Octavia Butler

Hello. My name is Nicole Pohl.

I'm professor of English at Oxford Brookes University,

and I'm really excited today to talk to you about Octavia

Butler and the Parable of the Sower.

So in this section I'm going to talk a little bit about

Butler's background,

her inspiration for writing and how she saw herself as a writer.

So Octavia Butler was really one of the first African

American women to write science fiction,

and she received great critical acclaim,

won lots of very prestigious prizes as well.

So now we call her the Grand Dame of science fiction.

She received the MacArthur Fellowship,

but also the very prestigious Hugo and Nebula awards.

And if you're a science fiction fan,

you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Now where did she come from? How did it all start?

Her father was a shoe shiner,

and he died when she was very young.

And she was raised by her mother and made in Pasadena,

California.

And I come back to the issue of California later on.

This is really important.

As an only child, Butler began entertaining herself but

telling herself stories,

sort of adventurous stories when she was just four.

Think about when she grew up.

She grew up in an era of racial segregation

so storytelling became really a form of escape,

an escape route.

She read as well quite hungrily and this is quite amazing

because she actually had dyslexia.

Her mother only had little schooling but made sure that

Octavia Butler could get to the local library but also the

mother got books from the households where she was a cleaner.

So Butler was always very well

supplied with books and reading material.

Now I said that for her storytelling was a kind of escape,

thinking about a different kind of life really.

But also

I mentioned the racial segregation.

Again, storytelling there empowered her in some way to think about

her own future but also future of African Americans.

Also she was a woman.

So again, storytelling,

and you will see that in all her writing,

became a way of thinking about equality,

not only for the different races, but also the sexes.

So what she wrote in nineteen ninety nine in an interview was

that she fantasized living

fascinating?

So her mother's life particularly,

but also the lives of African Americans and of women,

inspired her to use fantasy in a really interesting way.

So again, in an interview from nineteen ninety with

she wrote, my mother did domestic work and I was around

sometimes when people talked about her as if she weren't there.

And I got to watch her going back indoors and generally

being treated quite badly.

I spent a lot of my childhood being ashamed of what she did.

And I think one of the reasons why I wrote Kindred,

which is one of the novels she wrote,

was to resolve my feelings because after all,

I ate because of what she did.

Kindred was a kind of reaction to some of the things going on

during the sixties when people were feeling

ashamed of or more strongly angry with their parents for

not having improved things faster.

And I wanted to take a person from today and send that person back to slavery.

My mother was born in nineteen fourteen and spent her early

childhood on a sugar plantation in Louisiana.

From what she told me of it,

it wasn't that far removed from slavery.

The only difference was that they could leave,

which they eventually did.

Octavia Butler talked here about her inspiration for her

novel called Kindred.

And Kindred is a really fascinating novel.

It tells the story of Dana,

a young black woman who's suddenly transported from her

home in in the nineteen seventies in California

to pre civil war American South.

So she time travels between the two worlds and historical periods.

One in which she's a free young woman and the other one where

she's a slave.

And the whole plot is about how these stories are meshed

and and bound up in one big family story.

It's a very complex book.

It uses time travel, fantasy but also historical narratives

to talk about slavery and the impact of history onto

the here and now.

Butler chose the genre time travelling fantasy

on purpose, and she said,

I wanted to reach people emotionally in a way that

history tends not to.

So fantasy, science fiction,

comes a way of illuminating historical events, issues,

social and political issues of the time.

But she was inspired, as she said,

by a student at Pasadena City College who raised very

difficult questions about African American identity in

the past but also in the present.

So I quote Octavia Butler again.

I heard some remarks from a young man who was the same

age I was but who had apparently never made the con

connection between what his parents did to keep him alive.

He was still blaming them for their humility and their

acceptance of disgusting behaviour

on part of the employers and other people.

He said, I'd like to kill these old people who have been holding us

back for so long, but I can't because I have to start

with my own parents.

When he said us, he meant black people.

And when he said old people, he meant older black people.

That was actually the germ of the idea of for Kindred,

which came out in nineteen seventy nine.

And I've carried that comment with me for thirty years.

He felt so strongly ashamed of what the older generation had

to do without really putting it into context of being necessary

for not only their lives, but his as well.

Remember in the citation I had earlier,

Butler is that she recognized her mom was a cleaner to feed

her, to give her the books, to allow her education.

So slavery, the Atlantic slave trade,

imperialism, colonialism, but also trauma, racial trauma,

really became topics that underpinned a lot of Butler's novels.

Novels.

But it was not only historical issues that Butler dealt with in her novels.

In a talk at MIT in nineteen ninety eight,

she wrote about her inspiration for the parable of the sower.

Some of the news stories that I was responding to when I wrote

the novel were things like slavery.

Every now and then you hear,

and I'm not talking about antebellum slavery,

but modern day slavery.

Every now and then you hear about some group of homeless

people or illegal aliens or other people who have been held in slavery.

And I sort of combine slavery and throw away workers and

prison problems because in the parable of the sower, there's slavery,

and it is entirely legal because it isn't called slavery.

Nice technological ways have been found to make prisoners very productive

workers without doing them great injury

or living in danger of their running off or doing someone else injury.

So they're very useful, and therefore,

of course, you want more

of them.

So slavery, modern slavery, throwaway work as she calls

it, is a big topic in the parable of the sower.

Another topic which is really,

really important to us also nowadays with the climate

crisis was global warming.

In the same talk at MIT, she mentioned

the character of the novel called global warming.

And isn't it interesting?

Global warming becomes a character, not just a backdrop.

And she writes, this is something that I really wanted

to pay attention to.

And it's odd how it went in and out of fashion while I was

working on the novel.

It would be very big and everyone was talking about it,

and then it would just kind of die.

And then suddenly, it would be big again.

And I wondered about that.

It seems to me that things as important as global

warming should get a lot more attention than it does.

Does.

So I portray a world in which global warming is doing

things like creating a lot of erratic weather and severe

storms and drought in California and other things like that.

And isn't that so relevant nowadays?

So novel

and

still very novel and innovative about Butler is that she wove

these topics into genres that formally hadn't been used in that way.

But she also identified that even early science fiction

featured colonialism and imperialism.

And if you think about it, it makes complete sense.

Early science fiction had a lot of conquest, didn't it?

You land on another planet, you set up a colony, and

you somehow imprison or subjugate the

natives or the aliens, and then they come and work for you.

And she wrote about that.

She said, there was a lot of that.

And it was, you know,

let's do Europe and Africa and South America all over again.

That for her was the kind of underpinning of science fiction.

So science fiction as a genre already had incorporated

conquest, slavery, imperialism, world domination.

So that melange of different genres that she proposes to us

and and that she experiments with makes complete sense.

Indeed, most of her books combine science fiction,

fantasy, speculative fiction,

and elements of African American spirituality,

and I will pick up on that in the next section.

Now despite her amazing oeuvre,

her writing career started slowly.

And her personal papers contained a lot of very

motivational notes she frequently wrote to

herself to get, you know,

motivated but also to focus on her goals.

And on the slide, you have a representation

of her one of her notebooks

where she wrote, my novels will go on to the above lists where

publishers push them hard or not,

whether I'm paid a high advance or not,

whether I win another award or not.

This is my life. I write best selling novels.

My novels go onto the best sellers list

on or shortly after publication.

My novels each travel up to the top of the best sellers

list, and they reach the top and they stay on top for months.

Each of my novels does this.

So be it. I will find the way to do it. See to it.

So be it and see to it.

And in the notebook you can see that the last,

exclamation she wrote on the side

hard.

So her first published novel was a kind of volume of novels

called The Patternist Series.

And some other of her acclaimed books include The Parable of

the Sower, Kindred, which I mentioned already,

Parable of the talents, lizards, brutes,

fiction trilogy, and then also a short story

collection, blood child and other stories.

So to sum up her personality,

I let Octavia Butler speak again.

And she says, I'm a forty seven year old writer who can remember being a

ten year old writer

and who expects someday to be an eighty year old writer.

I'm also comfortably,

social, a hermit, a pessimist, if I'm not careful, a feminist,

a black, a former Baptist,

an oil and water combination of ambition,

laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive,

and she wrote this in nineteen ninety four.

So in the next section,

I will pick up on some of the issues I mentioned here,

particularly on the issues of genre literary forms as well.