"Radio Imagination": Octavia Butler on the Poetics of Narrative Embodiment.

I realize that I have been writing about people for years and I've never seen any of them. I have the kind of imagination that hears. I think of it as radio imagination. I like radio a lot, better than I do television; and, really, I have to go back and try to imagine what characters might look like because when I began writing at age twelve, I couldn't. What I had to do was go back and sort of paint the characters in. What would I like them to look like?

(Octavia Butler, Interview with Mehaffy and Keating)

African American science-fiction author Octavia Butler's work is thematically preoccupied with the potentiality of genetically altered bodies--hybrid multi-species and multi-ethnic subjectivities--for revising contemporary nationalist, racist, sexist, and homophobic attitudes. Yet a curiously polarized dualism has dominated the critical response to this thematics: while Donna Haraway and Amanda Boulter praise Butler's novels for the way that they consistently "interrogate reproductive, linguistic, and nuclear politics in a mythic field structured by late twentieth-century race and gender," Charles Johnson dismissively cites Butler's fiction's tendency to "plunge so deeply into fantasy that revelation of everyday life ... disappears" (Haraway 179, emphasis added; Johnson 115-16). Is Butler's science fiction radically revisionary, as Haraway and Boulter propose, interacting with the anatomical idioms of, specifically, everyday contemporary representation? Or, as Johnson proposes, do its frequent otherworldly themes and characters, and subsequent classification as fantasy, render Butler's work socially disjunctive or, as even a more positive critique like Eric White's depicts it, race-blind science fiction?

Our interview with Octavia Butler centers on several sets of questions having to do with the narrative embodiments inhabiting Butler's fiction: with the efficacy of science fiction as an ideology-bending genre; and with the possible connections between Butler's texts' unorthodox embodiments and her relative marginalization from the canons of US literature, both African American and "mainstream." Butler's relative marginalization within canonical contexts resonates as well in her work's peculiar position within the genre of science fiction. Recently, she has been the multiple winner of science fiction's highest awards, the Hugo and the Nebula; in 1995 she was awarded the MacArthur Foundation Award, popularly called the "young genius" award. However, Butler's work has never, as she related in our interview, "fit in" with conventional expectations for either canonical or science fiction literature. For many years, science fiction was written by, primarily, "white" men for "white" male adolescents. With very few exceptions, women of any color did not write science fiction, female characters were generally portrayed as sex objects, and men of color rarely wrote or appeared in science fiction novels or stories. Thus, Butler's entry into this genre represents an unusual and significant breakthrough. Her novels introduce strong female protagonists, usually African American, and characters of many colors.

In this way her work complicates traditional science fiction themes--global and local power struggles, for example--by inflecting such struggles with the implications of gender, ethnic, and class difference. As Butler explains in another interview:

   It is a writer's duty to write about human differences, all human
   differences, and help make them acceptable. I think science fiction writers
   can do this if they want to. In my opinion, they are a lot more likely to
   have a social conscience than many other kinds of writers. (Harrison 33)

Further, in a 1995 autobiographical essay, Butler addresses the challenges directed to science fiction's efficacy, as a genre, for representing struggles specific to African American history. She responds to the question, most often asked by African American readers, "What good is science fiction to Black people?" by answering:

   What good is any form of literature to Black people? What good is science
   fiction's thinking about the present, the future, and the past? What good
   is its tendency to warn or to consider alternative ways of thinking and
   doing? What good is its examination of the possible effects of science and
   technology, or social organization and political direction? At its best,
   science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and
   writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what
   "everyone" is saying, doing, thinking--whoever "everyone" happens to be
   this year. And what good is all this to Black people? ("Positive Obsession"
   134-35)

Like the opening critical commentary we cited from Donna Haraway, Charles Johnson, and Amanda Boulter, our questions in this interview engage the unorthodox, always embodied, thematics of Butler's work, and its potential for social intervention. But we are also interested in the formal promise of Butler's science fiction to revise, as well, what Robert Stepto identifies as "American acts of reading." For instance, if, thematically, Butler's work frequently envisions the "horror and beauty" of an alternately embodied global populace (Dawn 31, emphasis added), how might these refigured, hybrid categories of subjectivity structurally undermine readerly recognition, and therefore readerly mastery, of stereotypic, discretely raced, gendered, and sexualized subjectivities? That is, in its unorthodox formal aesthetics, how much political power and efficacy might Butler's science fiction, or any radical author's fiction, promise as a revisionary social project?

Toni Morrison, for instance, cites the authorial uses of hierarchized black and white bodies, the "demonizing and reifying [of] the range of [skin] color on a palette," as the founding metaphor and formal convention defining canonical US literary narrative, (white) nationalist identity, and colonialist habits of reading (7). With respect to subjective categories of gender, Luce Irigaray similarly questions the formal uses of female bodies for structuring modern representation: "without the exploitation of the body-matter of women, what would become of the symbolic process," including literary narrative, "that governs society?" (85). Furthermore, most postmodern critical thought, in many ways exemplified in Morrison's and Irigaray's work, calculates "the body" as a metaphor and formal narrative convention. Within this context, what is the ideological impact of Butler's apparent return, thematically, to the nineteenth-century genetics of flesh--sociobiology, eugenics--which prompts contemporary biological "truths" of discrete, identifiable categories of race, gender, nationality, and sexuality?

Our interview with Octavia Butler centers on these questions and others having to do with the poetics and politics of narrative embodiment: Butler's formal links between hierarchies of subjective corporeality and global environmental destruction; the efficacy of textually re-structuring popular representations as a mode for achieving more equitable personal and collective social relations; the crucial influence of a writer's body on the shape of her work; science fiction's long-time preoccupation with alternate corporealities, and the genre's marginalization as a credible component of US literature; and, finally, Butler's perception of her critical location within the canon of African American women's writing and within modern US literature as a whole.

We chose "Radio Imagination," Octavia Butler's self-described term for her artistic aesthetics, as the introductory phrase for our title because, for us, the term recapitulates Butler's unorthodox formal aesthetics. A "radio imagination" invokes and, for readers, invites a corporeal visualization of characters, yet short-circuits the foundational optical mastery of those characters that Toni Morrison and Robert Stepto associate with modern habits of reading. As in radio narration, the socially-built body of the speaker, or, in Butler's fiction, of the character's body, is initially displaced and delayed, rendered off-screen or off-stage, invisible, at least with respect to ethnicity and sexuality, if not always to gender or nationality. The "punch" of such an aesthetics, according to Butler's comments in the interview, allows readers to "see" and to "hear" characters' situational relations and "problems" before classifying those relations within familiar idioms of race, gender, or sexuality.

Yet, paradoxically, "radio narration" thereby subsequently intensifies, for readers, the irreducible significance of corporeal identity to those "problems" and relations, but without the initial optical instruction, and therefore without the accompanying stereotypic associations, of legibly inscribed bodies. Despite formally demoting corporeal appearance as a defining legible idiom, however, Butler explains that the body is "all we really know that we have"--"all we really know that we have is the flesh." Complementarily, the narrative embodiments of her fiction advocate a therapeutic reclamation of that flesh as a primary site and signifier of knowledge and communication, both personal and collective, both material and narrated. Acknowledging the exploitative narrative uses of what she calls "body knowledge," Butler claims here, does not necessarily entail renouncing the flesh, but, rather, re-imagining and re-assembling it within an ethics of survival.

The following interview took place on May 9, 1997, at the campus of Eastern New Mexico University, Portales. The interview references a number of Octavia Butler's fictions; therefore, for readers unfamiliar with her work, we have included Addendum I, which lists brief synopses and publication dates of her texts. Additionally, Addendum II recounts two follow-up telephone interviews with Butler after the publication of her December 1998 novel Parable of the Talents. We are indebted to ENMU's SALSA students (Students and Legislators Supporting Awareness), who lobbied and won funding from the New Mexico state legislature to support Octavia Butler's visit to their campus; to the ENMU Diversity Committee for further funding; and, especially, to Octavia Butler for her generosity in time, in candor, and in collegiality.

INTERVIEW WITH OCTAVIA BUTLER MAY 9, 1997

Octavia Butler: OB
Marilyn Mehaffy: MM
AnaLouise Keating: ALK

MM: As you know, the critical focus of our interview project is the use of bodies as a formal narrative convention in American literary texts, that is, how bodies--usually human [laughter]--are inscribed and constructed to serve narrative purposes. For instance, how do or do?--literary bodies mirror stereotypes and biases from other popular culture texts like advertising, or television and film, or political discourse? We're interested in how particular texts race bodies in certain ways; and how specific sets of value and aesthetics become attached to particular categories of ethnicity as a result. And, as well, how do literary constructions, in turn, interact with or impact popular perceptions? We're studying writers who devise different approaches to familiar categories of subjective identity--gender and ethnic identity and sexual identity; and how those re-imagined bodies might affect readers and, therefore, popular perceptions about subjective categories like race and gender and sexuality. Here's where you come in because your books, it seems to us, are all about recreating bodies in different ways.

OB: Well, this sounds interesting. But what you seem most interested in is appearance. I began writing back when I was twelve, and I'd already been reading science fiction. Later, when I realized that people actually publish this stuff, I realized that I had been writing about people for years and I'd never seen any of them. I have the kind of imagination that hears. I think of it as radio imagination. I like radio a lot better than I do television; and, really, I have to go back and try to imagine what characters might look like because when I began writing at age twelve, I couldn't. What I had to do was go back and sort of paint the characters in. What would I like them to look like? I had a character in Patternmaster, a very early character. This is somebody that I ran across when I was twelve even though he had a different name. He had lived in my head for over a year when I finally thought, "I gotta know what he looks like." But everything I imagined, or tried to sketch in, was a disappointment because somehow without this kind of--not bodilessness, because, actually, it was very sexy--he was not what I imagined.

MM: And your books are very sexy, by the way! I always think that--that they're a real turn-on--but I never hear anybody talking about their sexiness.

OB: I hope so because one of the signs--I put signs on my walls as a reminder while I'm writing--is "sexiness," not only sexiness in the sense of people having sex, but sexiness in the sense of wanting to reach readers where they live and wanting to invite them to enjoy themselves.

MM: Maybe this is a good time to ask you my vision question since it's related to your talking about how you don't see characters first. A physical function of the Oankali and the Oankali-human constructs [in the Xenogenesis Trilogy] that intrigues me is their ability to see without eyes, by means of sensory tentacles or patches rather than human optics. Are you commenting on the prevalence in modern times of optical vision as the privileged mode of seeing and knowing others and their bodies?

OB: You're probably putting more into it than I actually did, but this is something that is left over from my days of being down in the basement in the corner with J.B. Rhine and company.(1) There were books about strange people, books about people who had unusual abilities or deficiencies. Every now and then there would be something about someone who had photosensitive tissue in some strange place. If they couldn't actually read with it, they could at least detect light and dark, or vague images, that kind of thing. I thought, "This would be good," because I wanted these characters to look alien. I go from not paying any attention to how my characters should look to recognizing that it's very important how they look, especially if they're not supposed to be human. I need to help my reader visualize them even though what my reader sees won't be what I had in mind. My characters have their photosensitive tissue elsewhere, and they have a type of vision that's at least as efficient as the human eye. It's just not where you would expect it to be.

ALK: Since we're talking about characters' bodies and how you see them, I think this question goes to that issue. One of the things I'm fascinated to find in your work is the way that you mark bodies by their colors rather than by characters' ethnicity. And you only mention color when it's contextually important to the story. For instance, in Kindred readers don't realize that Dana is "black" until page 24, and that Kevin is "white" until page 54. This is something that completely astonishes my students.

OB: That's writing. If you have the character look in the mirror, and you say, "Notice her soft brown skin and her doe-brown eyes," that's too obvious.

ALK: I think you're underselling yourself. "Race" is one of the areas I study, and, over and over, I see other writers mark ethnicity in extremely obvious ways. Generally, they state characters' ethnicity in the opening pages, and you don't do that. Was the delayed description of color in Kindred deliberate?

OB: Yes, that delay was deliberate because of the kind of book I was writing. If I had given the characters' race away earlier, that aspect would have had less impact and possibly the reader wouldn't react, but, instead, maybe discard that information and then start wondering what the problems were later on. But what if I hit the reader with it in a very dramatic way? In that case, ethnicity, based in history, based in antebellum slavery, as a component of Kevin's and Dana's relationship, would have a lot more power and a lot more saying power.

ALK: Even in Survivor, it's not until Alana thinks back to her parents and provides readers with a visual description that we learn her mother was black and her father Asian. It just kind of comes through as a description, and not until page 27. You do the same thing in Dawn and the same thing in Parable of the Sower--when ethnicity fits the context, we learn about it within that particular context. You don't appear to use ethnicity to influence or predetermine readers' perceptions of a character.

OB: Which is also something in my life. I had a friend when I was in junior high and high school who was of mixed background, and I never knew that until somebody else mentioned it. It turns out her parents lived next door to one of my relatives, and one day I learned that her mother is Japanese and her father is black. Afterward I thought about it, and I thought, "Well, gee, I've been thinking all this time that she was Latina." It didn't change anything about the way I thought about her except that I was intensely curious about her life. How is her life different because she's from this unusual situation?-- unusual at the time. But in my life a lot of times there have been situations where either I didn't know or I found out late or something like that, and it's been a lot more interesting. I don't know what it would have been like if I had known immediately. Probably I would have just put it away and forgotten about it, but, again, the punch.

ALK: When you were talking earlier about the "bodiless" character in Patternmaster, were you referring to Teray? I don't think you ever really do identify him physically.

OB: Well, he was my first boyfriend [laughter]; and he had this wonderful bodiless body, where he could be marvelously sexy and good looking without my actually ever defining what that meant. So I guess I carried that forward into the fiction. It had not occurred to me that I hadn't described him, but you're right. I was in such a habit of not describing him and when I tried, it didn't work at all.

ALK: His personality comes through perfectly.

OB: He's very young and he's still learning to be a man.

MM: Perhaps of all the writers we hope to interview, with the possible exception of Gloria Anzuldua, your work most obviously imagines human bodies in ways which belie familiar ideals and expectations, not only in terms of race and ethnicity, but also with respect to gender, sexuality, and species. For instance, in the Xenogenesis Trilogy sex becomes an activity involving three genders, not two or one. For reproduction, the ooloi--the Oankali third gender--puts together or, as you call it in the Trilogy, "assembles" the offspring out of the genetic material from the two species, human and Oankali. Pleasure isn't necessarily associated with reproduction. And parenting in families changes, too: It involves five parents of two different species; and, again, the parents are of three genders and two species. Do these revised gendered and sexed bodies inhabit primarily a fantastic realm, or are you suggesting that popular narratives in categories of "family," "male"-"female," are actually inadequate to express sexuality and gender?

OB: Oh, I'm sure they are.

MM: Or inadequate to produce and rear offspring?

OB: Well, one person can rear offspring, and now that cloning is on the horizon, one person can also produce offspring. Most people would just love to reproduce themselves and then, of course, be immensely disappointed if they do it, because it won't be them.

MM: So, then, are these different configurations of family, sexuality, and gender simply fantastic, imaginative and fun, or are you doing something political where you're saying that popular narratives or traditional expectations are just really not adequate to express sexuality?

OB: I was trying to stretch minds. You remember in these three books [the Xenogenesis Trilogy] there is the idea that human beings have two characteristics that don't work well together.

MM: Yes, the "human contradiction."

OB: Hierarchical behavior and intelligence. Unfortunately, the hierarchical behavior is the older behavior, which is true; you can find it in algae, for goodness sakes. So sometimes the one in charge shouldn't be. That's why I begin the story with the idea that we've one-upped ourselves to death in a nuclear war. What I intended to do when I began the novels, what I really wanted to do, was change males enough so that the hierarchical behavior would no longer be a big problem. So, yes, I did have a perception-altering idea in mind. Not that women aren't hierarchical, but we don't tend toward mass murder.

MM: It's not usually the women who start wars.

OB: Yes. We're much more likely to figuratively stab one another in the back, sadly.

MM: Which saves bodies, in a way [laughter].

OB: But I'm not sure I really managed what I set out to do. I wound up with a somewhat different hierarchical system, chemically controlled as with DNA, but, instead, pheromonal.(2) I wanted to work with ways of having my characters function without having them function in traditional ways. But there's also the fun element. When I was a kid I used to read science fiction stories that talked about, for example, an alien race with twenty-seven different sexes, every single one of which is absolutely essential to reproduction. But then the stories would never tell readers how sex worked, what the characters did for pleasure, exactly. So I wanted to have the interesting task of figuring out exactly how a different form of sex might work biologically.

ALK: On the "human contradiction"--which you describe as the genetic combination of intelligence and hierarchical behavior that compels humans to use their intelligence to evaluate, rank, dominate, and control others--it's a central theme in Xenogenesis. The Oankali believe this contradiction will ultimately doom humans to extinction. Is that your perspective as well?

OB: It's a real possibility now that the Cold War is over; look at how we are hunting for someone else to hate.

ALK: So, like the Oankali, you see hierarchical behavior in humans as a genetic characteristic?

OB: Yes, I do, when you consider that our hierarchical tendencies go back to algae. Anything living, if it feels threatened, will try to push the other thing out of the way. ! saw this on a PBS show once, and I have looked for it again ever since. There's a particular kind of marine algae that grows on rocks on beaches. When two clones of algae grow around the same rock and eventually meet, instead of going the other way or going down into the sand or to another rock or something, one poisons the other. They actually both try to poison one another, but one is successful. So the simple hierarchical behavior goes all the way back, I suspect, to the beginning of life. And intelligence has not made us better. For instance, when I was in Peru doing research for the Xenogenesis books, we went to a number of the equivalent of national parks in Peru. Actually we wound up not being able to go to one because someone had come in during the night and cut down a lot of the trees, nice big virgin growth. Anyway, of the ones we went to, one of them had two flocks of macaws that used to fly in to be pampered by the tourists. These were very tame birds; they were wild, and lived on their own, but they would fly in every day. They would happily sit on your shoulder and take whatever food you gave them, and bite you on the ear if you didn't give them any. When there were no tourists out there feeding them, there was a roost that had been set up--a pyramid with long slats, then shorter and shorter going toward the top--and I don't know if the birds knew what they were doing, but those birds spent all their time fighting to see who would sit at the top.

MM: The birds did? That's discouraging, isn't it?

OB: No, it's entirely normal. That's what I mean. And, by the way, no bird ever got to sit there for more than three seconds.

MM: It was constantly in question, then--there wasn't really one bird that stayed up there?

OB: It meant that the fighting was continuous.

MM: So there was always that challenge of claiming the authoritative spot?

OB: Yes.

ALK: I know that intelligence can be used to devise even more hierarchical and new strategies to get to the top but, also, don't we have to hope that it can be used to figure out different ways of reacting?

OB: Sure, but the dangerous thing is that the more hierarchical we become, the less likely we are to listen to our own intelligence or anyone else's. During the Gulf War, I remember, there was an Italian student who had come to the US to go to college in California for a while. The other students were wearing American flag patches on their sleeves to show support for the war. He felt that he shouldn't do that because he wasn't an American and he was going to be going home to Italy, and finally the US students harassed him to such a point that he just left. Sometimes we lose all awareness of what we should be doing, what makes sense, what's intelligent, and just let that hierarchical stuff go to our heads, which, I guess, is where it is anyway. The other thing is that my mother developed a dislike of cats because she stopped two male cats from fighting one time, and they split her lip right down the middle. Even stepping between two men is a very dangerous thing. They might stop, but they probably won't because real fighting is much nastier than what we see on television. So I can't help wondering if our intelligence has much of a chance. Look at what we're doing to the environment. We know we're damaging it, but we can't stop. The people who are making the money out of this keep telling us, "Don't worry. It's OK." We who are comfortable may not believe them, but we don't push very hard.

ALK: So, in the Italian student's situation with US students, you're connecting hierarchical behavior with a fear of difference? --The US students' fear of a different perspective?

OB: Sure. I may be wrong, but it all seems to be part of the same thing.

ALK: You might be right; but as an educator I want to think there is more hope for human nature.

OB: Of course there is. For instance, on the news this morning I heard that there are now women executives climbing to the top of Fortune 500 companies. They're sitting at the top saying, "Oh, there's no more problem. There's no more glass ceiling, so we no longer need affirmative action. Don't worry; all you have to do is work really hard and you'll be fine." I thought, "That's the worst problem: The women who make it to the top have to pretend to be men." Of course I don't mean taking on physical male characteristics or acting like men, but in that way, they do seem to take on the characteristics of the people that they most try to imitate.

MM: So all of this hierarchical behavior, too, goes back to genetics?--which many of us don't want to believe because it seems so closed, so deterministic. The idea that subjectivity is reflected primarily in genes harks back to the age of eugenics, for instance, doesn't it?

OB: But we still need to look at some of those possibilities. For instance, several years ago one of my friends became really annoyed with my interest in sociobiology. I said, "Wait a minute. If you, for instance, are suffering from PMS and you know that you have PMS, there are going to be certain things that you don't do because you know that you will do them badly and hurt yourself or hurt someone else. But if you don't know that this is a biological thing that's going on with you, maybe you'll try to just bull your way through. You'll say, `Oh, I'm just being self indulgent,' and try to push through with it and may really hurt yourself." Another friend should not use sharp objects during that time because she will hurt herself, and she has stitches to prove it. Before she realized this, she often did hurt herself because those were the times when she wanted to do something with the sharp object, cut up salad or meat or whatever, or even go out and whack limbs off a tree.

ALK: So you're saying that knowledge of the body can be used to empower and not necessarily to determine?

OB: Yes. Sure!

ALK: Well, the determinism is what scares me about sociobiology.

OB: Don't worry about it.

ALK: How can you not worry about that?

OB: Don't worry about the real biological determinism. Worry about what people make of it. Worry about the social Darwinism. After all, if sociobiology, or anything like it (people don't really use that term much any more for obvious reasons), is true, then denying it is certainly not going to help. What we have to do is learn to work with it and to work against people who see it as a good reason to let the poor be poor, that kind of thing--the social Darwinism: "They must be poor because of their genes," that kind of foolishness.

MM: When you gave the example of your friend with PMS, you were talking about women looking after themselves and knowing certain things about their own bodies, and then conducting themselves as a result in certain ways. But there are still people who make jokes about how women can't ever be President because they'll have access to that red button during their period and we'll all be blown up.

OB: And men have access to it no matter how crazy they are.

MM: Exactly.

OB: This is what I mean: What's made of genetics--body knowledge--is what's important. What's made of biology is that the people who are in power are going to figure out why this is a good reason for them to stay in power. Look at the tests that show that women have better linguistic abilities: Yet, how many of our ambassadors are women? How many of the politicians are women? This is not looked at; instead, the argument goes that women don't have the mathematical abilities ... every now and then. So we're much more likely now to be penalized for whatever we're assumed not to have. We're much more likely to find that whatever little genetic thing that's discovered is going to be used against us. Recently I was sitting on a panel with a man who had just gotten his Ph.D in genetics, and he was going to be working with the Human Genome Project. He was gung-ho, very much, for it. I said to him, "But doesn't it bother you that this is going to be used for a considerable amount of crime against people? It's going to be used by insurance companies who will refuse to insure people who have certain tendencies even if they never develop the disease. It's going to be used by employers who will find it an excellent reason not to employ certain people who need a job. Ways will be found to use this against people." And he said, "Those people can always get a lawyer and sue." But the people who this is going to be used against are the people who are going to be the least able to get a lawyer and sue! When I suggested this, he replied, "Maybe that's true, but the work still needs to be done," and the truth is that the work will be done. So I think that really what we need to do is fight those reactions. They're bad reactions. They're the kind of reactions that serve as political bullying.

ALK: The rhetoric is so powerful, though, because science is the "truth," so if science says these things about bodies, they must be truth.

OB: But it isn't science that makes the sociological connections. We manage to do that without the benefit of science. Again, consider the fact that women are better with verbal skills: why isn't the popular perception, then, that they would make better diplomats?

MM: Because they're the bodies of the culture and they bear the children.

OB: So!?

MM: They have periods, and so they're dangerous. I'm just saying what I think is still a fairly popular consensus.

OB: But that doesn't make any sense when you notice how men behave toward one another.

MM: Oh ... we agree.

OB: It's not women with their periods who were out there starting shooting wars.

MM: You're saying that body-knowledge could, possibly, dehierarchize, or maybe re-hierarchize, social and political relations, then? In your work, body-knowledge carries a great deal of authority, unlike most postmodern thinking and writing which calculates the human body as primarily a discursive entity--perhaps in defensive response to the ways genetics studies have often allocated political power and influence according to hierarchies of raced and gendered bodies--again, movements like eugenics, for instance. For these postmodern thinkers and writers, race, gender, sexuality, are all metaphors. One's body can only be known through language or some other medium of representation. The body, for them, is a thing, in other words, which only language and narrative can bring to life and make known to ourselves or to others. In contrast, in a great deal of your work, the body is the central communicator. Spoken or written language is frequently inadequate for communication. Among the Oankali [Xenogenesis Trilogy], for instance, the flesh knows. Akin calls it an Oankali "certainty of the flesh." In this way your work grants a great deal of authority to the body and its metabolic processes and powers beyond discourse.

OB: Because the body is all we really know that we have. We can say that there're always other things that are wonderful. And some are. But all we really know that we have is the flesh. As a matter of fact in my next book, Parable of the Talents, there's a verse about that which begins "self is ...," and the verse goes on to talk about this concept.

MM: And what does the verse say a "self" is?

OB: Pretty much, body.

ALK: But people know their bodies so poorly; human beings don't usually know their bodies well at all.

OB: This goes to what we were saying earlier. Some things we are afraid to know; there's danger in knowing. We know a little bit about our bodies, and then along comes somebody writing a book invoking genetics, saying, "Well, what we know proves that some groups of people should be given vocational training, because they're not really intelligent enough to absorb an education like us, who are, somehow, apparently, better folk."

MM: So identifying some as, for instance, candidates for vocational training alienates those groups--as objects of inquiry--from their bodies because they're perceived and objectified in those ways?

OB: I mean that that's what's done with body knowledge.

MM: Hierarchy ... again.

OB: Um hm.

ALK: My favorite character out of all your writing is the protagonist in Wild Seed, Anyanwu. She knows her body. She knows bodies at every level, it seems to me.

OB: Actually, when I wrote her, I felt very insecure about what I was having her do. I tried to make it seem logical, but I felt very uncomfortable about it and then when I got to the Xenogenesis books, I understood more of what I was trying to get at. So the nice thing about writing is that you do keep discovering not only things about the world but things about yourself.

ALK: In December of this year [1997] we're presenting a paper at the MLA conference in Toronto on your work. One of the things that we're arguing is that you invent what we're calling "new orders of difference," communities with different categories of kinship relations and racialized gender. Would you say that you're trying to create new types of community in your writings?

OB: I'd say more that I don't try to create communities; I always automatically create community. This has to do with the way I've lived. I just bought a new house, where there really isn't much in the way of community. People don't know their neighbors, but I went to the houses on each side of my own and introduced myself. The neighbors said, in effect, "That's nice," and that was the end of it. I'm used to living in areas where there's real community. My little court that I've talked about where I lived for about six or seven years has six little houses right-angling off the street, and it was a community in the real sense of the word. We all knew each other and if one of us was going away for a few days, we'd tell the others. We didn't all like each other, but we all knew each other and, since we were going to be living there, we made an effort to get along. When I was growing up, I lived in my grandmother's house. She owned it--a huge old house--and the neighborhood had changed. It had gone light-industrial and the houses were selling cheap, so she bought this enormous thing and had it cut up into apartments for her children to move into with their families, and this was a community. It was a good thing, too, because it was a really bad neighborhood, and it was also good because my father wasn't there. He died when I was a toddler, a little bit earlier, really, and since he wasn't there, it was good that I had uncles living in the other apartments because that meant that the street people knew that I had these big uncles: "Don't bother her; she's so-and-so's niece." So I've always lived in clusters of people who found ways of getting along together even if they didn't much like each other, which was often the case. My character Anyanwu [in Wild Seed] at one point actually says that she makes communities around herself. All of my characters either are in a community like Lauren in Parable of the Sower, or they create one; she does that, too. My own feeling is that human beings need to live that way and we too often don't.

MM: Adulthood Rites is my favorite of your books. In it, there's a line at the beginning that, for me, imbeds the too-uncommon kind of community you're talking about in altered bodies, the result of gene trading in the book: Nikanj tells Lilith that "trade means change. Bodies change, ways of living must change. Did you think your children would only look different?"

OB: Exactly!

MM: So are you saying, then, that in order for society to change, the body must change genetically?

OB: I'm saying it will change, for whatever reason, if we leave the earth, for instance. Or, it is changing already, actually. People who reach my age and can't see very well to read without glasses, now can still do productive work, without servants to help us. That's a change, and other changes: now we can travel a lot more widely and this is good, but it also means we can bring each other our diseases. So we're changing in those ways. All of a sudden we're able to contend with diseases we never even heard of. Change is inevitable, and it won't just change one thing.

MM: When I read that passage from Adulthood Rites, I think of contemporary social relations. It seems like the conventional political wisdom is that we can talk out our problems, contemporary global problems or local social problems, and thereby change perceptions and advance to a more just and egalitarian system. But in so many of your books, especially the Xenogenesis Trilogy, talk as a way of changing perceptions is not enough. In your books, bodies have to be genetically, as well as visibly, altered, in order to alter the human contradiction.

OB: The Xenogenesis books looked at one possible way--but I don't think for one moment that aliens will actually come down and fix it for us. When the Oankali do fix it for humans in the Xenogenesis books, the humans don't like it and they wouldn't.

MM: Even Lilith.

OB: She wasn't that thrilled. In Parable of the Sower, I deal with another possible way: I talk about us as we are, and I give us--I don't give it; nature seems to have given it (I never heard of a culture that didn't have a religion)--a religion. Lauren uses religion as a tool. So I use that tool as something that she can use to help people who follow her and those who are influenced by them, to save themselves. Now her idea (and this is an old science fiction idea) is that the one insurance humanity can take out is to scatter among the stars. This is one way, probably, that some of us will survive somewhere, because of the way we've been going. We go in these strange destructive cycles, and we do it over and over again. I was reading the Will and Ariel Durant history and, especially in the first book, over and over again the marauders come in and they take over and kill and torture and maim and steal. It's horrible. The marauder king finally settles down and says, "I'm going to try to make a really good society here for my people," and he starts to do things that are actually useful, not always, obviously. But in several cases this happens: he starts to initiate actions that are useful: arrange for better care for the sick, and see to it that children get what they need. The more he does this, the more he steps on the toes of people who had a really good thing going before, exploiting whoever he's trying to help now, whether it's children or old people or whomever--women. Then those people who had earlier been at the top of the hierarchy begin to stir up the populace: "Don't you realize that this guy is your enemy?". This is what they're basically saying although they never put it quite that boldly. They find things to say about him that either make the people laugh at him or that make them suspect him of doing something behind their backs. In some way they diminish him in the eyes of the very people he's helping. Then after a while the populace can be encouraged to help bring him down. It seems to work every time; it never works as clearly as I've just said it, but it's the same pattern over and over again. I don't really have much hope for us as a species, especially if we become more technologically aware and if we all stay here on earth. Just talking through problems isn't an adequate solution.

MM: Related to my question about bodies changing in the Xenogenesis Trilogy, and therefore, as Nikanj says, "ways of living" changing, I'm fascinated by the third gender in the Xenogenesis Trilogy and how it alters the mechanics of heterosexual couplings.

OB: Well, the men don't like it because they feel they're being made into women. And that's not really what's happening. That's the way they see it because the men aren't at the top of the hierarchy any more, biologically or sexually. But the ooloi are not necessarily taking away any male functions. Genetically, the men are still male. But in the Oankali system, "male" doesn't carry the connotations of power and authority that it does in human systems. I don't know whether you've noticed--there're two differences in hierarchy that a lot of readers and reviewers tend not to notice in the Xenogenesis books. One is that the Oankali have no traditional government. Instead, they come together by way of the nerve systems of their various chips and appendages, and they get a consensus; that's how they make decisions. And the other is that the ooloi, who seem to have so very much power, make no personal genetic contribution to the offspring. It really hurts them in that sense, not hurts them, but they're cut off in that sense from their own young. So those two differences bend the usual hierarchy. The Oankali are hierarchical, but not in the same ways as humans; they have some natural brinks on their tendencies.

MM: What might be the effect on readers of a text like yours revising these, and other, hierarchies in this way, for instance the threesome of gender and of sexual activity, rather than the usual twosomes?

OB: To bend their minds a bit? That's what I'd hope for, but the problem there is the same problem with Lauren's hyperempathy [in Parable of the Sower]: people don't read carefully. Reviewers typically account for Lauren's hyperempathic powers as something supernatural--as a type of extrasensory telepathy--when I didn't write it that way. I guess that, with fiction, readers don't feel they need to read carefully; so many assume over and over again that the ooloi are just a combination of male and female. Even though in the Trilogy I say clearly over and over again that the ooloi are something different--not simply a combination of two, but a third gender altogether--and that they don't act like either men or women, readers usually see what they want to or what they expect to.

MM: So, if readers, as you say, "don't read carefully," then what's the purpose of writing such reconfigurations, ... or of having readers know about them? If people don't read carefully, then can there be any relation between writing fiction and political commentary and struggle?

OB: Do you mean, do I think I influence political commentary?

MM: Do you believe there is a relation between the two? For instance, my impression is that even many academics in our field believe that reading and studying literature is more an escape from ....

ALK: That it's just entertaining.

MM: That it just entertains people rather than having a political function or having some influence to change the hierarchies of bodies and social relations we've been talking about, for instance.

OB: Let's look at some fiction that seems to have had quite an influence recently and long term. What about that book which a lot of the survivalists are so hot on?--The Turner Diaries, by Andrew Macdonald. It looks forward to a time when there's a terrible race war, and his side wins. It's become an underground cult classic--said to have influenced Tim McVeigh and the whole separationist movement. Every now and then it's in the news because some new, pardon me, nut group decides to bring about, or tries to bring about, their agenda. Then there's that antisemitic one, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; I'm not sure people think of that now as fiction, but I'm sure back when it was written, the author knew it was fiction, whoever the author was far back into antiquity--it was brought back by the Czarists to demonize Russian Jews and, later, by the Nazis in Germany. I came across it in my research on how a country goes Fascist, the major theme of my new novel [Parable of the Talents]. A lot of readings that shouldn't have effect might just have it because they're taken so seriously, even something like the Biblical book of Ruth. The question about the book of Ruth is whether it's fiction or not because it's so unusual. It's pressing for a kind of tolerance that the books which follow it certainly are not. That kind of tolerance is not there. Instead, the later ones suggest, "Get rid of these foreign wives," which seems to me grotesque: "Here, take your family and shove them out the gates." But that one and the book of Job--both of these are fascinating fiction, but they have found their ways into our everyday religious discourse and had a heck of a lot of influence. If nothing else, they're at least fascinating to talk about and a lot of people do believe them literally.

MM: Do you see your texts as political?

OB: I have a character (I keep doing this to you)--I have a character in Parable of the Talents who says, "We have to stay out of politics. We don't want to get noticed. Things are too hot right now." There is a real Fascist running for President and my character is afraid the Fascist will win. My character and his friends are in the process of building up their business. At first, it's really basic barter and trade. Then, gradually, as they acquire a truck, it becomes wholesaling. They're doing more, and other people are afraid because one of the things that the Fascist is saying is, "It's these non-Christians, these cultists who've gotten us into all this trouble." And my character and his business partners are saying, "We've gotta cool it; we don't want to be noticed. We don't want to get into politics." But the female protagonist remarks, instead, that "To be human is to be political." That's pretty much the way I feel.

MM: So your texts are political.9 You do see your texts as political?

OB: Everything is political in one way or another.

MM: We see your texts as very innovative, and we believe that they....

OB: I'm not entirely sure that they are, but thank you.

MM: That they also represent a political struggle. We're wondering--with the way the world is (and we've talked about the Gulf War and all of the other conflicts having to do with various hierarchies even though there is no longer a Cold War)--if there's a relation between fiction and political struggle, as you've said you believe there is, how politically effective is textual innovation and struggle? Can the type of remodeled hierarchies, including remodeled bodily hierarchies in terms of gender and ethnicity, or sexuality, for instance can they make a difference in popular attitudes?

OB: When I buy a book, I say that if I get one idea from this book it's paid for itself. When I write a book, if I influence one person who goes on to influence others, then probably I've done something worthwhile if the influence is good. Nobody can see how long their books will last or how much influence they'll have, so I just assume that at least I can make a few people think. I don't know what will come of that, possibly nothing, but you never know what that one kid, for instance, sitting in the back of the room is going to wind up doing. You're both teachers, so I'm sure you're very much aware of this. That one kid is liable to someday be able to say "yes" or "no" to something very important: "Yes, we'll kill off the rest of this nasty Amazon forest," or, "No, we won't." I don't really believe one person alone will make that decision, but that's something that's important.

MM: So you do believe that textual innovation and struggle are or can be, politically, positively effective.

OB: Can be, but there's no guarantee.

ALK: Relatedly, how would you like your writings to influence and affect readers? You've already said that you want to make them think, but I wonder if you could be more specific, for instance if you had a lot of power and knew you could influence readers in certain ways. Would you want to influence them, and, if so, how?

OB: That's a genie in a bottle sort of question. If I knew that I could and did it, I hope that I would have the good sense not to do it most of the time. And if I did do it, I'm hoping that it would have something to do with the environment. I can make any number of people think about what we're doing to the environment without affecting what we're doing to the environment. But maybe they'll remember when they get older. It's obvious, for instance, that global warming is already taking place. All signs say "yes"; none of them say "no," but there are still scientists who'll look at one sign and say, "This one sign is questionable and maybe, therefore, it's not really happening." I write a book like Parable of the Sower in which global warming is practically one of the characters, and maybe it becomes more real to young readers who don't yet have any power but who might someday. Maybe they're more able to admit, "Yes, of course it's happening, and if we can't stop it, we have to at least start paying attention to it and preparing for it and not making it worse."

ALK: Since 1980 or so there's been a proliferation of works by African American women--Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Terri McMillan, among many, many others. Have you read and been influenced by them?--As a writer, how would you situate yourself among them?

OB: Not really. For one thing, we all seem to have come around at the same time. I came into writing first by way of my fantasies, magic horses and all that, and then by way of science fiction. So I had the flaw that so many young science fiction writers have. I read too much science fiction. It was practically all I read when I began as a writer. So these women writers you've mentioned are people that I discovered much later and, I think, late enough so that I don't think they had that much of an effect on my writing. However, Toni Morrison did make me aware that there are ways to use words, ways that I hadn't been using. I came in by way of pulp science fiction which had begun to annoy me even before I began to think about what else I might do. So writers like Toni Morrison who use the language so well made me aware of other possibilities.

MM: How would you situate your work within the context of US literature as a whole?--that is, not only how it fits into the science fiction genre, but how it fits with more canonical literary traditions.

OB: I've never been good at fitting in. You can fit it in for me.

MM: I ask that question because we both teach from the Heath Anthology of American Literature. We both teach the Survey of US Lit courses, and we're surprised that your writings aren't included in the 1865-Present volume.

OB: Well, is that because the anthology was published a while back?

MM: No the most recent edition is only two or three years old, and the new one is coming out in November. If you're not in the upcoming new edition, would you like to be?

OB: Sure. Why not? At least I'm now in the Norton Anthology of Afro American Science Fiction. You can look me up in the Oxford Companion to American Literature, that kind of thing.

MM: That's good, but I want to see your work in the Heath Anthology of American Literature too, not only as a science fiction writer, that is, but also as a part of US lit as a whole. That would also be a way, perhaps, for our field not to marginalize science fiction as a genre so much.

OB: It's interesting what gets called science fiction. Robin Cook came in writing bad science fiction, and he says that, before reading his work, most people didn't know anything about science fiction. It was brand new to most readers, and they were impressed with how innovative he was!

MM: So to what do you attribute his success, then?--a more mainstream success than most science fiction writers enjoy.

OB: To a couple of things: he was very smart in the way he did not sell to a small science fiction publisher. He found a mainstream publisher, and he's an MD; he wrote about medical subjects, and he got in. And now he can write about aliens coming to earth, and it's still a big deal because he's Robin Cook.

ALK: The classifying is so interesting because Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale isn't, surprisingly, labeled science fiction. And it deals more with the future than, for example, your Parable of the Sower, which of course is labelled as science fiction.

OB: Yes, they're equally un-science fiction-y books--Atwood's even more so because she has this future that is totally non-technological; it gets harder and harder to see how we would get to a non-technological future without a terrible war or something, simply because people find technology so convenient. So it isn't likely that they would just give it up. It was an interesting book

ALK: How would you say your own body has influenced and perhaps shaped your writing?

OB: Not so much my body, but other people's reaction to it. I grew up as out-kid. I think I was first called ugly in first grade, and I went on being called ugly all the way through junior high school. If you're called ugly that long, you start to believe it. You also start to expect it so that, after a while, when people become too polite to do that you assume that they're thinking it, and you start to miss it in a horrible sort of way. So I was out-kid, and I assume that I was out-kid because I was ugly. Actually, I was the most socially awkward person you can imagine, still am to some degree. And I was an only child and never really learned to work with other people very well. Because of this, because I was so ostracized and because I was so shy, the writing was a real refuge for me. So, in that sense, I guess you could say my body helped to make me a writer.

MM: In the writing process itself?.

OB: In other people's reactions to me. I was six feet tall when I was fourteen or fifteen, so that also helped. Boys figured I did it on purpose.

MM: What about specific texts? You said that other people's reaction to your body influenced your writing. Can you think of any specific ways of writing or specific characters or specific texts that were influenced?

OB: I tried being a small person--I tried to experience being a small person in Mind of My Mind and in Wild Seed. That was interesting because then I had to think of some of the problems that a small person might have to deal with, and to think as a small person. My first attempt at being as big as I am was in Survivor. Here I have a character who is not necessarily fat, but she's very tall and androgynous-looking. I used to be mistaken for a man a lot, and, occasionally, somebody would try to chase me out of the ladies room, which used to upset the hell out of me.

MM: What would you say?

OB: I was deeply offended.

MM: What did they do when you corrected them? Did they apologize?

OB: No, people tend not to apologize for mistaking me for a man. On the phone for instance, because I have a deep voice, people will often call me "sir," and my standard response now is just to say, "I'm a woman." Some of them don't hear me; some of them say, "What?" And some don't say anything; they just go on as if I haven't spoken. And some say, "Oh, I'm sorry," and they change their pronouns and their manner of address, so it's been an interesting life. The size thing has been the biggest influence. I had a friend when I was in junior high school who belonged to the same religious denomination as my mother. We both had the same prohibitions: no dancing, no makeup, no short dresses, although we did roll them up a bit; in other words, if it felt good, you couldn't do it, and let's not even talk about boys! And so, as a big person, bigger than most boys, my reaction was to dive into the writing. My friend's reaction, when she began to get to a rebellious age, was to go out and get pregnant. That was an act of rebellion. I saw this happen to other people, and I thought, "What's the future in that?". She missed a year of school; eventually she dropped out altogether and she couldn't get a decent job, so she found herself a husband. For one thing, she was about half a foot shorter than I was. So I figured I couldn't really take her track as far as men were concerned because, at that point, men were still looking at me and saying things I didn't really want to hear. I looked at other friends I had. In one neighborhood the girls living on both sides had decided that they wanted to prove they were women, so they got pregnant, and one of them more than once. I looked at them both, and I saw no future. Where are they going? One of them eventually wound up cleaning houses, which didn't appeal to me at all, and the other one just had a lot more children and eventually got married. None of this was in the vaguest bit appealing to me. Part of what I'm saying is that my body really got in the way of any social life that I was likely to have had. But, on the other hand, it did push me more into the writing because I was in the habit of thinking about things. Writing does encourage you to think about things. I would look at something before I leaped into it, and that's not really an adolescent characteristic: Typically, adolescents just tend to leap all too often.

MM: Now there are students waiting to talk with you. Thank you for being so forthcoming. We totally enjoyed our interview with you. This has been a thrilling two days, and we're grateful that you came to us in the high plains in the midst of a tornado warning.

OB: Well, I think if I'd heard about the tornado ... I might not have come!

MM: Thank goodness you didn't, then!

OB: I've enjoyed this very much, too.

Notes

(1.) In a subsequent phone conversation, Butler identified J.B. Rhine as a strong influence from her adolescent reading. Rhine was a pioneer in the field of parapsychology: a longtime faculty member at Duke University, he was the author, in the mid-twentieth century, of numerous non-fiction books and coined the phrase "extrasensory perception."

(2.) According to Raven and Johnson, pheromones are chemical substances released by the exocrine glands of one organism that influence the behavior or physiological processes of another organism of the same species. Some pheromones serve as sex attractants, as trail markers, and as alarm signals. A pheromonally-controlled hierarchical system, as a paradigm for human relations, then, would emphasize the associative and relational characteristics of the species rather than the discrete characteristics typically attributed to DNA--or hormonally-controlled systems (1268, 897, 1221).

Works Cited

Boulter, Amanda. "Polymorphous Futures: Octavia E. Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy." American Bodies: Cultural Histories of the Physique. Ed. Tim Armstrong. New York: New York UP, 1996. 170-85.

Butler, Octavia E. Dawn. New York: Warner, 1987.

--. "Positive Obsession." Bloodchild And Other Stories. New York: Seven Stories P, 1996. 123-35.

Haraway, Donna J. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.149-82.

Harrison, Rosalie G. "Sci Fi Visions: An Interview with Octavia Butler." Equal Opportunity Forum 8 (1980): 30-34.

Irigaray, Luce. "The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine." This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.68-85.

Johnson, Charles. Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970. London: Serpent's Tail, 1988.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.

Raven, P. H., and G. B. Johnson, Biology. 4th ed. Dubuque, IA: Wm. C. Brown, 1996.

Stepto, Robert. "Distrust of the Reader in Afro-American Narratives." Reconstructing American Literary History. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986. 300-22.

White, Eric. "The Erotics of Becoming: Xenogenesis and The Thing." Science Fiction Studies 20.3 (1993): 394-408.

Addendum I

Octavia Butler has published eleven novels and a collection of short stories and essays, described below in roughly chronological order. Her most recent novel, Parable of the Talents, appeared in December 1998; since Talents, book two of the new Parable series, was published after our May 9, 1997 interview with Butler, we include as Addendum II excerpts from two subsequent phone-interview conversations having to do with Talents. Butler's interest in exploring human engagements with difference--from multiple, always embodied, perspectives--has led her to write three sets of interlocking novels, listed here along with her short stories and her only single-volume novel Kindred, as the Patternist series, the Xenogenesis Trilogy, and the newest, the Parable series, of which only two volumes have appeared so far.

PATTERNIST SERIES: Wild Seed (1980), Mind of My Mind (1978), Clay's Ark (1985), Survivor (1978), Patternmaster (1976).

We've arranged the novels in the Patternist series according to the story's narrative events. The series moves back and forward through time, tracing the human race's transformation into three distinct genetic groups which vie for domination and survival: the Patternists, human beings who, through a process of genetic breeding, have attained heightened telepathic powers bound by the Pattern, an indissoluble, genetically-created psychic chain controlled by the Patternmaster; the Clayark, disease-mutated people with superhuman physical abilities and animal-like bodies; and the "mutes," ordinary, non-diseased, non-psychic humans enslaved by the Patternists. Focusing on the conflicts among Patternists, Clayarks, and "mutes" allows Butler simultaneously to critique contemporary "race" relations and to displace them with other forms of human difference. Two of the primary protagonists are Anyanwu, a three-hundred-year-old African healer and shape-shifter, and Doro, a type of psychic vampire, born before the pyramids were built.

KINDRED (1979)

Originally designed as part of the Patternist series, Kindred is Butler's only novel not classified as science fiction. Like Butler's other novels, Kindred explores ethical dimensions of human confrontations with difference. Set simultaneously in 1976 and the pre-Civil War South, this novel follows a "black" protagonist, Dana Franklin, as she is pulled back through time whenever the life of her ancestor, Rufus, is threatened. The "white" son of a slave owner, Rufus represents a shocking, previously hidden element of Dana's family history, which she must learn to understand and accept. Additionally, Dana's twentieth-century preconceptions concerning "mammies," "house negroes," "masters," and other components of slavery undergo significant changes as she learns to survive in the antebellum South. This novel deals with miscegenation, the seductiveness of power, the socialization of slavery, and the interconnections between the supposedly distinct "black" and "white" "races." Many scholars consider this novel a modern classic in US literatures.

XENOGENESIS TRILOGY: Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), Imago (1989).

Butler's second series, the Xenogenesis Trilogy, extends and develops Butler's narrative of embodiment, focusing especially on the creation of genetically altered and thus hybridized peoples and communities. The events of these novels occur after nuclear war has almost entirely destroyed the Earth and depict the interactions between the human survivors and their rescuers, the Oankali. This ancient, extremely alien-looking species has three genders; they are genetic engineers, compelled to interbreed with every "race" they encounter as they travel through space. For the humans, the price of survival is interbreeding with this alien species, an interbreeding which radically transforms both parties. These novels deal with conflicts concerning self and Other, sameness and difference. Central to this series is the "human contradiction"--the combination of intelligence and hierarchical behavior which compels humans to use their intelligence to evaluate, rank, dominate, and control others. According to the Oankali, this lethal genetic contradiction leads to slavery, wars, and other violent actions which will doom human beings to extinction.

PARABLE SERIES: Parable Of The Sower (1993), Parable of the Talents (1998).

Set in the New Millennium, Butler's third series explores physical and psychic forms of subjugation, and critiques colonialism, Afrocentrism, fundamentalist religious movements, capitalism, racism, and other contemporary issues. Parable of the Sower follows Lauren Olamina as she attempts to survive and create a new community in a radically altered United States where many people live in total poverty; the government is almost entirely useless; and violence, murder, slavery, and crime are everyday facts of life. Parable of the Talents continues Olamina's story as, despite extreme setbacks, she achieves her goal and establishes a network of alternative communities. As Butler explains in the interview, the second Parable novel examines the ways in which Fascism can, and in the twentieth century does, come to dominate a nation's perception of itself, both individually and collectively. (See Addendum II for our follow-up interviews with Butler after the December 1998 publication of Parable of the Talents.)

BLOODCHILD AND OTHER STORIES (1995)

Contains reprints of Butler's short stories and personal narratives.

Addendum II

In two phone interviews subsequent to the original in-person conversation at ENMU in May 1997, Octavia Butler talked about the two Parable novels as, at once, interconnected and different from one another. Both novels, she claims, represent "warnings": about the dangers of a fundamentalist religion-driven national politics, as exemplified in Pat Robertson's 1992 run for the US presidency, and about the climate changes, emblematized by global warming, occurring in the two fictional landscapes and in contemporary real time. Yet, further, Butler reiterated Olamina's self-conscious use, herself, of religion as a "tool" for transforming the relation among diverse populations and between humans and the Earth: "I had in mind how certain historical populations have used religion to focus a group toward long-term goals--such as building cathedrals or the pyramids. I wanted Lauren to envision, but then also to focus the Earthseed group toward, the goal of changing human attitudes about and treatment of the Earth and of each other. And a big part of that vision was to formulate not a national government but, instead, multiple communities, self-governing and--supporting, but also interactive with each other. In Lauren's religion, the Earthseed group's going back to the Earth, as at the end of Sower, means being alive again, literally and spiritually. Unlike a fundamentalist sensibility where immortality means death and transcendence, Lauren wants to give her group immortality by returning to the earth. And it was important to me that Lauren had some success.... By the end of Talents, Lauren's too old to go to the stars and she has no descendants going--Larkin won't go--but others are going. So the ending is ambiguous: There's some success for Lauren, some failure, and a lot of hope. The other ambiguity here is that if we humans are, as Lauren believes, and as I believe, a part of Earth in significant ways, then perhaps we can't, or shouldn't, leave and go to another world. The system of Earth is self-regulating, but not for any particular species, in the same way that the human body has its own metabolic logic. Perhaps the Acorn community represents the most logical way to halt the damage we're doing to the Earth and to ourselves as humans."

With respect to narrative form, Butler talked about the differences between Sower and Talents: "In some ways, having several narrators in the second novel serves, subtly, to, I hope, undermine the single-minded guiding voice of Sower--Olamina's. This is as it should be: Talents isn't the coming-of-age story that Sower is. Olamina doesn't have the only truth. I wanted Lauren's daughter Larkin to be heard as well, as one spokesperson for a later era; but her story, and her life, is very different from Lauren's--Larkin never had the intellectual leisure, for instance, that Lauren did for formulating a religion like Earthseed and a plan. Unlike Lauren, by the time Larkin gets an education, she's already an adult." Butler related as well how the early drafts of Talents changed after her mother's 1996 stroke and death: "In January 1997, when I got back into writing the novel, it had become a mother-daughter story." Additionally, we queried Butler about the narrative pattern in her previous books where, as we commented in the original interview, there's typically a delay in readers' learning a character's ethnic origins until, and unless, that information becomes central to the narrative; unlike these, Talents marks characters' racial or ethnic identity much sooner and more directly than does any of her earlier novels, including Sower. She commonsensibly replied that "By the time many readers get to Talents, they already know most of the characters from Sower. So they're accustomed to multi-ethnic and multi-cultural communities and blended bodies and identities. Besides, there's more at stake--life and death stakes--at this stage of the Earthseed community's development than there was early in the Parable story."

Finally, Butler related that after writing Talents she had envisioned four more novels in the Parable series: the third, Parable of the Trickster; the fourth, Parable of the Teacher; the fifth, The Parable of Chaos; and sixth, The Parable of Clay. She imagined that none of the four after the first two would have characters in common, though the stories would be interlocking. However, after re-writing the introduction to the third novel in the Parable series "at least 150 times," Butler says that she has permanently "killed" the series: "It was too hard to write the first sequel; and now I'm focusing on and having fun with a completely different text and a new narrator." The name of the new text is Mortal Words, which takes an epistolary form, daily letters written by a woman in her ninety-ninth year, the last written on her hundredth birthday. After a lifetime in Southern California, Octavia Butler has recently moved to Seattle, Washington.

Works by Octavia Butler

Adulthood Rites. New York: Warner, 1988.

Bloodchild and Other Stories. 1995. New York, Seven Stories P, 1996.

Clay's Ark. 1984. New York: Warner, 1996.

Dawn. New York: Warner, 1987.

Imago. New York: Warner, 1989.

Kindred. 1979. Boston: Beacon, 1988.

Mind of My Mind. 1977. New York: Avon, 1978.

Survivor. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978.

Parable of the Sower. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993.

Parable of the Talents. New York: Seven Stories P, 1998.

Patternmaster. 1976. New York: Warner, 1995.

Wild Seed. 1980. New York: Warner, 1988.

AnaLouise Keating, Associate Professor of English at Aquinas College, is the author of Women Reading Women Writing: Self-Invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldua, and Audre Lorde (Temple UP, 1996), editor of Gloria Anzaldua's Interviews. Entrevistas (Routledge, 2000), and co-editor, with Anzaldua, of This Bridge Called My Back, Twenty Years Later.' Enacting the Visions of Radical Women of Color (Routledge, 2001).

Marilyn Mehaffy received her Ph.D. in U.S. literature and American can popular culture from the University of California, Riverside, in 1995 and is currently working as an independent scholar. She has previously published in Signs, College Literature, and Women's Studies. She is completing a book manuscript about ideologies of cleanliness and the rise of the commodity soap industry in the mid-nineteenth century U.S.