Octavia Butler: A Freedom Dreamer

Octavia Butler was one of the only writers I feel spoke for my culture. Born in 1947, She died yesterday after a fall outside her home in Washington. What can you say about a boundary-buster who's very last novel was titled Fledgling? Diagnosed with dyslexia as a child, she went on to win the prestigious Hugo and Nebula awards for science fiction writing. She was also a MacArthur "genius" fellow and deeply loved daydreamer who left us at the height of her powers.

She told stories from the people, with a distinctly African-American sensibility. Butler got weird, such as the insane ethical quandaries of Kindred, the story of a black woman sucked through some portal back into slavery days (along with her white husband!). But isn't that just like life? Problems you couldn't dream up... and that nobody every wants to talk about.

In my two favorite books by her, The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents, she explored the seeds of what is coming to be in the collapse of the American dream through the journey of a young, black woman named Lauren Olamina. She suffers from a condition called "hyper-empathy"  in a dystopic near-future California that's an archipelago of walled communities surrounded by social and ecological disintegration.

In the failure of her father's religion, Lauren becomes the prophet of a new philosophy called "Earthseed," which to my simple eye is good, ol' fashioned dialectical materialism... with a penchant for space travel. Her collected writing are a high expression of what Robin Kelly called the Freedom Dream.

Let the opening words of the Parable of the Sower speak now for Octavia Butler's well-lived life:

All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
Is Change.

God
Is Change.

Kazembe Balagun, a leading voice of New York's lumpen intelligentsia, recently interviewed Octavia Butler for the Indypendent. The full text follows along with some defining titles from the genre of speculative fiction she came to personify.

Interviewing the Oracle: Octavia Butler
By Kazembe Balagun
(from the Indypendent)

Octavia Butler’s conversation style is like her prose: lean and to the point. Not that she does not have a lot to talk about. She has written eleven novels including Kindred, whose heroine keeps falling back in time to save her white slave-master ancestor, and Parable of the Sower, a richly-imagined tale of a small band of survivors founding a new earth-centered religion in the midst of a post-apocalyptic America.

You can call it save the world fiction, but it clearly doesn’t save anything,” she says. “It just calls people’s attention to the fact that so much needs to be done and obviously they are people who are running this country who don’t care.”

Winner of the Hugo Award for science fiction and a MacArthur Genius Fellowship, Butler’s fiction bends the boundaries of race and gender, while focusing on the problems of pollution, the legacy of slavery, and racism. The Indypendent spoke with Butler, while she was on tour promoting Fledgling, her first novel in nearly a decade.

KB: What were some of your major influences in terms of decision to start writing science fiction?
OCTAVIA BUTLER: I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time. I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining. Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.

You mention wide openness and I noticed in Lilith’s Brood and your most recent novel Fledging there a great concern with bending the constraints of gender, race and sexuality, as well as open relationships. Do you think polygamy is the future of humanity?
No, I think the future of humanity will be like the past, we’ll do what we’ve always done and there will still be human beings. Granted, there will always be people doing something different and there are a lot of possibilities. I think my characters [Lauren in Parable of the Sower and Shori Matthews in Fledging] have communities that are important in their lives or build communities around themselves.

Your novels deal with the past, future and present as one. Some have compared it to the concept of Sankofa “We look to the past to understand the present and prepare for the future.” How do you see the concept of Sankofa playing in your work?
Well there’s only one novel that remotely deals with that concept and that’s Kindred. I was trying to make real the emotional reality of slavery. I was trying make people feel more about the data they had learned. I wanted to make the past real and [show] how it scars the present.

What’s interesting to you on the literary scene at the moment?
I’ve been on the book tour for a few weeks, which means I haven’t read anything more difficult than a newspaper (laughs)so I can’t recommend anything in good conscience.  One of my favorite books is Issac’s Storm by Erik Larson. It gives us a picture of the great storm that hit Galveston, Texas and gives us a picture of 1900.  Also a book called T-Rex and the Crater of Doom, by Walter Alvarez. It’s a history of the finding of the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs. I like it because it shows more about how science is done than most books that you read about the subject. It’s talks about how the way we think about science can become religious if we are not careful. There were people who were firmly entrenched in the belief that things can only happen one way, they found it difficult that it could happen another way.

Do you see a tension between writing save the world type of fiction and the artistic impulses of the writer?
No, not at all. I have written books about making the world a better place and how to make humanity more survivable. While Fledgling is a different type of book, The Parable series serve as cautionary tales.  I wrote the Parable books because of the direction of the country. You can call it save the world fiction, but it clearly doesn’t save anything. It just calls people’s attention to the fact that so much needs to be done and obviously they are people who are running this country who don’t care. I mean look at what the Congress is doing in terms of taking money away from every cause that is helping people who aren’t very rich. Especially making it harder for people to get an  education. Who would want to live in a world where there were fewer educated people?

We’re speaking at time of crisis in the country between the Iraq war and Katrina. As a writer what makes you hopeful for the future?
At the present, I feel so unhopeful. I recognize we will pay more attention when we have different leadership. I’m not exactly sure where that leadership will come from. But that doesn’t mean I think we’re all going down the toilet, I just don’t see where that hope will come from. I think we need people with stronger ideals than John Kerry or Bill Clinton. I think we need people with more courage and vision. It’s a shame we have had people who are so damn weak.

--------------

The New Tradition of Speculative Fiction
By Kazembe Balagun

Octavia Butler is in the long tradition of writers who blend science fiction and resistance politics. Surprising to some, the progressive tradition in science fiction dates back to the 19th century. Here are some of the highlights.

Blake
By Martin Delaney
Delaney was an antislavery orator and editor when he published Blake, or  Huts of America in 1862. The central character is Henirco Blacus a runaway slave who becomes Blake, a leader of a slave rebellion to overthrow the Cuban government and use the island as a base area for ending slavery throughout the Americas.  Written some years before John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and, the novel was a stark contrast to the pacifist leanings of many in the antislavery movement.

Herland
By Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Before the personal became political, Gilman wrote this short 1915 novel on what a feminist republic would look like. Filled with wonder and irony, this funny tale challenged many to rethink what civilization is and what free women could do.

Looking Backward 1887-2000
By Edward Bellamy
The 21st Century was the subject of speculation from the futurists in Russia to “The Jetsons” in the 1960s.  For Bellamy, in Looking Backward, in 2000 America is a socialist republic where war, famine and cash are eliminated. Written in the vein of reform novelists like Sinclair Lewis and Upton Sinclair, Bellamy’s work is seen as naïve in light of the advent of the Soviet police state.

The Dispossessed
By Ursula K. LeGuin
Shevek is a middle-aged inhabitant of a desolate anarchist utopia. He is also the greatest theoretical physicist in the nine known worlds of LeGuin’s Hainish Universe. In The Dispossesed, he becomes the first person from his society in over a century to return to the powerful mother planet and unexpectedly lights the fires of change in both worlds. LeGuin uses his journey to subtlely compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of both anarchism and capitalism as well as to explore time, space, love, fidelity and the struggle to reconcile individual freedom and collective responsibility.

Comments

[P-Funk from the Mothership]

That is terrible. She was my favorite novelist. We should have a party for her.

[Say Word]

Parable of the Sower and the followup are must read. I read her and knew I wasn't crazy.

[celticfire]

A very sad loss.

She will be missed.

[Christopher Day]

This is very sad. The place she occupies in the lives of the people I most love and respect has always made me feel guilty for not reading her novels. Now I know I must.

[the burningman]

I'm currently going back through Kazembe's full interview with Octavia Butler, and it will be posted before the end of the weekend. This was edited for publication in The Indypendent, where space is a major concern. Since this was perhaps her last published interview, it seems worth bringing it out unabridged.