Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (361 page)

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.

A truly compassionate soul, Octavia Butler in her fiction left allusions to sturdy cages of normative logic underpinning racism, poverty, sexism, ageism, injustice, hierarchy, homophobia, classism—whatever the debilitating “ism”—no place to hide. When she discussed her background with me during the writing of my dissertation, proverbial, mind numbing, estranging realities—literally legacies of slavery, classism, racism, and patriarchy—cut to the quick of the soul of an African American female whose rite of passage is learning to endure the experience of being alienated in a great society of millions of citizens constructing and upholding invisible barriers to keep the eschewed “other” out. Until her premature death at age 58, living out her destiny Black and female and creative mattered, and I like to think that each experience and everyone on her path of self-realization and self-empowerment contributed to the weaving of authentic threads of self-unfoldment etched in the fabric of Black feminist lexicology we read in her literature today.

In reading Black feminist lexicology I highlight
transgressive creativity
in Black women’s science fiction and speculative fiction. On the one hand, the transformative power of language is assumed in and beyond the text not only in Octavia Butler’s writing but in that of her exemplars Nalo Hopkinson, Andrea Hairston, ihsan bracey, Nisi Shawl, Jewel Gomez, Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu and others. I posit that language is reliably employed in Black feminist lexicology to claim, privilege, inspire, investigate, critique, and promulgate women’s experience of their reality, self-healing rituals, imagination, and emergent consciousness. On the other hand, African culture informs black feminist lexicology where Sankofa or identification with one’s roots (inexorably African) achieves the status of powerful mythological and symbolic referent in West Africa. Put another way, for these writers and many others, the future of this planet rests as significantly upon recognition and application of African wisdom and/or spirituality as it does recognition and appreciation of women’s history, divinity, and humanity.

Considered science fiction fantasy, “Desire,”
written by Kiini Ibura Salaam,
refutes the madonna/whore dichotomy in the story of a woman’s sexual journey. Pregnant Sené’s deeply wrinkled dry skin transforms her twenty-four years into forty (a harsh environmental consequence braving wind, and sand, and sun daily). A cliff dweller whose hands constantly serve the needs of husband, children, and mother-in-law, Sené fails to touch her own body. One morning, while boiling lemongrass behind the security and privacy of rock walls called home—husband and children out—she reclaims her untamed sexuality. With the power of mythic beings, Sené explores the height of her moist pleasure puissant and free as ubiquitous horny goats, crocodiles, chickens, and elephants. The joy of self-pleasure and sexual desire running hot through her veins, she successfully revives her husband Na’s singular desire for her love. Thus with exquisite sensitivity to the sexual needs of a wife and husband during pregnancy, Salaam debunks the anti-erotic in African women’s experience.

The landscape turns lush with color as African Caribbean oral tradition sets the undulating rhythms of an intoxicating island ripe with heavenly laden guava trees. This is Beatrice’s island home. Her story unfoldis as she spies a hungry snake stealing a kiskedee’s eggs from her feathered nest in Nalo Hopkinson’s “The Glass Bottle Trick.” Beatrice does not know it yet, but she is also in danger having paid a high price to be Mrs. Somebody. Of fair skin tone, she marries Sammy, a stodgy, intelligent, wealthy man of duplicitous character who hates his black skin. Beatrice longs to convince him of his ebony beauty hoping that the baby is the answer—a pregnancy of which Sammy is completely unaware. Conversely, she discovers, almost too late, the murderous lengths to which Sammy will go to ensure that he never sire a child as black as he. Beatrice sacrifices her studies to become a medical doctor, sublimates her passion for life and fun, her own sense of domestic aesthetics, her voice, the way she prefers to slump in a chair when relaxing, denies a life balancing romantic pleasure with intellectual growth, simply put, her freedom. Believing he was “the one man she’d found in whom she could have faith,” she chose to love Sammy instead expressing her love according to the requirements of his personality—seductively sweet vs. unpredictably violent. An intriguing science fiction mystery, this story leaves the reader wondering if a community of women will save Beatrice from herself and from Sammy, given the two women she discovers in an always locked icebox bedroom of Sammy’s home have a very frightening vindictive pregnant-wife story to tell.

Even though we have not yet destroyed the planet at the dawn of the twenty-first century, it is not easy to forget the misery African people suffered during the Atlantic slave trade’s Middle Passsage nor the brutal circumstances they met when ships regurgitated them chained, sick, pregnant, stinking, and depressed onto the shores of a strange world of “ghosts” who are reliant upon the Atlantic slave trade for commerce and profit. Ihsan bracy’s “Ibo Landing”
engulfs our senses with this painful collective memory. Existentialist realities burgeon with disillusionment, dislocation, fear, brutal victimization, rape, anger, and courage. By the end of the day, the band of Africans muster enough energy to beget communal suicide, the singular remaining agent of liberation.

In
“
A Habit of Waste,” a Canadian landscape contrasts sharply with Hopkinson’s sweltering Caribbean in “Glass Bottle Trick,” evidencing the author’s deft skill in making selected scenes of her many places lived (Jamaica, Trinidad, the U.S., Guyana, and Canada) palpably rich with environmental texture. Yet “A Habit of Waste” is most memorable for its existentialist permeation reminiscent of ihsan bracy’s “Ibo Landing.” Interestingly, Hopkinson complicates the reader’s experience by developing a story within a story (or is it a trio of stories?) each arguably a take on the injustice inextricable to the African woman’s collective memory: European imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, poverty, slavery, apartheid, and the contested, deceptive, offputting notion of post-colonialism. “A Habit of Waste” begs the question: What’s so “post” in the poverty and self-annihilating hatred millions of “ex-colonised” people learn to endure and ignore, respectively, in the twenty-first century?

An award-winning Jamaican writer and editor, Nalo Hopkinson readily infuses African Caribbean cultural traditions, history, spirituality, and language in her fiction and elucidates the importance of doing so when interviewed. An author of science fiction histories and science fiction fairytales, Hopkinson’s credits include several awards and a Hugo nomination for Best Novel in 2001, one poem “For Winsome, Turning 50” (1998), one collection of stories
Skin Folk
(2001), four novels
Brown Girl in the Ring
(1998),
Midnight Robber
(2000),
The Salt Roads
(2003),
The New Moon’s Arms
(2007), twenty-three short stories published between 1996 and 2008, three anthologies of African Diaspora fiction Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction (2000), Mojo: Conjure Stories (2003), and So Long Been Dreaming edited with Uppinder Mehan (2004), as well as several essays and reviews.

Several things matter to me when I read Black women’s speculative fiction. At the top of the list is the desire to immerse myself in logos that makes me present to myself.

In other words, I want to see my life reflected through the multicolored prism of a quixotical imagination, that is, visionary extravagance informing a spiraling arc of Being: the unpredictable dance of material being and spirit being along a liquid trajectory of possibility and impossibility (what we know and do not know of the here and now), or infinity. Whether consciously or not, I yearn to be confirmed as significant consciousness my stories, culture, power, potential, purpose, hopes, fears, faith, dreams, even destiny explored.

When I read Black women’s speculative fiction, whatever else my response to the ideas there may be, I am always certain to lose myself then find myself in eternal shrouds of ontology, likely to embrace prescience. Such is my personal predilection as reader. And by the way, it is not too much to ask. Timeless literature has always served readers well classic in its irrepressible enigmatic light igniting bright sparks of reevaluation and change within us.

Works Cited

See De Shazer for Ntozake Shange quotation details.

Bracy, ihsan. “ibo landing.”
Dark Matter Reading the Bones
. Ed. Sheree R. Thomas. New York: Aspect. 2004. 1–6. Print.

Butler, Octavia E.
Patternmaster
, New York: Warner Books, 1976, Print.

——. Mind of My Mind
, New York: Warner, 1977, Print.

——. Survivor
, Garden City: Doubleday, 1978, Print.

——. Kindred
, Boston: Beacon Press, 1979, Print.

——. Wildseed
, New York: Warner, 1980, Print.

——. Clay’s Ark
, New York: Warner, 1984, Print.

——. Dawn
, New York: Warner, 1987, Print.

——. Adulthood Rites
, New York: Warner, 1988, Print.

——. Imago
, New York: Warner, 1989, Print.

——. Parable of the Sower
, New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993, Print.

——. Parable of the Talents
, New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998, Print

Del Caro, Adrian. “Nietzschean Self-Transformation and the Transformation of the Dionysian.”
Nietzsche, Philosophy and the Arts
. Ed. Salim Kemal, Ivan Gaskell and Daniel W. Conway. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. 70–79. Print.

De Shazer, Mary K. A Poetics of Resistance: Women Writing in El Salvador,

South Africa, and the United States. Ann Arbor: Michigan P, 1997. 273–299. Print.

Hopkinson, Nalo. “The Glass Bottle Trick.”
Dark Matter Reading the Bones
. Ed. Sheree R. Thomas. New York: Aspect. 2004. 47–60. Print.