Shori is badly burned, naked, and hungry. Over the course of the novel, Shori learns that she is the result of a genetic manipulation—partially human to give the Ina more melanin, so they can venture out in daylight, thereby redefining their concepts of who and what they are. But she is a target of her own people, who are offended by her existence and consider her a mutant.
Once again, Butler points to change through blending, urging us to learn to accept those differences between us.
• • •
Doro, a central figure in Butler’s Patternist series, is a genetic fluke. He alone has the ability to shift his essence from one body to the next—making him a very dangerous telepathic vampire. In order to survive, he must feed from his offspring.
But simultaneously, over four thousand years he has conducted a carefully controlled breeding program to preserve telepathic and other gifts in a scattered population of very psychologically unstable descendants. His ultimate quest is to find a “latent”—as his subjects are called when they have potential but have not yet made the painful transition into their abilities—who can emerge as the most powerful since him.
This novel signals a fundamental change. For the first time, there is a telepathic pattern that ties the telepaths to a central figure, the beginning of normalcy and a new day for the beleaguered “latent” population struggling to master their gifts instead of being mastered by them.
The creator of that pattern is a character named, not surprisingly, Mary.
In holding so many others to her telepathic breasts, Mary is the ultimate mother figure. But as is often the case in Butler’s work, there is also moral ambiguity. As with the vampires in Fledgling, Mary has intractable power over the others in her Pattern, so although there are benefits to her mental prison (for example, more control over their gifts, combined strength), a prison is still a prison.
Mary overtakes the amoral Doro—who lived with no concern for anyone but himself and his genetic research—and signals a new day.
But clearly even the new day is fraught with potential pitfalls.
He or she who holds ultimate power also holds ultimate power for abuse.
As Butler wrote in “Earthseed: Books of the Living” in Parable of the Sower:
Any Change may bear seeds of benefit.
Seek them out.
Any Change may bear seeds of harm. Beware.
God is infinitely malleable.
God is Change.
• • •
Butler’s seminal novel Kindred, perhaps the most-read of her work, offers readers a unique glimpse into the antebellum slavery period in the South by introducing a black female character, Dana, who is whisked back from the present—or, in this case, 1976—through time because of an unconscious summoning of a child ancestor who is drowning.
At least that’s how they first meet. Over the course of the novel, Dana will find herself unexpectedly transported back several times and will herself suffer the indignities of slavery.
The theme of change is persistent in the reading of Kindred, even if it is not as clearly delineated as the focus of a religion, as it is in Parable of the Sower.
There is also a through-the-looking-glass aspect of Kindred that invites the reader to undergo a psychological shift, or transformation, as the moral complexity of Dana’s predicament—and, thus, the moral predicament of all of the players in the Old South—becomes more and more apparent.
Kindred, with its contemporary setting in Southern California, invites the reader to reflect on change from the opening pages. Like many of Butler’s characters, Dana is in an interracial relationship with a white man, this one named Kevin. Even readers who overlook the significance of an interracial relationship in a nation where such relationships were once considered illegal, the social changes entailed in this relationship become much more obvious when Kevin too travels back in time with Dana.
Suddenly the white man who was one’s husband and soul mate is forced to play the part of a slave master when he tries to protect her in the thick of slavery in Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Unbeknownst to him, Dana is being summoned by a child, Rufus Weylan, whom we later learn is Dana’s ancestor.
But here’s the quandary: this helpless young child Dana finds drowning in the river is going to grow up to rape a black woman who began as his childhood friend—which is how Dana’s genetic line begins.
As Dana is forced back to the South several times, she sees the changes in Rufus, from young child to an arrogant, violent grown man she would rather kill than save. But how can she? If she kills Rufus—or prevents the rape of her black female ancestor—she will never be born.
This, of course, is the moral dilemma all blacks face in their examination of our past in slavery—and, to me, represents one of the most brilliant acts of literary sleight of hand on Octavia’s part. After generations of heartache and discrimination, Black Americans as a collective are also among the most powerful and affluent Blacks in the world. We too were ultimately the beneficiaries of slavery.
So Kindred not only recounts a horrible tale of violence, slavery, torture and rape—subjects Octavia is never shy with—it also invites the reader to change his or her perspective on the moral lines dividing whites and blacks when the subject of slavery is examined.
The intricate social webs between the racial groups during the practice of slavery have never been purely black and white. For example, slaves who had opportunities to run away did not—most slaves did not run away—and not simply out of fear of capture or lack of opportunities. In many cases, the reason not to run was much simpler: they didn’t want to leave their families and loved ones. And, yes, others did not venture to run because of fear of the unknown. Or, no matter how uncomfortable the notion, there was, at times, genuine affection for slave masters, a kind of systemic Stockholm Syndrome that those of us who haven’t experienced slavery will never understand.
My father—who is our family genealogist—delighted me through childhood with his story about how a group of my relatives in Indiana, freed Blacks, set up their own thriving community; it thrived so much, in fact, that neighboring white farmers grew jealous and attacked them. This is a familiar story, as in a massacre in Rosewood, Florida, but this story had a very different ending. Instead of politely dying as they were expected, these black settlers raced to a round house. With the women loading rifles, men shooting from the windows or wielding axes in the doorway, they actually fought their white attackers off. And instead of being burned to the ground, lynched, or thrown in jail, the blacks were resettled by the governor, with their own tract of land called Lyles Station, which exists to this day.
My father’s story is one of empowerment. There is an element of victimhood—the black settlers are treated unfairly—and victimhood carries its own sense of moral elevation, in a pinch. But beyond victimhood the story also represents a rare moment of empowerment, which to me, as a child, was far more satisfying than victimhood. If I had been descended from the settlers of Rosewood, I would have felt pride in them too—but there is far more pride in the notion of fighting back and being victorious.
Well, recently my father gave me a story from our lineage that left a very different moral taste in my mouth. One of his cousins was teasing him after recently learning that he is descended from a slave owner in the Carolinas.
Why is that news? Because this slave owner was not white—he was Black.
Bye-bye, moral superiority. While I might be able to rationalize how rare black slave owners were, they did, in fact, exist. I’d known this before, but to have a black slave owner in your own family line—through marriage, I understand—is a different matter. Slavery was not entirely an issue of race, even if race was the primary component. In my mind, my family story is no longer simply an issue of black and white.
Which brings me to the brilliant transformation I think Octavia calls upon from all of her readers of Kindred: Dana is a victim, yes. She is transported through time against her
will. Her female forebear was victimized and raped by the slavery system. Yet Butler forces us to reflect on Dana’s culpability in not helping to prevent the rape—killing the dragon while he’s young—and thus erasing her own family line. She is a caregiver to both Alice, the black victim, and Rufus, the slave master.
Dana finally kills Rufus when she feels threatened by rape, but all of her education, knowledge, and savvy still can’t prevent what happened. That is, she can’t prevent the tragedy of her future conception.
Dana and Kevin say quite often that they can’t change history—but the reader is left with the niggling notion that, well, actually, Dana could have changed history. But despite the horrors and heartache to Alice, her Black female forebear, Dana and Rufus were sucked into a very odd, codependent dynamic not dissimilar from power dynamics in Butler’s Patternist and Xenogenesis novels—that resulted in no change to history at all.
Except for the physical changes to Dana.
As Hampton points out in Changing Bodies, the transformation in Kindred is a physical one for Dana—as symbolized by her permanent injury she sustains during her time travel: she loses her arm, literally sacrificing her flesh as a cost for the experience and the memory.
• • •
One Sunday morning in February 2006, when a magazine reporter emailed me to say she’d heard Octavia Butler had died, I didn’t want to believe it. I saw nothing in the news or on the Web.
I called Octavia’s home number and listened with a pounding heart as her phone rang. Once. Twice. Three times. I delighted for just a bare instant when the ringing stopped and I heard her voice. On her answering machine. Already distant, clearly a recording.
Steve and I called Harlan Ellison—who had discovered Octavia so many years ago—and he later called us back to confirm her death.
So many times since then, I’ve thought of the other times I had called her—never enough, it turns out—when I tried to make our conversations brief, never able to fight the certainty that I was pulling her away from a stream of brilliant thoughts. Once she apologized for the loud music playing in the background. It turned out that Octavia, like me, enjoyed listening to music while she wrote. How many times did I hesitate to dial her number simply because I didn’t want to disturb her?
She was fighting a cold when I saw her in Seattle at the “Black to the Future” science fiction conference in June 2004, when she was happy to meet our new baby, Jason, but she didn’t want to give him germs. She was sick again when I saw her in New York for the Yari Yari Pamberi International Conference of Literature by Women of African Ancestry in October that same year.
I cautioned her to be careful about too much travel. Subsequently, I have learned that Octavia was far more ill than I knew.
Like most people, I cannot say that I knew Octavia well. But in the too-brief time I knew her, I saw many sides of her. Her fierce disappointment with humankind’s worse habits. Her girlish side. Her goddess side. Her insecure side.
The Christmas before she died, we sent Octavia a photo of our son, Jason, on Santa’s lap and said we hoped she was feeling better. Octavia could not have been feeling well when she sent out her own cards that year, but hers were always among the first to arrive. She wrote to us: “Have a creative, prosperous New Year down there in California where it’s WAY too warm.”
I must call her soon, I thought many times. I must call Octavia.
But what if she is writing?
9 Slightly edited transcript of a lecture given at Antioch University Los Angeles, December 2010.
10 Quoted in Gregory Jerome Hampton, Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler: Slaves, Aliens, and Vampires (New York: Lexington Books, 2014), 141.
11 Interview in American Visions magazine, October 2000, 27.
12 “Butler, Octavia; Imago,” Literature Annotations, Literature, Arts and Medicine Database, NYU School of Medicine, http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/Annotation?action=view&annid=222.
Outro
adrienne maree brown
We hold so many worlds inside us. So many futures. It is our radical responsibility to share these worlds, to plant them in the soil of our society as seeds for the type of justice we want and need. It has been beautiful to gather these stories, collaboratively edit them, and begin to understand not just the challenges we face or the enemies we need to transform, but the abundance of imagination we in the social justice realm hold, and must cultivate.
We see ourselves as part of a growing wave of folks connecting science fiction (or what we’re calling visionary fiction) with social justice. Science fiction is the perfect “exploring ground,” as it gives us the opportunity to play with different outcomes and strategies before we have to deal with the real-world costs.
In the process of hearing and working these stories, we developed tools, frameworks, and principles that would help us to bring the work off of the page and into our lives. We wanted to end this anthology with an offering of three of these tools. The first is visionary fiction, which Walidah spoke about in the introduction. The elements of visionary fiction are that it: explores current social issues through the lens of sci-fi; is conscious of identity and intersecting identities; centers those who have been marginalized; is aware of power inequalities; is realistic and hard but hopeful; shows change from the bottom up rather than the top down; highlights that change is collective; and is not neutral—its purpose is social change and societal transformation. The stories we tell can either reflect the society we are a part of or transform it. If we want to bring new worlds into existence, then we need to challenge the narratives that uphold current power dynamics and patterns. We call upon science fiction, fantasy, horror, magical realism, myth, and everything in between as we create and teach visionary fiction.
The second tool is emergent strategy. A strategy is a set of plans toward an action. Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns emerge from a series of relatively simple interactions. Instead of linear, hierarchical, outcome-oriented strategies and strategic plans that can’t adapt to changing conditions, we need ways of strategizing together based on understanding and respecting change. So far, the elements of emergent strategy are that it is intentional, interdependent and relational, adaptive, resilient because it is decentralized, fractal, uses transformative justice, and creates more possibilities. One of the ways we’ve been reading Octavia Butler’s work is as case studies of emergent strategy. In sessions with local communities, we’re introducing people to the framework and asking them to assess which elements of emergent strategy might be most necessary to their local work and supporting them in generating strategies together.
One aspect of emergent strategy is that there is no waste—we are encouraged to see everything around us as a resource. Butler’s book Parable of the Sower follows the main character Olamina, a young Black woman who lives in a slightly dystopic future in a gated community. She carries a radically different vision for the purpose of humanity than her Christian family. She believes our “destiny is to take root among the stars,” to see Earth as a womb rather than a permanent home. She calls her beliefs Earthseed, and she cultivates Earthseed as she matures in the tiny and dangerous container of her home. The essence of emergent strategy can be found in the central tenet of Olamina’s Earthseed: “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change.” Olamina begins studying the skills needed to survive outside of the walls and packs a survival bag. When the community is attacked and the walls fall, she finds herself on the outside with her bag, her knowledge, and her dreams. She finds people along the way, other survivors willing to dream with her new forms of community, adapting constantly to ever-changing conditions. Exploring these and other examples from Butler’s work—in addition to studying other aspects of emergence—creates a solid foundation for changing the way we strategize on our path to justice.
Finally, we have our collective science-fiction/visionary fiction writing workshops. Our premise is that if we
want worlds that work for more of us, we have to have more of us involved in the visioning process. One of the ways we perpetuate individualism is by ideating alone, literally coming up with ideas in solitude and then competing to bring them to life. Our workshops are designed to encourage collaborative ideation. Together we identify issues that are relevant to the local community and build a world in which to explore the issue and possible solutions.
In each workshop, we start out by asking ourselves what in our community needs vision, with the idea that we can apply our collective ideation to it like a healing salve.
We identify lead characters—often pairs or groups of lead characters to disrupt the solitary hero narrative—and we intentionally move those voices that are often marginalized in our society to the center of the world-building.
We then build the setting, identifying where we are in time, creating a geography and conditions, naming any shared assumptions we have, and determining what the major conflict will be in that world. What is the change our characters seek? Who else is seeking change?
Once these elements are laid out, we send people off to spend time writing their stories in this shared world. So far, no matter how much time we give people, they are still writing when the timer goes off. The imagination just needs a little nudge to run wild.
The writers come back together to read their work and affirm each other for being part of such a collective act of genius. Each time, participants are surprised and inspired by the ways others interpret and experiment in the world. We believe that this experience helps grow the capacity to truly vision and implement together.
We are touring the country, sharing these tools for communities to use in their own local work. What we continue to experience are the kinds of groundbreaking conversations that transform how people view their present lives and work.
Acknowledgments
The birth process for this anthology has been a lengthy one, and there have been countless writing and ideating doulas who helped us come to this point. We unfortunately don’t have the space to list everyone by name, but know you are now and always part of the Brood.
Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements Page 28
