“My aunt and I were in the kitchen, talking. She was cooking something that smelled good and I was sitting at her table, watching. A luxury. At home, my mother would have put me to help.
"When I grow up I want to be a writer," I said.
--Oh yeah? said my aunt. Well, that's very nice, but you'll also have to find yourself a job.
--My work is going to be to write.
--You can write whenever you want. It's a nice hobby. But you're going to have to earn a living.
--As a writer.
--Do not say foolishness.
--I'm serious.
--Baby... Blacks can't be writers.
--Why not?
--Well, why not?
--Yes they can, they can too!
When I didn't know what she was talking about was when I got the most stubborn. In my thirteen years of life I had not read a single word in print that, to my knowledge, had been written by a black person. My aunt was a mature woman. She knew more than me. What if she was right?
This is how Octavia E. Butler, one of the most important science fiction writers in the English language, recounts her revelation, her early desire to be a writer, in “Positive Obsession”, an autobiographical text included in Daughter of blood and other stories, the beautiful a book that Consonni edited a few months ago, is distributed in Argentina and comes to join the extremely messy editions of Butler in Spanish , an essential writer who, like many genre authors, is published with potholes and in half unknown publishers (at least in Argentina: in the United States it is a classic).
Her conversation with her aunt wasn't accurate –Octavia was right- but that doesn't mean the aunt was wrong. Beyond the fact that it is difficult to live from writing, with any identity, that a black woman dedicated herself to science fiction in the '70s was unprecedented. Californian, born in 1947 in Pasadena, the daughter of a domestic worker and a shoe shiner who died very young, Butler was above all a novelist, but the stories that Daughter of Blood rescues are an excellent introduction to her work and, in all cases, have an author's note that expands the context and meaning of the stories. Octavia E. Butler was, without a descent from a hard line or an explicit militancy, a writer who dealt with power, gender and race. That is to say: absolutely contemporary issues. She found it logical and she didn't much like being called a pioneer or "great lady" or any title of literary nobility. “I don't think she can write about other issues. All writers are influenced by who they are. If you are white, you can write about being Chinese, but you will put a lot of your experiences into the character.” However, she recognized the uniqueness of being a woman in the field: in that same essay she writes: “There was only one other black science fiction writer with a productive career when I sold my first novel: Samuel R. Delany Jr. Now we are four: Delany, Steve Barnes, Charles R. Saunders, and myself. Very few. Why? Lack of interest? Lack of trust?" .
There are now many more black women and there is also the somewhat discussed subgenre of "Afro-Futurism". To name a few: Andrea Hairston, Tananarive Due (also a horror author), the Jamaican Nalo Hopkinson, the already famous NK Jemisin, the Nigerian-American Nnedi Okorafor or the South African Mohale Mashigo (who doesn't just write science fiction, but is an extraordinary gender storyteller). But the appearance of all, except Due, is very recent. When Octavia E. Butler was writing, she was alone.
BRIEF FANTASIES
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Blood Daughter and Other Stories collects the few stories that Butler published. “Daughter of Blood” is her most famous story of hers. She published it in 1984 in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and it is a story of invasion and encounter between species: the dominant needs the bodies of the others to reproduce , like parasites, and they keep the potential reproducers in Reserves. For many, it is a story about slavery, although the idea of a young man's "pregnancy" is much more direct and very strange. Octavia E. Butler denied that it was a metaphor for slavery. "It's basically a love story," she said in a 1996 interview for Science Fiction Studies. “There are many kinds of love in that story: family love, physical love… The alien needs the boy to procreate, and makes it easier for him by showing him affection. After all, they are going to have children and he will carry them inside. A lot of critics see it as a story about slaves just because I'm black. I speak of slavery when I speak of slavery explicitly”.
The story “Daughter of blood” is, true, much more a story of invasion and body-horror, of body terror, of the body as a gore and vulnerable and morbid space. The “slavery” reading is in fact a prejudice: would it be done to any of the white authors who write about invasions and body theft? At the same time, Butler herself acknowledges that we are all nourished by our identity and experiences. The readings are particular and, often, the author is not so clear about what she is writing about. But she was always very firm: slavery had other treatments in her fiction.
"The afternoon and the morning and the night" is perhaps an even better story than "Daughter of blood." Butler invents Duryea-Gode disease: symptoms can be controlled for a while, but when the disease reaches its climax, patients attack themselves, eat themselves, mutilate themselves, commit suicide. It is a syndrome of fatal self-destructive tendencies. “If you had children, you passed it on to them. Not everyone was affected the same way. Not everyone committed suicide or murdered someone, but everyone mutilated themselves to some degree if they could. And they all left: they escaped to a world of their own and stopped responding to their surroundings”, explains the narrator, the daughter of two sick people and apparently condemned to suffer a horrible fate. Part clinical account, part body horror story, Butler explains that it has to do with "my fascination with biology, medicine and individual responsibility." She was also a fan of Oliver Sacks and in this story the influence of the famous neurologist is noticeable: it could be one of her cases taken to the extreme. “Speech Sounds” is a post-apocalyptic story that also uses the disease: “He was fast as a heart attack in his way of killing people and in some of his effects. But he attacked in a very specific way. Language was completely lost or severely impaired. He never recovered. It also often led to paralysis, intellectual disability, or death." Rye, the narrator, lost many linguistic abilities, such as reading. But she can still talk. It is her secret in the ruthless world of this cruel tale. “Amnesty” is another invasion story, in which aliens capture humans as “translators”; a story about language, such as “Speech Sounds.” And “El libro de Marta” is a utopia; the Marta of the title has an encounter with God (or a form of God) who offers her something as desirable as it is impossible: to make a better world.
There are two non-science fiction stories in this collection. One is “Close Relatives”, a story about incest but that tries to understand the motivations of those who are related and “Al otro lado”, about alcoholism and alienating jobs; Butler explains that she wrote it in 1970, when she was going to Delany's science fiction workshop in Clarion, San Diego, and hadn't yet sold any stories. “In the horrible jobs she used to have in factories, warehouses, food processing plants, offices and retail stores, there always seemed to be at least one or two very strange people. I lived in fear of going back to them.”
Consonni's book is not, as noted above, a sample of the work of Octavia E. Butler because she was not a storyteller, she did not consider herself as such, and the stories are almost exceptions. However, the main themes of her are here, the daring of her, the way she was ahead of her time almost without trying.
TIME AND HERITAGE
In 1979, Octavia E. Butler wrote her best-selling novel and perhaps the most accessible to the non-science fiction reader: Kinship. She technically uses a simple resource of science fiction, time travel, but the problem of that trip is of an unusual complexity that is accompanied by a limpid style, of enormous clarity, which contrasts with the dilemmas of the text. Dana, a young writer living with another (white) writer, Kevin, in 1970s liberated California, suffers what she believes to be a blackout. But her blackout leads her to a plantation in 1815, before the civil war. In theory she is a "free black" in the past, but that, then, does not mean much. The attraction, the magnet that makes her go through time is a boy and then a young man, Rufus: whenever he is in danger, and he is many times, he seems to call Dana, who somehow solves his crisis, be it dengue or a fight or about to drown. But why Rufus? It is that the red-haired boy, quite "soft" to be a slaver but still brutal, is his ancestor. He has a son with a slave, Alice, and from there, from that union, comes Dana. It is known how, in general, were the relations between master and slave, better said, between master and slave. And she is she does not escape the usual brutality, that is, rape, taking the body by force. But Dana's life depends on Alice having that child conceived without consent with the master: in the rules of time travel, the past cannot be changed.
In one of the transfers to the past, Dana travels with Kevin. She, before it happens, fears that company, although being with a white man would be useful to her. Because, she writes: “A place like that represented a risk for him that I didn't even want to talk about. If he stayed there for years, a part of this place would eventually permeate him. It wouldn't be a very big part, she was sure of it. But if he survived in a place like that it would be because he had somehow managed to tolerate that kind of life.” Kinship has scenes of mistreatment and enormous cruelty towards the slaves, human hunts, sales of people, the despicable practices that are expected from a text set in the pre-war period. But as often happens, for example, in some Toni Morrison novels, the narrator's concerns are very different from those expected of a well-intentioned white narrator. Dana, for example, worries about how easily she adjusts to slave life herself, how easy it is for her to lower her head, even tolerate whipping. She reveals to her what to do, if she has to rebel or survive. She tortures her knowing that she has to allow the birth of that child, her ancestor, whatever, in order to exist in the future. There is in her a state of indignation, nor of submission, but rather alert. Who is going to survive? The one who leads a rebellion or the one who learns the tricks of fickle masters? Is that survivor a coward? Should she continue to save this white ancestor, or is it "fair" for her to punish him like the cruel man he is, at least at times? The character of Rufus is also complex: Butler does not conceive of a villain without nuances, but a man of his time. “Slavery was a long and drawn-out deafening process,” he writes. The novel also brings to the fore the inevitable mix between blacks and whites with women taken by force and what it means for a woman of color, in the present, to relate to a man whose ancestors were rapists. But she does not emphasize this dilemma: she was a writer of enormous elegance, respectful of her readers and that is why Kinship is such a disturbing novel, because she does not point out how to think about it. On the 25th anniversary of its publication, Butler gave an interview to Joshunda Sanders in which he discussed what it meant to write the book. “I think it's the most successful because it's the most accessible and also appeals to multiple audiences: African-American studies, women's studies, and science fiction. Sometimes it reaches people who otherwise wouldn't read such a book, who wouldn't read history about that period except Gone with the Wind style. The good thing is that it is read in schools. Many times, especially boys, they say 'oh, if it happened to me, I would do this', and that simple solution would have killed them. They don't understand how serious it is when an entire society is against you and prepared to keep you in your place. I had the idea for the novel when I was studying. But the reason for writing it came from watching my mother work. I saw her receive insults and stay behind the scenes and even though I was a child, I knew she was humiliating. I knew that something was wrong, wrong, that it was unpleasant. I told him, when he was about seven or eight years old: 'I'm never going to do what you do, it's terrible.' She looked at me sadly and said nothing. I think it was that look and the indignities she had to put up with that gave rise to Kinship. I remembered it and wanted to show that people who go through these things and endure them are not cowards but heroes. They used what little they had to support their children. My mother knew what it was like to be hungry, she was a young woman during the Depression. She was taken out of school at the age of 10. She had no food, she had no shelter. I never worried about that. I studied and graduated and all because she endured to help me. These people were fighting, they just weren't fighting with fists, which is sometimes easy and pointless. The quick and dirty solution often seems the most admirable, until you have to live with the consequences."
THE SAGAS AND THE STARS
So far it seems that Octavia E. Butler was a "soft" science fiction writer, a bit on the edge of the genre. But that impression vanishes when she goes through the rest of her work, which has little to do with stories or Kinship, which is almost a historical novel. The Xexogenesis trilogy (also known as Lilith's Brood), for example, made up of three books (Dawn, Adulthood Rites and Imago), published in the '80s, begins with a black woman who is imprisoned and finds out, via her humanoid captors, that the Earth has been rendered uninhabitable after a nuclear war. Humans are almost extinct. The few survivors are "kidnapped" by an alien race, the Oankali. Lilith, the imprisoned woman, learns that she has awakened 250 years after the war in a ship. The Oankali have tentacles and three sexes: female, male, and Ooloi. In addition, they manipulate genetic material to mutate other beings and produce offspring.
A bit like in "Daughter of blood", the Oankali manage to make the Earth habitable but with the help of Lilith they want to join the humans to hybridize the races. They perceive this exchange as mutually beneficial. In particular, it will resolve what the Oankali consider the fatal human combination: intelligence coupled with hierarchical tendencies.
Based on this premise, adventures, rebellions, towns where the resistance lives, the future of the “mixed” – who sometimes can only be identified by a tentacle tongue or by DNA – follow one another. It's a trilogy about hybridity and environmental concerns, but it's genre raw, written for sci-fi readers with pride in their genre. True to her concerns, Octavia E. Butler said, "When I started the novels I wanted to change the human males, so that hierarchical behavior wouldn't be a problem." In the trilogy, as in almost all of Butler's work, themes of sexuality, gender, race, and species are explored. Also imperialism. Butler recognized that the space race and the possibility of a nuclear war kept her awake, and that a great trigger for Xenogenesis was the presidency of Ronald Reagan and her relationship with the USSR.
Another Butler theme, as is clear, is family, reproduction, blood ties. In Patternmaster (1976), Doro's character is creating a "superior" race and uses members of his family to keep them in check. Of course, Kinship and "Blood Daughter" and the relationship between humans and Oankali are also within this theme. She said: “Perhaps as a woman I cannot avoid research on the importance of family and reproduction. I don't know how men feel about this. Although I do not have a husband and children, I have another family, and it seems to me the most important of our relationships. It is such an important part of our identity. Nor does it have to be purely biological. I am not talking about adoptions but about other friends, for example, people who are part of your household. They are bonds that can survive terrible abuse.”
In the last years of her life, Octavia E. Butler worked on the series Parable (or Earthseed), which depicts a community's struggle to survive the political and socioeconomic collapse of the 21st century motivated by environmental causes, corporate selfishness, and inequality between rich and poor. Sound current? The first book in the series, Parable of the Sower (1993), features her teenage protagonist in a dystopian California of the 2020s (the one we're living through). Among his Parable series, Butler published Daughter of blood and other stories, this collection that is now distributed in Argentina, originally published in 1995: strictly speaking, a compilation of magazine stories and non-fiction pieces about his life and his way of working. .
A BIG AND SHY WOMAN
As an African-American in a literary world dominated by white men, Octavia E. Butler had many rejections early in her career. But she also got a huge recognition in her lifetime. She won the most prestigious awards in the genre such as the Nebula and the Hugo. She also won the PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award and the MacArthur Foundation Genius Scholarship in 1995 (the same one given to Thomas Pynchon and Susan Sontag). She to this day she is the only science fiction writer to obtain it. Samuel Delany, her teacher, used to tell how quiet she was about her and how amazing it was to see her grow up after Kinship: “She gained a lot of confidence and became an extraordinary speaker. She was also leading the way in a genre where you could count black authors on one hand and female authors on one finger, or two.” Tananarive Due and her husband Steven Barnes were part of this select group of black authors. Due used to say that Butler's two lives, public and private, were like living in two worlds. After years of traveling the United States, Butler settled in Seattle: she liked the Pacific coast, the cold, being away from the great literary centers, the relative solitude. But in recent years she got sick and it was hard for her to write. Her friend Steve Barnes assures that she had a hard time because she was a perfectionist and it made her angry not to get what she wanted. She had hypertension and was going through a depressive state but it was difficult to communicate with her, because, they say of her, she could be as warm as she was jealous of her privacy. However, she kept her job at Clarion's science fiction writers' workshop, where she had attended.
Octavia E. Butler died as she was leaving her home in Lake Forest Park on February 24, 2006, at age 58. There are discrepancies about the causes of her death, but it is believed that she had a fatal stroke; it is also possible that she died from a stroke caused by the blow to her head when she fainted: the street to her house was made of cobblestones. She left nearly 400 boxes of unpublished material to California's Huntington Library that, for now, can only be viewed by academics and researchers: there are no plans to edit her papers, which include correspondence and manuscripts.
