“Now!” I let her push me out of the kitchen, then walked ahead of her toward my bedroom. The sudden urgency in her voice sounded real. “You would have done it to Hoa tonight!” I accused.
“I must do it to someone tonight.”
I stopped in spite of her urgency and stood in her way. “Don’t you care who?”
She flowed around me and into my bedroom. I found her waiting on the couch we shared. There was nothing in Hoa’s room that she could have used. She would have done it to Hoa on the floor. The thought of her doing it to Hoa at all disturbed me in a different way now, and I was suddenly angry.
Yet I undressed and lay down beside her. I knew what to do, what to expect. I had been told all my life. I felt the familiar sting, narcotic, mildly pleasant. Then the blind probing of her ovipositor. The puncture was painless, easy. So easy going in. She undulated slowly against me, her muscles forcing the egg from her body into mine. I held on to a pair of her limbs until I remembered Lomas holding her that way. Then I let go, moved inadvertently, and hurt her. She gave a low cry of pain and I expected to be caged at once within her limbs. When I wasn’t, I held on to her again, feeling oddly ashamed.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
She rubbed my shoulders with four of her limbs.
“Do you care?” I asked. “Do you care that it’s me?”
She did not answer for some time. Finally, “You were the one making the choices tonight, Gan. I made mine long ago.”
“Would you have gone to Hoa?”
“Yes. How could I put my children into the care of one who hates them?”
“It wasn’t…hate.”
“I know what it was.”
“I was afraid.”
Silence,
“I still am.” I could admit it to her here, now.
“But you came to me…to save Hoa.”
“Yes.” I leaned my forehead against her. She was cool velvet, deceptively soft. “And to keep you for myself,” I said. It was so. I didn’t understand it, but it was so.
She made a soft hum of contentment. “I couldn’t believe I had made such a mistake with you,” she said. “I chose you. I believed you had grown to choose me.”
“I had, but…”
“Lomas.”
“Yes.”
“I had never known a Terran to see a birth and take it well. Qui has seen one, hasn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Terrans should be protected from seeing.”
I didn’t like the sound of that—and I doubted that it was possible. “Not protected,” I said. “Shown. Shown when we’re young kids, and shown more than once. Gatoi, no Terran ever sees a birth that goes right. All we see is N’Tlic—pain and terror and maybe death.”
She looked down at me. “It is a private thing. It has always been a private thing.”
Her tone kept me from insisting—that and the knowledge that if she changed her mind, I might be the first public example. But I had planted the thought in her mind. Chances were it would grow, and eventually she would experiment.
“You won’t see it again,” she said. “I don’t want you thinking any more about shooting me.”
The small amount of fluid that came into me with her egg relaxed me as completely as a sterile egg would have, so that I could remember the rifle in my hands and my feelings of fear and revulsion, anger and despair. I could remember the feelings without reviving them. I could talk about them.
“I wouldn’t have shot you,” I said. “Not you.” She had been taken from my father’s flesh when he was my age.
“You could have,” she insisted.
“Not you.” She stood between us and her own people, protecting, interweaving.
“Would you have destroyed yourself?”
I moved carefully, uncomfortable. “I could have done that. I nearly did. That’s Qui’s ‘away.’ I wonder if he knows.”
“What?”
I did not answer.
“You will live now.”
“Yes.” Take care of her, my mother used to say. Yes.
“I’m healthy and young,” she said. “I won’t leave you as Lomas was left—alone, N’Tlic. I’ll take care of you.”
* * * *
Copyright © 1984 by Davis Publications, Inc.
BLACK WOMEN WRITING SPECULATIVE FICTION, by Ayana R. Abdallah
“[T]he front lines aren’t always what you think they are”
—Ntozake Shange
As scholar and teacher, I typically question the role speculative fiction plays in defining human beings, how imagination is employed to redefine it, and for what purpose. How does speculative literature speak specifically to the needs of women and what is the significance of messages therein for women of color? I question how ideas, characterization, language/ voice, structure, time, setting, rhythm, space/place, action, and meaning establish a sense of purposeful movement between spheres of subjectivity, spheres of being, spheres of consciousness, or spheres of epistemology in the literature. In the classroom, I also pose additional questions: Why do Black women authors create characters (dark female heroines) that evolve (survive or transform) in communities teetering between self-destruction and struggle, waste and complacency, tradition and freedom? Have particularities such as obfuscation of gendered and racialized subjects lost urgency in their writing? I ask students to consider and investigate a core sensibility in Black women’s writing otherwise referred to as Africentric transgressive creativity—exploring characteristics of creative resistance in Black women’s literature.
Africentric transgressive creativity in African descended women’s speculative fiction heralds the primacy of research and creativity that move from known constraints on the dark (feminine) subjectivity (logos, religion, education, slavery, apartheid, dislocation, poverty, illiteracy, mysogeny, colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, patriarchal tradition, cultural oppression, all gendered and racialized modes of disenfranchisement ) to articulation of the possibility of freedom. Ahh! Freedom. Freedom from nagging socially constructed limitations on Black women’s internal and external universe of experience (or according to distinctions, a woman makes, between fact, reality, and belief), freedom as realizable concept for individuals and community alike, freedom and the means of attainment. Each is a contested point among scholars, artists, healers, and others. Nonetheless, one point on which Black women in the Americas concur is that African women’s suffrage before slavery, during slavery, and beyond lies at the center of African Diaspora discourse. A woman may have no legal rights to her body or movement or future, yet (as the ancestors have taught) if she is to survive (indeed, to thrive in peace and contentment) she must rely unfailingly upon her eternal faculty which can never be bound: Such is true freedom. The eternal faculty, or ori as it is labeled in West Africa’s Yoruba land, has myriad names throughout Africa. Yet the ontological root yields one understanding best translated as soul or spirit in Western logos.
Hence an authentic critical response to Black women’s speculative fiction is utterly impossible for me minus certain ontological, metaphysical, or epistemological considerations. In fact, theorizing African descended women’s speculative fiction fails altogether where African roots and a history of women’s transgressive creativity or creative acts of resistance to oppressive circumstances are absented, undermined, or not read as tightly interwoven variables of women’s experience. Sheree Thomas sustains my observation of the centrality of cultural roots in Black speculative fiction in her assertion that black speculative literature “reaches deep into Afrodiasporic traditions” revealing among other things “love and lore, oppression and abuse, identity, and community, revelations and new forms.”(xiv) Thomas edited the first anthology of Black speculative fiction, Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2004). Interestingly, stories by writers of color published in the same year are featured in editors Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan’s anthology So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy.
A striking fe
ature that sets Thomas’s work apart from other anthologies of speculative fiction is Dark Matter’s anthologized treatment of “desire” and imagination forming a single purpose—Black speculative fiction created “to alter one’s path, to understand how things have come to pass” (xi). With abundant significance, Thomas highlights the crucial role of Africana metaphysics in literature. In so doing, she simultaneously references the importance of ori in Yoruba culture, where an elaborate ancient system survives to serve people in their quest to know and appease their soul urgings and thereby improve their destiny. From another perspective, perhaps more familiar to contemporary Americans, given Thomas’s emphasis on the transformative power of the word in Black speculative fiction (essentially likened to ubiquitous divination practices), it is possible to see how writers employ language to actualize what may be termed an avatar aspect of self/being. The use of avatars in this writing points up the harmonious blend of soul, spirit, and consciousness in action. Endowed with an avatar’s choice to alter the course of events, it may be argued that these writers create according to the dictates of the story they must tell to affect social change.
Interwoven throughout my discussion of Octavia Butler and her exemplars are ideas illuminating Africentric transgressive creativity as a mitigating impulse in postcolonial discourse. We begin with review of Octavia Butler’s fiction with an eye toward transgression of debilitating worn out notions of gender, sex, class, and race exemplary in her 1) meditation on the Black woman’s tenacity, spirituality, leadership, and survival skills. 2) employment of logos to create liberated(ing) space and 3) attention to cultural transgression inherent in symbiogenesis. I further offer analysis of Black feminist lexicology in ihsan bracy, Kiini Ibura Salaam, and Nalo Hopkinson’s selected fiction Octavia Estelle Butler (1947–2006) is a writer whose metaphors of transgressions provided exemplars of unequalled power, authenticity, imagination, and sincerity. Be it in an interview, essay, short story, or novel Butler’s insight, creativity, intelligence, and compassion provided her readers with new (challenging) ways of thinking about old problems of personal identity, consciousness, community, relationships, war, ethics, and failures.
Butler’s Patternmaster is a fast-paced quest story which manages to interrogate homophobia via the character Amber, a lovely bisexual female healer and warrior, who teaches the male protagonist how to effectively use his fledgling psionic powers. The semiotic encoding germane to both Patternmaster and Mind of My Mind is fertile linguistic soil for cultural analysis of the espistemology of magic and ethics. In Mind of My Mind, telepaths unite for the common good. Mary, the novel’s African American heroine, outwits the charmed chameleon Doro, a four thousand year old murderer. He remains immortal as long as he feeds on his carefully bred worldwide stock of humans with psionic powers, a delicacy he finds unequivocally appealing in taste. However, Mary does not work alone to dethrone Doro. She could not have destroyed this Nubian power minus the collective help of a heterogeneous commune of telepaths who despite their fear, reservations and/or resistance to her telepathic abilities, eventually, learn how to live and work together to help save the lives of others suffering with mental abilities they do not understand or cannot control.
The magic in Wild Seed is ultimately knowledge of self. Here an African woman Anyanwu demonstrates amazing ability to heal others as well as to reshape her body into whatever animal form she chooses, a fantastic phenomenon which Butler deconstructs in order to explore the power of humans’ focused awareness and manipulation of energy. What is deconstructed is signified in Anyanwu’s exploration of healing energies; it is the very notion that certain nonwestern healing practices and/or perceptions of spatial realities the human body inhabits are illegitimate. Comparable to the mesmerizing Shirley Anne Williams’s “Meditation on History,” Wild Seed consistently exploits power of the word as a means of interrogating master narratives e.g., patriarchal values and/in western logos as singular authorial reality. Like Kindred, Wild Seed’s critiques of slavery, colonialism, imperialism, avarice, and desire not only deromanticize colonial assumptions in the “New World,” but signify a power struggle that never transcends a Manichean aesthetic.
Kindred narrates the significance of biracial ancestral lineage via a Black woman’s humanity, compassion, memory, and sexual relationships with White men from slavery to the present day. Between June 9, 1976 and July 4, 1976, Dana, a twenty-six year old African American, woman grows mysteriously dizzy seconds prior to vanishing before Kevin, her White American husband’s, unsuspecting eyes. She travels inexplicably through time from Los Angeles back to a slave plantation in Maryland to save and protect her great great ancestors—Alice Greenwood, a Black girl, and Rufus Weylin, a small White boy. Note that Butler goes the extra mile illustrating liberated(ing) space by countering the brutality of racist laws past and present in this novel. Not only is Dana’s slave lineage biracial, her 1970s biracial marriage was not a possibility in some parts of the U.S. as late as the 1960s, given miscegenation laws alive and well—as eminent science fiction author Sameul R. Delany’s personal experience attests.
Note also the ambiguity surrounding Kindred as genre specific literature. It is common knowledge that Butler did not ascribe “science” as an aspect of the novel, but her reason for that and typology created by readers responding to the novel do not overlap. In my conversations with Octavia Butler, my uncertainty about how to classify the novel was clear as I struggled to grasp a clearer distinction of terms. Is Kindred science fiction? Science fantasy? Why? Kindred is “grim fantasy” according to Butler and not science fiction because she did not bother with scientific design of a time machine. Ostensibly time machine is the operative phrase here, yet inferred scientific phenomena occur, explainable or not. In this sense, Kindred is an excellent example of liberated(ing) space where an author’s predisposition dictates form. Science fiction and speculative fiction are slippery literary terms yielding any number of possible classifications: Add to grim fantasy the idea of science fantasy, speculative history, science fiction history, fantastic science, and science fiction fantasy, then definitely leave room for the not yet born distinctions germinating in the rich irrepressible soil of imagination and authorial privilege.
Nonetheless in Kindred commonly held limiting beliefs about present and future homonid realities (realities constructed in the collective homo sapiens consciousness) are consistently critiqued where logos empowers dark heroines with agency to construct and put forth (actualize) particularities of their own history, experience, and truth throughout time and space. Survivor is another puissant example.
In Survivor, Alanna, an Afro-Asian heroine, experiences metamorphosis when she travels to another planet with White missionary foster parents. She befriends the Garkohn people (who the missionaries consider inhuman and godless because their bodies are covered with thick fur). Alanna likewise learns Garkohn language, marries into their clan, gives birth to a daughter who is later murdered by enemies and, still grieving her daughter’s violent death, returns to the missionary colony with a courageous plan to save White people from destruction in yet another colonial war in outer space. Alanna decries xenophobia, hypocrisy, and the role of religion as imperializing agent, and in so doing actualizes the voice of a future campaign against imperialism, colonialism, and slavocracy.
On the other hand, incurable diseases like leukemia and AIDS are prominent in the novel Clay’s Ark. Geologist Eli, the lone survivor of a failed space mission, returns to Earth infected by an intergalactic organism that is bent on colonizing the human race as host for its own survival. Eli’s unfortunate predicament compromises the well-being of people on Earth to the extent that we must at least try to answer pivotal questions. (1) When is a person no longer human? (2) Do ethics determine one’s humanity? (3) Is there life after being diagnosed with an incurable disease? The novel makes these contemporary questions implicit via characterization of the day-to-day lives of diseased desperate humans, their offspring, and their prey.
From the collection of short stories in Blood Child to Mind of My Mind to Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), Butler’s imagination pierces collective apathy about dystopic realities humans create yet have difficulty resolving. Is it that the human race is afraid to commit to peace or might the race need another millennium to evolve to that point? Responses are certain to be rich with variety. This may be why protagonist Lauren Oya Olamina is a leader who tackles these problems head on in what Butler describes as her “cautionary tales” in the near-future Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, depicting California in the apex of social crisis (“global warming…corporate greed,” poverty and bloody violence) in the year 2024.
Yet as far as Butler’s fiction is concerned we are not to despair, for young Black women, like centuries of determined African foremothers, play a key role in the survival of their community and the country. Butler creates for her readers a realistic character, Lauren Olamina, enduring rites of passage from teenager to adulthood through unpredictable, mean, insidiously frightening times. Yet Lauren manages to save her self and a few other people when she creates Earthseed, a poetic and material resolution to hell on Earth. A pragmatic spirituality nurturing the power of the individual to grow wiser, kinder, and more critical in thought and action, Earthseed likewise teaches the use of personal power to bring about change for the common good, incidentally central in aligning with one’s ori. “God is change” according to Earthseed philosophy, which also contains the Destiny, a poetic vision of homo sapiens’ respite in space; it is “a kind of species adulthood and species immortality when we scatter to the stars” (144). Earthseed and the Destiny offer a solution to complete social disintegration and chaos threatening over and over again in the Parables. They are here read as Butler’s solution to parallel contemporary social problems. Whether through reflection and journal writing or her father’s example, Earthseed’s young heroine learns how to cope with dystopia—the numbing realities of rampant rape, cannibalism, mental chaos, child abuse, xenophobia, drug wars, police brutality against the poor, corruption in politics and the church, unemployment, corporate exploitation of impoverished desperate workers (professional, skilled, and unskilled alike), senseless global wars, loss of family and other loved ones to violent deaths, sibling rivalry, a confused, angry, and gullible masses, homelessness, the ploys of White power buried in logocentrics of religious fundamentalism, greed, and the frightening ecological imbalance created, among others, by myopic irresponsible executives. Clearly Butler’s novels are a contemporary canvass of human chaos corroborating Nietzche’s view of the “world” as “a monstrosity of power” (Del Caro 79). Lauren’s pursuit of power has negative aspects, too, in keeping with a realistic portrayal of women’s abuse of power. Overall Butler’s canvass of power incites curiosity about the transformative signs of cultural, spiritual, and political energies in African descended women’s fiction.
Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction Page 309