Butler, Octavia 1947–2006

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Octavia Butler 1947-2006

(Full name Octavia Estelle Butler) American novelist, short story writer, and essayist.

For additional information on Butler's career, see Black Literature Criticism Supplement.

INTRODUCTION

An African-American woman who wrote in the science fiction genre dominated by white male authors, Butler explored such unconventional issues as race, gender, sexual identity, and the dynamics of power and submission in her works. Butler's protagonists, who often are black women, exemplify the traditional gender roles of nurturer, healer, and conciliator, but they also are courageous, independent, and ambitious, enhancing their influence through alliances with or opposition to powerful males. Over the course of her literary career, Butler received numerous accolades, including two Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award, a lifetime achievement award from PEN Center West, a Langston Hughes Award from City College of New York, and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Born in 1947, Butler spent her youth in a racially mixed neighborhood in Pasadena, California. Her father, who worked as a shoeshine vendor, died when she was young, and her mother worked as a maid, often taking her daughter along to work. Butler later wrote of the many sacrifices and humiliations her mother bore to encourage her daughter's emerging interest in writing. Butler suffered from dyslexia and a paralyzing shyness, spending much of her childhood absorbed in books. She entered student writing contests as a teenager and, after attending workshops sponsored by the Writers Guild of America and the Clarion Science Fiction Writers, she sold her first stories. This early training brought Butler into contact with a range of well-known science fiction writers, including Harlan Ellison, who became her mentor while she studied at California State University in Los Angeles. In her early years as a writer, Butler supported herself by working at a variety of low-wage jobs, including dishwasher, telemarketer, and inspector of potato chips in a factory. In 1976, Butler published her first novel, Patternmaster. Three years later, she published Kindred, which would become one of her most popular and critically regarded works, despite having been initially rejected by numerous publishers. During the 1980s and 1990s, Butler crafted a number of popular science fiction novels, novellas, and short stories, perhaps most notably the Xenogenesis trilogy (1987-89). In 1996 Butler moved to Seattle, where she found relief in her relative anonymity. Three years later, she was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Foundation fellowship, also known as a "genius grant." While the grant allowed Butler to live comfortably, it also initiated a period of writer's block that affected Butler's self-confidence and plunged her into depression and poor health. Finally in 2004 she published Fledgling, her first new novel in years. Having suffered from severe hypertension for many years, Butler died in 2006, after falling outside her home and sustaining a head injury.

MAJOR WORKS

A number of Butler's novels—Patternmaster, Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), and Wild Seed (1980)—revolve around a group of mentally superior beings, called Patternists, who are telepathically connected to each other. These beings are the descendants of Doro, a four thousand-year-old Nubian male who has selectively bred with humans throughout time with the intention of establishing a race of superhumans. He prolongs his life by killing others, including members of his own family, and inhabiting their bodies. The origin of the Patternists is outlined in Wild Seed, which begins in seventeenth-century Africa and spans more than two centuries. The novel recounts Doro's uneasy alliance with Anyanwu, an earth mother figure whose extraordinary powers he covets. Their relationship progresses from power struggles and tests of will to mutual need and dependency. Doro's tyranny ends when one of his children, the heroine of Mind of My Mind, destroys him and unites the Patternists with care and compassion. Patternmaster, the first book in the series, is set in the future and concerns two brothers vying for their dying father's legacy. The pivotal character in the novel, however, is Amber, one of Butler's most heroic women, whose unconventional relationship with her brother is often analyzed within feminist contexts. In Survivor, which is set on an alien planet, Butler examines human attitudes toward racial and ethnic differences and their effects on two alien creatures. Alanna, the human protagonist, triumphs over racial prejudice and enslavement by teaching her alien captors tolerance and respect for individuality.

One of Butler's most acclaimed works, Kindred departs from the Patternist series yet shares its focus on gender and racial issues. The novel's protagonist, Dana, is an African-American writer in 1970s Los Angeles who is transported to a plantation in the antebellum South. There she must save the life of a white slave owner, who, she discovers, is also one of her ancestors. The tension in Kindred turns on Dana's ambivalence over saving a slave owner whose existence is essential to her own birth a hundred years later. Tension and conflict are also present in Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy. This series—comprising the novels Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989)—features a race of aliens, the Oankali, who seek genetic diversity by attempting to overtake and mate with the human survivors of a nuclear war on earth. The story is told from the point of view of Lilith, a human woman abducted by the Oankali and expected to recruit other humans to mate with them. Attracted to the genetic enhancements offered by the Oankali, Lilith is, like Dana in Kindred, conflicted by her participation in a system she abhors. Butler's futuristic Parable of the Sower (1993), the first novel in her "Earthseed" series, traces the experiences of Lauren Olamina, a black woman living in southern California during the turbulent 2020s. As Los Angeles succumbs to chaos due to food and energy shortages and a sharp increase in violent crime, Olamina witnesses the destruction of her neighborhood and the death of her family. She flees society and heads north, where she establishes a utopian community dedicated to tolerance and cooperation. In her last published novel, Fledgling (2004), Butler departed from the science fiction genre and turned to a vampire fantasy to examine the nature of symbiotic relationships, particularly emphasizing the master-and-slave paradigm between vampires and humans.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Critics have praised Butler's unsentimental, yet perceptive treatment of racism, gender inequality, and social injustice in her works. In a survey of a number of Butler's major novels, Burton Raffel maintains that the author employs a simple, yet evocative literary style to give powerful expression to her ideas. The critic asserts that Butler's unique position as an African-American woman writing in a genre typically dominated by white males lends authenticity to her black female protagonists, who challenge authority and who nurture tolerance and diversity. Brian K. Reed focuses on Kindred to evaluate how Butler's representation of slavery in the antebellum South impacts contemporary race relations. According to Reed, Dana's time travel experience forces her to make an honest assessment of her own prejudices, which ultimately imbues her with increased tolerance and self-confidence. Clara Escoda Agusti examines this broader context of exploitation in Butler's Parable of the Sower. In this novel, the critic maintains, the protagonist, Lauren Olamina, overcomes the experiences of personal degradation that she has endured as a black female in a corrupt society to establish an egalitarian utopian community outside of the dominant culture. In the process, Agusti contends, "Olamina will redefine the concepts of femaleness and masculinity in her community, in order to undermine sexual exploitation based on gender and race discrimination."

PRINCIPAL WORKS

*Patternmaster (novel) 1976

*Mind of My Mind (novel) 1977

*Survivor (novel) 1978

Kindred (novel) 1979

*Wild Seed (novel) 1980

*Clay's Ark (novel) 1984

†Dawn (novel) 1987

†Adulthood Rites (novel) 1988

†Imago (novel) 1989

The Evening and the Morning and the Night (novella) 1991

‡Parable of the Sower (novel) 1993

Bloodchild and Other Stories (novella, short stories, and essays) 1995

‡Parable of the Talents (novel) 1998

§Lilith's Brood (novels) 2000

Fledgling: A Novel (novel) 2005

║Seed to Harvest (novels) 2007

*These works comprise the "Patternist" series.

†These works comprise the Xenogenesis trilogy.

‡These works comprise the "Earthseed" series.

§This work contains the complete Xenogenesis series: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago.

║This work contains the novels Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay's Ark, and Patternmaster.

CRITICISM

Burton Raffel (essay date spring 1995)

SOURCE: Raffel, Burton. "Genre to the Rear, Race and Gender to the Fore: The Novels of Octavia E. Butler." Literary Review 38, no. 3 (spring 1995): 454-61.

[In the following essay, Raffel explores Butler's stylistically simple, yet evocative narrative technique in many of her science fiction novels and remarks on how race and gender play a prominent role in her writings.]

Just as you cannot always tell a book by its cover, so too you cannot always know a novel by its apparent or even by its declared genre. Is Crime and Punishment merely a detective (or mystery) novel? Huck Finn simply (as Mark Twain once said of it) "another boy's book," War and Peace merely historical, The Trial only a Mittel Europa Perry Mason drama? Is Middlemarch (as its title page proclaims) nothing more than "a study of provincial life"?

A book's transcendence of straightforward genre distinctions can be in part thematic, but is mostly a matter of execution: far more importantly than its intention, what a novel does with its chosen materials stands directly at the heart of its achievement, as it also defines its very nature. Whatever his own artistic imbalances, no one knew this better than Henry James: "There are bad novels and good novels, as there are bad pictures and good pictures, but that is the only distinction in which I see any meaning … It goes without saying that you will not write a good novel unless you possess the sense of reality; but it will be difficult to give you a recipe for calling that sense into being. Humanity is immense, and reality has a myriad forms … and when the mind is imaginative … it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations." In this 1884 essay, "The Art of Fiction," James therefore lays down one standard: "The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting." Or, as the equally but on the face of it oppositely dedicated D. H. Lawrence put it, in a pair of essays published in 1925, "The novel is the highest example of subtle inter-relatedness that man has discovered. Everything is true in its own time, place, circumstance, and untrue outside of its own place, time, circumstance. If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail…. The novel is a perfect medium for revealing to us the changing rainbow of our living relationships … the one bright book of life."

Operating as I try to do, more or less according to the standards set out by James and Lawrence, I have just finished reading, seriatim, eight of the ten published novels of Octavia E. Butler, initially drawn on by the utterly unexpected power and subtly complex intelligence of her extraordinary trilogy, Xenogenesis, ¹ but sustained and even compelled by the rich dramatic textures, the profound psychological insights, the strong, challenging ideational matrices of virtually all her books. And in my seventh decade of reading fiction, there are not many novelists, neither those so bubbly light as Wodehouse nor even so broadly and diversely rewarding as Dickens or Balzac, Proust or Thomas Mann, who could have held me so long or so closely. Every one of these eight novels (and I stopped at eight only because I could not easily find her second and third books, some fifteen years out of print) was published under the explicit rubric of "science fiction," but four completely transcend the genre and only one is, though neither weak nor bad, less than absolutely first-rate. Perhaps just as significantly, I do not think any of these eight books could have been written by a man, as they most emphatically were not, nor, with the single exception of her first book, Pattern-Master (1976), are likely to have been written, as they most emphatically were, by anyone but an African-American. Butler's work, in short, is both fascinating and highly unusual, representing—not only in my mind, but to the growing number of critics and scholars being drawn to it—a richly rewarding and relatively rare fusion of sensibility, perception, and a driven, insightful intelligence.

That this is serious literature I have no doubt. But I must stress from the start that Butler is not, like some science fiction practitioners, overtly (and is never, like more than a few, over-bearingly) "literary." Her prose is crystalline, at its best, sensuous, sensitive, exact, but not in the least directed at calling attention to itself.² The moving final paragraph of the Xenogenesis trilogy—the title signifying "the fancied projection of an organism altogether and permanently unlike the parent"—is thus a model of quietly passionate writing:

I chose a spot near the river. There I prepared the seed to go into the ground. I gave it a thick, nutritious coating, then brought it out of my body through my right sensory hand. I planted it deep in the rich soil of the riverbank. Seconds after I had expelled it, I felt it begin the tiny positioning movements of independent life.

Carefully, expertly crafted, deeply satisfying as it is to the reader of more than seven hundred preceding pages, and tautly, firmly resolving as it does the major plotline question, this is nevertheless determinedly functional, essentially unobtrusive prose—unlike, say, the highly literary writing of Samuel R. Delany (the only other black s.f. writer of major status): "It was foggy that morning, and the sun across the water moiled the mists like a brass ladle. I lurched to the top of the rocks, looked down through the tall grasses into the frothing inlet where she lay, and blinked." Delany makes it work; as Henry James noted, the very good are very good. But more typically, "literary" s.f. prose reads like the early work of a writer who has since learned better, Walter Jon Williams, whose Ambassador of Progress opens, with a selfconscious flourish, "In a storm of rain, its brightness a steadier glow among lightning flashes, the shuttle dropped into the high pasture, scattering alarmed cattle who ran in a clatter of bells for the sheltering trees." One can go a good deal farther down the literary ladder; this is for my purposes quite far enough. Plainly, Octavia Butler does not thus tongue a golden-mouthed trumpet, summoning the word-drunk flocks to drink from her overflowing flagons of sweet-scented nectar.

The passionate, abiding importance of the nurturing of new life, which clearly informs the Xenogenesis passage I have quoted, equally deeply informs the entire trilogy, as in every book of hers I have read. It seems to me feminist writing at its very best, writing which, like the poetry of Sheryl St. Germain I have discussed in these pages (see The Literary Review, Fall 1993), proudly and utterly comfortably accepts itself as female. That strong, self-assured stance toward the fact of femaleness has been in Butler's work from the very first. The protagonist of Pattern-Master is, unlike the central figures in her other work, male. But he is quickly made to realize that the major female figure in the book, the woman "healer" with whom he binds himself, though clearly female and just as clearly both attractive and attracted to him, is "harder than she felt." Soon thereafter, he learns that her sexual interests are not limited to men. And some pages still further, when another female character makes the mistake of assuming that the healer is "his" woman, she is quickly, forcefully corrected. "I'm my own woman, Lady Darah. Now as before." (The two women have had prior contact, professional rather than sexual.) Finally, the protagonist asks the healer, bluntly, "Which do you prefer," men or women? She replies, "I'll tell you … But you won't like it…. When I meet a woman who attracts me, I prefer women … And when I meet a man who attracts me, I prefer men." The protagonist then effectively closes the discussion by announcing: "If that's the way you are, I don't mind." Nor does he, even though, when he asks her to marry him, she refuses, once again for reasons of independence. "As my lead wife," he argues, "you'd have authority, freedom," but she swiftly responds, "How interested would you be in becoming my lead husband?"

For all its excellences, however, Pattern-Master is a smaller, less complex, less far-reaching fiction; in many ways it suggests the sweep and depth of Xenogenesis without quite achieving the trilogy's impact. Another striking precursor is Wild Seed (1980), which mythologizes Butler's black African heritage in an extraordinary fusion of both pre-slavery African and post-slavery American strands with what seems clearly the most urgent impulse behind all her writing, the drive to define, achieve, and nurture new life. "You steal, you kill," says the witch-like female protagonist, Anyanwu, to the even more wraith-like male protagonist, Doro. "What else do you do?" And he answers, speaking speechwords framed in Butler's beautifully calm prose, "‘I build,’ he said quietly. ‘I search the land for people who are a little different—or very different. I search them out, I bring them together in groups, I begin to build them into a strong new people.’"

But Butler does not deal, as writers with lesser gifts so often do, with themes. Her novels teem with fully realized characters, male and female alike, who fascinatingly embody rather than merely represent ideas. Her fertile imagination throws up such intensely functioning, intricately enmeshed human beings that even minor personages take on vivid life—for yet another quality of a major fictive talent is a profound, virtually universal sympathy that permits imagined beings to be exactly what they in fact are, not idea-driven puppets who do only what their creators think the plot requires. The best writers are regularly, even easily, able to inhabit many skins, and to move and speak inside those superficially alien persons as if they were inside themselves. When a wondrously uncontrolled witch-like young woman leaps away from Doro, in terror, and falls heavily on a half-unconscious son of Doro, a man endowed with a propulsive power to move objects outside of his own body, the result is brilliantly, dramatically, tragically in character:

He gripped Nweke, threw her upward away from his pain-racked body—threw her upward with all the power he had used so many times to propel great ships out of storms.³ He did not know what he was doing any more than she did. He never saw her hit the ceiling, never saw her body flatten into it, distorted, crushed, never saw her head slam into one of the great beams and break and send down a grisly rain of blood and bits of bone and brain.

Again, this is not fancy writing; it is simply precise and tautly cadenced prose, forceful because it is focused, fictively superbly effective because it is in each and every detail true to the characters' lives. It is the furthest thing from accidental that the high point of such wonderfully accurate truthfulness, in the final pages, deals head-on with, and satisfyingly resolves, the novel's emotional and intellectual core. Anyanwu has fought, all along, to humanize Doro. She has sometimes seemed about to succeed, only again and again to fail. She therefore decides to commit suicide—and just when she is about to die, produces in Doro the reversion to human feeling for which she has so long struggled. But we are not told this in so many words, not at least right away. The novel's final words show us, first Doro's humanization, and then the success of what was not a strategy but Anyanwu's deep, thoroughly comprehensible decision:

His voice caught and broke. He wept. He choked out great sobs that shook his already shaking body almost beyond bearing. He wept as though for all the past times when no tears would come, when there was no relief. He could not stop. He did not know when she pulled off his boots and pulled the blanket up over him, when she bathed his face in cool water. He did know the comfort of her arms, the warmth of her body next to him. He slept, finally, exhausted, his head on her breast, and at sunrise when he awoke, that breast was still warm, still rising and falling gently with her breathing.

Butler does not need to resort to artificial icons or frantic adjectives. There is symbolism here, to be sure. But it is fully organic, neither laid on like icing nor, heavily, as with a trowel.

Butler's one comparative failure, Kindred (1979), is a much more predictable, far too consciously wrought attempt at a twentieth-century slave narrative. Even in this novel, the stale, overly conscious plot is in good part redeemed by some fine (if not universally three-dimensional) characterization and, hardly surprisingly, by much strongly evocative writing. But Kindred is about as close to an unsuccessful book as Butler is capable of producing, just as Clay's Ark (1984), though a fine, suspenseful novel, is about as standard a s.f. story as she is likely ever to tell, strongly imbued with her trademark concerns, nurturing and the survival of that most endangered of all species, homo sapiens.

I do not think, Butler being the kind of quietly powerful writer she is, that anything short of an attentive reading of Xenogenesis can convey anything like the book's multiple strengths. Not that it is deficient in either technical or substantive accomplishments. Each of the three component novels has a different though connected narrative point of view, the first using as its protagonist a black woman, Lilith Iyapo, the second using a part-human, Akin, and the third, told in the first person, experienced through the persona of Jodahs, also but markedly a part-human. Butler starts with the premise that humans have come very close to killing off one another, as well as destroying the earth humans have inhabited. An extra-terrestrial race, the Oankali, who speak of themselves, cryptically and rather oddly, as "traders," finds and preserves the few survivors. The how and why of that almost miraculous preservation, as also the full flowering of what it means that the Oankalis thus describe themselves, is what the three novels expose for us. The trilogy constitutes a remarkable exposition of eminently plausible emotional and genetic possibilities—imagined, from start to finish, in splendid detail, with a great range of characters both human and alien, and a fascinating unfolding of passionately felt, profoundly experienced events. More than all but a very small handful of "genre" books, Xenogenesis deals in basic wisdoms of a totally unparochial nature.⁴

Absolutely nothing is predictable, here. Indeed, it is I think utterly impossible for even the most ingenious reader ever to catch up to, much less overtake, the author's comprehensive, delicately modulated unfolding of her story. Lilith Iyapo, the first novel's protagonist (she appears in all three of the novels), is by the end of that first book still deeply unsure, on almost all levels, of what she ought to be doing and of what the Oankali truly intend.

Perhaps they could find an answer to what the Oankali had done … And perhaps the Oankali were not perfect. A few fertile people might slip through and find one another. Perhaps. Learn and run! If she were lost, others did not have to be. Humanity did not have to be.
She let Nikanj [an Oankali] lead her into the dark forest and to one of the concealed dry exits.

The narrative weight of every one of these sparse sentences is, in context, enormous. Indeed, the small excision I have made in the first sentence is designed to avoid discussing, here, perhaps the most pregnant and yet certainly the hardest to encapsulate in a brief essay of all the trilogy's concerns. We are to learn, in painful detail, that the Oankali are, in effect, no more "perfect" than are humans. Fertile people do slip through, and they do find each other. Lilith is in a sense "lost," but others, as she foresees, are not. At least, not necessarily. And the fascinating ambiguity of "Humanity did not have to be" will only be apparent hundreds of pages into the reading, just as the significance of that "dark forest" (a construct, not located anywhere on earth) and of the "dry exits," or why they are "concealed," cannot be dealt with here. An "answer" is given, by the trilogy's end: it rests, though not visible to someone who has not read the trilogy, in Xenogenesis 's final paragraph, quoted near the start of this essay.

Not that Butler, unlike such handy-andy novelists as Robertson Davies, ever plays unfair with the reader, ever conceals or manipulates fictional truth for mere novelistic effect. On the contrary: she is completely forthcoming, absolutely open. Like all her books, Xenogenesis provides us with a great deal of straightforward, old-fashioned storytelling, nor is there the slightest attempt at artful trickery. Butler's art is a substantive, not a merely technical one: she plainly cares about her material, cares about her characters, and is too deeply responsible to both to betray them in any way. The intensity of that caring is obvious throughout: here, for example, is a passage from the second of the trilogy's novels, dealing with Akin, a child and partly human, and Tino, an adult and wholly human. The human adult has just remarked on how "everything goes into" Akin's mouth, and how surprised he is that the only partly human child has not poisoned himself, ten times over:

Akin ignored this and began investigating the bark on the sapling and looking to see what insects or fungi might be eating it and what might be eating them. Tino had been told why Akin put things in his mouth. He did not understand, but he never tried to keep things out of Akin's mouth the way other visitors did. He could accept without understanding. Once he had seen that a strange thing did no harm, he no longer feared it. He said Akin's tongue looked like a big gray slug, but somehow this did not seem to bother him. He allowed himself to be probed and studied when he carried Akin about. Lilith worried that he was concealing disgust or resentment, but he could not have concealed such strong emotions even from Akin. He certainly could not have concealed them from Nikanj.

There is what I can only call a very special tenderness in such writing. (What may seem hard to understand, here, has been in context long since fully explained.) The writer sees herself, in a sense, as a kind of filter through which the fictive experience is transmitted to her readers. But she makes no claims for herself, assumes no privileges not absolutely required by the careful, orderly telling of her story. Just as her prose, sharp, clear, determinedly explicative, asserts no extraordinary claims for itself, so too her narration is made to appear simply "there," eminently apprehendable but in no way forcing itself on the reader. Just as we do not read Xenogenesis on account of stylistic pyrotechnics, so too we do not read it for anything but substantive reasons. The people are real, their doings are both believable and continuously interesting, and the stakes, though not fussed over, are obviously very high—I would myself say, with the author, that they could not be higher, involving as they do the present state of humanity and perhaps its future as well.

The following paragraph, which concludes the second section of the trilogy's third book, can perhaps most effectively summarize Xenogenesis 's complex effect (showing more clearly than the other passages I have chosen something, too, of the book's scientific alertness). I will not annotate or indeed comment on this quotation, but simply set it forth and hope that, as it should, it leads you to seek out the rest for yourself:

Tomás [human, male] lifted my unconscious body, Jesusa [human, female] helping him with me now that I was deadweight. I have a clear, treasured memory of the two of them carrying me into the small room. They did not know then that my memory went on recording everything my senses perceived even when I was unconscious. Yet they handled me with great gentleness and care, as they had from the beginning of my change [maturing Oankali experience, a kind of metamorphosis]. They did not know that this was exactly what Oankali mates did at these times. And they did not see Aaor [like the narrator, part-human, part-Oankali] watching them with a hunger that was so intense that its face was distorted and its head and body tentacles elongated toward us.

Notes

1. Originally published, in 1987, 1988, and 1989, as Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago.

2. I have argued, in The Art of Translating Prose (1994) and elsewhere, that perhaps the most fundamental difference between poetry and prose is that the former stresses non-linear and thus stylistic elements, while the latter necessarily stresses that which is linear and thus less narrowly stylistic. Poetry in a sense always calls attention to how it is written. But prose not only need not, but indeed cannot, have anything like the same emphasis: there is inevitably more mind in prose, more sheer emotionality in poetry.

3. The sort of thing we have previously seen him do, more than once.

4. I can report that not only do its various "messages" stay with the reader, but they so continuously and deeply involve him/her that, while reading and for some while thereafter, one finds oneself living partly in the "real" world and partly in Butler's. I do not think it is possible to more basically transcend a genre limitation: this sort of holistic absorption of the reader is, indeed, almost a definition of literary power.

Brian K. Reed (essay date September 2003)

SOURCE: Reed, Brian K. "Behold the Woman: The Imaginary Wife in Octavia Butler's Kindred." CLA Journal 47, no. 1 (September 2003): 66-74.

[In the following essay, Reed discusses the significance of the protagonist's time travel to the antebellum Southin Kindred, demonstrating how Butler uses this device to explore such issues as slavery, guilt, and interracial relationships.]

In Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man, when the narrator descends into his marijuana-induced dreamworld, he meets a former slave who tells him that she both loved and hated her master. The narrator replies, "I too have become acquainted with ambivalence…. That's why I'm here."¹ Dana Franklin, the time traveler in Octavia Butler's novel Kindred, could have explained her presence in the antebellum South in the same way. More than her need to save the life of her great grandfather Rufus Weylin, is her need to resolve the contradictory feelings about her marriage that brings her to this troubled era in American history. Rufus Weylin and Alice Greenwood allow Dana to participate in a drama which is distant enough from her own life to be non-threatening and yet close enough to be relevant, a drama in which she works out a conflict in her feelings toward her husband, a conflict which she has previously evaded because it was too sensitive for her to face directly.

Dana's relationship with Rufus is a journey from evasion to decision. When she has her first conversation with him, it is easy to ignore the conflict between her feelings for the child and her concern for the slaves on his father's plantation. The abuse he describes having suffered at the hands of his father helps her to associate him less with this cruel man than with his slaves. The welts on Rufus' back, marks from his father's most recent lashing, suggest this connection, especially when Rufus mentions that the stripes were administered with the same whip his father uses on "niggers and horses."² Having watched his father sell a horse he loved, he may have some sympathy for people who have had family members or loved ones sold away from them.

However, as Rufus grows older, it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore the conflict her feelings for him create:

I thought of Rufus and his father, of Rufus becoming his father. It would happen someday in at least one way. Someday Rufus would own the plantation. Someday he would be the slaveholder, responsible in his own right for what happened to the people who lived in those half-hidden cabins. The boy was literally growing up as I watched—growing up because I watched and because I helped keep him safe.
(77)

Though she is not ready to give up this friendship, now she must do more to justify taking care of this child who would some day own her ancestors:

And I would try to keep friendship with him, maybe plant a few ideas in his mind that would help both me and the people who would be his slaves in the years to come. I might even be making things easier for Alice.
(77)

When Dana tells Kevin about her plan to help the slaves by shaping Rufus' ideas, Kevin warns, "You're gambling. Hell, you're gambling against history" (95). Ashraf H. A. Rushdy notes:

By becoming an agent capable of transforming history, Dana becomes to the same degree subject to history—one who is liable to be transformed by seemingly dead historical forces. When she gambles against history, in other words, she can also lose to history.³

When she unintentionally brings Kevin with her on her third trip to the plantation, Dana wonders about the transforming effect history might have on him. While she is trying to teach Rufus to think like Kevin, Kevin might be learning to think like Rufus' father. When Kevin assures her that he "wouldn't be in the danger [she] would be in" (88), Dana worries, "But he'd be in another kind of danger…. If he was stranded here for years, some part of this place would rub off on him" (88). Even more threatening is the effect history might have on her. It is not only the children she is concerned about when she sees them playing "slave auction." She observes, "The ease. Us, the children … I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery" (119).

In this psychological battle Dana is more vulnerable than the other blacks on the property, for her enemy is not fear but complacency, a more subtle villain whose weapons are not the chain and the lash but privilege and favor. Whether or not her friendship with Rufus succeeds in making the lives of the slaves easier, it undoubtedly does so for her own. The breakfasts he shares with her are the clearest example of this special treatment. As she and Rufus talk genially over the morning meal, much more sumptuous fare than slaves commonly enjoy, Rufus remarks, "Daddy'd do some cussin' if he came in here and found us eating together" (160), words which indicate that he knows that with Dana he has strayed far from the traditional master-slave relationship.

Unfortunately, a smooth relationship with Rufus means a troubled one with Alice. Seeing Dana getting along so well with Alice's tormentor drives Alice into occasional outbursts of disgust. It is as if Rufus forces Dana to be the "white nigger" (193) that Alice calls her when he manipulates Dana into serving as emissary for his sexual tyranny by threatening to have Alice beaten if Dana does not persuade her to come to him without compulsion. Though Dana is merely trying to save Alice from another lashing, a part of her understands only that she is sending Alice to Rufus as an unwilling object of his lust. The awful message Dana carries in her heart, unable to find the words to express, makes her deeply sensitive to Alice's hostility as Alice derides her for grieving over her missing white husband. When Alice again calls her a "white nigger" (199), Dana cannot bring herself to respond. After Dana finally manages to tell Alice about Rufus' heartless demand, Alice spits, "I ought to take a knife in there with me and cut his damn throat" (202). Something inside Dana tells her that this is what she should be doing instead of helping Rufus exploit her friend. As Alice storms at Dana with the fury she longs to unleash on Rufus, Dana's silence is so startling that Alice is compelled to ask, "What's the matter with you? … Why you let me run you down like that? … Why you let me talk about you so bad?" (202-03). Somewhere inside herself Dana knows that her tongue is bound with cords not of forbearance but of shame.

Perhaps even more than Rufus's perfidy in not mailing Dana's letters to Kevin after promising to do so, is this shame that makes Dana decide to try to escape. When she is caught and mercilessly whipped, she senses that her defeat has more meaning than she wants to face. Tasting the true barbarity of slavery for the first time, she does not know whether she has the strength to endure the brutality the other slaves face. Though she tells herself that she will try again to escape, the thoughts she tries to bar from her mind tell her she is losing her gamble with history. "See how easily slaves are made? they said" (215). In this defeat she feels she has failed not only herself but Alice and the other slaves as well. As she resumes the relatively easy life which friendship with Rufus brings her, she finds it difficult to look her fellow blacks in the eye. Regarding one occasion when she quietly left the cookhouse rather than endure their hostile glances and disdainful silence, she reflects, "I wondered why I crept away like that. Why hadn't I fought back?" (269). As when Alice asked a similar question, deep inside she knows the answer.

The contrast in Rufus's treatment of these two women suggests that they serve two distinct yet equally important roles in his life. He gives a clue to these roles when, a little drunk after visiting friends, he sees Alice and Dana sitting together and remarks, "Behold the woman…. You really are only one woman. Did you know that?" (277). With these words Rufus reveals that he has found a way to have Alice as he truly wants her. Not content with her body, Rufus wants a part of her that slavery cannot claim—her heart. He dreams of possessing her not through concubinage but through marriage, a dream that is unrealizable not only because it would be illegal in the antebellum South, but also because Alice despises him. Yet if he cannot be married to her in reality, he is determined to be married to her in his mind. He uses Dana's friendship and the similarity in appearance between the two women to make this fantasy seem real. Alice nearly solves this mystery as she observes, "He likes me in bed, and you out of bed, and you and I look alike if you can believe what people say…. Anyway, all that means we're two halves of the same woman—at least in his crazy head" (279-80).

These two halves become Rufus's perfect whole. By pretending that Alice and Dana are one woman, a woman he makes love to at night and chats with pleasantly over breakfast the next morning, he tricks himself into believing that this woman is his wife.

Rufus's imaginary marriage parallels Dana and Kevin's real one, suggesting Dana's secret resentment toward her husband. Though she knows Kevin is a compassionate, fair-minded man, a part of her cannot see beyond his whiteness. This irrational part of her holds him responsible for every injustice committed by a white person against a black. Unable to see him as a loving husband, this person inside her transforms him instead into an evil, raping slaveholder. Thus the narrator is both Dana, the contented wife, and Alice, the unwilling concubine. Like the real Alice, this inner Alice represents to Dana every black person who has ever been abused by a white, thus accusing Dana of betraying her race by getting too close to a white man.

Dana's mounting self-contempt is reflected in the increasing sharpness of Alice's contumely. The more pressure Rufus puts on Alice to be like Dana, the more bitterly Alice reviles Dana. When Rufus talks of freeing Alice's children, Alice surmises what he wants in return and finds in it an opportunity to take another verbal slap at her fellow captive. She seethes, "He wants me to like him…. Or maybe even love him. I think he wants me to be more like you!" (284). Explaining to Dana why she must run away, Alice snaps, "I got to go before I turn into what you are!" (287). Hearing no response to this venom, Sarah becomes the third character to wonder at Dana's passivity in the face of such hostility. The question she asks is essentially the same question Alice once asked Dana, the question Dana once asked herself: "What you let her talk to you like that for? She can't get away with nobody else" (287). Dana's introspection brings her close to the answer: "I didn't know. Guilt, maybe. In spite of everything, my life was easier than hers. Maybe I tried to make up for that by taking her abuse" (288).

Yet it is not only the contrast between Alice's suffering and Dana's privilege that causes Dana to look inward with a scornful eye; it is also Alice's refusal to be vanquished by her suffering. Missy Dehn Kubitschek writes, "To a certain extent, each woman feels the other's choices as a critique of her own; each sees, in the distorting mirror of the other, her own potential face."⁴ Just as Alice sees in Dana the person she is afraid she might become, Dana sees in Alice the person she flagellates herself for failing to be. When she hears of Alice's plans to run away again, Dana feels the same self-reproach she felt when Alice spoke of using a knife on Rufus. Though Dana is at first reluctant to help Alice escape, protesting that the children are too young to face such hardship, Alice perceives enough of Dana's secret torment to be confident of her assistance. When Dana threatens to stop caring about what happens to her, Alice sneers, "You'll care. And you'll help me. Else, you'd have to see yourself for the white nigger you are, and you couldn't stand that" (288).

However, the true test of Dana's blackness is not whether or not she will help Alice gain freedom, but whether or not she can embrace Alice's passion for freedom. While the horrors of the plantation have taught Dana how easily slaves are made, perhaps Alice's willfulness has reminded her of Frederick Douglass' famous chiasmus: "You have seen how a man was made a slave; now you shall see how a slave was made a man,"⁵ words with which he introduces his narration of the moment he chooses to fight rather than endure a beating. When Dana thinks of these two defiant spirits, perhaps she wonders how much dehumanization it would take to make her use her concealed weapon. The sale of Sam triggers an incident that tells Dana she will soon learn the answer to this question. When Rufus strikes her for interfering with the transaction, he releases a side of himself he has previously shown to Alice but never to Dana. Dana knows that this physical brutality is a mere harbinger of the sexual brutality that has also been part of Alice's misery. Slashing her wrists is Dana's way of gaining respite in which to examine herself in preparation for this other, more sinister Rufus.

Dana is relieved to find herself transported back to her own century with her husband. This time, Kevin's absence from the stress of the plantation allows her to clarify her thoughts. At one point she hopes Kevin will relieve her of the responsibility of the dreadful decision she must make; however, their exchange only emphasizes what a terrible thing killing would be:

"Kevin, tell me what you want me to do."
He looked away, saying nothing. I gave him several seconds, but he kept silent.
"… Kevin, if you can't even say it, how can you expect me to do it?"
(298)

The full weight of this responsibility presses heavily on Dana's shoulders when she discovers the body hanging in the barn upon her return to antebellum Maryland. Her bones ache not only with the agony of confronting the appalling consequence of her complicity with cruelty, but also with the realization that without Alice, Rufus is even more certain to come to her with his sexual demands. Alice's death helps Dana to clarify her inescapable decision. Now she begins to sort out her confused feelings toward the two men in her life, for now in her mind the slaveholder begins to disentangle himself from the husband. Though she is still distressed by the thought of killing another human being, this new clarity of thought makes the alternative seem more revolting than ever. To surrender her body to the man who made Alice's life so miserable and brief would be a betrayal more vile than anything she has done since her time travels began. She feels she owes it to Alice to do for her what Alice once wished aloud she could do for herself. By killing herself, Alice has found new life in Dana's soul.

Though possessed by the will of her fallen friend, Dana also fears her soul's fierce new inmate, whose fingers lust for the feel of the knife handle. She dreads more than ever the agonizing choice she must make, for she is afraid to release this wrathful energy inside her. When she observes Rufus fondling a pistol as if contemplating suicide, once again she hopes to be relieved of the terrible responsibility she bears. When Rufus fails to pull the trigger, like Kevin he leaves the burden with her.

This responsibility is manifest the moment Rufus grabs her with lust in his eyes. His words have more meaning than he intends when he says, "It's up to you" (318). Dana tries to deny what is ineluctably hers. "No, Goddammit, it isn't! Keeping you alive has been up to me for too long! Why didn't you shoot yourself when you started to? I wouldn't have stopped you!" (318). Even now the debate rages in her mind. "I realized how easy it would be for me to continue to be still and forgive him even this. So easy, in spite of all my talk. But it would be so hard to raise the knife, drive it into the flesh I had saved so many times. So hard to kill …" (319).

As Dana finally forces herself to use the knife, she is more aware than ever of how much a part of her Rufus has become. When she is transported back to her own time, she has paid a monstrous price, a price that goes deeper than the part of her arm that is left joined to the wall, a price that includes the part of her heart that is lost with it.

Yet for this price she has begun to heal the wound in her marriage. In David Bradley's novel The Chaneysville Incident, John Washington, who struggles with conflicting feelings in his own interracial relationship, says it is important to understand history "so you hate the right things for the right reasons."⁶In her journey into history, Dana has learned to redirect her hatred from her husband, whose only crime is being white, to the slaveholder, who represents the true oppressors of her race. In killing Rufus she has satisfied the secret rage she has harbored against Kevin, for she has slain the monster who has inhabited his form.

Notes

1. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random, 1992) 10.

2. Octavia Butler, Kindred (New York: Simon, 1979) 23. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page number(s) only.

3. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, "Families of Orphans: Relation and Disrelation in Octavia Butler's Kindred," College English 55 (1993): 145.

4. Missy Dehn Kubitschek, Claiming the Heritage: African-American Women Novelists and History (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1991) 39.

5. Frederick Douglass, The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader, ed. William L. Andrews (New York: Oxford UP, 1996) 65.

6. David Bradley, The Chaneysville Incident (New York: Harper, 1981) 274.

Clara Escoda Agusti (essay date 2005)

SOURCE: Agusti, Clara Escoda. "The Relationship between Community and Subjectivity in Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower." Extrapolation 46, no. 3 (2005): 351-59.

[In the following essay, Agusti analyzes the dynamics of gender and racial exploitation in Butler's futuristic novel, Parable of the Sower. The critic maintains that Lauren Olamina, the black female protagonist of the novel, successfully subverts this corrupt culture of exploitation by creating a utopian society that eschews racism, sexism, and domination while it encourages egalitarianism, diversity, and individualism.]

Butler's future world of 2024 shares many of the characteristics Immanuel Wallerstein attributes to our contemporary society. In our contemporary world of economic globalization, says Wallerstein in his book Utopistics, "transnational corporations are so truly global that they can circumvent the states" (47). In her fictive world of 2024, Butler projects the political fantasies of the anti-government right into the future, a powerful segment of American society which would resolve the current capitalist crisis by accentuating economic inequality and by annulling the power of the state to protect and organize its subjects. In this context, as Tom Moylan argues in Scraps of the Untainted Sky, competing corporate values, "without the safety nets of regulation, support, and service … have completed the destruction of the social matrix and as the basic requirements of existence are being sold back to people who have been just deprived of them" (224). This leads Butler's female protagonist to assert that debt-slavery, something "old and nasty" (105), has revived.

This essay focuses on how Butler dramatizes and overcomes the exploitation of the female that ensues from such a form of capitalism. In her novel, sexual slavery and prostitution are inherent tendencies of a system that favors profit at the expense of human well-being. Lauren Olamina, the female protagonist, slowly unfolds in her diary how society allows for the sexual exploitation of, particularly, black women. When her house is burnt down by thieves, she flees to the North in order to forge her own utopian community. On her way North, Olamina meets a series of black and Hispanic women who have suffered sexual abuse, like Allison and Jillian, two young girls whose "pimp was their father" (212). So she will tell Bankole, her future husband, after listening to their stories: "You realize that women and children were sold like cattle—and no doubt sold into prostitution" (263). Olamina will begin to observe the close link between economic exploitation and sexual exploitation: "I wondered how much difference there was between Natividad's former employer, who treated her as though he owned her, and Richard Moss who purchased young girls to be part of his harem" (200). By inquiring into their personal lives, Olamina recognizes what Adam McKible terms in his article "‘These are the Facts of the Darky's History’: Thinking History and Reading Names in four African American Texts," "the gendering and racializing of reproduction; the exploitation of women as the producers of surplus value—children—and the exploitation of ‘free’ black women as low-wage producers and surplus reproducers" (232). In her double marginality, being both female and black, Olamina is exposed to the contradictions of a society which supposedly characterizes itself by "the ‘equality’ of ‘free’ wage-labor" (225). This subject position at the crossroads of society's contradictions that the African American woman occupies may become a site of awareness and, therefore, of powerful self-assertion.

This article focuses on how Olamina counteracts the oppression that the system wields over her as a black woman and how she is able to re-write her own utopian community's approach to gender and racial difference, thus creating a community of equals. The essay will trace the strategies by which Olamina acquires a subjectivity that allows her to modify the pattern of relationships in the group. Olamina will redefine the concepts of femaleness and masculinity in her community, in order to undermine sexual exploitation based on gender and race discrimination. Peter Stillman comments on the nature of Lauren's utopia, affirming that "Earthseed is definitely concerned with welfare and education on this earth, but by creating enclaves within the political system, not by changing that system" (32). Indeed, as Hoda Zaki specifies, as a black female writer who was influenced by the greater gender and racial equality that was achieved through the Civil Rights movements, as well as by the feminist movements of the 70s, Butler "demonstrates a conflation of the public and private spheres: she will attain her utopia by foregrounding personal relationships" (245). Olamina will achieve a more democratic society not by propos- ing a specific economic system, that is, by defining a society's infrastructure, but by modifying its cultural relationships, and this will lead us to observe how, from her interior utopia of relationships, a more rational organization of work and wealth can ensue.

"You Realize that Women and Children Were Sold Like Cattle."—Octavia E. Butler

The inherent exploitation of human beings that the capitalist system allows for informs the relationships between male and female on a daily basis, and it indeed penetrates into Olamina's household. "The economic foundations, the way in which men earn their living," states W. E. B. DuBois, "are the determining factors in the development of civilization … and the pattern of culture" (303). The interactions between the members of Olamina's family reveal what McKible calls "the actuality of two separate spheres—one public, male, valuable and productive; the other private, female, worthless, and somehow ‘outside’ capitalist production" (230). "The exploitation of gender and race," he continues, "is integral to the machinations of capitalism, and it extorts profit from the womb as surely as it does from the field or factory" (230).

Olamina's brother Keith repeatedly reduces Olamina's capacity for an extraordinary empathy to a female weakness, a pathology from the point of view of the male world, which justifies her exclusion from it: "[it] would bring you down even if nobody touched you. […] You better marry Curtis and have babies. Out there you wouldn't last a day" (97). In "Dystopian Critiques, Utopian Possibilities, and Human Purposes in Octavia Butler's Parables, " Peter Stillman finds that "dream" of domesticity "especially for the woman—only a dead-end of greater responsibility and fewer possibilities" (20).

Keith is imbued by the culture's binary oppositions, and his male identity is shown to depend upon the exclusion of the "female" in him. On his eighteenth birthday, he asks his parents for a gun, so that he may become a "man:" "I am a man! I shouldn't be hiding in the house" (82), he says. "He wanted to show he was a man, not a scared girl" (82). So Olamina records her disagreement with her parents' acquiesence to satisfy Keith's wish: "My parents' good judgment failed them this week on my brother Keith's birthday. They gave him is own BB gun" (83). Diana Fuss argues, in Essentially Speaking, that white patriarchy, traditionally based upon an understanding of the white, male subject as stable and unitary, is constructed upon an exclusion of difference: "to the extent that identity always contains the specter of non-identity, or otherness, within it, identity is always purchased at the price of the exclusion of the Other, the repression or repudiation of non-identity" (103). This way, woman is produced in social signification as the "other" on which the very existence of man depends, as much as other asymmetrical relations: that of exploitation, privilege, and patriarchy (Davies, 70). If manhood is defined in terms of privilege and the ability to rule over others, it should not surprise us that Olamina's brother has a strong power rivalry with his father in relation to the female: "Dad was home so he wouldn't come in. I thanked him for the money and told him I would give it to Cory" (99).

Indeed, Cory, Olamina's stepmother, is a crucial character who will allow us to trace the beginnings of Olamina's model of an empowered subjectivity. Cory functions as Olamina's mirror image; she is the woman in her family who does not survive the system, who cannot create a female subjectivity under oppression. Even though Cory is a PhD, she cannot project her identity and preparation into her job, as her husband does. This lack of freedom in the social world parallels her growing disadvantage and loss of authority inside the home, as opposed to her husband's growing influence on their children, and in the larger neighborhood community. Cory finally collapses when her husband forbids her to take a new job in Olivar, arguing that the town has been sold by a corporation and it enslaves workers through debt: "Freedom is dangerous Cory … but it is precious" (119), he argues. She finally gives up her voice and enters a state of "walking coma" (119).

In her double marginality, being both female and black, Olamina is exposed to the contradictions of a society which, in Angela Davis' words, supposedly characterizes itself by "the ‘equality’ of a ‘free’ wage-labor" (qtd. in McKible 225). Whereas other women, like Cory, cannot survive, Olamina is aware of the potential for subversion that her position allows her, the powerful site of self-assertion her position can be. Lisbeth Gant-Britton quotes precisely such an affirmation from the words of D. Soyini Madison, in The Woman that I Am: "Being the woman that I am I will make a way out of no way … [these] are the words of all women of color who assert who they are, who create sound out of silence, and who build worlds out of remnants" (282). At the crossroads between the liberal discourses of her society and her actual marginalization, Olamina envisions personal and communal change. In her diary, she painstakingly records Cory's incapacity for change and adaptation and, between the lines of Cory's disempowerment, she rewrites social relations.

An Interior Utopian Model

This complex subject position in which Olamina, as an African American woman, finds herself—one of race, gender and class oppression—"experiences gender from a ‘racialized’ position and race from a gendered position; so that any notion of the unified self is challenged both from without and from within" (McKible 226). As such, this new subject can relate to difference in terms of identification and interpellation. Butler demonstrates how Olamina is able to blur the differences between subject and Other, manhood and femaleness in herself, in a way that difference is incorporated into the self, and it can be taught to the community in the process of relating, in order to downplay the legal fictions of gender and race which distort the growth of a community and its individuals. Her utopia is interior because, contrary to traditional male utopias, change takes place within the individual and, in her process of relating, at the juncture between subject and object.

Lauren achieves this blurring and fragmentation of previously unitary and unconnected gender categories particularly through cross-dressing. Indeed, in order to protect herself from rape and violence inflicted on women, in her escape to the North Olamina decides she will dress as a man. By doing this she does not surrender to the invisibility or vulnerability of her sex, but she demonstrates her ability to understand gender not as essential, but as performative, and her eagerness to play with gender categories as well as with her own body. She understands her body as a site of political discourses and as a fluid space where gender categories are not mutually exclusive. Michael M. Levy, in his essay "The Survival of Adolescent Girls," calls this strategy of unfixing gender categories "androgyny." He argues that Olamina's survival is linked to her ability to be androgynous, "adapting actively in any situation regardless of gender constraints" (37). Olamina does not regard the body as an immutable biological given, but rather, as a field of inscription of socio-symbolic codes: it stands for the radical materiality of the subject. As Catherine S. Ramirez argues in "Cyborg Feminism," "the body is simultaneously material and discursive. Our conceptions and experiences of it as material are always socially mediated" (386).

Androgyny was a very influential concept during the 70s, mainly as a reaction to feminism as it was conceived in the 60s, where the centrality of motherhood still championed other alternatives. Androgyny is based on a definition of human characteristics as particular to one sex or another, with the androgynous individual exhibiting characteristics of both sex roles. Yet from the 1990s onward, some have questioned whether human characteristics need to be dichotomized and defined by gender at all. Even if it has been questioned, androgyny implies a sharing of tasks and emotions between genders that is subversive and challenges the traditional approach to difference. Butler will insist on the importance of this concept to the point of making it explicit in the novel's sequel, Parable of the Talents, where Olamina claims: "I usually travel as a man, by the way. I am big enough and androgynous-looking enough to get away with it" (370). Like Levy, Butler relates androgyny to adaptation and survival.

Olamina does not regard the body as an immutable biological given. Rather, it is a "field of inscription of socio-symbolic codes: it stands for the radical materiality of the subject. The body is simultaneously material and discursive. Our conceptions and experiences of it as material are always socially mediated (Ramirez 386). She understands her body as a site where gender categories are not mutually exclusive.

Another strategy is dialogue: by engaging in active dialogue with the members of the group, Olamina gives a power message to the reader on how to delegitimize the dominant ideology and introduce her subjectivity. She does this through discursive techniques which rewrite the dominant story; in this case, the construct of masculinity. In McKible's words, the privilege of Olamina's marginalization is a "consciousness that defies the purported truthfulness of History" (224). Indeed, feminine initiative is, at the beginning, still not well-regarded by the male members of the group, and Olamina rewrites the threats she experiences, responding to them in dialogic contestation: "Travis grunted, still non-commital. Well, I had helped him twice, and now I was a woman. It might take him a while to forgive me for that" (191). Her response both signals and de-legitimizes the construct of masculinity. She produces and activates her subjectivity by causing a rupture with the dominant story "resulting in a de-legitimating of the prior story or a displacement which shifts attention to the other side of the story" (McKible 226).

"But it was Unusual that he had Taken Care of this Child."—Octavia E. Butler

Out of her transformation, Olamina influences the members of the community into perceiving themselves as well as a site of dialogic differences, working against the perception of the subject as unitary and closed, and towards androgyny. In her contact with the male members of the group, she teaches about accepting gender and racial difference through empathy and mothering.

Olamina's "hyperempathy," which she got due to a pill her mother abused while she was pregnant with her, causes her to feel the suffering of others. As she ex- plains: "Thanks to Paracecto […] the particular pill my mother chose to abuse before my birth killed her, I get a lot of grief that doesn't belong to me" (Butler 11). As a result, the Earthseed community will only use violence to defend itself, not to dominate. An apparent "disability," hyperempathy helps her re-define manhood and its approach to arms. If violence is allowed exclusively for self-defense, manhood will cease to define itself in relation to domination. According to Ramirez, "Lauren's hyperempathy defies the notion of the stable and closed subject as it assumes and/or is catapulted into various social and subject positions, blurring the boundaries of consciousness" (Ramirez 385). Patricia Melzer adds, in her article "‘All That You Touch You Change’: Utopian Desire and the Concept of Change in Octavia Butler's Parables ":

[Hyperempathy] represents the painful and pleasurable process of crossing differences and of actually experiencing the other's world beyond a mere willingness to understand it. Sharing blurs and shifts boundaries and discloses a stable, autonomous identity to be a myth—sharing becomes a symbol against the binary construction of self and other and thus constitutes a crucial metaphor for re-defining social relations.
(45)

Olamina, therefore, creates a blank space where male domination was hegemonic. Now she will insert the female characteristic of mothering, or nurturing, in its core. Both mothering and "hyperempathy" have subversive qualities because they embrace difference without interposing society's symbolic codes, such as racist and sexist legal fictions. It is a source of stability and equality that can be used politically to counteract discourses of oppression.

The members of the group, as much the males as the females, take care of the children of others. This incorporation of difference can only make the community stronger. In Melzer's words, "children embody the future the adults are trying to create" (41), and she continues: "Olamina realizes how responsibility for others, children or adults, can give meaning to life and can heal internal wounds: ‘taking care of other people can be a good cure for nightmares’" (41).

Olamina's redefinition of manhood is now complete. Males as well as females can embrace androgynous aspects into the self. According to Mary Pipher in Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, androgyny is a survival strategy whereby adults adapt to their reality, males as well as females: "An androgynous person can comfort a baby or change a tire, cook a meal or chair a meeting…. They are free to act without worrying if their behavior is feminine or masculine; androgynous adults are the most well adjusted" (qtd. in Levy 37). Olamina observes this change in Grayson Mora, a male who took care of his daughter just as a female member of the group did: "the man had become a father almost as young as the woman had become a mother. That wasn't unusual, but it was unusual that he had taken care of the child" (261). Butler, therefore, subversively extends traditional motherhood to males, dissociating it from female biology. In including and arguing in favor of non-biological parenting she can extend the activity of care-taking to men, and separate it from her society's idea that it is a woman's enforced biological "destiny." Butler emphasizes the aspects of otherness in motherhood, not those of sameness, by extending the ability to care and support others beyond biological ties. Again, both mothering and "hyperempathy," therefore, have subversive qualities, embracing difference without interposing racist and sexist legal fictions.

An example of this is embodied by Natividad, who breast feeds both her baby and another woman's baby when she is found dead, incorporating the Other:

A lone, dark figure came away from the truck and took several steps towards us. At that moment, Natividad took the new child, and in spite of his age, gave him one breast and Dominic [her son] the other…. It worked. Both children were comforted almost at once. They made a few more small sounds, then settled down to nursing.
(226)

And indeed, an ironic, final comment, demonstrates that the dominant ideology still informs the community members, but that they have learnt to undermine it. Once the group has found the land that will be a home to the Earthseed community, they talk about the social roles each might now perform. Harry, the white male, is assigned the role of overseer, but he immediately achieves distance from such a power position, as it corresponds to previous definitions of masculinity with which he does not identify: "Are you telling me you believe I'd like a job pushing slaves around and taking away their children?" (290). The dominant ideology is now counteracted and re-thought, and a powerful alternative has taken its place.

Conclusion

The novel's aim is to map a subjectivity, or a series of viable strategies, as they take place within the consciousness of a black female, through which she is able to externalize a political voice and actively effect social change. Olamina's utopia is then an interior utopia, an interior model that, in the process of her actively relating to the group, is able to achieve change amongst its members, to actually shape society. It is from modifying gender and actively relating to the diversity of the group that change occurs. Whereas Olamina's proposal limits traditional individualism, the novel does affirm the individuality of the members of the group, in that change must first occur within the individuals in order to modify society in any lasting manner.

Interestingly, the group's search for the North as a site of freedom and possibilities echoes slave narratives' quest for the North as the site of utopian desire. The slave narratives perceived the North as a land where the possibilities of work generated freedom, and where the racist and gendered exploitation of human beings that had taken place in the South would be overcome. Olamina tells us the process whereby this goal of opportunity and equality could be successfully sustained.

As a result of Olamina's reconfiguration of the subject as a site of dialogic differences, her utopia remains open to conflict. It is based on difference, and difference needs to be continually acknowledged and renegotiated. Her utopia is imperfect in the sense of being unfinished. As a Critical Utopia, it differs from traditional utopias in the sense that it is no longer defined in absolute terms, it does not seek to "emphasize the notion of a unitary group of transparent selves, with a common identity," and thus stabilize the utopian horizon (Melzer 32).

Also, Olamina's leadership differs from that of former black and white historical leaders. In having little resource to authority because she is a woman, she does not base her leadership on charisma or on the retention of power. Instead, she builds a group of equally powerful and self-conscious individuals, seeking to uncover leadership potential in others. As Peter Stillman argues: "She does not try to force a connection, but lets it develop" (24), or "they arrive at decisions by open and unfettered discussions free from domination or imposed claims of authority" (21).

Indeed, in Butler's utopia no woman can be silenced like Cory, or be sexually exploited like Zahra or Natividad due to skin color, if an appropriate redefinition of manhood and femaleness takes place. From here, an equal distribution of goods and work can ensue; one which is not based on an essentialist perception of the sexes and races, but on a perception of any subject as a site of creative differences that enriches the group. In Olamina's utopia, "life commemorates life" (293) because the black, female body and agency are not distorted.

Works Cited

Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower, New York, Warner Books, 1993.

———. Parable of the Talents, New York: Warner Books, 1998.

Davies, Carole Boyce. Black Women, Writing and Identity. Migrations of the Subject, London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

DuBois, W. E. B. Dusk of Dawn. An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 2002.

Fuss, Diana. Essentially Speaking. Feminism, Nature and Difference, New York and London: Routledge, 1989.

Levy, Michael M. "The Survival of Adolescent Girls in Recent Fiction by Butler and Womack," Foundation, no.72 (1998): 34-41.

McKible, Adam. "‘These Are the Facts of the Darky's History:’ Thinking History and Reading Names in four African American Texts," African American Review, vol. 28, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 223-235.

Melzer, Patricia. "‘All That You Touch You Change:’ Utopian Desire and the Concept of Change in Octavia Butlers's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents," Femspec, vol. 3, no. 2 (2002): 31-52.

Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky. Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000.

Ramirez, Catherine S. "Cyborg Feminism: The Science Fiction of Octavia E. Butler and Gloria Anzaldua," Reload. Rethinking Women + Cyberculture. Eds. Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth. Cambridge and London: M.I.T., 2002: 374-402.

Stillman, Peter G. "Dystopian Critiques, Utopian Possibilities and Human Purposes in Octavia Butler's Parables," Utopian Studies, vol.14, no. 1 (2003): 15-35.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. Utopistics. Or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-First Century. New York: The New Press, 1998.

Zaki, Hoda. "Utopia, Dystopia and Ideology in the Science Fiction of Octavia E. Butler," Science Fiction Studies, vol. 17, no.2 (1990): 239-51.