Butler, Octavia - Kindred

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entire black populace unites to ensure that all members of the community can pay their debts and arrive at the rocket base in time for the great exo- dus. Barefoot white boys report in astonishment this unanticipated strat- egy for a black utopia: “Them that has helps them that hasn’t! And that way they all get free!” In a speech that ironically skewers the myth of progress in African-American history, one petulant white man complains:

I can’t figure why they left now. With things lookin’ up. I mean, every day they got more rights. What they want, anyway? Here’s the poll tax gone, and more and more states passin’ anti-lynchin’ bills, and all kinds of equal rights. What more they want? They make almost as good money as a white man, but there they go.11

“Way in the Middle of the Air” may be the single most incisive episode of black and white relations in science fiction by a white author. But its very rarity demonstrates how alien the territory of American science fiction in its so-called golden age, after the second world war, was for black readers and for aspiring writers like Octavia Butler. She has often observed, in response to questions about her nearly unique status as an African-American woman writing science fiction, that you have to be a reader before you can be a writer.

Butler’s formative years and her early career coincide with the years when American science fiction took down the “males only” sign over the door. Major expansions and redefinitions of the genre have been accom- plished by such writers as Ursula K. LeGuin, Joanna Russ, Pamela Sar- gent, Alice Sheldon (writing under the pseudonym of James Tiptree, Jr.), Pamela Zoline, Marge Piercy, Joan Slonczewski, and Butler herself. The alien in much of the fiction by women has been not a monstrous figure from a distant planet but the invisible alien within modern, familiar, human society: the woman as alien, sometimes—more specifically—the black woman, the Chicana, the housewife, the lesbian, the woman in poverty, or the unmarried woman. Sheldon’s famous story “The Women Men Don’t See” (1974), about a mother and daughter who embark on a ship with extraterrestrials rather than remain unnoticed and unvalued on Earth, is a touchstone for the reconception of the old science-fictional rep- resentations of the human image. “Science fiction,” Butler writes, “has long treated people who might or might not exist—extraterrestrials. Unfortunately, however, many of the same science-fiction writers who started us thinking about the possibility of extraterrestrial life did nothing to make us think about here-at-home human variation.”12 As American women writers have abandoned the character types that predominated in

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science fiction for a richer plurality of human images, they have collec- tively written a new chapter in the genre’s history.

During the course of Butler’s career a parallel, although slender, chap- ter began to be written by African-American writers. When Kindred was first published in 1979, the only recognized African-American writer of science fiction and fantasy was Samuel R. Delany. As Kindred celebrates its silver anniversary the landscape is visibly changing. Steven Barnes, Jewelle Gomez, Nalo Hopkinson, Charles R. Saunders, and Tananarive Due have joined Delany and Butler. And the publication of Sheree Thomas’s important anthology Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000) has showcased many contem- porary black writers of nonrealist fiction while excavating a few surprises from the past, like W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1920 story “The Comet.” In the years since 1979 Butler has emerged as the commanding figure among African-American writers of science fiction and fantasy, having become the first (and so far only) science-fiction writer to win a prestigious five- year MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Since the first Beacon edition of Kindred in 1988 there has been an explosion of critical interest in Butler. In 1988 it was possible to list nearly every critical article that had been published on her work, and most of that small body of material was pub- lished in obscure journals with tiny circulations. Today the list of works about Butler must be more selective, and the critical studies appear from major university and trade presses and in the premier journals of contem- porary literature, African-American studies, and science-fiction studies. And the interest is not just academic, nor is it confined to science-fiction fans. In the spring of 2003 the city of Rochester, New York undertook its third annual event titled “If All of Rochester Read the Same Book.” An estimated 40,000 to 50,000 people read Kindred, discussed it in local reading groups, and for three days had a chance to meet Butler and talk with her about the book at her numerous appearances at universities, libraries, and bookstores.

III

In 1980 Charles Saunders, himself the author of African-based heroic and mythic fantasies, wrote a lament titled “Why Blacks Don’t Read Science Fiction.” Twenty years later he published a more sanguine sequel in the Dark Matter anthology: “Why Blacks Should Read (and Write) Science

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Fiction.” If any contemporary writer is responsible for Saunders’s change of heart, it is Octavia Butler. She has redrawn science fiction’s cultural boundaries and attracted new black readers—and potential writers—to this most distinctive of twentieth-century genres. More consistently than any other African-American author, she has deployed the genre’s conven- tions to tell stories with a political and sociological edge to them, stories that speak to issues, feelings, and historical truths arising out of African- American experience. In centering her fiction on women who lack power and suffer abuse but are committed to claiming power over their own lives and to exercising that power harshly when necessary, Butler has not merely used science fiction as a “feminist didactic,” in Beverly Friend’s terminology, but she has generated her fiction out of a black feminist aes- thetic. Her novels pointedly expose various chauvinisms (sexual, racial, and cultural), are enriched by a historical consciousness that shapes the depiction of enslavement both in the real past and in imaginary pasts and futures, and enact struggles for personal freedom and cultural pluralism.

At the same time, Butler has been eager to avoid using her fiction as a soapbox. “Fiction writers can’t be too pedagogical or too polemical,” she told one interviewer.13 The route she pursues to her readers’ heads is through their guts and nerves, and that requires good storytelling, not just a good set of issues. Science fiction and fantasy are a richly metaphorical literature. Just as Mary Shelley in Frankenstein invented a monstrous child born from a male scientist’s imagination as a metaphor for the exclu- sion of women from acts of creation, and just as Wells’s Time Machine used hairy subterranean Morlocks and effete aboveground Eloi as metaphors for the upstairs-downstairs class divisions of Victorian Eng- land, so Butler has specialized in metaphors that dramatize the tyranny of one species or race or gender over another. In Kindred the most powerful metaphor is time travel itself. Traveling to the past is a dramatic means to make the past live, to get the reader to live imaginatively in the recreated past, to grasp it as a felt reality rather than merely a learned abstraction. The chapter titles Butler has given to each of the major episodes of Kin- dred further invite the reader to respond metaphorically: “The River,” “The Fire,” “The Fall,” “The Fight,” “The Storm,” and “The Rope.” As one commentator has observed, these chapter headings suggest something elemental, apocalyptic, archetypal about the events in the narrative.14 Kin- dred , after all, is not a documentary about racism, although the vividness of its invented details gives it a convincing “you are there” documentary power. But, finally, her work succeeds in engaging, terrifying, and mov-