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A Brave One Passes
February 26, 2006
Octavia E. Butler
June 22, 1947 - February 24, 2006
Word is making its way around f/sf circles: I read the news on FEM-SF when I got home from horse-sitting. A stroke, it seems. Surgery was not successful.
What to say? I started reading her not long after she started publishing, in the late 1970s. The mere premise of Kindred took my breath away. Still does: a young black woman in mid-1970s L.A. is called back to the antebellum South, her purpose to save the life of a despicable white slaveowner -- because if he doesn't live to impregnate one of his slaves, she will not be born. Oppressor and oppressed; descendant of oppressor, descendant of oppressed: we are bound together, we are the same person.
A few pages into Dawn it hit me: the survivors of this apocalypse are in the southern hemisphere, and the key player is a woman of color. Butler had this way of focusing your attention on the absences you never noticed before, and on the questions you barely dared ask, never mind attempt to answer.
I never met her. Last fall, though, I spent several weeks immersed in her newest, and last, novel, Fledgling, reading and then reviewing it for the Women's Review of Books; thinking hard about her earlier work; rereading Parable of the Sower, reading Parable of the Talents for the first time. One on one, mind to mind -- Mind of My Mind? -- it was challenging, and scary; but Octavia Butler was blazing the trail, how could I not follow?
In so much fiction, nothing much is at stake, not for the characters, not for the reader. The author is pulling rabbits out of hats; chartreuse rabbits out of chocolate hats, maybe, but still it's the same old same-old. Not Octavia Butler. Butler put it all on the table. Dare ya . . .
I emerged from my extended one-on-one with a pretty good review and a powerful reminder that fiction matters, or it can matter, if it's brave enough.
I wrote: "In Octavia Butler's worlds, change can be and often is terrifying, but the biggest folly is to refuse it; to deny change is to abdicate one's responsibility to help shape it."
Thanks, and blessed be.
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