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The first thing I thought when I
heard of Octavia Butler’s passing, just two weeks ago,
is that her loss is insupportable. At fifty-eight years
old and after having published in October her fourteenth
book,
Fledgling, Butler had many more thrilling
tales of reason and self-consciousness in her and she
was getting better and better at it. The loss of her
knocked me down and, while writing these words in her
memory, it’s been hard to get up again.
In many ways,
Fledgling was a
new departure: a “vampire” book that had returned her to
the supreme pleasures of storytelling. I was in the
audience at a “lecture” she gave at the Graduate Center
of the City University of New York in November, a few
weeks after
Fledgling’s release. There she
admitted to everyone that writing
Fledgling was
fun, that she hadn’t experienced this kind of joy in
writing a novel for a very long time. In her most recent
interviews, she was calling the new novel “light,” yet
this playful description was meant in direct comparison
to her previous novels, which are utopian in the
heaviest sense you can imagine.
I put “lecture” in quotation marks
because all Butler wanted to do that night in New York
was have conversation with the members of her audience.
She refused to lecture. In their questions, many of her
readers proved to be just as perspicacious as their
writer-hero up there on stage lounging comfortably, as
if this particular spot was for Butler no different than
being at home in her reading chair. I remember thinking
that these questions from the audience substantiate well
the claim that every artist deserves the audience they
end up getting.
This particular audience was simply
brilliant, in a laid-back kind of way. It was a
hard-earned cool, a self-ironic knowingness based on the
fact that they have been reading, and rereading, books
written not for the market or for a clique of
like-minded people but rather for the genuine love of
our abused humanity.
The line at the end of the lecture to
have Butler sign the books they had brought with them
was endlessly long and was not moving. I had brought
several of my favorites for her to sign (Patternmaster,
Dawn, and the Parable series) as well as
my entire English class, who at the time was reading and
studying
Parable of the Sower and
Parable of
the Talents. But the line’s lack of progress
deterred me from joining, so I went home. The next day,
when I asked my students how long they had had to wait,
many shot me disapproving glances. Had it been
necessary, they would have waited all night long.
It turns out the line didn’t move
well because Butler insisted on answering every question
asked of her, including an intriguing one posed by a
student of mine. He related to me and his classmates
that he had asked her when his turn came why she made
Lauren’s “hyper-empathy syndrome”—one of the main plot
devices of the Parable series—so ambiguous, that
is, biological, psychological, and socio-economic at the
same time? Butler had paused, set down her pen and
explained patiently to him her rationale.
From the beginning, Butler’s genius
was impossible to deny and nobody undertook what would
have taken strenuous effort the attempt to do it. In the
early 1980s she won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, which
are science fiction’s most coveted prizes, and in 1995
she won the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant. But you
could still not find an official Octavia E. Butler web
site, because one did not exist, on purpose, and never
would. And forget about catching her on C-Span’s
Booknotes or on Charlie Rose. She was an
unapologetic, self-declared hermit yet I had suspected,
which was confirmed for me while in her presence last
November in New York, that she had a good political
reason for always staying on the down low. She
deliberately avoided celebrity status because it
requires an end to thought, and that’s all her books
do—think.
Writing about one’s favorite writer,
especially when that writer has without any notice up
and died on you, should be short and to the point,
because this exercise can lead into a long, drawn-out
self-therapy session. I could use to talk about what
Octavia Butler has meant to me, how she saved me more
than a few times from cynicism, and more importantly how
she has constantly enlivened my classrooms for the last
sixteen years. But that would be for me, not for her. To
her, I’d like to say three simple things.
Thank you for weathering the storm of
American irrationalism. The degradation of thinking and
writing over the last twenty years in this society is
hardly believable. If visited by another solar species—a
storyline you made famous in your
Xenogenesis
trilogy (Dawn,
Adulthood Rites, and
Imago)—the conclusion they are compelled to draw is
that the human species is unusually cute and often
cuddly, and it continues to produce a lot of cute and
cuddly art and literature, but its lethal and highly
toxic fatal flaw has never been dealt with rationally,
honestly, openly and systematically, and as a
consequence we are now closer than ever to doing
ourselves in, albeit in a really cute, cutting-edge,
fashionable way.
You called this fatal flaw our
“hierarchical tendencies,” a pattern of species-specific
behavior that is completely transparent to anyone who
takes a moment to observe humans from outside their
pre-programmed pro-corporate consciousness. How else can
we keep missing it? All the genocidal wars of conquest
and mass extermination, almost always for higher profit
margins and therefore higher placement on the planet’s
human-made, market-driven totem pole; the everyday
assaults on each other’s vulnerable humanity; the
unspeakable vengeance and spite. The frightening lack of
historical consciousness and the idiotic denials of the
root of the real chaos causing all the weak denials in
the first place. The incessant and seemingly
inexplicable exact repetitions of past blunders. A blind
following of leaders who are absolutely not fit to rule,
and the odd religious conservativeness in a species
secular and often revolutionary in its actual
possibilities; the familiar preference for easy comforts
and solutions, for instant gratification over long-range
planning, self-criticism, self-sacrifice, and rational
experimentation with forethought and care.
The second thing is that your books
have encouraged the best feature of humanity,
intellectual curiosity. Your books never close the door;
instead they broaden current horizons and open up new
ones. They make people want to go to the library and
search out for themselves rational and scientific
explanations for the opaque world in which we live. You
have showed people that the thickness of reality can be
penetrated through focused and persistent intellectual
effort. You termed this type of mental labor a “positive
obsession,” this trying to survive whole.
The third thing is you have unsettled
the minds of a lot of people who otherwise might have
gone on thinking their shit don’t stink, people who
think of themselves as morally-sound, broad-minded,
liberal, and tolerant. You have in every book of yours
flipped the script on them by showing they are very
tolerant indeed, of racism and stupidity, illiteracy,
hunger, preventable and treatable disease, the
scapegoating, bullying, and persecution of the poor and
the politically defenseless, legal theft and official
lying, the wholesale deforestation of the planet and the
capitalist single-minded pillaging of what remains of
our earthly paradise, megalomania and self-seeking, and
a lock-step obedience to irrational and discredited
authority.
In one of your last interviews, you
put it tersely and profoundly as was your style. This
style led many people to call you an oracle, a label
that always made you chuckle. The interviewer had asked
you if you’re pessimistic or optimistic about the future
of the United States.
“At the present,” you answered, “I
feel so unhopeful. I recognize we will pay more
attention when we have different leadership. I’m not
exactly sure where that leadership will come from. But
that doesn’t mean I think we’re all going down the
toilet, I just don’t see where that hope will come from.
I think we need people with stronger ideals than John
Kerry or Bill Clinton. I think we need people with more
courage and vision. It’s a shame we have had people who
are so damn weak.”
Your own strengths as a writer and an
intellectual, expressed always with a determined
humility and without any fear of what those in power
might say about it, will remain in all your novels. So
we mourn not the loss of your words but of your future
words and how they could have straightened out our
thinking by focusing it on the root causes of all the
purposefully fabricated and contrived confusions and
controversies. It seems to me this is the whole lesson
of your Parable books. Lauren created this new communist
community you called Earthseed to save herself, but her
great intention was for us readers to keep planting it
deep in the ground of every place we live, work, and
educate.
Jonathan Scott
is Assistant Professor of English at Al-Quds University
in Abu Dees, the West Bank, and the author of
Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes
.
jonascott15@aol.com
posted 13 March 2006
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about
The Persistence of the Color Line
is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the
positions about Mr. Obama staked out by
black commentators on the left and
right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel
West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley.
He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr.
Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism
regarding whether blacks should back
Obama” . . .
The
finest chapter in
The Persistence of the Color Line
is so resonant, and so personal, it
could nearly be the basis for a book of
its own. That chapter is titled
“Reverend Wright and My Father:
Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”
Recalling some of the criticisms of
America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with
feeling about his own father, who put
each of his three of his children
through Princeton but who “never forgave
American society for its racist
mistreatment of him and those whom he
most loved.” His father distrusted
the police, who had frequently called
him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr.
Kennedy’s father “relished Muhammad
Ali’s quip that the Vietcong had never
called him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places
his father, and Mr. Wright, in
sympathetic historical light. |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
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George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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