Category Archives: ENGL 458 Octavia Butler Spring 2015

Posts by writers in Spring 2015 ENGL 458/Major Authors: Octavia Butler

Butler Reflection

Coming into Dr. McCoy’s Major Authors class, I thought I had a steady and quasi-holistic view of the world and how I fit into it. However, while interacting with Butler’s tests, I began to realize some darker truths, such as the heteronormative, cisgendeered and ableist society I lived in. I would say that I “bought into” this idealized and discriminatory view of the world, but that would suggest that I had consented and consciously interacted with these societal ideals, when, in fact, I had only been blindly indoctrinated with them. I was ignorant that they even existed in my schema. It was Butler’s insistence that humanity or personhood is not static or one-dimensional that changed my view of the world and the people I came in contact with every day. Continue reading Butler Reflection

Reflection

So I’m not really sure where to start. When the semester began, I had only been familiar with Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” from when we read it last spring in African American Literature, as well as Parable of the Sower, which I had read on my own. I don’t think I had many expectations so much as desires when I came into the class, the majority of which were tied to my first experience reading Bloodchild in the context of the African American literary tradition, then having that context turns upside down by Butler’s afterword, prompting a discussion about categorization and assumptions regarding black artistic and cultural production and the ongoing fight against its compartmentalization. Similarly, when I learned early on that we would not be reading Butler’s Kindred, her most widely read book that does deal explicitly with chattel slavery, I took it to mean that we would continue this process, that we would try to expand our conception of Butler as an artist and confront her work in all its plenitude. And I was looking forward to it.

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Eight Ways the Parable Novels aren’t that Different from Our Present Reality

I remember Beth telling us that when she started teaching the Parables in her INTD, most students didn’t find the novels that realistic.  But only six years later, her students generally agreed that the Parables were realistic possibilities of our future.  Drawing connections between Butler’s post-apocalyptic future and our current society, here are a few ways that Lauren Olamina’s world isn’t that far away from our own:

Continue reading Eight Ways the Parable Novels aren’t that Different from Our Present Reality

Reflections on Butler

While thinking about reflections about English 458 I pondered about Butler’s identity a lot. Octavia Butler is a black, female, Sci-Fi writer, which all together creates a unique prose within her writing. Nonetheless, I found myself multiple times in a position where one could misinterpret her analogies, which is seen in Bloodchild. Butler is able to draw you into her worlds that parallel issues in ours, but to do this she needs to create a good story as she asserts herself. Furthermore, I often thought her writings placed the reader in a bias opinions of her characters.

To further elaborate, Doro in Wildseed is portrayed as a colonizer that wants nothing more than to use Anyanwu. However, one must feel some sympathy for Doro because he has lived for one thousands years, which is long enough for him to see the people he loved die. It is this dual perception that frustrated me, but captured my mind as well. Nonetheless, I started to read one of her interviews in which shes states, “I have a kind of slogan to remind myself what I’m to be doing: The chase, the game, the quest, the test” (Francis, 45). She then goes on to define her works and overall writing style, which furthered my wonders about her writing. I view her writing as deceptive too because in one instance you find yourself analyzing one way, but Butler makes you question your notion by placing an underpinning that conflicts with your interpretation.

However, pushing back on my discomfort with Butler’s writing, which is a lot of the time she creates an outside world that forces you to contemplate real struggles. Butler’s way of writing really gets people into conversations they do not want to speak about. I feel this is where we find the beauty in Butler’s writing.

How I Learned To Read Octavia Butler

I have never been particularly interested in science fiction. I have always preferred more realistic narratives to “space alien stuff”, and as such, I struggle to imagine realities that differ from our own. When something appears to be completely intangible, it is easy to take it at its surface value and move on. It is easy to skim through a reading that is difficult to grasp, and walk away with only the plot. It is easy to breeze through a reading that is both easy and interesting to read, and miss the point. Octavia Butler does not allow me to do that – at least not anymore, after a semester of learning to read her novels.

Continue reading How I Learned To Read Octavia Butler

Hyperempathy – Pain – Baltimore

As I finished working on my bibliographies a couple weeks ago, I narrowly beat the deadline for submission and wiped a sweat gland off my forehead right after submission. I think I am becoming more and more of a perfectionist. And though I try to control it, I wonder if that could be considered a disability wherein time is sometimes against me or rather, the environment I am in does not allow enough time? This question compelled me to reflect on Lauren’s syndrome and an article by Their Pickens. Continue reading Hyperempathy – Pain – Baltimore

Course Reflection

“That’s the nice thing about science fiction,” Octavia Butler says in Mike McGonigal’s interview “Octavia Butler.” She continues: “Back when I was a kid and began reading it, it was called the literature of ideas. […] You can have video game science fiction on the screen, in movies, and you can also have science fiction that makes you think. I prefer the second kind” (Francis, ed. 137). Butler’s fiction is definitely a ‘literature of ideas’ and it certainly makes readers think. The applications of Butler’s work are seemingly endless—the worlds she creates can stand on their own, but also have a multitude of tie-ins with historical and current political and social contexts. Butler’s work can be applied to state regulated violence, the perceived fungibility of bodies, issues of consent, gender, and race. Butler keenly observes the ways that people and groups of people are constructed by outside structural forces—but constantly works to complicate these identities and demonstrate the ways that they are restrictive and damaging. Continue reading Course Reflection

Reflections

To be honest, I had never heard of Octavia Butler before signing up for this class. To be really honest, I had never even read much science fiction. “Science fiction? That sounds cool. Sign me up!” was my thought process. I did not know what to expect, so I didn’t really expect anything specific. I am not sure what I hoped for in regards to the material; I just hoped as usual that the class would be an open environment for discussion and exploration of whatever material we encountered. As for questions, my only real question was “Who is Octavia Butler?” Continue reading Reflections

Constraints

I took this class because I wanted to expose myself to African American and feminist literature, and I thought that taking a course which focuses on science fiction, a genre which is partially responsible for my love of reading, would be a fun way to do that. Right off the shelf, then, Octavia Butler caught me in a trap, and it was the trap of assuming that I knew something about her work based on her assigned place on that shelf. Clearly I was in for a bumpy semester with this author, and like her characters I was forced to adapt. The problems Butler presents in her work are nasty and complex, and she ruthlessly showed me that many of the ideas I came into her work with were based on nothing. Language inevitably fails me in the attempt to discuss such an author, but I think that I can reduce what I got out of her work in a useful way down to this: we cannot escape the conditions of the world we live in, so we are forced to negotiate with and to some extent adapt to them, and the construction of our identities is the result of this process. To quote Earthseed: The Books of the Living, “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you” (Parable of the Sower 3). That is as true of my experience contemplating Butler’s work as it is of anything else.

It took me a long time to control my tendency to try to escape an unfair situation whenever it came up in one of Butler’s novels. There were plenty of those in the works we read this semester, and every time one of them came up I found myself trying to think the characters out. In Clay’s Ark, for example, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out something Eli could have done that would be better than infecting a family with a plague and abducting and infecting strangers from the road. I liked his character so much, and I found what he was doing so despicable that I imagined whole complicated schemes in which the government kept him in isolation and occasionally sent in some evangelical Christians to fill his need to spread the disease. In Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind I had dreams of Doro creating a new kind of telepath who would be able to cure his insatiable hunger to devour consciousness. And most heart-wrenchingly, when Lauren Olamina’s daughter revealed that her uncle Marcus had known her whereabouts since the age of two and had hidden them from Olamina for thirty years while raising her himself, I protested that no one had to be so cruel, that Marcus could have shared Larkin/Asha without losing her companionship. I wanted the stories to be different, I wanted things to be fair, yet these reactions were ultimately irrational. Within the texts, the characters faced certain conditions, and what played out in each of these situations was more or less a logical progression from these conditions. Eli could not choose to die, and the Clayark disease gave him an uncontrollable compulsion to infect other people. Doro had psychic hungers that compelled him, and he understood them so poorly that he ended up actually creating and nurturing the means of his own destruction. And Marcus was so traumatized by his experiences and so lonely as a prominent closet-gay Christian America minister that his behavior can be understood, even if I will never forgive him. These characters did their best with the conditions they faced, and for the most part I think that what they did was the best thing that could be done in that situation.

Our work in class showed me what a mistake it would be to write off the difficulties these characters faced as the kind of impossible situations that could be found only in novels. The biological impulses that drove the Clayarks and the Oankali to spread and reproduce were mirrored exactly in images of the fungus that controlled the brains of ants and compelled them to climb. We saw individuals’ decision-making reduced to mere biology in cases as obscure as toxoplasmosis and as familiar as pregnancy. And, to me, biology was the least of it. Ghettoization and gentrification, wildfires and droughts, the entrenched racism in our society’s institutions – all the result of complex forces far outside the control of the individuals subjected to them. In the case of the biological restrictions we face in the real world, there is little we can do to change them, but the second class of conditions we face are all partially created by people. Wildfires and droughts are the result of our environmental policies, ghettoization (as Coates points out) is the result of public policies, and racial discrimination generates at least in part from our construction of certain groups as other. The most sobering part of accepting the novels’ situations as they are was that doing so meant that I had to admit to being partially responsible for creating similar situations in the real world (which is, I am sure, exactly what Butler intended).

Since the unfair situations could not be escaped, they had to be negotiated. I want to deal with this negotiation in several ways but to start, one thing that was impressed on me over and over in more and more profound ways was the immense power of soft power. In Wild Seed, Anywanu enters into a relationship with Doro and quickly discovers that she has no hard power to compel Doro to leave her children alone and thus he has almost absolute power over her, and she “is forced to choose between negotiating the conditions of her oppressive circumstances and suicide” (Duchamp 87). She chooses the former, and for much of the rest of the novel we watch as she makes small gains by convincing him through logic, trading with him by offering to raise some of his difficult seed, and ultimately forging a partnership with him by making him realize that he loves and needs her. She has to compromise her beliefs to get along with him, she has to allow him to continue killing and continue breeding her children, but she gains by convincing him to treat his people well. Doro wanted to dominate her, but she endured his domination while working to undermine it. Lauren Olamina does much the same thing in the Parables series. She faces overwhelming odds, but through patience and self-control, she survives the outside world, and through convincing people to join her she starts a movement and helps to change the world. Akin obtains a consensus from the Oankali to create a human space on Mars through reason and persuasion, the same tools Anyanwu and Olamina used. As Duchamp notes, this is the antithesis of the white bourgeois narrative model, in which the individual conquers insurmountable odds (90).

Butler is making a powerful statement about power dynamics through these situations: they are always a negotiation, and even the entity apparently on the disadvantaged end has power over the supposedly dominant entity. The message I got was that you don’t always need to point a gun at your oppressor and say “there is risk in dealing with a partner,” though Butler clearly thinks there are situations in which that is called for as well. Before taking this class I would have failed or died in every one of those situations. It would never have occurred to me to be that patient or that subtle in trying to get what I want, and hopefully the new ways Butler has given me of conceptualizing power dynamics will prepare me to negotiate unequal power dynamics whether I meet them in the professional world or in the Apocalypse.

I did have to negotiate unfair circumstances while taking this course. I truly enjoyed Butler’s novels, but there were weeks when I fell behind on the reading because of the demands of other classes, my applications to internships and study abroad programs, swim practices, and efforts to get my computer repaired. Even this paper suffers from under-revision. I had to compromise, because the constraints I face at this time of my life are that I have more things that I want to do than I have time to do them. This is not a new situation this semester. Normally, I resent having to cut corners in classes; in some small irrational way I blame myself for not doing more. But this class was different: we admitted it when we didn’t do the reading. We spent so much time dissecting the various unavoidable causes for characters’ behavior, it felt good to be treated as someone trying to make the best of his circumstances instead of a robot who was supposed to automatically do everything required of him for this one class. My inner over-achiever will never be satisfied with failing to complete my assigned work, but I believe that this class helped me closer to a rational, if grudging, acceptance of my own limitations and constraints.

I wish that I had been able to engage with this class more thoroughly. I wish I had time to fully flesh out the half-dozen or so other blog post ideas I have scattered throughout my notes, I wish that I had all of my readings done on time and that we could have had the discussions Dr. McCoy planned for us. But we live in a limited world, as Butler knew, and I’m happy with what I got. Thanks for a great semester everyone!

Does Rape Obtain?

I would like to take a moment to return to the Xenogenesis trilogy because I’ve come to a little more clarity about an issue that I struggled with while reading Lilith’s Brood. The question I could neither escape nor answer while we were reading Xenogenesis was, does rape (or some other form of sexual violence), as a metaphor for what happens between the Oankali and humankind, obtain? I am concerned with the metaphor of rape primarily as it applies to two levels of human-Oankali interaction. First, I am concerned on the macro scale: did the Oankali force the humans into the gene trade, were their actions as a group morally defensible, and were the principles of consent violated by the Oankali? Second, on the level of the individuals as prefigured by Kahguyaht’s removal of Lilith’s cancer in Dawn and played out over and over for the rest of the trilogy: do the individual Oankali (and especially the ooloi) honor the humans’ right to give or withhold consent in the specific interactions between individuals we see in the books?

Continue reading Does Rape Obtain?