“Diversity” and “Inclusion“. Buzzwords for the 21st Century, especially in “post-racial” America. But for all the mumbling and fumbling, the empty rhetoric and symbolic gestures, white media creators (and others from non-black majority countries) seem catastrophically inept at understanding what these words mean, or how to put them into meaningful action, especially as they apply to Black people.
What I am about to say is nothing new, nothing original, nothing that hasn’t been said — probably better by countless others — but I felt inspired to join the chorus of voices holding media creators accountable for how they represent me and mine: on paper, on screen, and in every other medium.
So here are my ten tips for white media creators seeking to be “include” Black people. It is by no means an exhaustive list.
1. Blackness is not metaphorical.
The X-Men have long been a stand-in for black people and black struggle.
The Black experience involves real people and real struggles, not to be “sanitized” or reduced to symbolic representation, as in the “Civil Rights” struggle of the X-Men or slavery in Dragon Age. If you’re going to “borrow” (read: appropriate) our struggle, then at least include our likenesses from time to time.
2. Blackness is not skin deep.
Commander Shepard from Mass Effect can be customized to look black, but nothing about the Black experience informs her character.
Merely palette-swapping racially or culturally “neutral” (read: vacuous) characters from #F6DACD to #7E3617 does not count as “inclusion”. Blackness involves a vast, diverse, historically grounded, continuously lived experience all but inexorable from skin tone. Do some research, or better yet, hire some black creators.
3. Blackness is not monolithic.
Dear White People is the rare example of a show that demonstrates that Black people have a wide variety of perspectives, ideologies, conflicts, experiences.
This may seem obvious, but…ALL BLACK PEOPLE ARE NOT THE SAME. See the above point about “vast and diverse”. We come in many skin tones, have thousands of different ethnicities, and countless different experiences along multiple axes of gender, class, sexuality, ability, religion, and…just being different people because that’s how people work. Even an egregious stereotype might be excusable if it doesn’t exist in isolation. Still probably better to avoid those.
TLDR: Feature different kinds of black people.
4. Blackness is not expendable.
Darwin from X-Men: First Class fell victim to the “Black Dude Dies First” trope
It is inconceivable to me, outside the context of pure malice, that I even need to bring up such an established trope. If you’re going to include black characters, maybe don’t kill them off first, or even second, unless you’ve heeded Point #3, and have plenty more to spare. Even then, maybe just don’t, at least not until they’ve had time to develop? Or, you know, unless your the majority of your cast is black. Including your hero.
5. Blackness is not a punchline.
Jules from Pulp Fiction was a “bad mother fucker”, and a bottomless well of meme-ification and white laughter
The “Sassy Black Woman”. The “Mammy”. The “Smooth Pimp”. The “Bad Mother Fucker”. These and others have all been deployed at different times for the amusement of white audiences. There is nothing inherently wrong with these archetypes, provided that they are given some breadth, depth, and nuance. See Point #3 about blackness not being monolithic. Just as all black people aren’t the same, no black person is only one thing. Can we be funny? Absolutely. Humor for black people has been essential to our survival. Exploring why that is and has been might help with your character development.
Black people have struggled. Continue to struggle. We also endure. Our endurance is one of the foundations of our pride. But we also laugh (see Point #5), learn, love, contemplate, question, explore, create, eat, sleep, shit, and fuck just like everyone else. Which is to say, we contain multitudes. Also, our struggle and our endurance don’t exist in a vacuum. Rather they are informed and shaped by the prevailing context of white supremacy. I know those are two words you probably hate seeing adjacent to one another, but the shit is real. Choose to address it head on, because at least you have that choice.
7. Blackness is not violence.
Though black people’s lives and experiences have historically and continue to be beset with violence, it is not inherent to our condition. See Points #2, #3, and #5. And despite the narrative of “black on black” violence, the simple truth is that violence most often occurs between members of the same group — any group — if only because there is a larger set of interactions of any kind between members of the same group. We do not present some unique and ever-present danger. We are no more prone to perpetrating violence than any other group. Which, frankly, is kind of amazing, given that we have been and remain the disproportionate victims of violence, by the state and its proxies.
8. Blackness is not scarce.
Black Joy!
There are over a billion black people in the world — one-sixth of the world’s population. And that’s just by “official” counts, which may exclude any number of people who do or don’t identify as such. Which in itself speaks to Point #3, about how blackness is not monolithic, even in how it is defined. Black people make up anywhere from 11-13 percent of the United States, and yet you’ll hardly ever see either of these proportions (11-13 percent or one-sixth) reflected in the populations of most media properties.
In spite of the huge set of everyday dangers that pretty much ensure these percentages seldom increase, black people are not in short supply. There is, nor has there ever been, any paucity of black resources to draw upon when building that imaginary world which looks suspiciously a lot like this world. For the record (and yes, there are records), we’ve always been around. In spite of white/European historians’ relentless attempts to erase us, or decouple us from our own history. Dwayne McDuffie’s Rule of Threecan actually be broken with a shift in consciousness.
9. Blackness is not a commodity.
It’s only “dreadlocks” when white people do it.
Black music. Black art of any and every kind. Black language. Black aesthetic. Black culture more broadly. The Black Experience (See Point #1). Each and all of these things have been and continue to be stolen, appropriated, decontextualized, remixed, and whitewashed for mainstream consumption. Which is to say they are stripped of their most fundamental element — black people ourselves — for the sake of white palatability. Or perceived white palatability. To be clear, brown skin fixed to a black aesthetic — clothing, voice, music, etc. — does not a black person make. See Points #2 and #3.
More importantly, if the blackness in your properties, however it may manifest, does not promote, uplift, or enhance the lives of black people in some way – and positive representation has a greater impact than you might realize — then your property is not inclusive. It is appropriative for the sake of drawing in black dollars (or maybe white liberal dollars) or creating some sort of “feel good” image for the company — currency that can also be traded for…yes, dollars. This is the very definition of commodification.
Taken literally, this is obvious. But perhaps what isn’t so obvious is that all the shades and nuances of the Black Experience are not accessible to you. No matter how many books you read, albums you listen to, films you watch, plays you attend, black friends you make (though by all means, yes, tap that resource if you have it, without demand or expectation), there are things about being black that you simply cannot comprehend—physically, intellectually, emotionally, or spiritually.
This leaves you with one—also obvious—recourse. Recruit black people to work beside you. By which I mean hire them, because that work-for-free shit is over. Or, if you’re feeling particularly “magnanimous”, hand black people the reins and see where they lead you. I hear some guy named Ta-nehisi Coates is killing it on that Black Panther comic. And every other thing he touches, for that matter. Incidentally, he is not the only smart black person in the world. See Point #8.
Conclusion: Black People are Human Beings
In closing, it needs to be said that including diverse representations of black people in media has nothing to do with “political correctness”. It has little to do with fairness, either. This is not a zero-sum game by which black gain equals white loss.
What it concerns, most significantly, is the acceptance of this proposal that Black Lives Matter. That Black People Matter. Black representations are a matter of survival. Of casting us as fully-realized human beings with thoughts, feelings, dreams, aspirations, complexity, agency — against a backdrop that explicitly shows and tells us (everyone) that the opposite is true.
If we don’t matter, if we are seldom seen or heard, reduced to caricatures, or otherwise rendered less than fully human, it creates a void. Not just of our bodies or our voices, but of empathy and compassion toward us.
The cost of this void, engraved in history and playing out in real time, is our very lives.
Amongst the many rich and complex topics tackled by legendary science-fiction author Octavia E. Butler, few are more perennial than sexuality and the inherent moral questions it raises. Butler herself appears to take no moral position, simply presenting behaviors and situations that might be considered objectionable by some, and leaving it for them – be they readers or her characters – to discuss the implications.
This essay will present an examination of how Butler challenges sexual norms, from the incest taboo in the Patternist series, to interspecies sex in the Lilith’s Brood trilogy, to pedophilia and rape in Fledgling, and arguably all three of these in her short story Bloodchild. These stories show us how norms, particularly sexual ones, are flexible between worlds, cultures, and especially individuals. Her challenge to human moral hegemony is implicit, but there is also an acute self-awareness throughout her work that suggests she wanted to inspire discussion.
Interspecies Sex, Heteronormativity, and Ménage à trois
The Xenogenesis trilogy presents a world in which humanity has destroyed the Earth in an unnamed conflict, the means unknown except that they are absolute. However, due to the efforts of a benevolent alien species known as the Oankali, the remnants of humankind are salvaged, and the planet is entered into a slow restorative process.
The Oankali’s benevolence, however, is not without conditions. In order to rein in what they consider to be the cause of humanity’s destruction – that is, a biological predisposition towards hierarchical behavior – they use their biotechnology to sterilize us. As it turns out, the purpose of sterilization is not to prevent procreation, but to see it continue along the paths set by the Oankali, which involves their direct participation. In 1987’s Dawn, the first book of the series, Butler broaches the subject of interspecies sexual relations and crossbreeding.
The Oankali are masters of DNA manipulation, to the point that they can retain a complete memory of a being’s entire genetic makeup for use in duplicating them. The Oankali nature as well as their culture – including gender and sex roles – all revolve around assimilating the genetic traits of other species in order to strengthen their own gene pool. For the Oankali this is more practical than moral – a matter of evolution, even survival, for their species.
The Oankali have three sexes: male, female, and ooloi, this third being neither more male nor female, and in fact completely different from both. The ooloi are essential to Oankali reproduction, which involves all three sexes, and is otherwise impossible. The ooloi role is to extract gametes from both male and female and to induce fertilization within its own body before replacing the new zygote into the female and chemically stimulating the womb for bringing the new life to term.
In her essay Eugenicism: The Construction of Queer Space in the Works of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany, Freda Fair discusses how Butler uses Oankali social constructions to flex rigid sexual and gender norms.
[Gender roles] are constructed in order to extend along a prescribed sociological trajectory that rests on the existence of a biologically attainable end. Thus, whether it is about pregnancy, menstrual cycles, and erections all have a locale inside of the normative sociological gender-sex trajectory of male and female… [Fair p. 78]
Fair acknowledges the disruption of the gender binary for the mere existence of a third, but also points out that how and where Oankali and humans enter “male” and “female” spaces is dictated by the ooloi. After all, it is the ooloi who receive sperm from the male, which is traditionally a female role, but perhaps with greater agency in that the sperm is actually withdrawn rather than deposited. The ooloi also withdraws the egg from the female, a process for which there is no analog in human sexuality, and renders male and female identical with respect to their “passive” role in the reproductive process.
Because sharing genes between species is endemic to Oankali evolution, the ooloi are capable of facilitating interspecies reproduction as well. The challenge to sexual norms is first introduced in Dawn, when main character Lilith Iyapo participates in sexual intercourse with Joseph, a human man, and Nikanj, an Oankali ooloi.
Nikanj freed one sensory arm from Joseph’s waist and extended it toward her. She stayed where she was for a moment longer, proving to herself that she was still in control of her behavior. Then she tore off her jacket and seized the ugly, ugly elephant’s trunk of an organ, letting it coil around her as she climbed onto the bed. She sandwiched Nikanj’s body between her own and Joseph’s, placing it for the first time in the ooloi position between two humans. For an instant, this frightened her. This was the way she might someday be made pregnant with an other-than-human child. [Dawn, p. 161]
The above circumstance clashes with our social norms on three distinct levels, each with a different degree of severity. The mildest conflict is the matter of sexual relations between three people. Threesomes, or ménage-a-trois if taken to the degree of full companionship, has found acceptance at various times up to the modern era, though usually in an “unofficial” capacity.
In other words, what people do in their private lives may differ greatly from their own account of their activities in the public sphere. Either way, three-way sexual relationships at the very least have often existed in opposition to the “romantic ideal” of sex as an expression of love between two people. It especially conflicts with institutional marriage, which has often throughout history and across cultural boundaries been a social imperative.
Within the context of science fiction, perhaps only the most conservative of readers would take issue with three-way sex in Dawn, were it between two men and a woman, or two women and a man. Three men or three women might be viewed with greater disdain for it then also being gay sex. Which brings us to the second clash with normativity.
If gay sex is so objectionable, even more so than a threesome, how are we to accept Butler’s concept of a third sex? Not male, not female, but…well, it would seem our rigid adherence to binaries leaves us without a term to apply to the situation. This is demonstrated through Lilith’s interaction with Jdhaya, the first Oankali she meets:
Lilith glanced at the humanoid body, wondering how humanlike it really was. “I don’t mean any offense,” she said, “but are you male or female?”
“It’s wrong to assume I must be a sex you’re familiar with,” it said, “but as it happens, I’m male.”
Good. “It” could become “he” again. Less awkward. [Dawn, p. 13]
Humans are most often viewed with respect to a sex and gender binary: males and masculinity versus females and femininity. Yet there are countless individuals of varying circumstance who find this polarity to be restrictive – socially, psychically, and even physically. Many people have, as a result of rational reflection, or intimate feeling, concluded that gender is fluid, and as such they may be plotted anywhere along the continuum between male and female. A person may be biologically female, but identify as male, or more commonly as a gender that exists between the two poles.
Those who fall under the umbrella term transgendered experience a distinct disparity between their own sense of their gender and their biological, i.e. sexual, manifestations. That is to say, those who are born biologically male or female strongly identify – physically and psychologically – as the other, or as neither, again existing somewhere along the continuum between the two. To be clear, this is not some mere schism between the biological and the psychological, but the very reality of the transgendered individual, one that happens to exist apart from those hedged in by the binary.
As with all things that conflict with social norms, the struggle of these individuals to be recognized for the sex and/or gender with which they personally identify, often makes them the target of reprehensible discrimination and abuse. Although recent years have seen more publicity and sincere dialogue around issues of sex and gender, these circumstances and how those they affect have been treated is hardly new. For that we can assume that even were the circumstances of Dawn to have come about in the 1800s, or were they to occur tomorrow, our reaction as a society would probably be much the same.
That being the case, it is no wonder at all that the humans of Dawn have a sort of knee-jerk rejection of the Oankali, and especially the ooloi, for their conceptually foreign gender roles and truly “alien” third sex. Were we as a society able to even accept those amongst our own species who do not fit within rigid sexual and gender “norms”, we might be more amenable to the ways of the Oankali. Alas, there is one more major point of contention between humans and Oankali in matters of sex and sexuality.
The interspecies sex taboo in human society gets smacked with the label “bestiality”, which contains all manner of assumptions about the differences between “man” and “beast”, and the presumed eminence of humankind above all other creatures. It is, by this pretext, beneath us to engage in sexual activity with other animals.
However, if we examine it objectively, separating out the socially conditioned revulsion attached to it, the real moral quandary inherent to sex with animals is that it may amount to rape. The real separation between humans and animals is a communication barrier. We cannot know their minds, and as such we cannot presume or even ascertain consent. Were this communication barrier to be removed, and with it perhaps the idea of human superiority, I imagine that the stigma towards bestiality would have to be reexamined.
The issue of interspecies sex as a matter of superiority also evokes a terrible historical precedent: the morality and legality of so-called miscegenation, a thoroughly racist concept defined as marriage, sex, or procreation between different racial groups. The imperative against interracial relations was perhaps most pronounced amongst Europeans, and indeed the term miscegenation most often applied specifically to relations between Europeans and other groups, not so much between two non-European races, or between two European ethnicities.
The reasons for this are clear. The social and pseudo-scientific consensus in Europe and its colonies around the world was that races demarcated the boundaries between species, or perhaps “sub-species”, there being three: Negroid (African), Mongoloid (Asian), and Caucasoid (European).
In some cases, miscegenation was not merely a social taboo, but seen as the equivalent to bestiality for the fact that other races – especially peoples of Africa – were regarded as less than human. It was not enough for non-Europeans to be seen as “other”, but implicit in that otherness was inferiority. Indeed, it was for their less-than-humanity that the enslavement of African people could even be justified. It was within that institution that human beings could be treated exactly like animals: used for labor, selectively bred for favorable outcomes, traded and sold as nothing more than property. So of course it would be prohibited for a “real” human being – i.e. a European – to lay with a mere animal.
Yet, for all the stigmas against miscegenation, slave-owners mating with the enslaved – often rape – was a common practice. There is an unconscionable paradox in how slavers could have sex with enslaved peoples in spite of their being viewed as animals, while actual bestiality remained forbidden.
This is not a defense of the practice of having sex with animals, but rather a challenge to an obvious hypocrisy. If the enslaved were mere animals, then by their own rules, the European slavers should not have taken to having sex with them. Of course the truth is that they were human beings, but social acknowledgment of that fact would cancel out the “less-than-human” justification for slavery.
More relevant to my analysis, however, is the idea of superiority and inferiority between species mentioned earlier. This human tendency towards hierarchical behavior – the Oankali consider it indivisible from human nature – is what lies at the heart of such despicable concepts as miscegenation, and perhaps why, instinctively, the humans in the Xenogenesis trilogy reject sexual integration with the Oankali.
It must create even more confusion for the humans who reject the Oankali “other” in being forced to acknowledge the latter’s superiority, demonstrated through their absolute control over the human population. In this way, if interspecies sex is to be viewed as bestiality, then the Oankali become analogous to the human, while the humans, whose ability to mate is strictly controlled by the Oankali, and procreation only possible through the ooloi due to sterilization, have been relegated to the role of beast.
Dawn presents a plurality of views and levels of acceptance of the Oankali and their integration of humans into their way of life. In a way the ooloi and the sexual conundrum they present for humanity serve as an open question – about normativity, about propriety, and even morality. There is an implicit challenge to human society, to examine and re-examine our understanding of sexuality, that we might find it more flexible than our social norms dictate.
Incest, Inbreeding, and Eugenics
The incest taboo is examined in the Patternist series, in which a god-like body-swapping telepath by the name of Doro aims to produce a superior race through thousands of years of eugenics. This necessarily involves a lot of inbreeding, with Doro himself often mating with his own children. The obvious stigma towards parent-child breeding becomes a bit muddier when we consider Doro is never in the physical body of the parent when mating with one of his children. In Mind of My Mind, main character Mary – a daughter of Doro – reflects on her feelings towards him:
I remember once when I was about six years old I was sitting on his lap frowning up into his latest face.
“Shouldn’t I call you ‘Daddy’?” I asked.
Until then, I had called him Doro, like everybody else did.
“I wouldn’t if I were you,” he said. And he smiled. “Later you won’t like it.” [Mind of My Mind, p. 17]
As Doro anticipated, he and Mary do engage in a regular sexual relationship, one that is only possible where Mary does not regard him as her father. Indeed he is only ever “Doro”, not “daddy”, and any thoughts to the contrary are lost along with the biological body Doro inhabited in order to conceive her. Still this raises the question of whether or not parentage is merely a biological reality, a social construct, or a combination of the two. More importantly, is the problem implied by the incest taboo a physical one or a moral one?
The incest taboo seems to exist in one form or another in cultures throughout the world, and therefore its origins are near impossible to determine. Whereas many taboos originate from practical concerns – for example the taboo of eating pork stemming from pigs carrying disease – the incest taboo cannot be so easily pinned down. Practical concerns about incest, to do with genetic disorders flourishing within small or isolated populations, were certainly not on the minds of people in the time of Sophocles, whose Oedipus Rex may be viewed as a critique of incest to the point of suggesting that it ultimately brings one’s doom:
Blind, who once had seeing eyes, Beggared, who once had riches, in strange guise, His staff groping before him, he shall crawl O’er unknown earth, and voices round him call: “Behold the brother-father of his own Children, the seed, the sower and the sown, Shame to his mother’s blood, and to his sire Son, murderer, incest-worker.” [Oedipus Rex, vv. 456-478]
In the case of Oedipus, there were no physical consequences to his having sexual relations with his mother, and there was no moral quandary so long as neither knew the other’s true identity. Sophocles, however, transmitting the norms of Greek culture at the time, made Oedipus’s incest a teleological problem, one that aside from any social or physical consequences invokes punishment from fate.
The situation between Mary and Doro in Mind of My Mind is a sort of gender reversal of the Oedipus story, what has sometimes been called an Electra complex. Generally, this complex is used to describe daughters with an affinity to men who resemble their fathers. But for Mary, perhaps because of the different socialization she receives as a part of Doro’s collective, it seems perfectly natural for her to have sexual relations with him. Even so she still must separate his identity as “Doro” from his identity as “daddy”.
The fact that he has different bodies is interesting because it makes us examine the multiple dimensions of sex: physical and emotional. On the one hand, the man she sleeps with does not have the same physical body as the one that gave birth to her, but he does have the same mind.
The practical concerns of incest around inheritable diseases or conditions are a non-issue given that procreation is not the purpose in this case. The moral concerns, once removed from the practical, become completely subjective and vary between individuals, groups and societies. They do not apply at all within Doro’s breeding collective.
On the contrary, the idea of inbreeding for the sake of preserving racial or sanguineous “purity” has been common for centuries, such as the “cousin marriages” of European royal families. Even the degree to which inbreeding or intermarriage is considered acceptable varies from place to place and culture to culture. In ancient China, for instance, patrilineal intermarriage was expressly forbidden, while matrilineal was permitted. Neither would be acceptable in ancient Rome or contemporary Western society, such as the United States where incest is legally prohibited.
Apart from social stigmas, looking to incest as a vehicle for the propagation of genetic disorders retains some practical legitimacy for human beings. The opposite is true for Doro and his brood, as he mates relatives in order to transmit favorable traits into future generations. While he is no geneticist, his immortality grants him the luxury of an eternity of trial and error.
The implicit question Butler raises here is whether or not incest could be acceptable once removed from any practical concerns, such as the propagation of negative genetic traits. And if we are to look at sex strictly as a means of procreation, then where inbreeding allows for the evolution of the species, would it not only be acceptable, but perhaps favorable?
Pedophilia, Rape, and the Age of Consent
Fledgling, Octavia Butler’s final novel, addresses the issue of pedophilia, or at least perceptions of it and the moral questions it raises. The story revolves around the relationship between humanity and the Ina, a humanoid species that evolved in parallel, and which forms the basis for the many vampire legends. Like vampires, the Ina have a master-slave relationship with humankind. They all live together in communes, with the humans providing food (by way of their blood), sex, and companionship. The arrangement is ostensibly mutual, except that the humans are enthralled to the Ina by way of some chemical influence exerted through the exchange of bodily fluids.
Main character Shori is a fifty-three year old Ina, who in spite of her age, retains the appearance of a prepubescent girl. One of her thralls a man in his twenties named Wright Hamlin, who is torn between his supernatural attraction to Shori and the sense that he is having sexual relations with a child.
I looked at him and saw that he was looking intently at me.
“It doesn’t hurt anymore,” he said. “It feels good. Which is weird. How do you do that?”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “You taste good.”
“Do I?” He lifted me, squeezed past the division between the seats to my side of the car, and put me on his lap.
“Let me bite you again,” I whispered.
He smiled. “If I do, what will you let me do?” [Fledgling, p. 11]
At this point in the novel, Wright has yet to become aware of Shori’s true age, but there is a subtle sense of awareness in how he lifts her and places her on his lap, as he might handle the child she appears to be. Yet only moments later he is asking sexually suggestive questions. If his awareness was in doubt, it becomes unambiguous a few paragraphs later:
“You’re way too young. Jailbait. Super jailbait.”[p. 12]
The truth, of course, is that Shori is much older than Wright, and that under normal circumstances their relationship might be looked upon with disdain of a different sort, though ultimately with no real moral or legal implications.
Sexual relationships between adults and children are stigmatized for the assumption that children are not emotionally mature enough to consent. The age of consent is a tricky one, however, as emotional maturity varies by individuals more than by age. And indeed, the legal age of consent also varies from country to country – as low as twelve and as high as eighteen.
However, the argument can be and has been made that maturity is a consequence of biology, and that it corresponds to a certain level of brain development. Recent studies show that the brain does not stop “maturing”, and with that a person doesn’t make truly “adult” decisions, until reaching their mid-20s:
Previous research has shown that most teens’ gray-matter structures – including those involved in decision-making – are less advanced than those of adults, as you would expect, until now no one had studied teens’ white matter, which works along with gray matter to produce decisions. The key part of white matter is called myelin, a fatty substance that coats the individual neural strands, or axons, that make up white matter. Myelination of axons begins during childhood and is completed at the end of adolescence, around the mid-20s. [Cloud 2009]
For this reason, if we tie the age of consent to biological development, it might be increased significantly. I anticipate that such a change in the law would not be well received anywhere in the world.
If the issue is consent, and if sex without consent is rape, then we must also examine the relationship between Shori and Wright in a different way. Shori’s supernatural nature has a seductive effect on Wright, and if we assume he has some revulsion to having sex with a child under normal circumstances, it can even be said that he is being compelled by Shori to act against his will. The question of consent, then, has less to do with adults and children, than with Ina dominion over humans. Is the sexual influence Shori exerts over Wright, then, tantamount to rape?
The Ina exert influence over their human companions – called symbionts – through biochemical exchange. As Shori’s father explains to her:
We addict them to a substance in our saliva – in our venom – that floods our mouths when we feed. I’ve heard it called a powerful hypnotic drug. It makes them highly suggestible and deeply attached to the source of the substance. They come to need it. [Fledgling, p. 79]
This exchange not only enthralls the human symbionts to the Ina, but makes them physically dependent. Ordinarily Ina outlive humans by centuries, but where one perishes prematurely, their symbionts must quickly be bonded with another, or risk dying themselves soon afterwards, from withdrawal.
While this relationship between Ina and human sounds rather one-way and predatory, the word “symbiont” suggests what it really is – a mutualistic symbiosis in which both gain considerable benefits. The Ina are able to feed, and their venom nearly doubles their companions’ life expectancy. Still, in spite of the mutual benefits, due to the catalyst to the symbiosis being an imposed biological imperative, the question of consent still remains. Where a human comes to accept their role as symbiont, is it really a choice, or are they essentially drugged into compliance?
When the story begins, Shori has lost most of her memory, and the first few chapters are spent with her relearning the ins and outs of human-Ina relations by way of her own connection to Wright Hamlin. As she recalls the true nature of the relationship, however, she offers Wright the choice of leaving her. She informs him that he does have the ability to do so at such an early stage, but that soon afterwards their separation would be impossible – and for Wright, fatal.
We come to understand that this is how most if not all Ina-human symbioses play out, that in spite of the biochemical tether, there must be some initial consent on the part of the human before the bond can be realized. So as to the question of whether or not Shori can be said to be raping Wright Hamlin, the answer would appear to be no, for how enthusiastically he agrees to remain as her symbiont.
Still, the ethical lines are blurry, because who is to say at which point a human becomes enthralled, and whether or not that initial consent is given without any influence from the Ina. Indeed Wright had already been subjected to Shori’s venom when he made his choice to stay with her.
Furthermore, these “consensual” symbioses do not preclude situations where Ina simply prey upon humans for their blood without forming a permanent bond with them, usually so as not to exhaust their own symbionts. It also does not stop Ina from using their influence to manipulate humans into serving their other interests, from keeping their existence a secret to protecting their communes.
Where the taking of blood, and with it a transmission of Ina venom, also includes sexual relations, but does not lead into a new symbiosis, it does seem to be a case of rape. The human victims, however, for what they receive in exchange – pleasure beyond anything they’ve ever experienced – is likely to disagree. This is trademark Butler, because here we find the moral conundrum, or rather the flexibility in our sexual norms explored between human and Ina. Again, Butler merely asks a question, but does not give any definitive answer, leaving the matter open to discussion.
Intersections and Gender Fluctuations
Bringing it all together is Bloodchild, which although only a short story, seems to exist at the intersection of sexual themes explored in Butler’s other works. It features the interspecies sex of Dawn, the issue of consent from Fledgling, and arguably from a social standpoint, the incest of Mind of My Mind. In addition, it introduces the concept of male pregnancy, automatically at odds with normative notions of human sexuality and gender roles.
The premise is that humans, having long fled hostile circumstances on Earth, settled on the world of the Tlic, a sentient race of caterpillar-like creatures. During the initial encounters, humans fought against the Tlic and were eventually subjugated and corralled in the way of farm animals. They were heavily drugged to dampen their will, which allowed the Tlic to use them as living incubators for their own young. Over time this relationship changed, however, with Tlic and humans entering into a consensual family dynamic, one son from each human family appointed to be the host – known as N’Tlic – for the single fertile female from each Tlic family.
Gan, the point of view character of the story, is the appointed host, chosen by T’Gatoi, a Tlic politician who oversees the Preserve, a closed human colony. T’Gatoi was a long time member of Gan’s shared family, having been hosted by Gan’s own father, and growing up with his mother. With respect to a traditional human family structure, T’Gatoi is the equivalent of Gan’s sister, and yet she chooses him to bear her young. She chooses him at a young age, and many of his formative years were spent preparing him for the task of becoming an N’Tlic.
However, once Gan witnesses a rather traumatic Tlic birth, he has second thoughts about his role, and even considers suicide as an alternative. In the end, however, he chooses to go forward with the pregnancy, for the fact that he loves and trusts T’Gatoi, but also to spare his sister, who would’ve been chosen in his absence.
Gan lays with T’Gatoi in a ritual that can only be regarded as sexual for the fact that it will eventually lead to T’lic reproduction, but also in Butler’s choice of imagery.
I undressed and laid down beside her. I knew what to do, what to expect. I had been told all my life. I felt the familiar sting, narcotic, mildly pleasant. Then the blind probing of the ovipositor. The puncture was painless, easy. So easy going in. She undulated slowly against me, her muscles forcing the egg from her body into mine. [Bloodchild, p. 53]
This scene clearly disrupts the traditional gendering of sexual intercourse, both in terms of the male and female roles and the expected outcome.
In the essay Would You Really Rather Die than Bear My Young? – the title being a question T’Gatoi asks Gan – author Elyce Rae Helford discusses how many attempts to challenge traditional gender roles fall flat, because they attempt to deny gender altogether, while still using the binary encoding of certain actions and activities as “masculine” and “feminine”. Critical theorist Alice Jardin calls this encoding process gynesis.
The undulating body of T’Gatoi, forcing the egg into Gan’s body, recalls human intercourse from both female and male positions: T’Gatoi’s action embodies both possession of the female egg and male penetration and ejaculation. [Helford, p. 264]
The sex scene from Bloodchild is an example of gynesis, but Helford suggests that a deeper reading presents a legitimate challenge to the encoding process, perhaps even destabilizing the binary altogether rather than merely reversing roles.
Her argument rests on the fact that there is little focus on the genders of Gan or T’Gatoi, or upon the role of the male Tlic, whose function, much like human males, is to fertilize the eggs. Tlic males, however, are short-lived and serve no additional role in the raising or protection of the child as is common amongst the males of other species, including humans. So here we have a complication instead of just a re-encoding, with different aspects of the traditional roles split between males and females and across species.
Beyond this, I would argue that Butler’s imagery also adds a symbolic dimension to the sexual dynamic between male and female, human and Tlic. Consider, for instance, that the very body of T’Gatoi is phallic, which corresponds to her occupying the traditionally “male” role of being the penetrator and impregnator. Yet one might also look at the very name of T’Gatoi’s race – Tlic – and see that it is an anagram for clit, which in spite of being a female organ, is still phallic, and is in fact the female equivalent to the penis. Was this intentional on Butler’s part, or perhaps something that surfaces on a more unconscious level?
Either way, Butler has created a sort of concentric juxtaposition of gender roles, wherein a female entity in the vague shape of a male organ invokes the name of its female counterpart only to fulfill a traditionally male role in sexual intercourse. All of this and perhaps Butler’s only true goal was a mind fuck.
Conclusion
The science fiction of Octavia E. Butler is known for its ability to, as Elyce Rae Helford puts it, “bridge the gap between ‘high’ and popular culture”. As readers we are never merely exploring a foreign galaxy or settling on an alien world. Earth is not merely being invaded by hostile alien forces, nor are our bodies simply host to malignant parasites. These are the tropes of popular science fiction. Butler grazes them to create a familiar framework, but always plumbs to new depths, using science fiction as a tool through which to ask implicit questions challenging our notions of normativity or propriety.
We often regard gender and sex and sexuality as rigid constructs, or perhaps we don’t view them as constructs at all, but rather an inseparable part of reality itself. There are always limits to which people are even willing to think about such charged issues. It is as if even thinking outside the norms, let alone issuing any sort of open challenge, is to participate in social deviancy.
People often fail to consider the subjectivity of norms, that under different circumstances – social or biological – that the behaviors we take for granted might be regarded as aberrant. Or more importantly that this is not merely a hypothetical or a thought experiment, but that people actually do live under different circumstances, and those behaviors we regard as aberrant are simply different, and only stray from the “norm” for the fact that they are in the demographic minority. Going even further, we fail to consider that differences are not so black and white – or straight and gay, or masculine and feminine – but exist within a spectrum, separated by degrees.
Even where there is “tolerance”, the implication is that there is still something wrong and only by one’s graciousness can there be any civility around it.
“I have no problem with gay people,” someone might say, “I just don’t agree with their lifestyle.” They do not realize, nor even consider, that sexuality is not a choice, but an inexorable aspect of being human.
Human. Perhaps therein lies the limitation. The Oankali in Lilith’s Brood attributed hierarchical behavior to our very natures and claimed that it was responsible for the “mass suicide” that destroyed most life on Earth. Given our enthusiastic willingness to destroy each other for our differences, this prospect sometimes seems more science than fiction.
I would argue, however, that these shortcomings of humanity are not genetic – such as could be weeded out by several generations of Oankali engineering – but memetic, meaning that they are rooted in the propagation of cultural rather than biological data. Those who study memetics say that our bigger human brains developed to accommodate memes, to better enable us to transmit them, and that in fact they, rather than genes, are the selfish driving force behind our unique sociobiological trajectory.
If that is true, then we do not need cosmic intervention from the Oankali, manipulation by the Ina, the eugenics of Doro, or to be corralled by the Tlic. We need to instead take a hint from the Oankali, only assimilating new memes instead of genes, in order to assure our preservation as a species. Namely we need to better cultivate an awareness of the fact that differences can co-exist, and in fact, must co-exist peacefully. We also need to more aggressively propagate very old memes such as compassion and humility, not just as abstract ideas, but as concrete practices.
Where do we begin if not with open and candid dialogue that acknowledges these degrees of difference between us, that recognizes the subjectivity of who or what is “other”, and how anyone should be treated because of it?
Freda Fair and Elyce Rae Helford might disagree with me that Ms. Butler did not have any agenda – political, social, or otherwise – in the crafting of her stories. I contend that these commentaries, these implicit challenges to the construction of social orders, naturally emerged out of the kind of person that Butler was – one who simply dared to think beyond what manifests as the “norm”. Butler, in the afterword to Bloodchild published in a 2005 collection, said:
Other people have done all the print interpretations of my work: “Butler seems to be saying…” “Obviously, Butler believes…” “Butler makes it clear that she feels…” Actually, I feel that what people bring to my work is at least as important to them as what I put into it.
Regardless of our different interpretations, I think that all readers of Butler come into alignment in our acknowledgement of what she brings to the discussion of sex and sexuality. We should be thankful that she decided to put her thoughts down on paper, that we might discuss them amongst ourselves and add some diversity to the meme pool. Thinking “differently” about issues of sexuality – flexing sexual norms – is not only purposive in the ongoing struggle to achieve sexual justice, but creates a pretext for our continued examination of what it even means to be human.
References
Butler, Octavia E. Mind of My Mind. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1977. Print
Butler, Octavia E. Dawn. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1987. Print
Butler, Octavia E. Fledgling. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2007. Print
Butler, Octavia E. “Bloodchild.” Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine June 1984: 34-54. Print.
Sophocles. Oedipus Rex. 429 B.C.
Fair, Freda. “Eugenicism – The Construction of Queer Space in the Works of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany” Digital Commons at Macalester College, 2006. Print.
Helford, Elyce R. “Would You Really Rather Die than Bear My Young?: The Construction of Gender, Race, and Species in Octavia E. Butler’s Bloodchild” African American Review 28.2 (1994): 259-71. Web. 17 May 2011.
Cloud, John. “The Teen Brain: The More Mature, the More Reckless” Time.com. 02 Sept. 2009. Web. 07 Mar. 2011.
High concept, as best I understand it, refers to a story in which the ideas underlying the plot take precedence, perhaps even to the detriment of character development. Star Wars is sometimes cited as an example, as with its epic space-battles, Empire vs. Resistance theme, and surplus of action and adventure, there was little room – especially given the time limitations of the film medium – for character development. Yet Star Wars was successful for its concept, one that spawned many a spin-off, from comic books to video games, not to mention the six films.
Certainly high concept and character development need not be mutually exclusive, as evidenced by Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death. I anticipate that many will argue my classification of the book as high concept at all. Who Fears Death is a speculative fiction novel set in post-apocalyptic Sudan. The apocalypse is so “post” in fact, that we never learn, nor does it even matter, what circumstances brought about the end of the world we know, replacing it with a seemingly endless expanse of desert and a peppering of ruined technology.
The focus, instead, is on the future. The narrator, Onyesonwu, is about to be stoned to death, and she is recounting the tale of how she came to be in that situation. As the readers, we are permanently invested in how the story’s present will lead to those circumstances, and as such are pulled along towards an inevitable conclusion.
This made for an interesting narrative strategy, because while on the one hand it created a sense of urgency and anxiety, there was also a loss of suspense, because regardless of what dangerous circumstances found her, we could disregard anything that did not lead Onyesonwu to the execution chamber. There was the prevailing sense that like in the Great Book heralded by the people of the story, everything that was to happen was already written. Of course, literally, every story we read is already written, or there would be no book, but that sense is not necessarily present in the reading. This kind of thing is often subverted when the narrator’s own expectations are defied for how things will ultimately play out. But in Who Fears Death, there was the sense of an inescapable fate. One perhaps, preordained by an almighty force.
Coming back to the idea of “high concept”, Who Fears Death, for its fatalistic structure, could have easily fallen into the trap of giving the overall plot precedence over the characters. Yet, on the contrary, the vast majority of the book was spent developing the characters as they traveled – no, were pulled along – towards their fate.
We come to regard Onyesonwu as a woman of indomitable will and purpose, yet in spite of that, the sense prevails that for all her strength, there is nothing at all that she can do to avoid her fate. The story – the concept – is in fact, stronger, and no matter how she struggles, she is to be merely whipped about in the figurative sandstorm. The prospect of Onyesonwu’s death hangs heavily over the entire story, reinforced by the characters’ own awareness of their fate by way of prophetic visions. It becomes almost oppressive in its inevitability.
Yet Who Fears Death is a study in contrasts, because while the characters are ruled by their circumstances, they are developed into fully-realized, living, breathing, believable people. It may be for this reason that the tension created by the sense of unavoidable fate is so strong, because most of us do not subscribe to such fatalistic notions, and so therefore neither should those characters with which we identify.
There is also a contrast that comes as the plot itself is turned on its head by the actions of the characters. Before she is executed, Onyesonwu manages to “rewrite” the Great Book – and again, how this happens seems to be completely beyond her control – in the process altering the fate of the world and its characters in subtle ways. Ways that left room for the changes to be perceived by those who were attuned to such things – as were other sorcerers like Onyesonwu herself.
The novel ends with a rewrite of the first chapter, in which Onyesonwu is not stoned to death, but rather destroys her captors and escapes, heading off in search of those she had lost: her lover, her friends, who fate had cruelly wrested from her before taking her life. But could they, who died before the point of revision, still live elsewhere, in a world literally outside of the story told in the Great Book? Perhaps.
This interplay between fate and self-determination, the meta-concept of a novel about a Great Book that once rewritten changes the structure of the novel itself, is an absolute mind-fuck, albeit a good one. And it is for this reason that I would call Who Fears Death a high concept novel. Yet for the precedence of its ideas, it remains a book full of strong characterizations, ones that both determine and are determined by the course of the narrative.
For a long time I’ve contemplated the relativism of insanity. I’ve seen people – usually homeless – sitting on the city sidewalks and murmuring to themselves or screaming nonsensical outbursts. Most people probably look at these individuals and, if they don’t ignore them entirely, they dismiss them as crazy. Perhaps they are, but sometimes I wonder just what that means. If perception is completely subjective, and reality is quite different for everyone with the exception of the few observed phenomena that humans generally agree upon, who’s to say that those murmurs or outbursts aren’t perfectly sane within another person’s reality?
Steel Rider, by Rachel Manija Brown, has a protagonist by the name of Corazon, who is a one of these titular riders. What these riders have in common is that they all somehow managed to gain access to some “other desert” within the deserts of the United States southwest, perhaps another dimension, where they were mentally bonded with giant steel robots called steeds. Each of the three women that we know this to have happened to in the story also experienced some sort of psychological trauma: the death of a husband, the massacre of a family, years of abuse.
As a child, Corazon heard voices in the things around her, and she often had trouble making sense of them, instead trying to block them out. But her experience with these voices encroached upon her reality, the accepted reality of her family, making it so that she was unable to care for herself and her family was unwilling to do so. They locked her in her own room for two years, until her sister, in a moment of mercy, left the door open for her to escape. Corazon ran out into the desert, shifted into that “other desert”, and returned in command of a steed called Nocturno.
The woman cocked her head toward the steaming pan, as if it might whisper the answer. I listened idly, now that she’d put the idea in my mind, and the pan began to recite nonsense poetry full of sibilants. The world is so talkative when I’m not riding Nocturno. [p. 145]
Upon her return to this world, this dimension, this reality, whatever the distinction may be between the two places, Corazon could still hear voices, but they no longer troubled her, and she could now make sense of them. In fact, the voices became a part of her new reality, practically another sense, with mountains and rivers or desert sands and frying pans communicating with her on a wavelength that others simply cannot perceive.
This is quite the interesting concept, and it brings me back to my earlier reflections about the relativism of insanity. We cannot know what the so-called “crazy” person experiences that causes them to act as they do, to act in ways that most of us find perverse or intimidating.
I recall a conversation with a woman who was in the process of getting her degree in clinical social work, her program involving work with patients at a local mental hospital. As she explained her work to me, and described several patients with a mostly compassionate outlook, she still could not refrain from referring to some of them as “just plain crazy”. Of course it is the fact that there is nothing plain or ordinary about their behavior that makes us perceive them as crazy in the first place.
What that conversation told me was that even amongst those who better understand the underlying conditions and the variables that can lead to someone having a perception of reality that conflicts with the surrounding world, there is a consensus that it all amounts to illness, rather than mere difference.
We take it for granted that our perception of reality is grounded in some objective truth. We do not even consider the possibility that there is no such thing, that instead “reality” is composed of a multitude of overlapping spheres of perception, the shared spaces together making up those aspects of reality that we agree upon – the collective consciousness, to give it another name.
What was it about traveling to that “other desert” that allowed Corazon to reconcile the disparity between her world of voices and the collective consciousness where such things were dismissed as indicators of insanity?
Is it not possible that the agreed-upon reality is restrictive, that it was the limitations of the collective consciousness that created the disparity, rather than any physical or mental dysfunction of Corazon herself? If so, then perhaps being able to detach from this reality momentarily, by traveling into that other world, she was able to gain some clarity, and emerge in a better place, where she is able to navigate the inner and outer spaces more fluidly.
Although I do not come away from my reading of Steel Rider with any greater clarity on the matter of mental illness versus differing perception, it is a story that I think could get people to think about psychological disparities in a different light. This may not be a matter of compassion, but also of advancement as a society, because it has always been those who “think differently” who have enabled us to evolve from the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Perhaps the paths to those other realities that are postulated by physicists and experienced by shamans are not opened by any physical tearing of time or space, but rather an inner journey between modes of perception.
Octavia E. Butler was renowned amongst science fiction authors for many reasons, from the literary content of her work to her implicit commentary on society to her stretching the usual tropes to the point of snapping. She proves that while there may be “no more original stories”, there remain ways to revisit familiar elements with a fresh pair of eyes and give them new life.
An example of this can be found in her novel Wild Seed, the protagonist of which is a shapeshifter – hardly anything new in the realm of fantasy, but perhaps not so common to science fiction. What Butler does with her shapeshifter – Anyanwu – however, is completely uncommon, in that she deeply considers all of the implications of what it means to even be a shifter, the full parameters of that ability.
The analogue that comes to mind is the wind elemental, who will of course control currents of air, maybe fashion them into slicing wind blades. But how many will manipulate air to create a vacuum around an opponent to suffocate him, or in combat with a fire elemental, simply withdraw the oxygen from the flames and render him powerless? Authors tend to delve into only the most superficial aspects of a given phenomenon, which is what makes them worn and trite.
Butler describes Anyanwnu’s abilities this way:
And you have not understood how completely that one body can change. I cannot leave it as you can, but I can make it over. I can make it over so completely in the image of someone else that I am no longer truly related to my parents. It makes me wonder what I am – that I can do this and still know myself, still return to my true shape. [p. 198]
As a shapeshifter, Anyanwu has complete control of her body down to the smallest unit. We see her perform the expected, such as transforming into other people, or even animals. But we also come to understand that because aging is entirely a physical process, Anyanwu for her ability to control all such processes, is also in fact, an immortal. For this, she has lived thousands of years, and countless different lives. In the particular situation above, Anyanwu is discussing how she transformed from an African woman to a white man.
The setting was the southern United States in 1840, a time when as an African woman, she would have been enslaved. She invented the identity of a white man and even purchased other enslaved people under the pretense that she would own them herself, only to instead create a sort of egalitarian commune in the midst of a time and place that such a thing should have been impossible.
Furthermore, she was married to a white woman, one who for her own special abilities, became fully aware of who and what Anyanwu really was – that is, a black woman – and loved her just the same. In the above section, Anyanwu is further clarifying her abilities within the context of an offer she made to her wife, to transform herself so completely into a white man that they may have children. However, during the time, a white woman who gave birth to black children was looked upon with scorn, “becomes almost an animal in the eyes of other whites”.
Under normal circumstances, Anyanwu only changes her outer appearance, but in this case she was willing – and able – to transform her very DNA, although this term was not yet known, to give her wife white children. In the end, the wife recognized the implications of such a change for Anyanwu, that she would be asking her to be something completely other than herself, invalidating her worth as a human being. The compromise was instead, for the two not to have children at all, and instead continue caring for the greater community as their family.
But the above passage also raises an interesting question about the content of “self”. If a person were able to transform themselves down to their very DNA, yet still somehow maintain their concept of self, how exactly do we define such a quantity? It would seem to me that, as Susan Blackmore discusses in her book The Meme Machine, that self is merely a collection of mutually benefitting ideas – memes – which in the spirit of preservation enter into a sort of collaboration, defining “self” within the brain of the human being.
This concept of self as a collection of interchangeable parts is consistent with our existential freedom to “reinvent” ourselves, once we recognize that we have the ability to do so. We can change how we interface with others, our outward appearance, our language, our gender, even to a point our “race” – at least with respect to our own internal concept of self, apart, if not completely removed from the perceptions of others.
The character with whom Anyanwu is speaking is another immortal, Doro, who although he cannot shapeshift, is a telepath with the ability to transfer himself from one body to another, “overwriting” the “soul” of the person who occupies the body and in effect killing them. His nature is an anathema to Anyanwu and forms much of the central conflict between them.
Wild Seed, which is part of Butler’s Patternmaster series of novels, does not get around to explaining the nature of Doro’s power, though most – including Anyanwu – believe him to be some sort of devil or spirit. However, knowing Octavia Butler to be a science-fiction writer, and one who always goes beyond the usual expectations for the genre, I suspect he is something far more complex.
I suspect that Anyanwu’s understanding of her own abilities and the implicit question of self offers some insight into Doro as well. It is my hypothesis that Doro is actually telepathically imprinting all of his knowledge, memories, and aspects of his personality – that is, the contents of his “self” – into the mind of the new host. He is, in terms of the body he originally occupied, his DNA, everything physical about him, long dead. But he manages to preserve himself by proxy, through a transference of “self” as a collection of memes.
If my theory proves to be true – although I actually suspect the above hints may be all Butler is willing to give, leaving readers to extrapolate for ourselves – it is yet another example of how the standard elements of speculative fiction can be infused with new life, so as to seem like entirely new concepts. In a sense, Butler shows us that whatever “self” defines the genre, is subject to the same existential transformation we see in Anyanwu and Doro.
The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad by Minister Faust is a complex work of fiction, from which it is difficult to pull a single unifying thread. Philosophical, historical, literary, political, and pop cultural references abound, such that it offers a connection point for many different audiences, while at the same time potentially losing others in the sheer volume of proprietary information – that is, exclusive to certain academic or cultural spheres.
For this, any attempt to “close read” a small sample of such a dense work risks overlooking just how many themes Faust is tackling – from the importance of brotherhood (specifically intimate male-male bonding without the false-necessity of homosexuality and subsequent stigmatization), to the little-discussed political motives of crack-cocaine distribution.
Minister Faust also evokes the parallel between the destroyer impulse and the advance of civilization – the latter usually attributed to mankind’s collective creativity. It is this theme that I will explore, through the lens of Heinz Meaney, one of Coyote Kings’ primary antagonists.
The World Man whose skull becomes sky and whose bones become mountains after he is murdered by his children – the Green Man whose body is seed becoming spring growth and summer harvest after assassination at the hands of his brother – the Sacrifice Man made of flesh but who is a woodworker nailed directly onto wood (as if the ancient code makers could not have been more clear) and whose followers wear a model of the device that murdered Him like a talisman (only incomprehensible if one neglects the core revelation) – is the earth-god who must die so that Its children may live upon Its flesh… [p. 530]
Meaney is a man who seeks the power to dominate and devour the rest of mankind to stand at what he projects to be the pinnacle of human evolution. To that end he destroys lives – through murder, manipulation, theft, deceit, even literally cannibalizing others. The “core revelation” of which he speaks is that it is through the lens of the “grotesque” that humans can truly understand the driving force behind both civilization and human evolution. Not just the pain of initiation into any number of social groups or status echelons, but how great advancement for the one has often come at the literal “sacrifice” of an other. He offers the alternate interpretation of the story of Cain and Abel, suggesting that Cain was in fact rewarded for his sacrifice of his brother, as from Cain sprouted civilization – again regarded as the gauge of human evolution.
Truly it is a strange – indeed grotesque – practice for Christians to wear the symbol of their savior’s destruction, under the pretext that it was through his suffering that mankind was redeemed from Original Sin. It is ironic, too, that Christians have often turned their noses up or pointed accusatory fingers down at faiths which practice animal and human sacrifice, while celebrating the sacrifice of their own religion’s central figure. Their hypocrisy is enabled by the purely bogus distinction between “sacrifice” and “martyrdom”.
In casting Heinz as a rather detestable antagonist, Minister Faust seems to be suggesting that we look at civilization in a different light. That perhaps we should look at it not so much for the boons it has granted humankind, but with respect to the oft-forgotten sacrifices – of human labor, flesh, and spirit – which make up its foundation.
Heinz speaks of the advances in medicine founded upon the sacrifice of animals and says that we are not likely to discard them on account of the millions of human lives they have saved. He also mentions discoveries made through torture in Japan and China, and mass murder in the Jewish holocaust.
I was reminded of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, wherein she lays out in explicit detail the shock treatment practices of torturer-psychologists, which were intended to unmake the victim and make his mind fertile for new suggestion. Klein draws a parallel between the shock treatment of individuals and the shock tactics employed against entire nations, the latter of which – not so coincidentally – often directly incorporated the former. The series of military coups in South America in the 1960s and 1970s, in which countless dissenters were executed, created such a “shock” to the public consciousness that they were less resistant to sweeping economic changes from a socialist model to a neoliberal one.
The events of September 11, 2001 in the United States, and the rush to build anew in New Orleans and Iraq, in the aftermath of natural disasters and man-made destruction respectively, offer more contemporary examples of how “advancement” has been predicated upon enormous sacrifice. Not one’s own willing sacrifice for the good of others, which we call altruism, but the more predatory sacrifice of another for one’s own gain. We call that parasitism.
Meaney extrapolates his central thesis of sacrifice to what may seem to be an absurd extreme – specifically, the need for the children of the earth-god (humanity) to devour that god (our world) in order to reach the next stage of evolution. But is it truly any different from or less extreme than the real-world myopia and immediate gratification motives of neoliberalism and the industrial complexes that ravage the planet in its name?
It was interesting to me that Minister Faust also drew a distinction between the “agro-sedentary pastoral” epoch, in which women and goddesses were the seat of power, and the “technomobile”, “urbanized”, “modern” period, built upon the primacy of men and male gods. The shift from the more egalitarian agrarian societies of antiquity to the more contemporary selfish capitalistic societies of today is itself a result of what Meaney calls the “phallic imperative”. Our modern civilization’s destroyer impulse is often referred to as the “rape” of the planet, a term that may seem like hyperbole in common discourse, but becomes poignant within the broader context of the epochal shift.
Heinz Meaney’s implication is that our final advancement as human beings will be predicated upon the annihilation of the world itself. Minister Faust seems to be suggesting we look at our “highly advanced” civilization for what it is – violent, invasive, and ultimately destructive for both those who have been and will continue to be sacrificed, and the sacrificer as well. Meaney, after all, meets an explosive end on the wrong side of a shotgun. Food for thought, perhaps, for other parasites and cannibals.
One thing that separates classic and modern fantasy, and seems to persist as a dividing line between British and American works as well, is the prevalence of lengthy exposition, particularly that applied to the setting. Psychologist B.F. Skinner posited that with each subsequent generation, modern audiences have greater need for immediate gratification in their consumption of media. Newspapers gave way to radio, and radio to television, and with each new innovation, the need – and thereby the desire – to wait decreased.
This certainly seems true for me in my reading of fantasy, as I find the works of Tolkien nigh unreadable, and I dismiss Robert Jordan as long-winded and pretentious. My eyes automatically glaze over any detailed descriptions of the slope of a hill or that precise shade of orange that only occurs in an autumn sky at 7:18 AM on the Northwest coast of – insert fantasy land here – during the second solstice on the morning after a full moon. I mean, seriously, give me a break. Who has time for that nonsense?
There were times during my reading of Richard K. Morgan’s The Steel Remains when my gaze jumped over a bit of exposition, my brain deeming it insignificant as I bridged the gap in text with my own imagination. Regardless of my personal tastes, one thing is for certain: an author cannot ever expect the reader to see their environment precisely as they imagine it, no matter how precise the description. Isn’t it better, then, to cover it in broad strokes, and leave it to the reader’s mind to ink the finer details? While Morgan is nowhere near as wordy as a Jordan or a Tolkien, he could stand a trim here and there. However, one thing that I can say for him is that he has moments of truly stunning exposition.
The sun lay dying amid torn cloud the color of bruises, at the bottom of a sky that never seemed to end. Night drew in across the grasslands from the east, turned the persistent breeze chilly as it came. There’s an ache to the evenings up here, Ringil had said once, shortly before he left. It feels like losing something every time the sun goes down. [p. 12]
For most people, and in most places, sunsets are regarded as beautiful, for their dazzling and often unique array of color, for the opportunity to look directly at the sun, for the painterly transition from day to night. For this, they are often the setting for many romantic scenes in books and film alike.
Yet, from the very first sentence of the paragraph above, we view the sunset through a different lens – one of morose, even pessimistic contemplation. The sun is not merely setting to rise another day, it is dying. The clouds are torn, suggesting that their condition is not natural, but has been inflicted upon them. The color is of bruises, not the more benign hues of flowers or other more pleasant things. In fact, the sun is not so much setting, it seems, as being assaulted by the oncoming of night – wounded, killed, then gone permanently cold.
Aside from the obvious success of this passage in creating a mood, it also speaks volumes about the character Ringil, a grizzled war veteran who is estranged from his family, and completely cynical towards political establishment. His is an embittered, often caustic personality, and yet here in this paragraph we get to see some of the wounded spirit beneath the calloused persona. Far from filling his head with romantic notions, the sunset in this place fills him with an ache, a sense of loss – perhaps another reminder of all that he has suffered, on the battlefield, in the court, and amongst his own family. It is a rare insight into the vulnerability of a man who otherwise interacts with people from the other end of a blade – both his physical weapon and his sharp tongue.
More than creating a vivid visual, this bit of exposition serves additional purposes – one being to convey the mood of the place, and also the far more important task of character development. In my opinion, this is the strength of the modern writer, to be able to say so much in so little space, to be concise but no less evocative.
Broken Kingdoms, a fantasy novel by N.K. Jemisin, was a delight to read for many reasons, amongst them for having a woman of color as the lead character. When one considers the tropes of fantasy, they may think of Tolkien’s elves, dwarves, and dark lords. Few, unless they personally feel that inability to identify with the characters, would consider the absence of characters of color to be one of most common aspects of fantasy novels.
It is interesting that for all “darkness” figures into the thinking of fantasy authors, it is conspicuously absent from the features of the characters. The exceptions are perhaps the “dark lords” and such, who play off of the fact that darkness equates to evil in the white literary imagination. Tolkien himself even took it a step further, equating not only darkness with evil in the abstract, but designing his evil characters – goblins, trolls, and the like – with Africanesque features.
So, again, it was refreshing for the main character in a fantasy story to be a woman of color. Truly, for all the lack of protagonists of color in general, the absence is even more pronounced for women. It is as if “the darkness” obscures the authors’ ability to see the possibility for merit in such characters, or perhaps more mundanely, the prospect of profitability in the mainstream market.
One could say, and certainly it has been argued, that such exclusion is the product of experience, or lack thereof, that for fantasy authors – the vast majority of those who have been published being white men – people of color simply do not factor into their frame of reference. It is an argument with some validity I am sure, but it seems to falter when we consider the preponderance of ethnic fetishism, that is, the exoticification of the “other”.
For their distance from white beauty standards, black women are the most often excluded, while their Asian counterparts are more likely to be exotified. Still, it is more likely for a black woman to be fetishized for her blackness – and moreso any meaning ascribed to such a quality – than to be regarded for her personhood. This phenomenon is a reflection of Western culture as a whole, one that Jemisin in a suitable twist uses fantasy to illuminate. The protagonist, Oree, says:
Men praise parts of me endlessly – always the parts, mind you, never the whole. They love my long legs, my graceful neck, my storm of hair, my breasts (especially my breasts). Most of the men in Shadow were Amn, so they also commented on my smooth, near-black Maro skin, even though I told them there were half a million other women in the world with the same feature. [p. 24]
There it is in the first sentence, “always the parts, mind you, never the whole,” a commentary on how a person can be viewed in fragments, the imagination taking the pieces it wants while discarding the rest.
While this sort of objectification is common in general for men in their regard for women, it is particularly poignant in the case of women of color, who are often altogether invisible. Again keeping in mind their disqualification from the white beauty standard, even the “parts” viable for recognition in the imaginations of white men are limited.
To lend some weight to my analysis of Jemisin’s meaning here, in her world, the Amn race are analogous to Europeans, not only for their pale skin and angular features, but for their near world dominance – a hold they achieved, no less, through conquest and colonization. Indeed, Oree’s people, the Maro, were mostly annihilated in one fateful battle with the Amn.
The passage describes how these Amn – white – men lust over Oree’s dark skin, while at the same time demonstrating how Maro women in general are invisible to them. Only when dark skin can whet their sexual appetites does it receive any acknowledgment. And for that fetishism, the minds, the souls, the irruption of culture beneath the skin continue to go unnoticed. Jemisin and other authors of color, as well as more progressive-minded white authors, are the rebuttal to these tropes of fetishism and exclusion.
It is interesting to note that Oree’s invisibility was dangerous, for hidden beneath her dark skin is the very power to unmake the world. There may be a statement hidden here as well, because for all that black women are ignored outside of their sexual merits, black men by contrast are actively perceived as a threat in mainstream Western societies. Oree’s father was murdered for the threat he was deemed to present, while Oree herself remained beneath the radar.
Yet, of course Jemisin’s message probably is not that women of color, more than mere sexual beings, should also be recognized as a threat. Oree is a being as rich and multifaceted and complex as any other, one that should be recognized as an individual for all her merits and flaws – the latter never having anything to do with her skin color. She demonstrates artistic ability, wisdom, vulnerability, perseverance, and unfaltering love. And by the story’s end Jemisin shows that for all Oree’s capacity for destruction, she is more fundamentally a being of creation and preservation, through her art and by way of motherhood.
Perhaps the message then, is that the matrix of potential is far greater than what can be observed on the outside. Fetishism and exclusion – both in fantasy and real life – are equal in their disregard for this simple truth.
Indian Killer, a novel by Sherman Alexie, is a mystery thriller in which the Seattle area is terrorized by an unknown murderer. Because of the killer’s calling card – scalping the victims – and due to the fact that all of the victims are white men, many people in the area suspect that the killer is Indian. Fears and racial tensions further escalate when a six-year boy is kidnapped right from his family home. Attacks on Indians by white people lead to retaliatory attacks, and before long the situation is out of control.
Matters are further exacerbated by the ramblings of a conservative talk show host from the mold of Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck – the one gives the killer the name “Indian Killer”. It is a strange moniker for its ambiguity, able to be interpreted as a killer who is an Indian, or one who kills Indians. And indeed, the situation taken as a whole, beyond just the actions of the killer, encompasses both interpretations.
Alexie writes the story in the tradition of all good mysteries, leaving the reader suspecting just about anyone and everyone as a possible suspect, giving them motive and opportunity. Yet the end gives the reader no conclusive evidence as to the killer’s identity, and it is even suggested, with elements of magical realism, that the killer is something other than human.
Yet the identity of the killer is not even the point. More than a thriller, the book is a social commentary, one pointing at the bubbling racial tensions in ostensibly liberal and harmonious Seattle, such that a single event could unravel the social order.
As Alexie has been known to do in his other work, he points a finger at the self-satisfying ramblings of white liberals, who for all they may understand intellectually, lack any real personal understanding of the Indian condition, or of the fact that there may not even be any such monolithic condition.
One such character, a college professor named Dr. Mather, who has studied Indians in depth, and even lived on a reservation for three months, makes the following assessment about the Indian Killer:
“The Indian Killer,” began Dr. Mather, “is an inevitable creation of capitalism. A capitalistic society will necessarily create an underclass of powerless workers and an overclass of powerful elite. As the economic and social distance between the worker and elite increases, the possibility of an underclass revolution increases proportionally. The Indian Killer is, in fact, a revolutionary construct.” [p. 245]
His assessment draws the ire of student Marie Polatkin, who already takes issue with white men presuming to know so much about Indians for all they’ve read about them in books – books, she points out, mostly written by other white men.
While the professor does well to cite the classic Marxist argument regarding the relationship between a generic and hypothetical proletariat and bourgeoisie, he does not take into consideration the specifics of individual or group experiences.
While such revolutions have occurred, and broadly speaking, for the reasons suggested, there are countless micro-dynamics that unfold within the greater conflict. To look only at the surface, at the seemingly universal aspects of revolution, is to ignore the specific factors leading up to it. In the case of the Indians, it also ignores history, as for the most part, for the unprecedented devastation visited upon them by European colonists, they did not and have not responded in accordance to the Marxist framework.
The professor’s windy exposition also fails to consider one obvious fact: that the killer is an individual, one who could be killing for any reason at all, such as mental illness or revenge. Most importantly, the professor’s assessment – and it resonates with the presumptions of the white population of Seattle at large – is contingent upon the killer being Indian at all.
This presumption is entirely racist, not only for fingering an Indian as the killer without any evidence, but in suggesting that for the mere fact of the killer’s ethnicity that he/she should behave in a certain manner. Furthermore, even if he could otherwise confirm that the killer was Indian, he cannot with any certainty say that he or she would be motivated by forces conceived of within a European social context.
For me this brings back to mind the ambiguity of the book’s title. Are we supposed to be following the story of a killer who is allegedly Indian, or the wider circumstances that continue to “kill” Indians?
Perhaps the real Indian Killer is not the man or woman scalping random white men, but the society that, as the novel’s blurb reads: “colonizes and marginalizes a group of people while failing to value or understand it”.
In the novel Flight, by Sherman Alexie, there is a visible current in which the author establishes the white person aesthetic as “beautiful”, in contrast to the “ugliness” of Indians. As it is common in American (U.S.) society for whiteness and white people to be held aloft as the standard by which all else be judged, this current became clear to me almost immediately.
The main character is a half-Indian, half-white teenager named “Zits” – a nickname he adopts for the fact that he has a severe case of acne. The character defines himself by his worst physical quality, but also his “Indian-ness”, in spite of his blended heritage. That Indian-ness and ugliness should be mutually inclusive, at least in the narrator’s mind, is established early in the story.
I’m ashamed of … being tall. And skinny. And ugly. I’m ashamed that I look like a bag of zits tied to a broomstick. […]I wonder if being Indian causes acne. […] I’ve inherited his [my father’s] ruined complexion and black hair and big Indian nose. (p. 4)
This self-identification with Indian-ness and ugliness is juxtaposed against the other side of his heritage, which he regards as beautiful. We are first exposed to the “white is beautiful” theme as Zits speaks of his mother and mourns the fact that he did not inherit her qualities.
She was a white woman. Irish I guess. I have a photograph of her, too, and she is gorgeous. My eyes are green, like hers, but I’m not pretty. I wish I looked more like her. (p. 5)
Throughout the story, Zits has the unusual opportunity to occupy the bodies and circumstances of other people throughout time. The pretext for this “time-jumping” is that he experience the universality of human brutality, but the equally ubiquitous – if only less common – instances of compassion. But there is a subtext tucked within this main premise wherein the character also has the opportunity to be “beautiful” by inhabiting the bodies of white people. The first is Hank Storm, an FBI agent who serves on the front lines of some sort of shadow war against Native Americans. When Zits first notices his new body, he thinks:
And so they had to take my zitty teenage Indian mug and replace it with a handsome white guy’s face. Yes, I am looking at a very handsome white guy in the mirror. His hair is blond. His eyes are blue. His skin is clear. (p. 40)
Here we notice two things: first, that Hank Storm has blond hair and blue eyes, two qualities that are quintessentially “white”, those regarded as pristinely beautiful for the fact that they belong almost exclusively to white people. Second, the man has clear skin, another way the narrator notices how different – that is, how beautiful – this white man is compared to himself.
Later, while Zits is still occupying Hank’s body, we meet his wife, who again is clearly described as a white woman, and also the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.
I can’t believe this woman is my wife. She is beautiful. Black hair, blue eyes, pale skin. She is maybe the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in person. (p. 58)
For their prevalence, it is my impression that Alexie is drawing intentional parallels between white and beautiful, Indian and ugly. Also for the emphasis he places on features that are unmistakably white versus those that could also belong to people of a different race.
During another time-jump he inhabits a pilot named Jimmy – who also has pale skin, blond hair, and blue eyes. Jimmy has relationships with two women, one of which is his wife, and the other a younger acquaintance. Zits describes the mistress, Helda, as:
Red hair, green eyes. And she’s pretty. Very short and very curvy. Cheerleader curvy. (p. 115)
There is a connection drawn between Helda and Zits’ own mother, who had earlier was identified as white – specifically, Irish. Helda’s features automatically speak to her whiteness even were the connection to the mother not made, as red hair and green eyes are second only to blond and blue in identifying a person as white. Both are described as beautiful. In contrast, Zits describes the wife – Linda – as:
…older, gray-haired, a little bit pretty and a little bit chubby. Her brown eyes are huge. (p. 117)
Linda’s race is left ambiguous, although for Jimmy and Helda’s ultra-whiteness, the reader might assume that she is white as well. I get the sense that the ambiguity is intentional, because Alexie does not miss any other opportunity to identify a character by ethnicity. Linda has features that could belong to any other race or ethnicity, and perhaps for those features she can only qualify as “a little bit pretty”, not for the overwhelming beauty of Helda or the other quintessentially white women in the book.
One of the last instances of tethering beauty to whiteness comes towards the end of the book, as Zits finds himself back in his own body, just seconds before he made the lethal choice that set the book in motion – to shoot and kill random strangers in a bank, and to be shot in the head himself. Visiting this choice a second time, he takes a particular interest in a woman and her son.
He is maybe five years old. He has blue eyes and blond hair. He’s wearing good shoes. A jean jacket. Khaki pants. Blue shirt. He’s beautiful. A beautiful little man. (p. 158)
Again the emphasis on blond hair and blue eyes. Alexie even verges on hyperbole by saying beautiful twice, and by making the child’s clothes blond and blue – Khaki pants, blue shirt – as if to punctuate the statement that white is beautiful. If there is beauty in compassion and ugliness in brutality, then perhaps this child is also the punctuation on Zits’ decision not to carry out mass murder a second time.
Throughout the text, Zits makes it clear that he regards himself as ugly, in contrast to the beauty of the many white people he encounters. When in his final time-jump he occupies the body of an Indian man – and not just any Indian man, but his own father – we are again presented with an unappealing physical image.
Not only do we know him to possess the features that Zits regards as ugly in himself, but Alexie adds an extra veneer, of dirtiness – the man is homeless, drunk, and has vomited on himself – and bloodiness – he is ill, vomiting up blood. He meets a couple of strangers, a couple who are, at least ostensibly, of the white liberal ilk that in spite of the most benign of intentions (they call the homeless man an ambulance and the woman even goes so far as to say he is important to them) try to smother all the nuance of racial and social dynamics beneath a pretext of compassion. Alexie shows us the kind of rage the white liberal attitude can provoke, but instead of recognizing it as justifiable, he paints this man as ugly both inside and out, the point being not merely to cast Indian as ugly and white as beautiful, but to identify this current as one of self-hatred.
Self-hatred is explicitly named on page 137 – “Maybe I can defeat her with my rage and self-hatred”, as an answer to a white woman’s display of compassion towards him – and again on page 156 as Zits’ father affirms his own father’s low opinion of him, repeating “I ain’t worth shit!” over and over again. It is the same self-hatred and rage that underlies Zits’ predisposition at the start of the book, and ultimately his violent actions that set the story in motion.
But in the end, Zits makes the “beautiful” choice and rather than killing the people at the bank, turns himself in to the police. He is in turn offered a chance at redemption, but more importantly a chance to love and find beauty in himself.
This shift in self-image and potential – a word Zits sneers at early in the story – is punctuated by his new foster mother telling him that he is handsome, and showing him how to remove the acne from his face. The story ends with Zits insisting that his foster mother refer to him as Michael, his real name.
Where I am left wondering, however, is in how redemption and self-love are still necessarily facilitated by white people and via whiteness. It is the white cop, his white brother, and white sister-in-law, who foster Zits and who offer him not only to wash away those physical traits that he identifies as ugly, but also to participate in the quintessentially “American” – that is, white – experience, living with them and going to baseball games.
A psychologist early in the book tells Zits that he’s “never learned how to be a fully realized human being”, something she connects to mainstream U.S. (white) culture, things like wearing a tie and having newly shined shoes. Zits, while strongly identifying as Indian, rejects these norms, but at the end of the story seems to embrace them. It is interesting too how he distinguishes between Indian-ness and American-ness, the latter interchangeable with whiteness for all that it seems to be inclusive of people of color in the United States – which is to say, not very inclusive at all.
A baseball game! Jesus, how American. Next thing you know, Dave and the firefighter and I will be playing catch in the backyard. (p. 176)
In Flight, Alexie seems to be asking whether or not self-hatred can be neutralized through assimilation – that is, can Zits’s hatred of his own Indian-ness be dissolved into a claiming of his whiteness? Indeed whiteness itself is a product of assimilation, with Irish, Italian, German, and other European ethnicities blending within the “melting pot” to create a new racial paradigm. Alexie clearly recognizes the construct of whiteness – an institution that transcends individuals – identifying it explicitly when Zits occupies the body of his own father:
Jesus, I wonder if this homeless guy understands the difference between white and whiteness. And then I wonder if I should be so condescending, considering I am this homeless guy. (p. 136)
Yet in spite of this clear acknowledgement of whiteness, at the same time Zits becomes Michael he embraces his white foster family and their “American” cultural norms. It seems Zits is on the verge of the same assimilation. Should, then, his father have accepted the compassion of the white liberals rather than demanding their respect?
Could there be salvation or redemption in assimilation? Just who is redeemed in such a situation – the person of color who by default is excluded from the mainstream American experience only to be invited in by the sheer grace of white people? Or is the redemption for the white people themselves who seek to alleviate the guilt they possess for how their own institutionalized supremacy has caused such exclusion? Alexie may be hinting at this question, if not its answer, on page 177:
[Officer Dave] is trying to save me. And he’s smiling about it. I guess that’s okay. Maybe I can save him, too. (p. 177)
Is Alexie’s message, then, a more saccharine one, that through some sort of joint effort people of pallor and people of color can come together and redeem each other or their collective society? I sincerely doubt it. I think Mr. Alexie, known for his wit and subversiveness, is taking aim and laughing at the idea.
