting for freedom.

  But America, like every nation, has its ages of psychosis. It has fits of indecision and periods of self-delusion.

  Consider how presidents spoke movingly of “freedom from tyranny” while personally holding hundreds of men, women, and children in slavery.

  Or imagine Jefferson, the Sage of Monticello, who was the father of half-Black children, at the same moment as he wrote, in his only book Notes on the State of Virginia, that Black people were essentially nonhuman, a species related to the orangutan. (Does this mean that he saw himself as being into bestiality? Or did this mean he really thought his children were, well, half monkey?).

  Americans, like any people, are subject to delusions.

  Was this fascination with Star Wars and the national identification with the rebels one of them?

  For generations, Americans have declined to define themselves as imperialists. That’s what our enemies called us. That wasn’t what we called ourselves.

  We were for freedom. We were for self-determination. We were good. We were white (mostly).

  We were Luke Skywalker, not Darth Vader, and definitely not the cruel, warped emperor!

  Yet aficionados of the Star Wars saga know that Luke and Darth were, after all, intimately related.

  Darth’s infamous line at their light saber battle has become a cultural byword: “I am your father, Luke!”

  It is a measure of Lucas’s genius that he scripts that moment of self-realization, of self-discovery and revelation.

  In the grisly aftermath of a war that tore millions from the face of Asia, all to cover for the corporate exploitation of Vietnam’s bauxite and other natural resources, the imperial shock trooper, the imperial, metallic death’s hand, was father to the rebel.

  They were, in fact, more than related.

  In truth, they were one.

  That is the meaning of Star Wars: we were rebels; we are Empire.

  And like all rebellious children, we were but going through a phase.

  We are getting ready for adulthood, after we sowed a few wild oats.

  Once grown, we put on our imperial uniform, and bowed to the Empire.

  “It is your destiny.”

  Right? Unless—

  8 To the uninitiated, the author here refers to actress Nichelle Nichols, who performed as Lt. Uhura of the Trek bridge crew —Eds.

  The Only Lasting Truth

  The Theme of Change in the Works of Octavia E. Butler9

  Tananarive Due

  “I’m a 46-year-old writer who can remember being a 10-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an 80-year-old writer. I’m also comfortably asocial—a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles—a pessimist if I’m not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.”

  —Octavia E. Butler, “About the Author,”

  Mind of My Mind

  If I squint my eyes just right, I can almost see her right here in this room. An aspiring writer like all of you—a gangly giant who’d been six feet tall since she was fifteen after a growth spurt that horrified her, probably sitting in the back row, so shy that you’d have to move your head closer to hear her speak, because she would cover her mouth with her hand.

  That’s how pioneering science fiction legend Harlan Ellison remembers Octavia Estelle Butler when he met her in 1970, the year he introduced her to the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers workshop—and the rest is history.

  Octavia was dyslexic, the only child of a housekeeper, whose father died when she was a baby. She grew up in poverty. Seeking escape from the constraints of her life when she was twelve, Octavia started watching a movie called Devil Girls From Mars, and she had the epiphany so many of us have experienced: “Hell, I can write better than that!”

  Thank goodness for bad science fiction movies.

  In her novel Parable of the Sower, and in other works, Octavia writes about characters who are “empaths” or suffer from “hyper-empathy”—a condition that forces them to suffer the pain of others, often to paralysis. As a writer who suffered from depression in addition to physical challenges, Octavia did not have to stretch her imagination too far to imagine the plight of characters like Lauren Olamina.

  “I can remember getting very upset over things that weren’t upsetting to anyone else,” she told Terry Gross in a 1993 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air. “Most kids empathize too much at some point in their lives and are forced to grow out of it. My character [Olamina] is a person who can’t grow out of it.”

  And Octavia never grew out of her own brand of hyper-empathy. Like Ellison, her mentor, Octavia was deeply offended by the societal ills she saw around her: poverty, racism, political oppression, and disregard for our natural environment.

  She loved this planet, but her vision stretched far beyond it. Not only was the premise of the Earthseed religion her character created in her Parable series pointing toward a destiny in the stars, Butler’s personal email address included Butler8Star, which I see as her own private commitment to her vision of a different place. A new place.

  A change from everything we have known.

  • • •

  What is speculative fiction? This umbrella term refers to science fiction, fantasy, and horror—the fiction of fantastic scenarios and world-building. The Passage by Justin Cronin is speculative fiction, for example, depicting a world that is not quite our own, and creatures that don’t exist in the world as we know it. H.P. Lovecraft. Edgar Allen Poe. Kurt Vonnegut. George Orwell. Ursula K. Le Guin. Stephen King. All well-known authors of speculative fiction.

  Speculative fiction by black authors enjoyed a surge of interest at the end of the twentieth century. If you’d like to see a sampling of speculative short stories by black authors, check out the Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction From the African Diaspora and Dark Matter II: Reading the Bones anthologies, published in 2000 and 2004 respectively, edited by Sheree Renée Thomas. These anthologies include work from authors as disparate as Butler and W. E. B. DuBois—who wrote his own post-apocalyptic story at the turn of the century as a way to examine issues of race.

  Like Butler, DuBois—a cofounder of the NAACP, an early vocal advocate for civil rights and a crusader against lynching—uses a science fiction premise in his 1920 short story “The Comet” in the hope of planting the seeds of change in his present.

  Walter Mosley declares in a compilation of transcripts from the National Black Writers Conference at New York’s Medgar Evers College, entitled Meditations and Ascensions: Black Writers on Writing (2008): “The only form of fiction that I know of that is truly revolutionary is science fiction and speculative fiction. . . . Not only is it revolutionary to mean to say it overthrows a way of thinking; it also puts pressure on you to figure out, what are you going to do now that you’re here?”

  I first met Octavia Butler at a speculative fiction conference at Clark Atlanta University in the spring of 1997, “The African-American Fantastic Imagination: Explorations in Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror.” At the time, I had published only one book, The Between, a novel of alternate realities that had been favorably reviewed in the New York Times. On the basis of my entry in the field as an author of speculative fiction, Clark sent an invitation to my publisher that was tied up for months before it finally made it to me.

  I didn’t know all of the authors invited, but I knew Octavia Butler and Steven Barnes by reputation. Butler was an author whom a white male writer friend in college had told me I had to read, and I knew Barnes from his television work on The Outer Limits. Other atten
dees were the pioneering writer Samuel R. Delany and Jewelle Gomez.

  Octavia was gracious and pleasant, having learned to shed much of the shyness of her earlier years in her public interactions. As Steven Barnes—who would later become my husband—said of Octavia in an interview in Crisis in May 2006: “She definitely learned how to relate to the public more fluidly and openly as she became aware of the way the public saw her. The science fiction field was never as open to her as the feminist and black female readers were. They opened her up and set her free.”

  Octavia, like all of us, was glad to have found a literary home. The participants of that conference posed for a photo together that was later published in Locus magazine—and in 2000, when Steve and I visited Octavia’s home near Seattle to interview her for a magazine story (and a long visit in her kitchen, where she gave us lentil soup and fresh bread)—I noticed that photo of all of us posing at Clark Atlanta framed on her wall.

  “My other family,” Octavia told us warmly.

  Steve had known Octavia for twenty years—she never drove, so he used to give her rides and exchange dinner invitations with her early in her writing life—but I primarily saw her at conferences during a bubble of time when we felt like a “community” of black speculative fiction writers. Octavia returned to that notion of family in March 2003 at a Howard University conference entitled “New Frontiers: Blacks in Science Fiction.” Steve and I appeared with Butler and acclaimed fantasist Nalo Hopkinson.

  “I think there is something very interesting about the four of us sitting here,” Octavia said. “Okay, we’re all black writers, three of us are female, but I think if you gave all four of us a single topic, you’d come up with four very, very different books. I think it’s neat the way we bounce off of each other when we’re talking, and it might be the same when we’re writing. I’m not trying to write like Steve, or he like me or whatever, but somehow it helps that they’re here.”10