Imaginary Worlds - The Legacy of Octavia Butler

Episode Date: July 27, 2016

2016 marks the ten-year anniversary of Octavia Butler's passing. Commemorative events are happening across Southern California, where she spent most of her life, from conferences to panels to walking tours. Recently, I've become obsessed with her writing -- which can be so powerfully disturbing it keeps me up at night, while at the same time, I can't get enough of it. Nisi Shawl, Ayana Jamieson and Cauleen Smith explain how Butler came to tell stories about power imbalances between humans and other worldly beings, and what her work means to them. ***This is the end of Season 2.***Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection, free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH-balancing minerals and crafted with skin-conditioning oils. So whether you're going for a run or just running late, do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't. Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. A special message from your family jewels brought to you by Old Spice Total Body.

Hey, it stinks down here. Why do armpits get all of the attention? We're down here all day with no odor protection. Wait, what's that? Mmm, vanilla and shea. That's Old Spice Total Body Deodorant. 24-7 freshness from pits to privates with daily use. It's so gentle. We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend

our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. So when I started this podcast a few years ago, I knew I had a lot of catching up to do when it came to science fiction literature. And so I've been trying to read as many of the great books that I've missed out on. And a lot of them have been great. But I hate to admit this, but I often have trouble suspending my disbelief in losing myself in some of these stories. And I don't know if it's because I need the visual component of TV or film or comic books. Although one issue I have is that a lot of these stories take place so far in the future, in a distant galaxy. The author of the stories needs

to lay down so much backstory to explain how the human race ever got there. I'm lost by the second chapter. And then I read Octavia Butler. She does not write stories like that. And her writing is so powerful, so disturbing, I couldn't sleep at night. I actually had to keep reminding myself these are just stories. They're not real. And I never have to do that. And just to give you a sense of these stories without too many spoilers, you know, I'd be lying in the dark thinking about Doro,

the spirit in her book Wild Seed, who kills anyone he wants and takes their body. He gets into a century-long abusive relationship with a shape-shifting woman during the American slave trade. Or I'm thinking about Shori, the vampire-like character in her novel Fledgling, who looks 12 but is much older. She has sex with adults, both men and women, who become addicted to her body chemistry.

Then there's the novel Dawn, where the few remaining people that survive a nuclear war are taken aboard a spaceship. The aliens mean well, but they treat humans as an endangered species. They try to fix our fatal flaw toward self-destruction by altering our genes. Humans can only have sex or feel attracted to each other when one of these repulsive aliens is squirming between them. Heterosexual males are very nervous about that arrangement and not being on top anymore. Ayanna Jameson is writing a biography about Octavia Butler. She shows over and over again that sometimes the best choice

is the one that you may not be able to live with. And a lot of people can't really deal with the ambiguity of some of the things that are being experienced. This year marks the 10th anniversary of Octavia Butler's passing, and there are commemorations happening across the country, including a conference that Ayanna Jameson organized. By the way, she grew up in Pasadena and remembers seeing Octavia Butler taking the bus around town. Octavia Butler was dyslexic and didn't drive. Ayanna is also working with an arts organization in Los Angeles called Clock Shop, which is hosting a year-long series of events, panels, and walking tours.

And Clock Shop is commissioned works by artists about Octavia Butler. The filmmaker Colleen Smith is making a short movie about her favorite Butler novel, Kindred. Ever since I read that novel, I have been haunted by the first and last chapter. Kindred is about a black woman in the 1970s who is transported to a slave plantation in the 1800s. When she finally returns home,

the time vortex closes in on her arm. In that scene, that moment, bookends the novel. She survives this incredible sort of journey of time traveling back and forth and living as a slave. She survives it, but not without it leaving this fairly indelible mark on her, which is the loss of her arm. Octavia Butler was celebrated during her lifetime. But too often, white journalists would focus on the fact that she was an African-American woman writing science fiction. would focus on the fact that she was an African-American woman writing science fiction.

You know, they would ask her how she got there, but they would hardly ask any follow-up questions about the content of her work, which really irritated her fans. Her life story and her work are definitely linked, but I wanted to explore why her stories dig so deep into my consciousness. Why do they keep me up at night? Well, at the same time, I can't get enough of them. That's just after the break. So to start learning about Octavia Butler and her work, I called up Nisi Shaw. She and Butler were good friends,

and they first met at a fantasy convention in Seattle. Butler grew up in L.A., but she eventually moved there. I think the first thing I said to her was, oh, you're much more beautiful than your photographs, which is, it was not at all premeditated, but apparently she understood I wasn't just flattering her. It all premeditated, but apparently she understood I wasn't just flattering her. Butler was not traditionally beautiful. She was over six feet tall with a deep voice. She says in an interview that she remembers being called ugly for the first time in first grade. And that by the time she got to middle school, she thought that people still believed that she was ugly.

So she still believed that she was ugly, only they were now too polite to say it. Now, Octavia Butler may have had many rich friendships as an adult, but Ayanna Jameson says as a child, she was pretty lonely. Her mother had four miscarriages before she was born, including a stillbirth, and the idea of her missing siblings always haunted her. When she first started writing, she was very isolated. I actually know a person that went to high school with her, and so people knew that her mother cleaned houses for a living. So there's a weird sort of class thing, right? And she writes as a child about being afraid that they're going to be evicted and not knowing where her mother had or was going to get the money for the rent.

When she was a teenager, Butler's mother gave her a hundred dollar bill as a Christmas present. And when she tried to use it at Ralph's supermarket. They didn't accept the money. Right. And so they didn't allow her to use the bill. And they must have called the police because by the time she left the store and went to the bus stop to wait to take her home, because she didn't drive, right? Two police officers approached her and said, you know, we hear that you have a counterfeit $100 bill. We're going to take it down to the station. And if it's real, you can have it back. So they were kind of playing good cop, bad cop, and she basically said to them, look, if you were me,

what would you think about somebody taking their money? Would you stand for that? And I guess they backed down. She did not suffer fools. And that memory, that sense of outrage, became fodder for her fiction. Now, Butler knew she wanted to be a writer at a very young age. Here she is on a panel discussion from 2002. I was influenced to write science fiction two years after I began writing other things by a bad movie. My response to the movie was, geez, I can write a better story than that.

My response to the movie was, geez, I can write a better story than that. And I thought about it and I realized, geez, anybody could write a better story than that. And my final assumption, however erroneous was, somebody got paid for writing that story. Devil Girl from Mars. But she actually had been telling herself stories from age four and beginning to write the stories down at around age eight. And then eventually, by the time she was about 12, sending out her manuscripts to be published. At the same time as she was ambitious, she was humble. She wanted to reach a lot of people. She wanted her work to be successful, but she was always surprised

when it was. Nisi Schaal is also a fiction writer. And I asked her why Butler's writing is so effective. What exactly is her technique? Well, she's certainly good at the kind of thing where you're using all your senses. She doesn't throw it all in your face, but you can smell the smoke of the burning houses. And so since she's there, you're there. The other thing, though, is that she doesn't flinch. Her specialty was to think about the things that people would rather not think about. that people would rather not think about. One of the exercises that she gave to a class which I sat in on, but I remember her asking everyone in the class to write about what they feared because she thought that the emotion of being repelled and in fear

would come out strongly in our work. And I think she did that a lot herself. Don't you? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I feel frankly terrified reading a lot of her work. I mean, I could tell you the things that the fears that I feel through reading the work, but tell me what are the fears that you see of hers that come out through her work? the fears that you see of hers that come out through her work? One of the main fears I see is that of losing control of your body in so many different ways. In Bloodchild, which she always called her pregnant man story, it's pretty obvious there are these huge, insectile non-humans who lay their eggs in your body. And it's in some way, I think, connected to the legacy of of hierarchy, the fear of domination being the end story of humankind. Octavia Butler was also interested in politics.

I was happy to learn that she was an avid NPR listener, and I imagine she probably listened to KPCC in her hometown of Pasadena. And she would get outraged by things like Proposition 187, the 1994 voter initiative in California that tried to deny rights to immigrants. And she did write op-eds and give speeches, but she really preferred to work with metaphors. She didn't think that people wanted to be lectured to. She thought they wanted to be entertained. I mean, it worked on me. I'm a straight white guy, so I have never experienced what it's like to not have those privileges in the United States.

Now, her protagonists were often black women, so it's not like she wasn't writing about race. She got so deeply into the perspective of her main characters, reading her work is like experiencing virtual reality. Her characters also have a deep yearning for connection. I don't know what that says about Octavia Butler. I couldn't even find out if she ever had any romantic partners. I know some lesbian women have tried to claim her as a role model, but Niecy and another friend of theirs, Nalo Hopkinson, have been trying to correct the record. Nalo and I both have been all over the internet telling people, I'm queer, she wasn't. And here's Colleen Smith. Not only do people want to imagine her as being gay,

but they also want to imagine her as being sort of like asexual, that she wasn't interested in sex at all. It's actually an impossible conclusion to come to when you read her work. You know what I mean? Sex is like motivating so much of the characters in every way. Her characters are motivated by very basic needs, love, food, safety, survival. Butler once wrote about the moment she first became interested in what makes us sentient beings. Her mother was a maid for a wealthy white family,

and she brought young Octavia Butler along to the house. But she finds herself one day staring into the eyes of the family pet, this dog, and that her aha moment was realizing that there are other beings around us besides humans, that she was like totally confronted with the sentience and self-awareness of this dog. They're about the same size and they're both laying on the floor just staring at each other. But it's within the context of her mentioning that her uncle was the gardener and her aunt did the laundry and her mom worked in the kitchen of this home. Often in her stories, we are in the place of that dog. The idea of dominion, you know, which is what humans have assigned themselves over every other

being on the planet. She sort of flips it and imagines what would it mean if there was some being that was able to imagine itself superior to us, and they imagine themselves benevolently caring for us by holding us captive and determining how we live. I mean, maybe that's what disturbs me the most about her work, and I mean disturb in a really good way, is that she doesn't condemn these otherworldly beings who can be selfish and cruel and arrogant. Her protagonists often don't have the power to overthrow their oppressors until maybe the very end.

So instead, they try to understand them. Her level of empathy actually frustrates me as a reader, where I'm like, I really wish her character could be harder, be more cruel, be more self-interested, you know? That just wasn't in her nature. In 2006, Octavia Butler died of a stroke. She was only 58 years old. Besides losing a good friend,

Nisi Shaw was devastated because Butler was in the prime of her career. She had just started a new series with Fledgling. Now there was a long period where she was unable to write as far as she was concerned. You know, she wrote things and then she destroyed them. She didn't like them. She considered herself blocked between the end of Parable of the Talents and the beginning of when she started fledgling. I was really looking forward to the rest of those books with Shori as the protagonist. They were great. she was great yeah what made me saddest after she died was that i got the immediate feeling that she had lived her entire life so that people would talk about her good when she was gone. Really? How so? Afterwards, I could only say good things about her to the point that the book that I co-edited was sometimes panned because, you know, we didn't say enough bad things about Octavia Butler. But I look back now and I see how she approached problems, how she responded to people's requests.

And she did it because she was leaving behind a reputation. And she knew it. She was an atheist. She didn't believe in an afterlife. But she did believe in having a reputation, and she made sure that it was good. And that's what made me sad. Yeah, her reputation. She knew her reputation would be her afterlife to some extent.

That's what I would say. She knew her reputation would be all the afterlife she had, and she made sure that it was a good one. And this year, this summer particularly, we need her words now more than ever. Well, that is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Nisi Shawl, Colleen Smith,

Ayanna Jameson, Tisa Bryant, Nalo Hopkinson, and Julia Meltzner at Clockshop. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emolinski. And thank you to. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emolinski. Thank you to everybody who donated to the show on Patreon. I really appreciate it. You can find my Patreon page by clicking the donate button on my site,

imaginaryworldspodcast.org. Panoply