Rites of Passage, Liminality, and Community in Octavia E. Butler’s Science Fiction Novels 1666903108, 9781666903102

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Rites of Passage, Liminality, and Community in Octavia E. Butler’s Science Fiction Novels

Rites of Passage, Liminality, and Community in Octavia E. Butler’s Science Fiction Novels Lin Knutson

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Knutson, Lin, author. Title: Rites of passage, liminality, and community in Octavia E. Butler's science fiction novels / Lin Knutson. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023002602 (print) | LCCN 2023002603 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666903102 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666903119 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Butler, Octavia E.--Criticism and interpretation. | Science fiction, American--History and criticism. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. Classification: LCC PS3552.U827 Z75 2023  (print) | LCC PS3552.U827 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54–dc23/eng/20230123 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023002602 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023002603 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

With all my love to Elska, Lizzie, Girlfriend, Flannery, and Gus

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction

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Chapter 1: Rites of Passage Chapter 2: Patternist Chapter 4: Parables

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41



Chapter 5: Fledgling

Index

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Chapter 3: Xenogenesis

Bibliography



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73

91

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About the Author



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Acknowledgments

I want to thank Mississippi Valley State University for supplying summer grants to help me complete this project. I also want to thank Dr. Donna Bauerly from Loras College, who first supported my work and sent me to present an academic paper at my first eye-opening conference. I want to thank the members of the Marquette University English Department for the training I received while completing my MA in English. I also want to thank Dr. Mary Lou Emery and Dr. Anne Donadey, the cochairs for my dissertation at the University of Iowa, who spent many hours giving me excellent advice. I am also thankful for Dr. Books Landon for his science fiction course at Iowa, and for the Writers’ Workshop at Iowa, where I first met Octavia E. Butler in person. Thanks especially to the incomparable Octavia E. Butler for your all-too-brief presence on our planet and for your incomparably stimulating writing. In the process of writing this book I have discovered a dedicated community of scholars and creative writers who adore you. May your light shine on the past, present, and future. I want to thank my many students throughout the years for making this field that I love come alive for me with decades of stimulating discussions. I also want to thank my friends and family for their love and friendship and for being with me through this journey. I am particularly indebted to my dear friend Ellen O’Rielly for all of the love and encouragement and support. I am dedicating this book to my exemplary housemates. Chapter 5 has been revised from an earlier edition with permission from the University of Toronto Press. It was first published as “Monster Studies: Liminality, Home Spaces, and Ina Vampires in Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling,” University of Toronto Quarterly 87 (Winter 2018): 214–33. I thank the editors for permission to reprint this material.

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Introduction

The theoretical framework of this text rests on the work of Victor Turner established in his body of work and included in seminal texts such as The Forest of Symbols (1967), The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969), and Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (1974). These texts lay out his philosophy of the social processes that exist in society. Victor Turner did anthropological fieldwork on African social processes in the 1960s, and he worked with the Ndembu peoples of Africa to explore the ways ritual and social drama are related to conflict resolution. He argues that individuals go through what he calls “Rites of Passage” or transitions. The first phase is a separation from social structures. This may be a literal or metaphoric journey or other kind of break from society, such as a holiday where normal social life stops and a new phase begins. Once the separation has occurred, individuals move into the realm of anti-structure, called liminality, which is a transitional period that may be filled with ambiguity and instability. During this time individuals may critique or question the structure of which they are a part. This separation phase may be unsettling and cause profound change or cause individuals to behave in new ways. For example, the individual may be opposed to social and political structures that constrain their personal freedom and growth. Therefore, they seek out spaces that generate creativity and freedom that present the potential for change and renewal, and may even modify or reverse discriminatory social structures. The individual is thus transformed by this liminal process. The third phase is marked by a return to structure; however, it is a new world to which they return because the individual has been altered, and perhaps the structure itself has been altered to eliminate an oppressive structural paradigm. Turner’s concept of Rites of Passage applies to the texts of Octavia Butler, because her protagonists engage in forms of patriarchal and racial structures in society that oppress and limit individuals. She furthermore examines ways that communities are able to empower individuals to remove or reduce the oppressions in society. I apply Turner’s theories to all of Butler’s science fiction novels: the five texts of the Patternist series, the three texts of the 1

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Introduction

Xenogenesis series, the two texts of the Parable series, and her final text, Fledgling. As Butler’s writing develops, so do her uses of Rites of Passage, structure and anti-structure, and community and her ambiguous return to structure. Why might a text focus solely on a particular theory, you might ask? First, to expose the underlying structure to the texts. Furthermore, as in Butler’s work, the central tenets of Turner’s work are the role of community, the formation of community, and the kinds of interactions that occur in community. Butler discusses the significance of community in her texts and in her own life. During the process of creating community, intimacy is formed, as is what Turner describes as “communitas,” or a meeting of individuals on a basis of equality. Here, individuals relate to each other without dominance or social status. Understanding Turner’s theories clarifies the social process undergone by the protagonists of Octavia Butler’s novels. I first encountered the writing of Octavia Butler in a contemporary literature course at the University of Iowa when I read Parable of the Sower. Then, I took my first undergraduate science fiction course with Dr. Brooks Landon. Finally, The Iowa Writers’ Workshop brought in Octavia Butler for a talk, and I was deeply impressed by her integrity. She spoke from the heart about the dangerous state of politics in our country, but she spent most of her talk discussing not herself or her fiction, but rather a topic close to my own heart: the power of teaching writing to young adults. Butler operated outside power structures. She famously said, “I began writing about power because I had so little.” During her life as an author, Butler found a myriad of ways to dismantle power. Although survival is always the bottom line in Butler’s worlds, how that survival is accomplished is part of what makes her writing so troublesome and so powerful. In Butler’s obituary in the New York Times, Margalit Fox states that Butler’s “evocative, often troubling novels explore the far-reaching issues of race, sex, power, and ultimately, what it means to be human.” Butler became one of the few African American writers in the field of science fiction, delving into what had been a primarily white, male genre until the 1970s. However, she consistently refused to be identified solely by her race or her gender, either as an individual or through her writing. Butler was born in a racially diverse Pasadena, California, where her father, Laurice Butler, shined shoes. He died when she was a baby. She was raised by her mother, also named Octavia, and her grandmother. She observed how Black people were mistreated when she was taken to work with her mother, who worked as a maid. Her texts are about the misuse of power and ways to use power effectively. Her protagonists are primarily Black women who relate their stories from a first- or third-person narrative, as disenfranchised

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people forced by events to take significant and sometimes shocking action in order to fulfill unimaginable destinies. Her protagonists find ways to use power responsibly, in contrast to the structures of domination around them. For this reason, Butler taps into a wide audience of readers, who reach out to her in a wide variety of ways. Octavia Butler was one of a handful of Black writers of science fiction active when she began publishing in the genre, but their numbers have grown to include Nisi Shawl and Jelani Wilson, Derrick Bell, Milton David, and Nova Sparks, among others. Butler attended Writers Guild of America workshops where Harlan Ellison became her mentor, and he subsequently invited her to the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop in 1970. Butler falls squarely in the realm of traditional science fiction in her creation of unusual bodies, yet for Butler, that space has a much deeper meaning than to strike awe or amazement into the heart of the reader. It is why she is considered part of a “feminist tradition in science fiction literature” (Melzer, “All That You Touch,” 43). I would argue that Butler writes neither utopian nor dystopian fiction, although elements of both are found in her work. Essentially, she includes the oppressive power structures that exist today, but she leaves us with hope. Butler and Samuel R. Delaney write in the genre of Afrofuturism, a philosophy of science and history that explores the developing intersection of Black culture where it overlaps with science and technology. The term “Afrofuturism” was coined by Mark Dery in 1993, and it describes a vision of multiethnic populations of Black, Latino/a, Asian, white, and mixed-race people. Butler presents a multiracial world and a vision of humanity as fundamentally flawed; humans are intelligent, yet hierarchical, determined to claim social status over others. Intolerance, racism, violence, and gender discrimination all stem from this duality in humans. In contrast to these oppressive social structures, Butler instead forms “homogeneity and comradeship” among communities that cross boundaries (Turner, Ritual, 96). Sexuality is part of the community formations, and this is often the context within which Butler explores the most intimate of power engagements. The body is the site of agency and becomes a revisionary social project that frames a critique of corporeal hierarchies. Butler’s bodies and fantasy bodies are often displaced or difficult to visualize, which allow for possible nonhierarchical relationships. Because the characters reside outside the familiar socially structured realities of race, gender, and sexuality, Butler can critique stereotypes of the Black body and reclaim the body as a source of knowledge (Mehaffy and Keating, “Radio Imagination,” 48). Sixteen years after her death, Butler’s reputation is soaring. In Parable of the Talents, set in a futuristic 2032, she predicts the direction that US politics would take today; she prefigured Trump and the MAGA world with character

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Texas Senator Andrew Jarret, who comes into power shouting “make America great.” In Butler’s version of 2032, resources are increasingly scarce and communities live in walled-off enclaves with little protection against increasing violence and a growing authoritarian government. Butler would not be surprised by today. Tarsha Stanley, president of the Octavia Butler Society, puts it this way, “World building is huge in her canon, so there is always hope that since we built this world, we can build another one.”1 Butler’s diverse societies are controlled by evolutionary realities and paranormal experiences. We see the competition and struggle for power, the domination of the weak by the strong. Butler is constantly engaged with the power dynamics of social structures and the oppressive racist, sexist and classist agendas of these structures. Her protagonists are on a quest for self-identity and the creation of a fairer, more equitable society. Butler’s accolades are impressive both as a literary writer and as a science fiction writer. She won two Hugo Awards and two Nebula Awards, and in 1995 she became the first science fiction writer to be awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. Butler’s work has received the attention of both the arts community and the scientific community. Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon produced Parable of the Sower as an opera in 2018. Furthermore, graphic novels have been created by Damian Duffy, who wrote Kindred as a New York Times bestselling graphic novel that won the 2018 Eisner Award for Best Adaptation from another medium. Duffy also adapted Parable of the Sower as a graphic novel and in 2021, it won the Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Graphic story. More recently, in another medium, Dawn is currently being adapted for television by Ava DuVernay, and Wild Seed is being adapted as a television series by Viola Davis and her husband Julius Tennon through their company, JuVee Productions. Kindred was developed into a 2022 miniseries for FX on Hulu by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. Scientific organizations are also very aware of Butler. They have given Butler extraordinary recognition in the last several years. In 2018, the International Astronomical Union named a mountain on one of the moons of Pluto “Butler Mons” in her honor. In 2019, an asteroid was named “7052 OctaviaButler” in recognition of her. Most significantly, on February 18, 2021, the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover touched down on Mars, and NASA named that site the “Octavia E. Butler Landing.” Many articles, book chapters, and dissertations have been written on Butler’s work. Books that focus solely on Butler’s work are just emerging, however. Critic Gregory Jerome Hampton taught African American literature at Howard University and was one of the first to elevate Octavia Butler to the level of serious academic study with Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler: Slaves, Aliens, and Vampires (2010). He examines her texts primarily in light of African American theory and her use of the Black body.

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For example, he writes about how she uses W. E. B Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness, which describes the character’s internal conflicts as they view themselves one way, but are always aware of how they are viewed by others; he also writes about how double consciousness can be an advantage in awareness of the different facets of racial identity. Another important text is Gerry Canavan’s Octavia E. Butler (2016), as part of the Modern Masters of Science Fiction collection. Canavan views Butler’s writing largely in terms of the field of science fiction, her life, and the papers she bequeathed to the Huntington Library archives. Canavan analyzes all of Butler’s writing, including the unpublished drafts, letters, and private thoughts and threads that shape Butler’s work. Two books in particular, both compiled after her death, are a combination of creative writing and scholarly writing, pointing to the variety of connections people feel with Butler. One collection, Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, published in 2017, edited by Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal, includes reprinted articles on Butler by Salvaggio and Govan, but is also a collection of twenty-seven creative letters written to “Dear Octavia” after her death. These letters and essays show the intense and personal connections, and “communitas” people feel with Butler. Another collection, Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler (2013), edited by Rebecca Holden and Nisi Shawl, poses intimacies, personal photos, and perspectives relating Butler to many genres, including African American culture, “queer” science fiction, and feminist science fiction. Both of these collections defy structure, and instead take a creative, unstructured, and “liminal” approach as a way of relating to Butler. Butler’s creativity crosses boundaries between literature and science and inspires relationships on levels that cannot be categorized. This is because her writing itself follows the liminal process of dismantling structures, forming new ways of creating community, and recombining into new structures of relating. Another recent text, God is Change, published by Temple University Press in 2021, tackles the range and depth of Butler’s thinking on spirituality and religion in her novels. The text shows how the Parable and Xenogenesis novels actually offer practical philosophical and spiritual ideas and can serve as resources for healing and community building in the real world. This publication examines alternate religious possibilities that illustrate the individual and collective human ability to endure change and thrive in Butler’s writing. The book includes Eastern religious traditions including Hinduism and Buddhism and Western beliefs in Christianity. The current book also falls into the realm of spirituality. For example, I argue that when individuals separate from society and social structures, their identity undergoes a transition, and they reject status and hierarchies, they

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also exist in a lowly position where they have the “powers of the weak” and deny materialism. At this point, they become a sacred being with strong moral values. In this state the inequalities existing in society become most visible and they are able to create communities and “communitas” relationships that help them remove oppressions from the social structures in society. The first chapter of this book discusses Victor Turner and Rites of Passage, and makes reference to liminality, community, and communitas in Butler’s writing. Chapter 2 examines Butler’s five Patternist texts. I discuss the underpinning theory that shows each of the protagonists going through the liminal process, and how they separate from structures, and how their identities alter through the liminal process. Here the protagonists cross thresholds and engage in symbolic behavior. These narratives are quest narratives in that they involve personal memory and cultural experiences that are bound with a struggle for justice, including the removal of oppressive hierarchical structures that oppress in the contexts of race, gender, and class. The protagonists’ quest for justice by dismantling oppressions functions through the various communities the protagonists participate in and create. In the Patternist series I follow the chronological order of the developing psionic pattern in the series, rather than the dates of publication, which is also the order of the Patternist texts as they were published in Seed to Harvest in 2007. I do include the text Survivor, which Butler rejected, but which I argue remains an essential text to understanding the larger scope of her work. These five science fiction texts provide Butler’s initial exploration of the liminal process, which further develops throughout the rest of her novels. I begin by analyzing Wild Seed and Anyanwu as a liminal persona who confronts an oppressive hierarchical structure in the form of Doro, whose abuse wears down and reduces her liminal power throughout the text. I argue that Anyanwu experiences liminality in reverse, because she begins as a creative, liminal being, and undergoes the Middle Passage with Doro to America, where she becomes a commodity in his capitalist breeding venture and loses more and more liminal power. She begins as a healer and moves to enslaved status as we observe her gradual loss of liminality and empowerment. Mind of My Mind reverses that process and focuses on Mary as she creates a community of telepaths who give her the strength to counter the violent and destructive Doro. Mary uses her telepathic community to dismantle the patriarchal system. There is no reintegration into a new order, however, since the text ends with her triumph. The next text, Clay’s Ark, examines how the alien Clayark disease transforms individuals into a liminal, alien species that threatens US structures of medicine and science. Characters align themselves with structure, or accept the unstructured identities of the Clayarks. Those who embrace difference survive, and the liminal experience becomes an essential part of the emerging community. In Survivor, Alanna lives within

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religious structures and gradually breaks from this rigid community to create a liminal, albeit alien community with the Garkohn people. The final text, Patternmaster, shows how bisexual Amber becomes one of the masters of the pattern by embracing her outsider status and the power of her liminal status. The Xenogenesis series advances Butler’s depth of character to focus on ways the liminal process creates community. In fact, survival itself is based on the ability to forge community and understand difference in others in relation to one’s own identity. Dawn shows Lilith crossing thresholds and empowering herself outside the Oankali structural treatment of humans as she comes to understand the limits of Oankali understanding as she reconciles working with her captors. In Adulthood Rites, Akin experiences duality of identity as the first construct who can both “pass” as human and embody the characteristics of the alien Oankali. Akin’s liminal ability to embody both human and alien aids in his collaboration with both species. In Imago, the human-ooloi Jodahs comes to understand that his own life depends upon an understanding between self and other. Where the Xenogenesis series emphasizes the role of community as a structure, the Parable series, discussed in chapter 4, emphasizes the empowerment of unstructured mobile communities on the road. Parable of the Sower examines the anti-structural belief system, Earthseed, promoted by the protagonist Lauren, who embraces the liminal process and becomes the leader of an anti-structural community of believers. Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents together expose the evils of a hyper-capitalist economy and ways that anti-structural liminality can successfully operate within an oppressive structure. Chapter 5 explores Butler’s last published novel, Fledgling, as Shori addresses the racism in her own Ina vampire community and reverses hierarchical race and gender oppressions as she creates a world that opposes traditional vampire lore and the American family. NOTE 1. Tarsha Stanley has edited an MLA publication, Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Octavia E. Butler (2019).

Chapter 1

Rites of Passage

I would argue that no examination of Butler’s writing is complete without an analysis of ways that Butler’s work aligns with the theories of Victor Turner. In fact, I would say that Victor Turner’s concept of liminality, and the transformations that occur when one separates from social structures and shifts the realm of anti-structural liminality, is crucial to any reading of Octavia E. Butler’s science fiction novels. Turner’s theories prove a framework for her texts because undergoing Rites of Passage is a process, and Turner elucidates the process that Butler’s characters engage in throughout each of her science fiction novels. First, her characters are on a quest for justice, and that quest involves confronting rigid political, patriarchal, sexist, capitalist, and materialist power structures. Furthermore, Turner underscores the relationship between structure and anti-structure in society. He argues that although we need structure, we sometimes operate on the fringes of these structures, or separate from these structures entirely during calendar breaks, such as holidays and other serious or celebratory occasions. During that time, we are separate from social structure, and we may engage in a social performance that ridicules, mocks, and debases social statuses and institutions of which we are a part. Other cultures that exist in the United States, such as the Native American cultures, provided other cultural expressions such as matrilineal models and a non-ownership model of planting and social rituals including working with nature and relating to wild animals on an equal status, were obliterated through westward expansion and the near extermination of that culture, as Eurocentric models took root. Thus, cultures that were not dominant became decimated by the culture in power, and there was little opportunity to learn from them. In a like manner, the peoples enslaved from Africa were colonized and had little opportunity to expand their cultural beliefs in mainstream culture. Much has been written about ways that African culture and African American narratives, slave narratives, and oppressive paradigms influence Butler’s writing. I could not begin to list the articles and dissertations written 9

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about these paradigms, so pervasive is the influence. Butler’s use of these models arises from her own experience going to work with her mother, who worked as a maid. She acknowledges, “I was around sometimes when people talked about (my mother) as if she were not there, and I got to watch her going in back doors and generally being treated in a way that made me . . . ashamed of what she did” (Kenan, Callaloo, 496). Although Butler asks her protagonists to confront almost impossible choices, she always leaves the reader with a sense of hope. She famously claims, “the one thing that I and my main characters never do when contemplating the future is give up on hope.” She began by imitating the white, male, pulp fiction writers she read as a child, yet Butler’s own approach to science fiction involved “choosing to write self-consciously as an African American woman marked by a particular history” (Kilgore and Samantri, “A Memorial” 353). The protagonists follow the Rites of Passage model as described by Victor Turner. The protagonists separate from the forces of domination because they, themselves, are among the disenfranchised. Butler’s protagonists experience conflict on many sides, and must struggle against oppressive power structures and they sometimes must partner with the dominating power structures in order to survive. Because the protagonists are survivors, they refuse to give up hope. The reader observes these protagonists operating outside structure, and working within a creative space where they attempt to either work with, work against, or dismantle that oppression. There is sometimes a return to structure, where, because of the actions of the protagonist, the oppression has been removed or mitigated. STRUCTURE AND ANTI-STRUCTURE “Rites of Passage” can be found in all societies. Primarily, they indicate transitional phases between more permanent states or structures. The Belgian anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep describes these rites as constituting any change in social position, or place, or structure. Victor Turner would add to this concept that society itself is in process, and moves, or alternates between “fixed” and “floating” worlds. Turner argues that there is a three-phase process including separation, liminality, and return to structure. The fixed structures reflect the norms in a society and the social and political structures; the floating states are outside those structures, and this space is sometimes referred to as “anti-structural.” Turner argues that individuals break with the normative constraints in order to experience creativity and novelty. These breaks with structure may be as benign as taking a vacation or celebrating a holiday, or they may take more serious forms involving social revolutions

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against social or political practices, such as those that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, or that can be found in the demonstrations against police behavior in the George Floyd murder, that have marked more recent times. LIMINALITY Liminality occurs when individuals oppose the social and political structures that constrain their personal freedom and growth. Thus, they seek liminal spaces and places that generate a sense of liberty and creativity and that offer the potential for social and political change and renewal. The liminal process has three phases. The first phase allows the individual to detach mentally or physically from society and social belief patterns. Once separate from society, the liminar’s identity undergoes a transition and becomes part of the subverted world Turner describes; this phase is often accompanied by passing across thresholds, such as doorways, windows, and gates, and involves ritualistic behavior. Furthermore, reversals of social, political, and legal status occur. Although liminality may be temporary, there are also examples of permanently liminal groups; those include those individuals, organizations, and groups living on the fringes of society, such as motorcycle groups, cults, or the homeless, living in an unstructured space. These individuals function outside the mainstream social and political systems, which instigate liminars to formulate new identities through their experience. During the liminal phase, reversals and interchanges of political and cultural status and identity occur where the high become low and the low—those economically and politically disenfranchised—are elevated to stations of power and influence. Relationships are also removed from status markers, and it is possible to relate to another person in a deeper, more profound, and even sacred way that Turner calls “communitas.” Those in high positions accept low positions. For example, people running for public office, or who are chosen for leadership positions with authority, often stress their humble beginnings as a way to show that they understand those of lower status in society, in order to prove that they are being raised to a higher position in order to represent those who have no voice in society. In this way they attempt to prove they have a higher purpose of actually serving society, rather using this new position merely for fame and fortune. We expect our leaders to care about the disenfranchised and not just themselves. The third and final phase of the liminal process involves a return to society, with the added ability of the liminar to alter society’s stability (Turner, “Betwixt,” 235). I adapt Turner’s anthropological work and ideas on liminality and rituals as an explicative tool for unearthing identity and structural issues in Butler’s texts.

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Turner’s theories about liminality arise from the Manchester School. He pursued graduate studies at the University of Manchester under Max Gluckman, who sponsored anthropological fieldwork in central Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. Gluckman’s work focuses on African social processes as they relate to conflict and resolution. Turner’s reach extends beyond anthropology and into the fields of psychology, theology, sociology, literary studies, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and media studies.1 Turner’s work with the Ndembu peoples of Africa explores the ways in which ritual and social drama are related to conflict and resolution. He theorizes that when individuals detach from society or social groups, they enter a “liminal” space that does not define itself by the hierarchies, rank, or status used by society. Liminality criticism views society as a “process” where individuals shift between structurally defined social spaces and liminal “floating worlds” or non-structured spaces.2 Turner’s concepts of liminality through his study of the Ndembu people relied on the work of Claude Levi-Strauss’s writings on French structuralism beginning about 1958. According to Turner and Levi-Strauss, the liminal state functions in opposition to ego characteristics such as “pride of position,” “distinctions of wealth,” “selfishness,” and other hierarchical structures in society (Turner, The Ritual, 106). Part of the liminal process is to reject or abandon social status and socially identifiable symbols; individuals may become “invisible . . . stripped of names and clothing” as they separate from socially defined roles; they may be brought low and become “dead to the social world” (Turner, “Liminal,” 58, 59). In this way, the protagonist functions in opposition to “the coercive power of supreme rulers” and is in a position to enact humanistic moral values. She is part of the “cosmic terror” of which Mikhail Bakhtin writes, the lowering of all that is high or spiritual (Turner, The Ritual, 110). In this lowly position, he has access to the “powers of the weak,” similar to a wandering mystic or monk who denies materialism and becomes a sacred or mystical being with strong moral values. The classic liminal figure functions without status and operates in silence and simplicity. Turner’s concept of liminality and Bakhtin’s carnivalesque world of folk culture are similar in that both emphasize an inversion or reversal of boundaries, and both operate in a space outside social structures. In Rabelais and His World (1968), Bakhtin describes the holiday carnival held in many societies (such as Mardi Gras in New Orleans, the Glastonbury Festival in England, the Trinidad Carnival, the Rio Carnival in Brazil, and the Jamaica Bacchanal Carnival) as a socially accepted phenomenon of the liminal experience, where social hierarchies are upended, often in mockery of political and powerful figures. Bakhtin writes that “the essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal” (317). He emphasizes the monstrous or grotesque body as the opposite of shared

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decorum. Thus, what are perceived as acceptable manners in public are replaced with debased speech focusing on bodily functions, including references to excrement, flatulence, and other socially unacceptable behaviors. Bakhtin argues that at this “lower stratum” of degradation, the grotesque body is the site of rebellious unacceptability; this is the space where new life is forged (Bakhtin, Rabelais, 303–6). BUTLER’S NOVELS Butler is writing in the science fiction genre and engaging in the creation of new worlds, however similar to our own. This project elucidates ways that she follows the pattern of “Rites of Passage” as described by Turner in her science fiction novels. The first signifies a significant break with society that’s marked by a similarity to death and rebirth. The separation phase is marked by a death to the old self and a rebirth into the new self. The individual may begin this phase naked, and in a cave, as in the case of Shori, the Ina Vampire, in Fledgling. Lauren Olimina in The Parable of the Sower, once her walled community is overrun, finds an old burned garage, changes her clothes to look like a man, and covers herself with garbage and sleeps under it. In another example, Lilith, in Dawn, awakens naked, in an organic pod without access to food or clothes. These characteristics, among others, signify the beginning of the liminal phase. Other characteristics of liminal personae is to actually represent a transition between states. For example, Shori, in Fledgling, appears to be a young Black girl of about ten years old, but is actually a fifty-three-year-old woman. Anyanwu in Wild Seed has the appearance of a beautiful young woman, but is actually a three-hundred-year-old priestess who has birthed forty children and had ten husbands. Akin, the protagonist of Adulthood Rites, is a baby as the text opens, yet even as a toddler, can manipulate DNA on a genetic level and thinks on a genius level. The list, as I assert through the chapters of this book, goes on and on. Symbols surround the liminal phase of the process. This may involve masking, or embodying monstrous identities, to signify the ambiguity and paradox of the liminal phase. A central tenet is loss of social status markers. Although the protagonist is a leader, they have nothing to mark them as different from others; in fact, they may be considered among the lowest level available. They are considered removed from status markers. In this way they come to face others with absolute equality. They may already know ways that others are oppressed or denied acceptance, but in this state, they function in a way that has no status, and therefore are not superior to anyone. This space is one of “one for all and all for one,” where food may be shared equally and

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no one is considered superior. In this lowly position they have access to the “powers of the weak” that creates community and comradery. Friendships are forged without concern for status. Characters are able to speak out freely, and say honestly what they mean. They are a representation of rebirth and are therefore a new person. For example, in Wild Seed, Anyanwu does not enslave people, in spite of being a priestess, and she works with those who work for her. She has many roles as mother, teacher, and lover and shifts her identity to relate on an equal level to each person, even if that other being is from another species, such as a dolphin or a bird. She transforms herself to relate to them as an equal. In another situation, Mary in Mind of My Mind comes from poverty and abuse and in her lowly position is able to see more clearly the telepathic pattern that connects her to others, create protective shields for those who need it, and link up with others as a way to empower them. Jodahs, in Imago, is a healer of others, completely dedicated to communicating and mediating between the human and Oankali, breaking down barriers between the two groups so that the human voices are heard and humans are able to emigrate to Mars to create their own species without the Oankali. In the Parable series, Lauren Olamina, through her concept of Earthseed, creates a belief system outside structure. Thus, these protagonists who maintain a low status, are raised to a position of respect and leadership. In this process, oppressions embedded within the social structures are mitigated or eliminated. THRESHOLDS Turner discusses the symbolic rituals of the liminar persona during anti-structural liminality. The initiate may cross markers, sites, or thresholds that indicate the separation phase or movement away from structure into anti-structural ambiguity. These sites or thresholds are commonly symbolized by the passage from one phase of experience into the next, and include objects such as doorways, gates, fences, and mirrors. A protagonist, for example, may cross back and forth over passageways, involving real or metaphoric gates in the process of altering or reversing hierarchical positions. There may also be symbolic birth/death imagery and the use of sacred objects, like mirrors. For example, Shori Matthews, in Fledgling, leaves her cave, passes through the burned remains of several buildings where she used to live, and then begins to recall some of her past, then crosses a highway and a metal gate, then is invited to enter through a car door. Because of her amnesia, these continued crossings cause Shori to delve deeper into a quickly developing new identity. Furthermore, when Shori looks into a mirror, she ironically does not see the image of a vampire, or rather does not see an empty mirror, since traditionally

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vampires cannot see themselves in a mirror; instead, Shori is the “lady in the looking glass” who slips through passages, like Alice in Wonderland from one world into another. In another text, I argue that Anyanwu’s identity in Wild Seed moves in reverse from liminal to structural, as she crosses the Atlantic with Doro, symbolic of the middle passage from Africa to America, she moves into loneliness, then to the home of enslaved people in Wheatley, where she loses further identity as more and more structure is imposed. In Dawn, Lilith crosses through the walls of her dwelling to come to a deeper understanding of her purpose, and passes into the towns of Kaal and Tiej as she comes to understand the oppressive powers of the Oankali. In the Parable series, Lauren Olamina crosses through the destroyed wall of her community in Robledo to continue the creation of Earthseed on her journey down California’s coastal highway, where she experiences birth and death passages because of her hyperempathy. In Imago, Jodahs experiences birth/death passages as his body begins to deconstruct out of his control, similar to when his brother Aaor’s body “was trying to commit suicide” (Imago, 158). These examples give an indication of how protagonists in Butler’s novels follow the process of Rites of Passage as described by Turner. COMMUNITY AND COMMUNITAS Turner argues that the crossing from structure to anti-structure, and removing social status markers of the larger society, as the process by which new forms of relationships emerge, he describes as a “community, or even communion of equal individuals who submit together” (Turner, The Ritual, 96). In Butler’s writing, community is of primary importance and often involves intense relationships. Butler famously said that she creates communities and community in her writing. In Mind of My Mind, Doro’s daughter, Mary, comes from centuries of Doro breeding telepaths. Mary discovers and develops the telepathic pattern and uses it to heal individual participants in her telepathic community of about two thousand individuals. When Doro attempts to kill her husband, Karl, she combats Doro with this community, then, the strength of that community bolsters Mary’s power to help her defeat him. Once Doro is defeated, Mary immediately returns with gratitude to nurture and empower that community. Without this community, Mary would not have been able to stop Doro’s destructive behavior. In another novel, Dawn, Lilith is made to create a community of humans who will mate with the Oankali aliens. She spends days and days deciding on which humans to awaken, especially because of her concern about the community she’s creating. She wants “thoughtful people” who will also “push her” as she attempts to create a community of people to whom she can relate on equal terms. (Dawn, 117). Even though this

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community falls apart, that is the fault of the Oankali who sabotage Lilith’s community by intervening unexpectedly to drug humans and incite terror in them so that they never trust Lilith again. Finally, the Earthseed community that Lauren creates in the Parable texts is able to withstand being taken over by a militaristic force, being dispersed afterward, yet reforming again because of their support for each other through Lauren. Each of these communities is different, yet in each there exists the intimacy of “communitas,” where individuals respond as equals on a partnership level where there is mutual consent, pleasure, and respect. RETURN TO STRUCTURE During the process of the upheaval of liminality, society has been cleansed to the extent that the oppressive situation is reduced or eliminated. The liminal persona is reintegrated into the social fabric, and the liminal experience ends for the emergence of structure, although a new world has been created. The structure that was oppressive has alleviated the oppressions, to the extent that the social fabric recognizes that justice has been done or that a new equality is in process. Furthermore, by participating in this liminal process, the reader arrives at new insights into the violence or racism in society and the possibilities afforded through liminality. The examination of rigid social structures plays into Butler’s admonition that human beings are hierarchical, yet must embrace change, or, as I would say, must embrace liminality. The new options available at the end of the novel bolster Butler’s embedded belief that justice, caused by acceptance of change, ultimately overpowers hierarchy. Let me make clear, however, that Butler is not writing utopias! She merely gives hope while combating the embedded oppressive social structures. At the end of the text, Butler points to the new structure and new possibilities available, as well as pointing to the reality that these new changes may not actually ever be realized. Butler provides many options for a return to structure. In Mind of My Mind, Mary is in control of the telepathic pattern and has removed the oppressor, and is healing those linked into the pattern. We may have questions about her hidden motives in killing Doro, and wonder if she will be less authoritarian in her replacement of him, but at the end of the text, she appears dedicated to peace and fairness. In Clay’s Ark, Keira has been cured of leukemia and is the progenitrix of a new race, with her lover, Steven, and his human/alien son Jacob. The acceptance of difference has saved these individuals, however fraught with violence the future may be. In Survivor, Alanna has been able to reject the Missionaries and begin a new race of people with Duit and the Garkhon people. Alanna cannot change the patriarchal and racist structure

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of the Missionaries, and in rejecting them she has chosen a life of personal integrity and respect. Parable of the Sower ends with a return to structure as they create an Earthseed community on Bankole’s land. They engage in healing rituals, such as planting trees in memory of the dead, in eating a meal, and naming the community Acorn. The following text, Parable of the Talents, shows the destruction of that community, and ends with the reality of her dream of the Earthseed community living among the stars. Butler’s final novel, Fledgling, ends with a judicial victory for Shori and an end to the Ina racism, but, again, it is mitigated by the council members who voted against Shori and Shori’s violent killing at the end of the text. Butler ends these texts with a projection of a new structure and potential. There exists a sense of hope, but that hope is clearly fraught with the threat of a resurgence of a hierarchical structure that may reimpose itself. This project argues that each of Butler’s novels follow the pattern of the Rites of Passage as theorized by Victor Turner. There is a process the protagonists are engaged in throughout these texts. There is a framework or pattern between structures in society and within anti-structural liminality. Turner shows the drama, performance, and fluidity of social life that invites new possibilities and the potential to remove at least some of the more pervasive oppressions in society, given the spontaneous power of community and communitas. Liminality and communitas work together, in fact, to show that social structure and social norms can be artificial and arbitrary and can be altered to the benefit of the disenfranchised in society. Humans need structure in their lives, organizations, and larger social structures. However, the infusion of liminality, community, and communitas can create a reevaluation of these structures, to ensure that the structures are actually in the service of humanity, rather than the other way around. Turner observed in his study of Ndembu royalty that a king, for example, would first be stripped of all the elements of royalty and ridiculed by the populace before he actually became king. In this way the person who was exalted to lead the people was humbled for the purpose of recognizing his actual purpose is to serve the community as a whole, rather than to use the position of authority for ego desires. Thus, this book argues that Rites of Passage posit a method that provides hope to alter oppressive structures, systems, and governments. This is part of the power of Butler’s work and explains some of the intensity and attraction readers feel toward her.

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NOTES 1. See Kathleen Ashley’s work for an in-depth study of Turner and twentieth-century literature. 2. For a detailed discussion of the process of liminality and communitas, see The Ritual Process by Victor Turner.

Chapter 2

Patternist

This chapter examines Butler’s five “Patternist” texts in the chronological order of the developing psionic pattern, rather than by the date of publication. I begin with the origin story of two immortals originally from Africa, with Doro’s search to discover and breed communities with psionic power, in Wild Seed (published fourth in 1980), then move to Mind of My Mind (published second in 1977) where the breeding program of telepaths is developed, and the first Patternmaster emerges; I then discuss Clay’s Ark (published fifth in 1984), which explores the development of the alien Clay Ark disease brought to Earth by astronauts that threatens to alter human DNA permanently; Survivor (published third in 1978) examines Christians living off-world to escape the Clay Ark disease and Patternist control, and finally, Patternmaster (published first in 1976) which is the culmination of the series of the developed, telepathic, Patternist society. This is also the order in which the Patternist collection was published as Seed to Harvest in 2007. Significantly, this Seed to Harvest (2007) publication eliminates Survivor, a text that Butler asked to not be published, yet I include it here because it is essential for an understanding of her protagonist females, and it is invaluable for a complete understanding of Butler’s work. These five science fiction texts provide Butler’s initial exploration of the liminal process, which develops throughout all of her science fiction texts. These narratives are quest narratives, in that they involve personal memory and cultural experiences, bound with a quest for justice—the removal of oppressive hierarchical systems that oppress on the level of race, gender, and class, among other factors. The protagonists’ quest for justice and dismantling of oppressions functions through the various communities the protagonists participate in and create. I use the theorist Victor Turner and his interpretation of Rites of Passage to argue that society contains both social structures and individuals or groups that separate from those structures. The individuals enter into a phase of liminality where transformation occurs. I argue that the process when one separates from social structures, and moves into the realm of anti-structural 19

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liminality is crucial to reading Octavia E. Butler’s science fiction novels. During the process of liminality, the protagonists oppose the social and political structures that constrain their personal freedom and growth. The liminal experience generates a sense of creativity and exploration of community. For Butler, community functions as a powerful force of change. It is within these communities that Butler explores the power of “communitas,” in which relationships become elevated beyond status markers and the individuals relate on a basis of equality, in profound ways that are healing and empowering. The communities thus function as a way to remove oppressive behavior within hierarchical structures and make them more egalitarian; this is the real power of community in the writings of Butler. As previously discussed in the first chapter, Octavia E. Butler’s protagonists follow the ritual process and engage in psychological, physical, political, and social transitions through what Victor Turner and Mikhail Bakhtin would describe as carnivalesque identities and communities. During this process, the protagonists attempt to reverse hierarchical structures that are oppressive and regressive to the communities of which they are a part. Thus, these protagonists are healers in that they provide physical and psychic healing properties while creating a communitas relationship. WILD SEED The novel Wild Seed follows the Rites of Passage in reverse. The protagonist of Wild Seed is Anyanwu, an immortal three-hundred-year-old priestess and a “wildseed woman” who has birthed forty-seven children to ten husbands (10). Anyanwu lives outside the norms of society, in a state of “liminality,” which means that her identity is flexible and that she is not bound by structural limitations. In fact, she constantly creates and recombines herself with other humans, and with animals such as birds, sea creatures, and panthers. Anyanwu’s physical empowerment allows her to use her own body as a performative space where hierarchical structures can be altered. She fits the characteristics of a liminal persona because her own parentage is uncertain (Wild Seed, 9). She can furthermore be viewed in relation to African myths and languages, histories, and technologies. Rebecca Holden argues that Anyanwu is based on African Igbo myths and multiple shades of African American protagonists leading humanity’s futures (Holden, “Let’s Dwell,” 70). Doro finds Anyanwu in her African village of Onitsha in 1690. Anyanwu is able to alter her body to make herself look very young or very old. She is a psychological and physical healer, and because she has outlived her own children, she yearns to have children outlive her; this goal makes her vulnerable to Doro’s promise, when he argues: “If you come with me, I think someday I can show

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you children you will never have to bury” and causes Anyanwu to leave all that she knows for that promise, and leave her freedom, and accept a life of both patriarchal control and slavery in America (Wild Seed, 22). This ties the characters together throughout the book, long after Anyanwu is apathetic and sick of Doro’s capitalistic, colonizing behavior. Anyanwu has met her destroyer in Doro, someone who will constantly return throughout the text to remove her communities and liminal possibilities from her, and eventually abuses her to the point that she becomes suicidal and feels either hatred or apathy for Doro and life. Doro’s abuse is part of the patriarchal structure that Anyanwu attempts to escape in the text. If she is in a safe space, however, she will revert to her shape-changing ways. In this way, Anyanwu moves back and forth between a life of liminality and a life of rigid structure in the text. Where Victor Turner describes individuals breaking from structure and moving to the freedom and creativity of liminality, Anyanwu experiences this process in reverse. In the beginning of the text, she is the image of the powerful priestess who easily kills adversaries, yet only out of self-defense. She hopes that Doro “would lose his courage and go away” so she doesn’t have to kill him (Wild Seed, 4). She is a healer for the village, and “people brought their sick to her” (Wild Seed, 4). Once under the power of Doro, she crosses thresholds that restrict and limit her, such as when she undergoes the Middle Passage to America to experience loss of identity and culture, through patriarchal oppression. Doro is the ultimate capitalist who sees humans as commodities to breed with others in order to create specific telepathic powers. His plan is to breed her, then kill her when she no longer serves her purpose. L. Timmel Duchamp convincingly argues that where Doro “conflates the roles of father, master, and owner; he considers ‘his people’ to be his children’s slaves and property,” in contrast to Anyanwu’s parenting with the “power of her love” (Duchamp, “Sun Woman,” 88). Doro “believes that childbearing makes women weak and vulnerable to domination” (Duchamp 88). He constantly kills others and takes their bodies since he is a spirit without a body. He has spent thousands of years in the process of eugenics, in order to create a telepathic community. Although Doro does not have psionic powers himself, he is attracted to those who have those powers, and is determined to create a race of people with incredible psionic powers. Doro exhibits a tyrannical control over people in his villages and demands complete loyalty. Gerry Canavan views Doro’s seed villages as: a secret competitor to white hegemony . . . revealed to exist alongside modernity’s actually existing history of intergenerational slavery and forced reproduction, an alternate history that is both a deviation from and nightmarish replication of white supremacy. By positing a eugenics project in the heart

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of Africa, beginning a millennia before Europe’s parallel project and selecting against whiteness in favor of superpowered blackness Doro manifests as a strong challenger to the racial fantasies that have undergirded modernity. (Canavan, Octavia, 68)

Canavan argues that although “there is precious little difference between Doro’s eugenic exploitation of his charges and the breeding practices of slave owners in the antebellum south,” that Doro stands in for practices of power and domination that are utterly ahistorical” (Canavan, Octavia, 69). Wild Seed shows that it is possible to lose the power of earlier liminal experiences once patriarchy consumes more and more of her psyche. As a healer, she will not leave her children to die in order to save herself. This is the essence of Doro’s control over her. In this process we see Turner’s anti-structural liminality in reverse. We move from liminality to rigid social structures, including the structures of male patriarchy and the colonizing US slave system. The first phase of liminality is where the individual detached mentally or physically from society and social belief systems where they are not defined by the hierarchies, rank, or status determined by society. This is the site we find Anyanwu in the beginning of the text in Africa. Turner describes the symbols and symbolic rituals of the liminar experiences during the liminal phase. The text itself function as a mirror of social power dynamics as they relate to racist, gendered, and colonial structures. The initiate crosses markers, sites, or thresholds that indicate the separation phase or movement away from structure into anti-structural ambiguity. These sites or thresholds are commonly symbolized by the passage from one phase of experience into the next and include objects such as doorways, gates, fences, and mirrors. Anyanwu’s liminal experiences take the shape of literally becoming new people and animals. Anyanwu enacts a personal performance in the world, moving her from an empowered woman, to a limited, colonized woman. She passes over thresholds that constrain and limit her, such as the journey from Africa to America, from her own village to Wheatley. Anyanwu encounters a structure that will not be changed. Anyanwu crosses her first threshold with Doro when he takes her from Africa to America. Doro puts her on a slave ship leaving for America. Once on the ship she experiences a loneliness she has never before experienced and she considers suicide, “But now, the solitude seemed to close in on her as the waters of the sea would close over her head if she leaped into them” (Wild Seed, 60). As she is about to leap into the sea, her future husband, Isaac, “pulled her backward and down onto the deck” in order to save her (60). Although the slave ship does not have chains, and has plenty of food, and so gives the outward appearance of freedom, all individuals are physically and psychically controlled by Doro. During the initial threshold experience,

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Anyanwu experiences brief moments where she maintains control over her body and becomes liminal. In one example there is an aggressive man, Lale Sachs, who is able to read her thoughts, and he forces her to think about having sex with him. Sachs becomes “a great, horned, scaly lizard-thing of vaguely human shape, but with a thick, lashing tail and a scaly dog head with huge teeth” and she transforms into a leopard and attacks him, killing him. Doro sees this and strikes her, demanding that she change back into a woman, and threatens to kill her if she does not (74). Later, she decides to become a dolphin because she ate a piece of dolphin meat and knows how to become one. To her dismay Doro tries to stop her. She is shocked at this limitation, but soon realizes that many of her actions will now be curtailed by Doro, primarily because once she is transformed into a new body, Doro cannot track animals. Anyanwu has been reduced to a commodity. Doro fears her power, and decides “he wanted as many children as he could get from her before it became necessary to kill her. Wild seed always had to be destroyed eventually. . . . Anyanwu would learn to fear him and bend herself to his will” (90). The next major threshold is when Doro’s ship arrives in America, and we see the enslavement process taking place. This causes Anyanwu’s further regression and loss of confidence. Once in Wheatley, Doro’s seed village, she tries to assimilate, as Isaac brings her a petticoat to wear (96), and she acts shyly (113). The antagonism with Doro intensifies as he forces her to drink the milk that makes her ill, forcing her to say to him “I will obey” (118). Doro orders her to marry Isaac, which she doesn’t want to do. She attempts to control her body when she kills Doro’s seed that is making her pregnant, and afterwards he “struck her across the face with all his strength” (121, 125). Doro’s refusal to examine his rigid structural system reduces him to an abuser who causes Anyanwu’s loss of identity. There is a fifty-year hiatus in the text where Anyanwu and Isaac have five children, find love, and experience flying together, and a sense of community. Isaac uses his own telekinetic powers to fly, and Anyanwu is also able to fly as an eagle. The two share this pleasure throughout their lives. Anyanwu’s shape-shifting abilities keep her in communion with animals that Doro cannot track. Furthermore, we see Anyanwu’s joy in being another being. When she lives as a dolphin, she considers herself equal to them as they “came to rub themselves against her and become acquainted.” The dolphins welcome her; they do not kill, molest, rape, or enslave. She lives with them for decades and bears dolphin children she sees as equal to her own children. This is the second community that Anyanwu creates. It is a community of equality, and empowerment. This kind of community is not possible in her own plantation community, but can be seen as Butler’s utopian vision of what is possible for community. In the last section of the novel, “Canaan 1840,” Anyanwu has created her own community of individuals. She has created an alternate

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community in stark contrast to that Doro created in Wheatley. She finds Black people and individuals who are free and pays them a salary. Butler writes: She owned no slaves. She had brought some of the people who worked for her and recruited the others among freedmen, but those she bought, she freed. They always stayed to work for her, feeling more comfortable with her and with each other than they had ever been elsewhere. . . . They were misfits, malcontents, trouble-makers—though they did not make trouble for Anyanwu. They treated her as mother, older sister, teacher, and when she invited it, lover. . . . They knew her power she was who she was no matter what role she chose. . . . She was not Doro, breeding people as though they were cattle, though perhaps her gathering of all these special ones, these slightly strange ones would accomplish the same purpose as his breeding. She was herself, gathering family. (Wild Seed, 219–20)

This striking contrast is underscored by Sandra Govan. She writes, “both Doro and Anyanwu use the kinship social model as each collects his/her people, by psionic ability, and by their difference from the world outside their sheltered communities. Genes and bloodlines are important not as they bear on race or sex but as they bear on the development of psychic identity, on the enhancement of psionic talent” (Govan, “Connections,” 207). What is most telling, however, is the difference between these two communities and the treatment of the individuals. Anyanwu on her own creates communities that empower. We see elements of “communitas” in the relationships Anyanwu has in the text. Butler articulates a foundational principle of her writing when she states: “I always automatically create community. This has to do with the way I’ve lived. . . . My own feeling is that human beings need to live that way and often don’t” (quoted in Mehaffy and Keating). Turner argues that the transformation occurring in the liminal period does not occur alongside the action but “may be accompanied by a strong, sentiment of humankindness, a sense of the generic social bond between all members of society” (Turner, The Ritual, 116). For his definition of the “social bond,” Turner turns to Martin Buber’s definition, which states that “community presents “the spontaneous, immediate, concrete nature of communitas, as opposed to the norm-governed, institutionalized, abstract nature of social structure” (Turner, The Ritual, 127). Anyanwu’s marriage to Isaac, her experience of living with dolphins for one hundred years, and the community she creates constitute community in Buber’s sense of the word, generating a social bond equivalent to the communitas experience. Anyanwu has individual communitas with Isaac, and with Thomas, and with her community at the end, and with the dolphins with whom she lives.

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Although Isaac is not abusive, he receives all of the benefits of the patriarchal system. A symbol of their relationship is the physical portrait of Anyanwu as a Black Madonna and child, where she is holding her first child with Isaac (Wild Seed, 142). In spite of the powerful religious context, the portrait is also a symbol of the patriarchal disempowerment of female power to a maternal and passive one. Anyanwu’s attempts at self-assertion are always foiled, and her disempowerment continues as Doro forces her to have sex with other men; at one point in the text Doro forces her to have sex with a very troubled man, Thomas, as a way to punish her. At this time, Anyanwu’s essential liminal position returns; she sees the potential in Thomas; left alone, she transitions into a leopard, hunts a deer, and brings him food. (Wild Seed 165). She helps him go through transition, and heals him psychologically. They become friends; Doro had given her to a man he hoped would repel her. Instead, she begins healing him. Clearly, she had not been punished, so Doro’s vicious response is to kill Thomas in front of her. Thomas freely gives his life for her; following his death, Doro wears Thomas’s body, forces Anyanwu to bury his former body, then rapes her after she has done so. Butler exposes a patriarchal system that will not alter, and acknowledges current women likewise colonized and disempowered. Each time another threshold is crossed, Anyanwu becomes further disempowered, to the point that in Mind of My Mind, the next text where she appears, she can no longer imagine herself outside the patriarchal system. She can still heal others, however, and is able to empower others, but she does not see herself as able to take on patriarchy, and does not mobilize others to fight the system with her. However, at the end of the Wild Seed text, Doro, who has been searching for her for the last one hundred years, finds her. The is the final threshold she crosses. He destroys, again, the communities, the communitas that is an essential piece of her liminal identity, for the last time. Instead, Doro forces her to accept his own telepathic individuals, and forces all to obey him. She tells Doro that he has not gained wisdom with his years of life, and I would argue the same about her. She has accepted patriarchy on its terms, and this is where she stops gaining wisdom. She can still empower others, but she has accepted hierarchy and patriarchy as the “norm,” and when it emerges again, as it always does, she accepts it. When Doro tells her that she must accept his people into her community, she may hate him, but does not believe that she can fight him. Instead, Doro forces Anyanwu’s children to obey him, and some of her own children die in the process (242). In one example, one of Doro’s sons, Joseph Toller, is able to mentally force people to behave against their wills. First, Joseph Toller tries to rape Anyanwu’s daughter; her son, Stephen grabs his sister away from Toller. That night Stephen sleepwalks and jumps, killing himself. This is obviously Toller, who also makes the daughter Helen jump

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off a building, but Anyanwu catches her. Anyanwu then becomes a leopard, rips out Toller’s throat, and eats him (235). Although Doro apologizes for Joseph’s cruelties and for Stephen’s death, Doro also tells her that she must raise Joseph’s two sons. Anyanwu turns into a bird, flies away, and is gone for one month. She returns to care for the rest of her people, yet returns to Doro’s abuse. In the final scenes Doro almost kills her, and Anyanwu does not care any longer for her life. Anyanwu decides on suicide. We see her in constant grief over the death of people around her (269). She is desperately tired of life. Doro has been a death threshold force throughout the novel. Anyanwu knows that this is the only way that she can leave him. When Doro realizes that she will kill herself, he realizes how much he needs her, and begs her to live. In one scene Doro is nursing from her breasts, reducing her to the most traditional and most commodified female role (264). He begs her not to leave him, crying and pleading. Butler writes, “Doro had reshaped her. She had submitted and submitted and submitted to keep him from killing her. . . . She had given in to him again and again” (196). The final agreement between the two is that Doro will no longer kill anyone in her household, including her children, and that he will stop killing those who have borne enough children. This is what women do in patriarchy. They are powerful and healing, and get brutalized. The final scene is a mockery of the Black Madonna and child image with Doro sleeping at her breast. Anyanwu/Emma has been completely reduced to the traditional role of motherhood within patriarchy, nursing her oppressor. This is one of the most destructive forms of female behavior, women who support the patriarchal system, even as it limits and cripples them. She represents many enslaved women during the transatlantic slave trade, but also many women under patriarchy, whose gifts are reduced and minimized as they become commodified under a capitalist patriarchy. In this novel, Anyanwu moves from a state of liminality to a state of colonization, with her liminal states becoming more and more limited. Her dominant form of anti-structure throughout the text is when she changes from human form to animal form. She is unable to maintain that anti-structural form because of her strong obligation to community and family. Throughout the text Doro controls and oppresses her using her high need to heal and nurture. Anyanwu does not find a way to use her strength to break Doro’s hold. In this earlier vision of female empowerment, we see a protagonist limited by patriarchy, and other forms of oppressions, such as slavery. She is the force and power of positive change that creates mental and physical healing, yet allows the system to limit her power. She does not mobilize others to stop the violence and oppression. She returns in Mind of My Mind, as Emma, bearing a colonial, enslaved name that reflects her embeddedness in the

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structure, and could have forged a community with her daughter, Mary, but instead commits suicide, once she knows that Doro is dead. In this way she is an example of many women, past and present, of all races, who lose their powers as social structures oppress them. Even though we will see Butler examine disease as biology, the real disease is patriarchy, as it works hand in hand with capitalism. MIND OF MY MIND Chronologically, Mind of My Mind takes up where Wild Seed ends. Where Wild Seed (1980), emphasizes the negative power of structure, Mind of My Mind (1977) looks at change possible with the empowerment of a community. Where Wild Seed explores Doro’s work on creating communities of individual telepaths, Mind of My Mind explores the pattern itself and the power of community, through the eyes of the first Patternmaster, Doro’s daughter, Mary. Where Doro has spent centuries treating human beings like animals, and interbreeding them in the hopes of creating a highly sensitive mental pattern within a community, Doro’s capitalist and tyrannical tendencies do not make him fit for being the Patternmaster, and furthermore, he is not a telepath. Doro argues “I wanted a girl, and I wanted her to be one of the youngest of her generation of actives (telepaths who have crossed through the adolescence and are in control of their powers). Both those factors will help keep her in line. She’ll be less likely to rebel against my plans for her” (Mind, 12). However, this very loss of status will aid in her Rites of Passage. Mary fulfills Victor Turner’s concept of a “liminal persona” by being a person able to slip through the traditional classification of structure. Mary is a fitting liminar persona because she is born without status into a poor Black family. Coming from poverty and abuse, she begins her life without status or property. This early lifestyle prepares Mary to obey Doro, at least until her transition. Transition is a life crisis in the Patternist texts, where the initiand experiences emotional and physical chaos and extraordinary powers over which they have little control. Butler’s concept of “transition” and Turner’s interpretation of “liminality” are similar. The difference is that Turner views liminality as having a distinct separation from normal structures, where the individual transforms, followed by a reintegration into structure, that may reoccur throughout life, where Butler’s “transition,” is marked by a beginning and ending point, with psychological and behavioral changes, such as adolescence. For Turner, liminality is marked by status reversal, where the low is seen in a high-status position, the weak become strong, and the strong become weak. Here, the liminal state functions in opposition to ego characteristics

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such as “pride of position,” “distinctions of wealth” “selfishness,” and other hierarchical structures in society (Turner, The Ritual, 106). Part of the liminal process is to reject or abandon social status and socially identifiable symbols. Individuals may separate from socially defined roles; they may be brought low and may become “dead to the social world” (Turner, “Liminal” 58, 59). During her transitional period, and afterward, Mary functions in opposition to “the coercive power of supreme rulers” of the patriarchal system and, in the liminal state, is able to enact humanistic moral values. During her transition Mary recognizes the Pattern that connects her to others and uses the pattern to create a protective shield around herself to stop some of the incoming information from others. At this point, she is in an intimate pattern with six people, who come to Forsyth to live with her (Mind, 58). Mary’s initial threshold experience is when she undergoes a forced marriage by Doro to another telepath, Karl Larkin. With his lack of understanding of people, Doro does not anticipate Karl falling in love with Mary, or that Karl would appreciate her leadership qualities; in fact, it is Karl who suggests to Mary that she could defeat Doro by using the Pattern (197). Mary was created from centuries of breeding telepaths to bring “warring tribes” of telepaths together (9). Karl bonds with her during her biological transition as she moves from a latent to an active telepath. During this harrowing process, Mary uses her telepathic powers to call people to her. Although Doro is the one trying to teach her how to handle people, it is Mary, not Doro, who shows an ability to create a community. For example, at one point Mary takes a knife and cuts her arm, then stops the pain in her mind. She then allows the pain to come, and then stops it again. Another telepath, Rachel, is watching her, and argues that she could have controlled the pain and healed the wound more quickly; rather than react in anger, Mary simply states “You’re right. I did take a long time, compared to you. Maybe you could help me learn to speed it up. Maybe you could teach me a little more about healing too” (110). The dialogue between Mary and Rachel creates an understanding and intimacy between the two women. Mary is able to move outside the hierarchy, and that opens an entirely new form of communication. This is the relating to another with equality and understanding that Turner calls “communitas.” Although Mary is in control of the pattern, her strongest characteristic is her ability to create a sense of peace with those around her. She argues, “I was settling in, though. I was learning not to be afraid of any of them. Not even Karl. They were all older that I was, and they were all physically bigger. For a while, I had to keep telling myself I couldn’t afford to let that matter” (113). In this monologue we see the reversal of statuses, where individuals are showing their vulnerabilities to each other, and we see areas where some members are stronger, and weaker than other areas. Once this happens, the

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relationships become more intimate, and individuals come together to form “homogeneity and comradeship” across boundaries (Turner, The Ritual, 96). Mary’s killing of her father, Doro, at the end of the text can be seen as Mary becoming a “female Doro” by Karl (117), and some critics argue that “perhaps Mary turns out to be truly her father’s daughter; the startling ending of the novel reveals that the newly empowered Mary is just another vampire” (Canavan, Octavia, 51). In contrast, I agree with Ruth Salvaggio where she argues that “when she kills Doro, patriarchal domination becomes maternal caring. Having the potential for destructive power thrust upon her, Mary learns to control that power, to use it wisely and cautiously. She is Butler’s study in brute feminist force” (Salvaggio, “Octavia,” 193). It is clear that Mary’s strength and fearlessness give pause. Butler is examining the kinds of complexities available for women who are unafraid of power while they function within the patriarchal system. Today, the terms “girlboss” and “ladyboss” may be used in popular culture to describe these women. The titles themselves point to the problematic position of women in power by trivializing women as girls and ladies, rather than women. In recent popular culture, depictions of women comfortable with power include the film Working Girl and Madonna in the 1980s; in the 1990s there was Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter world. In the political realm are the Notorious RBG, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Hillary Clinton, and vocalist Lady Gaga. More recent examples in fiction include Annalise Keating in How to Get Away With Murder, and Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones. Many more examples exist, but fictionalized women fare better than those in the social and political world, where intense strength or aggressive behavior is viewed as unnatural for women. Mary is successful as a Patternmaster because she works with others in the Patternist community. For example, in chapter 8, Mary begins to observe new pattern strand of those new members of the pattern, and also discovers how the patterns are helpful in moving other telepaths through a difficult transition. Mary, as Patternmaster, uses her power to stop pain and empower others. Mary helps Seth and Clay through their very difficult transitions, and they find that being part of a community makes this much easier (Mind, 143,148). After two years as Patternmaster, Mary has 1,500 people and 500 children in her pattern. Gregory Hampton argues that “Where Doro’s form once represented an advantage because of his mobility of identity it now becomes a handicap that marks him as an incomplete being in the shadow of Mary and her new group” (Hampton, Changing, 54). He further argues that Mary’s use of community moves telepaths out of “Doro’s rape and consumption” through Mary (54–55). Once the healing begins in the Pattern, Mary wants it to continue. In discussing Clay Dana and his transition, Mary’s husband Karl tells Doro, “Ten years ago he didn’t have the pattern to help him along” (Mind, 136). Mary

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uses her position to empower, rather than control, others. Toward the end of the novel when Doro is discussing his inability to relate to others, he argues to Emma, “I should be telepathic, like Mary. If I were, I would have created a pattern and fed off live hosts instead of killing. As it is, the only time I can feel mind-to-mind contact with another person is when I kill” (157). Doro controls and kills, and sees his role as patternmaster as a predator feeding “off live hosts.” The men, Doro and Karl, try to tell Mary that being the Patternmaster is all about power, but that’s because they are under control of the patriarchy, which is giving them power (140). Mary empowers and is being read by men who do not understand her. The next threshold occurs when Doro tells Mary she must stop recruiting individuals for the Pattern for twenty years, because he fears her power (190). It is her husband Karl who tells her that she could defeat Doro with the help of others in the Pattern (197). The two communicate this news to others in the Pattern, and give Patternist members the option to leave the Pattern, or to stay and fight with Mary against Doro. This is a vastly different use of power. It empowers the community to stop the oppression of its own members. Mary overpowers Doro with her community of Patternists only after he attempts to kill Karl, her husband (215). Mary argues, He had nearly killed her, had been about to kill the man she had attached herself so firmly. Now she took her revenge. She consumed him slowly, drinking in his terror and his life, drawing out her own pleasure, and laughing through his soundless screams. (215)

Mary’s immediate response once Doro is dead is to return to nurture the community. She says, “I began to try to give back the strength I had taken from my people” (216). At the end of the text, Mary is supremely grateful for the support of other people when she claims, “Now we were free to grow again—we, his children” (217). Since the oppressor is dead, and the pattern is established as an empowering community, what is left is a world without capitalist, patriarchal control. There is a return to structure, but the structure is, at least temporarily, more egalitarian. Butler writes “Doro was dead. Finally, thoroughly dead. Now we are free to grow again” (217). Butler has shown the power of community action under the control of a fearless leader, that may be completely focused on empowering the community, or, as some have hypothesized, may become like Doro, since we see her glee at his death.

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CLAY’S ARK Where Mind of My Mind shows that rigid social structures can benefit from the changes enacted by Rites of Passage, Clay’s Ark examines a community that, like that in Wild Seed, embraces structure completely and refuses to accept change and liminal beings who represent that change. However, in this text, the liminal beings represent survival and a new world. Clay’s Ark shows the creation of a human/alien life-form and the destructive power of two men who refuse to accept this change. The conflict occurs when an astronaut, Eli, who is the lone survivor, returns to Earth after traveling to the planet Proxi Centauri Two, and is infected with an alien disease. His DNA is altered and he becomes more highly sensitive, much stronger, ravenously hungry and driven to reproduce the disease. As an astronaut and scientist, Eli attempts to control the progress of the disease by containing it within a small compound. He initially rejects his first child, Jacob, who has the disease, since he is the visual representation of a hybrid being. Jacob is described as “a small, large-eyed brown body . . . slender . . . and startlingly beautiful” (Clay’s Ark, 81), who leaps like a cat and is a quadruped . . . “a miniature sphinx” (83). He spends the first part of the boy’s life attempting to alter the fact that his son was born “quadruped.” Eli is a bastion of patriarchy; he cannot accept his son as he is, with four legs, and a catlike body, along with a human face. He forces the child to walk “upright” on two legs, since he was determined that “no son of Eli’s would run on all fours like a dog” (175). Eli’s fear is that his son is “a freak who could not hide his strangeness” (176). For a long time, he rejects his son, who avoids him in fear. Ironically, Jacob reveals himself to have much more “humanity” than his father. The other bastion of social structure in the text is Blake Maslin, a physician, who, along with his two daughters, is kidnapped by Eli and his family. As a physician, he views humanness in terms of biology rather than behavior or beliefs. Blake attempts to use his medical skill to control and eradicate the Clay Ark disease. For example, Blake uses his medical bag to cleanse the wounds Meda, Eli’s female partner, has gotten, and analyzes her skin as a way to figure out the disease. Through his microscope, the reader can watch the Clay Ark disease replicating itself: “It was able to show him tiny, spiderlike organisms in her flesh, cells—as part of her cells (emphasis Butler, 51). Blake cannot believe that this disease has become part of Meda’s DNA. Eli has tried to make antibodies to stop the disease, which failed. These two men represent the position of the scientific and medical social structures and the resistance to the change that has arrived. Part of the rejection of the disease is the loss in status. What does it mean to be no longer 100 percent human in a culture that values 100 percent human biological attributes

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above humane behavior? When another adult male, Zeriam, discovers he has the disease, he asks Eli, “How much of you is left?” where Eli responds, “You’re asking how much of you will be left.” (140). The men are asking about biology rather than behavior; these men divide themselves into self and other, and reject the other. In spite of the fact that Eli tells him that “most of the time, a lot” of him will be there, Zeriam takes a butcher knife and “cut his throat” rather than live with the disease (141). Butler again leaves us with a most difficult community that forces us into alternate ways of being. Butler is posing the anti-structural possibility of kinship across species boundaries. She pushes the reader into the possibilities of a hybrid community, a difficult community, beyond racial configurations, to include animals and other species. In the Patternist world, the Clayarks are considered animals, and have less social status. In later novels we see that the Clayarks, who have become the descendants of Eli’s clan, are killed for their lower status. Indeed, there are reasons for concern. Gregory Hampton argues that “Jacob represented a threat to the race of humanity and other life on Earth” because 60 percent of those infected die, and that since he is a carrier “he and all of his kind would live to spread the virus to uninfected humans.” (Hampton, Changing, 58). Thus, the virus represents a form of genocide for the human species. Others argue for a different way to see this cross-species hybridity. Holden argues that Butler “breaks from Doro’s careful programming and becomes one version of the boundary-breaking, post-gender, and post-race cyborg that Haraway celebrates” (Holden, “I began Writing,” 31). I agree that Butler creates “cyborg multiplicity” beings in these early texts. Holden examines the identity of these new beings in terms of race and argues that for Butler, multiplicity, hybridity, and speciesism are ways to make “women of color both visible and powerful within the futures or pasts that she imagined” (Holden, “I Began Writing,” 19). Indeed, Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” (1991) is a critique of patriarchal society, as is Butler’s work. Haraway’s “Manifesto” argues for “lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. . . . Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate; in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling” (Haraway, “The Cyborg,” 154). In “A Cyborg Manifesto” Haraway refers specifically to Wild Seed and Survivor as using hybridity as a transformation through genetic exchanges that “coerce surviving humans into intimate fusion” in ways that challenge race and gender constructs (Haraway, “The Cyborg,” 179). I argue that they use capitalist and patriarchal constructs as well. Although these transformations may be caused by virus vectors, they also embody the intersection of feminist theory and colonial discourse, because bodies are sites of power

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and identity. Haraway ultimately argues that cross-species imagery provides a route out of the dualisms, and, I would argue, oppressive structures. She writes, “It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories” (181). In this way, Butler is identifying hybridity in our current society. The problem is not just a species threat, it is also an economic threat. Within the Patternist system established on Earth, the lower-class individuals are mutes, or human beings who are not telepathic; the telepathic Patternists control all forms of government and social systems. If life is allowed to continue, their economic system would become obsolete as the lower-class Clayarks take over the planet. A new economic system would have to replace the current structure. Blake Maslin’s daughter, Keira, is the only member of the captured family to survive. Kiera crosses the threshold into liminality when she is abducted by Eli and his family. I would argue that Keira survives because of her acceptance of change. She begins the text vulnerable and sickly, with an untreatable form of leukemia. Another threshold occurs once she is open to the possibility that the disease might cure her cancer, and she is correct. Furthermore, Keira accepts the Clayark child, Jacob. Jacob leaps into her room where she is being bound, and she hugs him as “he clung to her, utterly silent, but clearly terrified” (199). She is thrilled to see him and frightened for him because of the killings going on. Another threshold experience occurs for Kiera when Jacob saves her. One of Eli’s central concerns is maintaining his own humanity, and it is clear that this characteristic is passed on through his son’s humane behavior as he frees Keira by biting off the ropes holding her, which allows her to escape (198). This is one of the more intense scenes of intimacy and relating in the text. Jacob shows her the route to navigate out of the household, and they both escape. As a liminal persona accepting difference, Keira watches him leap away and thinks, “her children would do that someday. They would have four legs and be able to bound like cats, and they would be beautiful.” (202). It is the recognition of the humanity and decency in community with the Other that saves her life. In contrast, Rane, the other sister, embraces structure and rejects difference. She argues, “What was worse? Being raped by three or four car rats before she was ransomed or submitting to Eli’s people and microbe? Or were the two the same now that the car gang was infected” (179). She equates biological change to the violence of rape. Her own quest is to “have a doctor to care of the disease and any possible pregnancy.” Butler provides as very violent end; Rane attempts to shoot her way out, and is finally shot and killed as her head is cut off her body. Butler shows us one result of those who cannot accept change. Another rigid structuralist, her father, Blake, also dies after he infects a trucker, who runs him over. It is ironic that Blake’s intention to escape and seek medical treatment is what leads him to infect the trucker

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who will continue to spread it to everyone he meets. Ironically, both Rane and Blake, who cannot accept change, meet violent ends. Keira, who does accept the disease and the change it brings, alters her identity and displays agency and maturity at the end of the text. She becomes a liminal being. Sophia Magnone argues that “Infection and symbiosis also present a set of revolutionary challenges to entrenched human norms about species, identity and kinship” and argues that through the text Butler sees the value of disrupting normative behavior (Magnone, “Microbial,” 117). The final image in Clay’s Ark is of Jacob, her lover Stephen Kaneshiro, and Keira sitting together as Jacob “climbed into Keira’s lap and fell asleep. She stroked his hair, accepting his presence” (209). These characters have begun a separation from these rigid social structures and emerge to accept a new world of Clayarks. The father, Stephen, has stated that he is committed to the pregnant Keira, who has been cured of her leukemia. Stephen sums up the future, “It will be chaos. Then a new order. Hell, a new species Jacob will win, you know. We’ll help him” (213). Butler leaves us with a small community bound by loyalty, love and community in spite of the violence to come. Kiera actually states toward the end of the novel, “The organism had given her a great deal” (203). SURVIVOR Cross-species identity difference continues with the protagonist Alanna, in Survivor, who will become a progenitrix of a new race, and like Keira, her child will be alien/human. Survivor continues with Butler’s use of protagonists who cross thresholds, reject patriarchy and capitalist structures, and show the power of hybridity to find creative ways to heal, form new identities, and use community to move toward social justice. This text takes place off-world on an unknown planet, with Missionaries, who have traveled to a new planet in the hopes of keeping some groups of humans separate from the Clay Ark disease taking over Earth. Although we never know what happens to Kiera, we do know that the Clay Ark disease had “killed over half the population. It was still killing, and still causing the distinctive Clayark mutation in the young of its surviving victim” (28). The other part of the Missionary mission was “to spread the Sacred image to one more world” (29). Thus, their religion becomes yet another rigid, structural, patriarchal belief system projected onto the new world. In fact, they believed that Clayark children were made in the image of Satan (26). The protagonist, Alanna, lost her parents as they were protecting her from the Clayarks, and she lived in the wild for seven years; at fifteen, she is adopted by a Missionary family whose children died, and she left Earth with her Missionary foster family, Jules, and Neila Verrik. Alanna is Afro-Asian,

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with a Black father and Asian mother, and left with other Missionaries to another planet as a way to save the human race, leaving Earth to the Clayarks and Patternists, since the telepaths cannot “break free of the mental ties” they have with other Patternists to enable them to leave the planet (31). Once the Missionaries land on the planet, they are caught in the midst of a conflict between two Kohn tribes, the Garkohn and the Tehkohn. The Tehkohn is the more humane tribe, yet the Missionaries form an alliance with the Garkohn, led by Natahk, a patriarchal leader who had deliberately made Missionaries addicted to maklah as a way to control them (35). Sandra Govan argues that Alanna is successful with the Tehkohn because she is a survivor and shows “savage skill, stealth, and cunning,” yet I would argue that her most significant role is her gift of community building (Govan, “Connections,” 212). As Govan explains, Alanna does not carry the biases and rigid rules of the Missionary community, and this allows her a creativity and acceptance of cultures she does not completely adapt. Bound by no particular structure, Alanna functions to try to create peace between the Missionaries, Tehkohn, and Garkohn and throughout the text tries to heal and build alliances between the two tribes. She attempts to inform the Missionaries that they are being conned by the Garkohn, who are abducting them, and blaming the Tehkohn for the abductions. Much of the action of the text involves this kind of deception. Alanna is on a quest to free herself from the restrictions of patriarchy of both the Missionaries and the Kohn cultures. As a liminal persona, Alanna crosses thresholds. The first threshold she crosses is being abandoned after her parents die, when she first experiences independence and liminality. When Alanna was eight years old, the Clayarks attacked her family, and the parents died in order for Alanna to escape. She lives on her own for the next seven years, learning to survive independently. We don’t discover much about her life during these years, except that she was able to adapt and survive. Her parents’ compassion, and their sacrifice for her by saving her at the cost of their own lives, was passed on to Alanna, with a loyalty to those who aid her; once she discovers her own agency, her immediate move is to create a community with those around her. At fifteen years old, she crosses a second threshold, when she is adopted by the Missionaries Jules and Neila Verrick, who lost their children to the Clay Ark disease, and wanted a child to raise. Alanna adapts to the Missionary doctrine and loses her wild ways and language; however, she never actually believes in the narrow and rigid beliefs of the Missionaries. The next threshold she crosses is when she is captured by the Tehkohn tribe, lives with them for two years, marries the Hao, or leader of that tribe, and has a child, who dies during a battle. This threshold causes Alanna to gain great strength and respect as an individual. She is given the roles of warrior and

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judge and uses her skills to bring peace between the warring tribes (Survivor, 24). The Tehkohn alien community she joins is structured, but that structure is more egalitarian and more able to change than the Missionary community. Alanna’s choice to live with the Tehkohn that she has grown to love liberates her from the racism and patriarchy of the Missionaries. Beatrice Stamp tells the foster mother, Neila, that Alanna should leave their community and live with the Black community since she would be “happier with her own kind” since “the girl isn’t white” (Survivor, 27, 28). Previously, Missionary children mocked her and then attacked her. She “put her back against the wall of the nearest house and fought them as though she had never left the wilds” (Survivor, 26). After she severely beats several of the children, the community complains to her adoptive father, Jules, and, at first, he supports her ability to defend herself, yet we will see that his own racism appears at the end of the novel (26). Crossing the threshold into the Missionary community forges Alanna’s independence and rejection of structural racism. The Kohn peoples live in clans and are tall and fur-covered. This fur is unusual in that it is thick, alive, and changes color and texture; this allows them to camouflage themselves and blend invisibly into their surroundings. The blue color is a sign of honor and status, and is the color of the Hao. Alanna’s mixed race is not discussed among the Tehkohn, but her child is given respect because of her blue tones. Alanna comes into her own identity with these people, and when she is returned to the Missionaries two years later, she is not glad to see them, but feels obligated to help them out of a sense of loyalty. She crosses a further threshold when she returns to the Missionaries as they are being controlled by the warring tribe the Garkohn, who deliberately make the Missionaries addicted to maklah as a way to control them (35). Natauk, the leader of Garkohn, is using the Missionary base against the Tehkohn. Alanna is trying to forge an alliance between the Missionaries and the Tehkohn. Alanna’s new role with the Missionaries is as a healer and peacemaker. She works with her adapted father, Jules, to help the Missionary community reject the Garkohn. Her advice to him shows her process of survival. She recommends that in facing the enemy, “You give in until your position seems strong. Then, you use your strength, and others give in (Survivor, 110). She further argues that she has learned to survive by playing all three roles: “leader, slave, ally” (110). Alanna has become a community leader; her other task is to help the Missionaries safely get through the meklah withdrawal (68). She talks about the importance of communal support in getting out of addiction, and recommends hypnosis as an aid (73). Secondly, Alanna is going to feed the Tehkohn prisoners so they don’t die (82). They finally agree to eat. At the end, the

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Missionaries are leaving to the north, along with Jules. The Tehkohn fighters will guide them into the next valley to settle; she is able to aid the Missionary community, but she is unable to alter the Missionary community structure, since they refuse to change. Here we again see a community-minded protagonist, whose purpose is to help the people heal and to live in peace (77). The relationship Alanna has with Duit could be called “communitas,” although Alanna must initially struggle to gain respect in the early stages of the relationship, and it is difficult to see this as a completely equal relationship (120). As the Missionaries leave, Duit encourages Alanna to create peace with her adopted parents, since she has chosen to live with the Tehkohn. We see a dramatic contrast between the Tehkohn community and the Missionaries. Alanna makes a choice to live with people where she receives respect and fair treatment. She has spent the novel attempting to forge peace between the people and fighting for self-respect. She is able to achieve this with the aliens, but not the humans. In the final scene, the Missionaries are leaving to live in the north, after a battle where the Verrick cabin, among other Missionary cabins, is burned to the ground. The Tehkohn fighters will guide them to the next valley to settle. Her Missionary pastor father, Jules, not does accept Alanna’s decision to stay with Duit and the “alien” species. He slaps her face, and rather than fight back, Alanna thanks him for allowing her to be his daughter for a while (177). She does not struggle against his discrimination. Ruth Salvaggio describes her as “a unifying force on a foreign planet inhabited by warring tribes” (Salvaggio, “Octavia,” 191). I agree with Salvaggio’s assessment that Alanna submits to social restraints on the outside, yet is able to find her source of strength. This does not mean that she participates in the oppressive structures to which she appears to submit to. Instead, what appears to be submission is instead a break with the structure as she determines her best strategy to fight the next oppression. In this way Alanna functions outside structure in a state of liminality. Alanna is able to change the structure of the Garkohn people and gain their respect; she is able to help the Missionaries break their addiction to meklah, and she makes a personal decision to begin a new race of people with Duit. Thus, I would argue that Alanna helps reduce the oppression of the structure, and where she cannot change the oppression, she takes a public stand against it. Alanna does not have the power that Mary has, in Mind of My Mind, to actually alter the Patternist system by creating community within it, or change the rigid racist, and patriarchal Missionary society, yet is choosing a life of personal integrity and respect. She remains a liminal person.

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PATTERNMASTER The Patternmaster narrative teaches a great deal about the embeddedness of hierarchical structure and the power of those who dismantle those hierarchies. Although Butler has structured the narrative as two brothers competing for the position of Patternmaster, and the younger brother, Teray, is the wiser brother, the secondary narrative exposes the real protagonist, an independent healer named Amber. She claims her own independence from the social structure and reveals herself as the most powerful person in the text by virtue of her liminal status. Her individual power resides in the identity that she has chosen, as a healer, a loyal confidante and friend and as one who fearlessly embraces a bisexual identity and chooses motherhood outside marriage. In this Patternist patriarchy, her behaviors lie outside the norm. Both Teray, the future Patternmaster, and Rayal, the current Patternmaster, recognize her superior talents. Rayal, the father of the two sons, and present Patternmaster, opens the narrative with information about the structural hatred between the two mortal enemies, the Clayarks and the Patternists. The controlling Patternists see the Clayarks as animals, and the non-telepathic humans, “mutes,” are enslaved by the Patternists. Some Patternists are considered “outsiders,” and their only status is dependent upon their function as apprentices to the Patternists of higher status. Although Rayal has experienced peace for over a year, that peace ends in the initial scene of the text, when the Clayarks attack Rayal’s house in Forsyth, and one of their cannonballs beheads his wife, Jansee. The text continues twenty years later in the next chapter with two of his sons viewing themselves as vying to be Patternmaster once the father dies. This patriarchy allows for fighting to the death, and we discover that the father, Rayal, had to kill two brothers and a sister to get to where he is. For this reason, Rayal knows that his sons will compete with each other for control of the pattern. Since Rayal has had many children and many wives, the two brothers, Teray and Coransee, are unaware of their sibling relationship; Teray has just completed his schooling from the Redhill School for Patternist youth, and is searching for a Patternist of status with whom to apprentice. The older brother, Coransee, wants Teray to be his apprentice, but that includes placing “controls” on Teray’s thoughts, which is where Teray draws the line, and where the competition between the two brothers becomes the central action of the text. Through this narrative the reader sees the highly structured patriarchy of this society, where the women are considered sex slaves of the men, and where Patternist authority is based on violence and hierarchy. Butler’s nod to the US slave system is obvious, as she inserts a sub-narrative about a female

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healer who emerges as the protagonist of the text, operating as a Patternist outsider, and “healer.” Amber does not arrive into the narrative until the third chapter, yet her intensity and skills quickly override the patriarchal conflict between the two brothers. Although Amber has been unable to control her body, as in preventing the older brother Coransee from sleeping with her and impregnating her, she does assert control by eliminating that pregnancy, and later she accepts and desires her pregnancy with Teray, the brother she loves. As a healer, she has a complete understanding of the body, which also makes her an efficient killer, a skill Teray recognizes. It is the efficiency of the killing that she passes on to him, as well as supports and promotes his own characteristics as an emerging healer, that help him survive the Clayark attacks on the journey to Forsythe to meet Rayal, the father. By the time that she has met Teray, Amber has already crossed significant thresholds. She currently lives with Coransee because she is a healer without a House of her own. She is considered “free people,” and she facilitates the freedom of others. She views physical and psychological oppression as places in the human condition that she needs to heal. When she first meets Teray, she allows him to read her mind, and Teray sees the physical abuse going on at Coransee’s house, including when a character, Jason, has severely wounded a female, Suliana, and that some Patternists are abusing “mutes,” another name for human beings, by forcing them to fight each other. That Teray also has compassion is shown when he mentally beats Jason, one of the abusers, for hurting the mutes. Amber tells Teray that there is a sanctuary in Forsyth, and because Teray refuses the apprenticeship with Coransee because of the thought controls, they both escape together. This is an important threshold experience for Amber; she opens herself mentally and physically to Teray. Teray discovers that Amber had fallen in love with a woman, Kai, who saved Amber from being killed for killing her housemaster. Amber argues, “When I meet a woman who attracts me, I prefer women . . . and when I meet a man who attracts me, I prefer men” (133). Bisexuality is clearly not an accepted norm, and Teray is stunned, but he accepts Amber and does not judge her. Amber is superior to Teray in many ways; she can kill Clayarks, and is better at strategizing a route to Forsyth. Coransee has sent many Patternists to stop the two of them. Amber tells the central Patternist, Darah, that she refuses to be held, saying that she is “her own woman,” and that she and Teray will fight them if they attack her (128). Amber kills their horses, which allows Teray and Amber to escape. When Teray asks Amber to be his wife, she refuses, since what she wants is her own House, just as Teray will have his own House. In fact, she reverses their positions, asking him if he would prefer to be her lead husband. (134). Thus, Amber expects equal status in this relationship. It’s probably best that she doesn’t marry, since the reader can

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surmise how it might work out when Teray thinks, “she was always right. He was getting tired of it” (136). In this liminal moment, as they are heading toward Forsyth, however, Amber chooses independence over her own body; she chooses to keep Teray’s child, even though she will not marry him. Crossing this threshold has caused her to expand her concept of herself as independent, even as she chooses to become part of a community with him. Even though Amber cannot change the structure, her independence is a threat to the older brother, Coransee, who is caught in patriarchy and capitalism and wants to take the pattern from his father, Rayal, before he’s dead. In the final fight between the brothers, Teray kills Coransee using the skills he learned from Amber. She taught him how to focus his power on the body of the Clayarks in order to kill them, and Teray transfers this knowledge when he fights Coransee. He contracts the muscles of Coransee’s legs, which cause him to fall, then contracts the muscles of Coransee’s brain, and finally Coransee bites off his own tongue and dies. Amber heals Teray after the battle, and reveals that the Patternists wanted to know if it would be Amber or Teray who would lead them (194). She has chosen to not be the Patternmaster, and relegates Teray a Patternmaster. The reader is thus left with very strong community, and communitas occurring between Teray and Amber. They mentally link, and Teray recognizes her superiority and is grateful that she saved his life. Although she is considered on a lower status in terms of the social structure, he knows her psychic superiority. Amber finds community and communitas with a man able to step outside patriarchy. One can speculate on a Patternmaster like Teray, who is also an emerging healer. He is a man with female characteristics. He will have a child from Amber, the woman who loves him but will not marry him. The new world presented at the end has more equality. Butler is clearly exploring alternate ways of living outside the patriarchal structures deeply embedded in societies. My primary concern is to reveal ways her female protagonists in these earliest works find ways to break from that structure and to find ways to heal, through community, the oppressions of those victimized by the system. There is going to be a return to structure, but that the creativity of anti-structural liminality that moves one into community and communitas has the potential to remove the effects of patriarchy and sexism from the structure.

Chapter 3

Xenogenesis

I agree that the three books that make up the Xenogenesis series, Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989), “represent . . . the key turning point in Butler’s lifelong investigation of the mystery of human nature” (Canavan, Octavia, 98). In this series, there is a shift from relying on action to advance the text to a dramatic focus on communication and community. The Xenogenesis series involves three groups of beings: the Oankali, who saved eighty humans after a nuclear war, the resister humans who refuse to mate with the Oankali, the compromised humans, like Lilith, who are willing to create construct children with the Oankali, and the Akjai humans who are actively fertile and reproducing with other humans on Earth. The focus of the Xenogenesis series is about the importance of these communities and the kinds of behavior that either forge or block community. In Adulthood Rites, Lilith’s hybrid human/Oankali child, Akin, is stolen by human resisters to sell to other humans unable to have children. His survival depends upon his ability to understand and accommodate the resister behavior in order to stay alive. Jodahs, in Imago, discovers that his life depends on living intimately with humans, or his own body will devolve into lower life-forms. Thus, the Xenogenesis series shows that understanding “difference” is essential for one’s own survival. One must both recognize the inherent value in individuals, groups, and communities unlike us. The Xenogenesis series crosses genre boundaries. Mehaffy and Keating note that Butler’s fiction is liminal by genre as it “has never simply ‘fit in’ with conventional expectation for either canonical or science fiction literature” (Mehaffy and Keating, “Radio,” 46). The Xenogenesis series furthermore deploys characters that are outside mainstream structure in terms of race, species, and gender. Butler’s discussion of these identity factors is always complicated and never reduced to simple binary positions. Her characters are identified as individuals but are also influenced by their histories and cultures. Mehaffy and Keating argue that: 41

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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. (Mehaffy and Keating, “Radio,” 45)

The central characters maintain a liminal position of being between structures and statuses. Butler further introduces ambiguities and ambivalences into Oankali behavior. Thus, the conflicts Butler portrays in her texts are not reduced to simplistic readings of African American history or alien abduction texts. In Dawn we can see Lilith’s experience as echoing African American slave narratives. Jean Slonczewski compares Lilith’s experience to the “dehumanization of slave conditions—she is naked, has to beg for clothing, and is denied reading materials and other access to her own culture and history” (Slonczewski, “Octavia,” 150). Furthermore, like an enslaved person, Lilith works with her captors for survival, yet feels ambivalence and deep sorrow for making this choice. Furthermore, if Lilith refuses to create a new species with the aliens, she will have no family at all. Like slave masters, the Oankali lecture her about their superior nonviolent lifestyle, as opposed to the hierarchical, violent behavior of humans, even as the Oankali, rather than come to an understanding with the humans, instead choose to drug them and seduce them through chemical pheromones. These texts are, furthermore, quest narratives, and the Xenogenesis texts combine slave narratives, captivity narratives, and science fiction alien invasion frameworks that Butler re-creates and revises under the umbrella of the bildungsroman. The search of the central characters for their own identities involves a larger search for a communal connection between the species of human and alien Oankali. Bound with the quest for individual freedom is the larger question for equality and justice for the captive humans. The protagonists of these texts cross significant thresholds to each become leaders in order to transcend structures of dominance. Lilith and her hybrid, or “construct,” children provide the wisest and most compassionate worldview in understanding and negotiating issues of difference between the Oankali and humans. Like enslaved people and their descendants, Lilith often feels ambivalent about her participation with her captors and the choices she makes. In her lowly position, Lilith confronts the violent control inherent in the trade and argues that “A rebirth for us can only happen if you let us alone! Let us begin again on our own” (Dawn, 40). Part of her ambivalence is the result of ways the Oankali sabotage Lilith’s attempts to create a community among the human survivors. Lilith’s goal of humans living with the Oankali and willingly having construct children with them is finally accomplished through the efforts of Lilith’s human-ooloi child, Jodahs, in the third text of the series, once he discovers his physical

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body must have human mates in order to survive. Within the space of these three texts, the reader follows Butler’s depiction of individuals of different species facing the colonizing Oankali, unwilling to acknowledge their basic human rights. These texts provide insight into conflict and the potential of establishing communities of difference. The Xenogenesis series can be read as exploring colonizing power structures. Frances Bonner astutely argues, “Just because the Oankali claim to have avoided hierarchies, it does not mean they have eschewed power” (Bonner, “Difference,” 59). The Oankali are the alien species who have rescued human survivors from the nuclear war yet have stopped human biological reproduction in order to prevent inherent human hierarchical tendencies from destroying their own species. However, it can be difficult to tell if the Oankali exist to oppress humanity or to free humanity by mating with humans to create a new race free from destructive human hierarchical tendencies. The Oankali are male and female, with a third sex, the ooloi, who facilitate reproduction between the humans and Oankali to create “construct” beings. Humans who refuse to comply with alien sexuality are the “resister humans” who are unable to reproduce and who view Lilith as the “Judas Goat” because she has construct children with the Oankali. We discover a group of Akaji humans in the second volume, who are able to reproduce with each other without Oankali intervention, and who will be allowed to colonize a future human race on Mars, in the third volume, undisturbed by the Oankali breeding project. The Oankali are gene traders, and they exchange genes with every species they meet in order to enhance their own genetic abilities. By the time the reader meets them they are able to modify DNA without the use of technology; they have additional “sensory arms” able to read and manipulate the DNA of other species through first, just touching, and then probing beneath the skin of another. The character Jdahya, in Dawn, explains the Oankali nature to Lilith: “We acquire new life—seek it, investigate it, manipulate it, sort it, use it. We carry the drive to do this in a minuscule cell within a cell—a tiny organelle within every cell of our bodies. . . . Because of that organelle, the ooloi can perceive DNA and manipulate it precisely” (Dawn, 39). A central Oankali attraction to the human gene trade is their strong attraction to human cancer, which they use to increase the powers of their own DNA. Hampton relates the physical hybridity in the texts to the trope of the “tragic mulatto.” He argues that Butler refuses to write “tragedy onto the body of the mixed-race person” to “highlight the contradictions in our present system of racial classification” (Hampton, Changing, 67). Hampton argues for a specific African American identity trope Butler’s characters possess through Du Bois’s term “double consciousness.” Du Bois writes:

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This history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. . . . He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa . . . He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows. (Du Bois, The Souls, 11)

Hampton locates “double consciousness” as an identity that knows both its own emotions and the position of the colonizer. For example, in Adulthood Rites, Akin experiences duality of identity as the first male human/Oankali construct who can “pass” as human but has the gene-trading characteristics of the alien Oankali. Akin believes that humans have a great deal to teach the Oankali, and supports their ability to do so, yet he believes that without the Oankali gene trade to reduce their hierarchical tendencies, humans will destroy themselves again. Akin’s body is both human and Oankali, and his double consciousness aids in his collaboration with both species. Some critics view the Oankali as liberator, determined to stop all forms of oppressions and violence. Donna Haraway posits a posthuman cyborg theory arguing for the Oankali value of embracing “difference” wherever they find it. Hampton explains this when he argues that “the Oankali are vaguely reminiscent of displaced Africans, not seeking a return to home and origin but seeking and embracing difference as a method of survival” (Hampton, Changing, 77). Thomas Foster further argues that the Oankali reproductive behavior disrupts any “essential norm to be assimilated to,” calling into question “what it means to ‘be’ something” (Foster, “We Get,” 143). Thus, one way to understand the gene trading Oankali is to view how they create unlimited identity possibilities. Turner’s theories of liminality in these volumes become more visible because of Turner’s emphasis on communities and personal interactions in the liminal process. Survival, in these texts, is based on one’s ability to understand the needs and conflicts with culturally different groups of people. In this way, Butler is exposing the dangers of ethnocentrism in a racially diverse society. Turner emphasizes community and “commmunitas,” where individuals relate outside hierarchical structures. He argues that the transformation occurring in the liminal space “may be accompanied by a strong sentiment of humankindness, a sense of the generic social bond between all members of society” (Turner, The Ritual, 116).

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DAWN In Dawn, the first text of the series, Lilith begins the text in the classic position of a liminar, stripped of social status, and “dead to the social world” (Turner, “Liminal” 58). We discover Lilith is naked and sleeping in an organic pod that has kept her alive. Turner describes the sacred Rites of Passage from one identity to the next as beginning “at the hole or burrow” as symbolic of a new birth or womb site (Turner, The Ritual, 20). Lilith’s pod is a symbol of a womb, and she experiences death and rebirth as she awakens to the fact that her husband and son are dead and that her Earth home has been destroyed. She muses. “Luxury. What did she have? Very little” (Dawn, 4). Lilith is in opposition to “the coercive power of supreme rulers” and is a position to enact humanist moral values. Functioning in a lowly position, she has access to the “powers of the weak.” Because of her lowly position, she has the potential to be a force of change in relation to the social, cultural, and political structures of racism, sexism, and xenophobia. In the first page of the novel, Lilith is being awakened out of induced sleep. Lilith furthermore is stripped of knowledge of her present space, knowing that her past life on Earth is gone forever. She thinks, “It had occurred to her—how many times? It could not matter while she was confined this way, kept helpless alone, and ignorant” (Dawn, 3). In fact, “She had not been allowed clothing from her first Awakening until now” (Dawn, 4). She is therefore anonymous and devoid of family, friends, and property, including clothes to wear. She is the embodiment of a classic liminal figure who functions without status and operates in silence and simplicity. Once Lilith finds out how to walk through the walls of her rooms, she travels to the towns of Kaal and Tiej. During these threshold crossings, Lilith becomes aware of the oppressive treatment of humans by the Oankali; she knows they will be permanently altering human DNA, and that their genetic experiments with human cancer cells increases the powers of their own DNA. She comes to understand the severe limits of the Oankali in understanding human behavior, except for the fact that humans are hierarchical and therefore self-destructive. Beyond this ubiquitous comment, they show little understanding of the human psyche. In fact, the Oankali bear a strong resemblance to imperialists and colonizers, establishing a hierarchy where they are in control. In fact, I argue that the hierarchies that they critique in humans are embedded in the Oankali culture itself. For example, they continuously argue that they know what is best for humans, even as they ignore and deny the humans’ response to their experiences. For example, the sex act with the Oankali, which is usually forced on the human the first time, is meant to be appealing because it is a highly

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eroticized experience as the ooloi taps into the nerve centers of each participant to increase the stimulation of all participants. However, humans in each volume reject the experience. In Dawn, Lilith’s human partner Joseph argues that he will “not again” have sex in the same manner because humans do not touch each other during the sex act, and furthermore, he believes the stimulation to be artificial (Dawn, 188). The Oankali, Nikanj, counters that the “electrochemical stimulation” he used to make the sensations “entirely real” and that “your body has made a different choice,” thus dismissing Joseph’s point completely (Dawn, 188–89). Rebecca Holden broadens my argument to conclude that the Oankali reveal themselves unfit to govern, yet instead focus on human failings as the cause of their behavior (as quoted in Canavan, Octavia, 108). Another example of Oankali misreading of humans in Dawn is when they introduce Lilith to Paul Titus because, biologically, he looks like he could be a brother in Lilith’s own family. Titus proceeds to attempt to rape Lilith, then beats her, breaking her wrist. His defense is that “[the Oankali] said I could do it with you. They said you could stay here if you wanted to. And you had to go and mess it up” (Dawn, 94). Thus, the Oankali actually set Lilith up for rape and violence because they base their superior understanding on biology, as if bearing a familial resemblance will somehow create a physical or psychological connection. Furthermore, as Titus beats Lilith, the Oankali do not intervene to protect her. They seem to rationalize that healing her physical wounds later absolves them of accountability for abandoning her. A logical extension of this argument is that the Oankali best express their imperialist project through the practice of “gaslighting,” where, the “Oankali exacerbate a neocolonial situation in which humans are radically and permanently disempowered, and then [the Oankali] step in to provide “assistance.” (Canavan, Octavia, 106). A final betrayal against Lilith occurs by her partner Nikanj, who tells her, “I have made you pregnant with Joseph’s child.” When Lilith responds angrily, “You said you wouldn’t do this,” and Nikanj counters, “You’re ready now to have Joseph’s child,” even though Lilith tells him she would never be ready (Dawn, 245–46). The fact is that, “the Oankali control the terms of the ‘experiment’ in every respect so completely that neither the humans in the narrative nor we as readers can even state with certainty what the limits of their power are” (Canavan, Octavia, 105). Throughout the three-volume series Oankali lack of compassion causes much of Lilith’s loss and grief. However, Lilith continues to alter her Oankali community in their insistence that they know more than humans. Early in Dawn, when Lilith is forced to confront the deadly seriousness of her situation, her Oankali Jdahya offers, “Touch me here now,” he said, gesturing toward his head tentacles, “and I’ll sting you. You’ll die—very quickly and without pain” (Dawn, 42). This

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choice had never previously been offered to a human. Because she is able to choose, Lilith rejects a quick death and instead lives in order to help humanity in the ways she is able. Another example of Oankali accommodation to Lilith is when her Oankali partner, Nikanj, shares her pain after her human husband, Joseph, is killed. Lilith asks for a personal response from Nikanj that is not tainted by the ubiquitous Oankali drug-induced calming techniques. Nikanj gives Lilith a “beautiful and complex” color that had never been seen before, as “a blaze of something frightening, yet overwhelmingly compelling” (Dawn, 225). Lilith’s perseverance in attempting community and intimacy with her oppressors causes them to change. However, because she cannot trust him, her private, central message to the humans she awakens is still to save themselves and “Learn and run!” (emphasis Butler, Dawn, 247). As a liminal protagonist, Lilith has all of the characteristics necessary to create a healthy human community. She does this in several steps. First, previous to awakening the humans to prepare them for a life of returning to Earth and creating children with the Oankali, she formulates relationships with the Oankali. She is given an Oankali family to teach her about Oankali life, and she meets the cranky Kahguyaht, mate of the ooloi Jdahya, and their ooloi child Nikanj, who later becomes Lilith’s mate (Dawn, 54). Lilith’s honesty helps forge a relationship with Kahguyaht, the Oankali most cynical about humans, during Nikanj’s transition, asking him questions about the physical changes the ooloi is going through, and how to best take care of him. Kahguyaht tells her, “I didn’t want to accept you, Lilith. Not for Nikanj or the work you’ll do. I believed that because of the way human genetics were expressed in culture, a human male should be chosen to parent the first group. I think now that I was wrong” (Dawn, 110). Lilith is able to negotiate these biases without resentment. In fact, although Lilith is eventually given the freedom to leave the Oankali compound, she returns to help Nikanj go through his first metamorphosis. The reader sees that, “She had not been able to leave Nikanj trembling in its bed while she enjoyed her greater freedom” (Dawn, 102). Lilith displays honesty and integrity in her interactions with Nikanj in spite of his lapses in honesty and respect. In Dawn, Lilith’s first project is to awaken forty of the eighty humans taken alive by the Oankali. Lilith’s approach to this task is careful and considerate. This is the second step. The reader discovers that “She had been in the great room alone for three days now, thinking, reading, writing her thoughts . . . eighty dossiers—short biographies made up of transcribed conversations, brief histories, Oankali observations and conclusions, and pictures” (Dawn, 116). Lilith’s choices were made because: She needed thoughtful people who would hear what she had to say and not do anything violent or stupid. She needed people who could give her ideas, push

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her mind in directions she might otherwise miss. She needed people who could tell her when they thought she was being a fool—people whose arguments she could respect.” (Dawn, 117)

Lilith’s first concern is community; she wants and needs relationships and to lead as an equal, not an oppressor. Turner argues that liminal persona form “homogeneity and comradeship” across boundaries of difference and that community is “the being no longer side by side (and, one might add, above and below) but within another of a multitude of persons” (Turner, The Ritual, 127). Turner furthermore argues for “spontaneous, immediate, concrete nature of communitas, as opposed to the norm-governed, institutionalized, abstract nature of social structure” (Turner, The Ritual, 7). I argue that Lilith’s approach to awakening the humans and the intimacy of the relationship that follows with Tate constitute community in Turner’s sense of the word, generating a social bond equivalent to the communitas experience. The bonding of communitas reveals why Oankali sex does not build community across beings of difference. It is not based on actual communication; it is merely a sensory experience. Thus, I argue that Butler sides with Joseph, not the Oankali. Lilith’s approach to creating community is vastly different from the Oankali methods of interacting with the humans. In fact, the Oankali sabotage Lilith’s inherent sense of what will work and prevents the community from forming. First of all, the Oankali are not honest with Lilith. They do not communicate with her the way she communicates honestly with them or with the humans she awakens. Furthermore, during the process where Lilith is awakening humans, she does not know what the Oankali are doing and does not know if they necessarily even support her. The Oankali simply want the project of awakening to be completed as quickly as possible. Once Lilith has awakened the forty humans, rather than allow Lilith to complete her training with them, the Oankali intervene to drug the humans, then enter into the room, inciting terror and trauma in the humans, which instills a permanent suspicion against Lilith throughout the series. In fact, the Oankali behavior ironically increases what the Oankali claim to be the human penchant for violence and death. Once the Oankali join the awakened humans, it is Lilith who first realizes their intention. She tells Joseph, “The Oankali are about to come in. We’ve been drugged” (Dawn, 183). The results of this action are panic and chaos. One human, Curt, responds violently, and attacks an ooloi (184). Beatrice tries to flee from the ooloi who has been paired with her, only to lose consciousness. Others were collapsing in fear, or banding together to try to support each other. Because they are drugged, “The room was a scene of quiet, strangely gentle chaos” (184). Lilith’s partner, Joseph, reacts self-destructively, as he “gouged one [hand] with the nails of the other and that the gouged hand was dropping blood onto the floor” (185).

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In response to Joseph’s self-destructive behavior, the ooloi, Nikanj, coolly argues, “let Joseph go on hurting himself for now” (185). That the Oankali/ ooloi do not prepare the humans for their entrance, then drug them, is, in itself, a form of violence. The resulting violent human response is merely an understandable reaction to the Oankali emotional violence. The Oankali may be masters at biology and genetic manipulation, yet they show little concept of understanding basic human psychology and rely instead on drugs or pheromones to manipulate humans. The result of this behavior is that Lilith is eventually left with a small core group of human supporters, who are gradually weaned away from her by other resisting humans, until she stands alone against the humans with just Oankali support. Thus, the Oankali behavior puts Lilith in an ever more vulnerable position. In spite of these betrayals, Lilith is still motivated to create healing relationships at the end of the text. Informed that she is not allowed to travel to Earth to begin the repopulation strategy, Lilith’s response is “Let me help you learn about us, or there’ll be more injuries, more deaths” (Dawn 235). Lilith’s dogged attempts to support the “other” place her as a leader with the broader and more powerful message of embracing a culture of difference, even if it is blind to her most noble virtues. ADULTHOOD RITES Akin is Lilith’s child, the first construct human/Oankali male. His is a liminal journey through self-discovery into self-determination. Like Lilith, Akin is focused on the importance of relationships, and because of this, he is able to successfully create possibilities of communication between the Oankali and the human groups of: the compromisers, the resisters, and the Akaji reproductive humans. When Akin enters the text, he is a baby, yet he is neither human nor Oankali, though he has aspects of both. In spite of his age, he also has the amazing Oankali power of manipulating DNA on a genetic level and operates on a genius level of intelligence. Like his mother, Lilith, he is driven to establish justice for the humans, at the risk of his own life. Like Lilith, Akin performs as a liminal persona. Like Lilith, Akin is in a lowly social position, and he embodies the “powers of the weak” by spending his days learning from everyone, conversing, and creating friendships and community. Akin crosses over thresholds when he is stolen from his Oankali home and sold into a resister human home. Furthermore, he passes through two physical metamorphoses. These thresholds create subversive spaces for Akin to deeply understand the oppressions the humans feel. His death and rebirth experiences occur significantly in the town of Phoenix, a town named for symbolic regeneration and rebirth, living there with the resister humans Tate and Gabe

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from Dawn (among the first humans Lilith awakens in Dawn). He becomes an advocate for the human position to create a separate human race on Mars. Once he understands his role as a liminar who can remove oppression from the human community, Akin returns to Phoenix to plead with the Oankali to accept a new option of resettlement on Mars for resister humans. Once this occurs, Akin’s maturation is complete, and he experiences his final metamorphosis, making him an adult and fulfilling his life purpose. The entire liminal experience of leaving his home structure, functioning in a liminal space with several communities of humans, generates the creativity within Akin to recognize his love for his own family, which leads to his understanding of the human desire to continue their own race. Akin’s act to help humans move to Mars is a completely selfless act. He needs humans to trust that they won’t be manipulated by Oankali and he argues: “I want to do it . . . The Oankali won’t help, except to teach. . . . They won’t set foot on Mars once we’ve begun. . . . They won’t transport you” (Adulthood Rites, 262). On one hand, Akin experiences human hierarchical tendencies by living with humans. After he has been sold to Tate and Gabe in Phoenix, he uncovers the racism in the resister community. In one example, two young construct girls are sold to resister families in Phoenix, “They were brown girls with long, thick black hair and dark eyes. . . . [One of the girls] had a cluster of tentacles at her throat where they probably protected a sair breathing orifice” (125). Since the tentacles identify the girls as constructs, a human, Neci, spends months trying to convince other humans to cut off the tentacles, so the young females appear completely human. This is fortunately never accomplished because Akin learns of the plan, bonds with sisters Amma and Shkaht, and helps them escape (150). Akin has also experienced the Oankali tendency to not aid those in trouble. As when they allowed Lilith to be attacked and almost raped, the Oankali do not step in to aid Akin when he is experiences terrible loneliness at not being able to bond with his closest sibling. Since Akin was kidnapped away from his construct family in Lo, he has been unable to spend time with his closest sibling. Akin explains, “This is the time for bonding,” Akin said, wondering how he could explain such a personal thing to a Human who deliberately avoided all contact with the Oankali. “Bonding happens shortly after birth and shortly after metamorphosis. At other times. . . . Bonds are only shadows of what they could be. Sometimes people manage to make them, but usually they don’t. Late bonds are never what they should be. I’ll never know my sister the way I should.” (Adulthood Rites, 115–16)

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It is clear that the Oankali know where Akin is being held, and that they have, in fact, deliberately chosen to let him live there for three years. The lack of bonding with his closest sibling leaves both Akin and his sibling in pain and feeling incomplete. The Oankali privilege what they want rather than caring about Akin’s serious psychological needs. Akin’s relative tells him toward the end of the novel that “Keeping you separated (from your sibling) was a mistake. . . . I can see now why it was done, but it was a mistake” (Adulthood Rites, 216). Akin discovers that the Oankali left with Akin the resisters so he could know them better: He had been abandoned to the resister when they took him so that he could learn them as no adult could, as no Oankali-born construct could. . . . Everyone knew the resisters’ bodies, but no one knew their thinking as Akin did. . . . They had deliberately rested the fate of the resisters—the fate of the human species—on him. (Adulthood Rites, 233)

Later, they give Akin the authority to decide what must be done to the resisters. From Akin we learn the importance of embracing ethnicities and cultures different from our own, even if they appear to violate inherent values. Bridging these differences creates a greater sense of community. Thus, Akin has found a way to maintain a separate identity as both human and Oankali by the end of the text. His hybrid status helps him to both perceive and accept the conflicts and contradictions in his own nature. For example, he is able to participate in Oankali communalism, yet he is not completely communal. He participates in human individualism, yet instills a sense of community and communalism with the humans. Akin is thus able to embrace ambiguity in a way the colonizing Oankali are unable to experience. He sees that the Oankali collective thinking or knowing threatens to erase difference, and it blinds them to their own failings. Akin recognizes that the forced sterilization by the Oankali clearly treats humans unfairly and dooms them to extinction. Like his mother, Lilith, Akin develops a strong sympathy for humans and explains to his Oankali relative Dichaan, “But we will be Oankali. They will only be . . . something we consumed. . . . It was wrong and unnecessary” (Adulthood Rites, 199). However, unlike Lilith, Akin will not be seen as a traitor to either the humans or to the Oankali. Akin knows that the Oankali see his aiding the humans as actually killing off the human race, but Akin has more faith in humans. Akin’s hybridity allows him to negotiate with both communities and create an equitable solution for the humans. Butler provides another liminal protagonist able to create greater freedom for the oppressed human group because of his high level of communication with communities of difference.

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IMAGO The emergence of the first-person protagonist of Imago, Jodahs, creates a deeply intimate portrait of what Butler perceives of an “imago,” which is either the adult stage of a being, or the idealized image of what is possible for a being. Jodahs, as “imago,” provides what Butler might see as the projected human potential. If this is true, the idealized image we receive of Jodahs is one of great compassion, literally embodying two separate hearts, whose mantra is “I don’t want to hurt anything. . . . Don’t let me do any harm” (Imago, 25–26). In fact, Jodahs’s greatest pleasure is healing others of their pains; human pains often involve cancers and tumors and deformities, which are the result of genetic illness or inbreeding. Where Akin is a mediator between human and Oankali, Jodahs breaks down barriers between the two groups completely and shows his absolute need for both species to relate and coexist. Jodahs is a liminal character because he is a new creation, a new being. As a human-ooloi construct, he is the result of the final interbreeding between the Oankali and humans. This new being not only is part human but also needs humans in a way not previously seen in this trilogy. He discovers that his body will devolve into lower life-forms if he is not in close contact with his own human mates. This leads Jodahs to create humans who want to procreate with the Oankali. The second generation completes what the first generation (Lilith), was charged with creating in Dawn and what the Oankali so desperately wanted to create. Like Akin, Jodahs is concerned with relationships and with creating more freedom for the humans. Akin created the choice of a continuation of the human race on Mars. Because of Jodahs, humans now have the choice of either emigrating to Mars or staying on Earth and willingly creating a new species with the Oankali. At this point in the trilogy, the Oankali colonial tactics are clear, but the Oankali see only local human behavior and not their own. Imago reinforces the previous colonizing image of the Oankali and shows readers more serious flaws in Oankali life. For example, the Oankali are often not in control of their own compelling desire to hybridize, and their desire to sample and consume every new being leads to their behavior as engineers of genetic diversification through the lens of capitalism, who absorb and consume everything in their path, even if they destroy the Earth’s ecosystem, which will make the planet as empty as it was after the humans’ nuclear war. A second flaw is the discovery that the Oankali have actually not been able to prevent humans from reproducing with each other, as we were told in the first two volumes. When Jodahs meets humans Tomas and Jesusa he knows they are both fertile, even though they both have massive tumors all over their bodies. When they lead the Oankali to their home resister village in the mountains, we meet an

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entire community of humans who are fertile and reproducing naturally. These humans also do not have any of the enhanced physical conditions given to humans by the Oankali, and they and their children have deformities and diseases brought about by the presence of human genetic diseases. These humans have not been affected by the Oankali control over humans. Like Lilith and Akin, Jodahs is a communal being. He understands that community, communication, and communitas are vital. If he is with his family in Lo, or captured by humans planning to sell him to resister humans who cannot have children, or if he is living with Ajkai fertile humans, Jodahs records how he is being treated. Like Akin, Jodahs feels “a sense of the generic social bond between all members of society” (Turner, The Ritual, 116). As a liminar protagonist, Jodahs sees community as primary. Lisa Dowdall argues convincingly that, “The symbiotic relationship between the Oankali and human exceeds the strictly genetic terms of the trade, and suggests that human/Oankali morphogenesis is a relational process” (Dowdall, “Treasured,” 516). Dowall cites Jennifer S. Nelson’s concept of “feedback loops” where “the ‘perfect stage’ of symbiosis is “the steady state of iteration that reproduces the symbiotic system . . . indefinitely” (as quoted in Dowall, “Treasured,” 517). Dowall applies this technique to the relationships between humans and constructs, as when Akin “sees potential in human flaws and new chances at life instead of an imperative to death” or that Akin and Jodahs “embody the potential for ongoing transformation” (Dowall, “Treasured,” 517). Thus, “Butler positions human identity as something flexible and manifold” (Dowall, “Treasured,” 517). A central difference with Jodahs as a human-ooloi construct is that he is not in control of his own physical changes. Before his second metamorphosis, Jodahs describes his body devolving: “I wandered for three days, my body green, scaly and strange” (Imago, 88). At another point, “My fingers and toes became webbed on the third day. . . . My hair fell out . . . and my coloring changed to gray-green” (Imago, 69). As the first human-Oankali ooloi, Jodahs is a master at camouflage and altering his personality to please the other, yet these physical changes are not in his control. He discovers that his body cannot hold its shape; he needs to have the human species around him to prevent his own body from devolving. Butler underscores this important point by doubling the emphasis toward the end of the novel. Jodahs’s closest sibling, Aaor, also becomes a human-Oankali ooloi, and his experiences mirror those of Jodahs. When Aaor undergoes its metamorphosis, its body alters, turning into a “limbless slug” and Jodahs recognizes that “Aaor’s body was trying to commit suicide” (Imago, 158). The solution for both siblings is to find human mates. In Jodahs’s case, he follows a pair of humans for weeks. He initially lures them in by feeding them, and later heals the tumors covering their bodies. Jodahs then uses his own human mates to save Aaor’s life. The

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only solution for the dissolution of the human-ooloi construct is to stay close to humans. On Aaor’s case, “For a day and a half, the three of us (Jodahs, Tomas, and Jesusa) lay together, forcing Aaor’s body to do what it no longer wanted to do” (Imago, 159). The human mates, Thomas and Jesusa, introduce Aaor to their resister village. Their central malady is neurofibromatosis, the creation of body tumors, some of which become malignant. Jodahs previously healed the tumors of Tomas and Jesusa, and once Aaor meets humans in the resister village, he spends his time healing humans of these physical defects. Aaor does find his own human mates among the mountain resisters, which allows his body to maintain its structure. Butler is showing the extent to which communities with cultural difference need and depend upon each other. In the last few scenes of the text, Jodahs and Aaor gleefully realize they will be allowed to stay on Earth with humans willing to mate with constructs. We also discover that other human-ooloi constructs have been reported on different parts of the Earth. We know, through the experiences of Jodahs and Aaor, that human-ooloi constructs must mate with humans in order to survive. The siblings’ experience will aid these new human-ooloi constructs. However, the reader is left wondering if the levels of manipulation perpetrated on the humans actually allows for human choice. On one hand, this act can be seen as a purely capitalistic enterprise. Molly Wallace argues that the ooloi desire for human mates can also be read “as an expression of pure market desire—what happens when the genetic code meets the ‘semiotic logic of capitalism’” (Wallace, “Reading,” 117). Wallace argues that Jodahs’s incorporation of humans willing to mate with Oankali makes the Oankali culture and system supreme, leaving the races with a new hierarchy, with the Oankali at the top. Jodahs’s final act is to literally plant a new town that will grow into a ship, and be the means by which the willing hybrid species of human-constructs will travel into space. Butler gives us a powerful image of exploding fertility in the last lines, where Jodahs creates this new life: I chose a spot near the river. There I prepared the seed to go into the ground. I gave it a thick, nutritious coating, then brought it out of my body through my right sensory hand. I planted it deep in the rich soil of the riverbank. Seconds after I had expelled it, I felt it begin the tiny positioning movements of independent life. (Imago, 220)

This can be read as a positive origin story of a new creation, new life, and new possibilities. The other option Canavan articulates when he argues that “this pregnant moment is simultaneously an apocalyptic harbinger of global death: what grows from the seed will consume the entire ecosystem of Earth in

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the name of Oankali expansionism before departing in search of some other place to destroy and consume” (Canavan, Octavia, 118). Other critics agree that “all of Earth’s species will ultimately vanish, as the Oankali consume the planet” (Slonczewski, “Octavia,” 154). Indeed, the Oankali, under close scrutiny, embody what Joan Slonczewski describes as “an extension of some of humanity’s most extreme tendencies” (Slonczewski, “Octavia,” 154). Like Canavan, she argues that the Oankali’s desire to consume everything on the planet is as bad as human pollution of the ecosystem and the human hierarchical tendency toward violence. I would argue for something between the utopian and dystopian versions. I see Butler showing the possibility of both options. I believe that as much as Butler acknowledges the ravenous appetites of Oankali and humans, she also provides us with exceptions to the rules in her protagonists. We find this in Lilith, who, throughout the trilogy, remains steadfast in her quest for fairness and justice, in spite of her deep sadness at her complicity with the Oankali. Furthermore, Akin has countered the Oankali belief in the self-destructive nature of humans to the extent that he has gotten them to agree to allow humans to live on Mars, to re-create their own species. In Jodahs, we have a being complicit with the Oankali in his knowledge that his own humans are actually no match for the manipulative power of his species. When he contemplates his own need to mate with humans, Thomas and Jesusa, Jodahs muses about Thomas’s and Jesusa’s love and sacrifice of themselves for their own people, and wonders, “How could either of them mate with me, knowing what my people would do to theirs?” (Imago, 105). Jodahs does provide the quest for justice, making him a vital part of Lilith’s family with Akin. As a new being, each individual is called to move the marker of justice farther along. We observe these characters examine their own suffering and oppressive behavior and choose something else. The liminal protagonists Butler creates have a purpose larger than themselves. They show the benefits of embracing community in spite of difference, and in the process create space for greater freedoms because of their noble quest.

Chapter 4

Parables

Where the Xenogenesis series emphasizes the role of communities in Rites of Passage, the Parable series emphasizes mobile communities formed during journeys, made of the homeless and disenfranchised. The two “parable” series texts, The Parable of the Sower (1993) and The Parable of the Talents (1998), problematize the disempowerment of the poor and homeless by taking place in a not-so-futuristic America (2024), where Lauren Olamina, a young African woman, lives in a postapocalyptic world where everyone, except the few wealthy people living in gated communities, is a homeless scavenger. The protagonist has “hyperempathy,” a chemical condition that causes her to share all emotions, from the most pleasurable to the most painful, with those in her immediate vicinity. The small community she forms practices “Earthseed,” a religion of “change” that increases individual empowerment. These members also challenge US economic capitalism, because they, themselves, are the products of colonial disenfranchisement and are a mobile community. I use Victor Turner’s interpretation of the significance of Rites of Passage to explain the power of this anti-structural community. Turner argues that those on a journey or pilgrimage are between structures or states of being, and that they operate outside the established social order. A wandering person, through the process of liminality, may acquire the sacred status of the lowly. An example of this is a homeless or mysterious stranger who “restores ethical and legal equilibrium” to a community (Turner, The Ritual, 111). Here, the outsider or marginalized person may represent important humanistic values. In Parable of the Sower, the homeless protagonist, on a spiritual quest, creates a spiritual community of other homeless and disenfranchised individuals. In the first section of the text The Parable of the Sower, we learn that America has colonized Mars, is rampant with drugs, has destroyed the planetary ecosystem, and suffers from lack of water. Furthermore, communities have built walls to protect themselves from the homeless scavengers and drug addicts called “paints” who have an orgiastic experience by lighting fires. It 57

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is in this context of anxiety and fear that Lauren creates her religion based on adaptation and change. Called “The Book of the Living,” her philosophy creates a flexible framework based on “God is change.” A tenet of the belief is that “forethought” anticipates the necessary changes to come. The destiny of Earthseed sees outer space as the future of humanity. Movement, change, and migration are essential features of this religion created by the homeless on their journey. Lauren’s middle-class town of Robledo is falling into chaos. Although the community is surrounded by walls to keep out intruders, they break in with greater frequency, and the individuals living within the walls have rigid beliefs about religion and racial purity. The people in the town want to avoid the danger and violence coming, yet only Lauren and her father are preparing for the disaster to come by learning to shoot weapons and reading survivalist books. Others only react in fear rather than face the problem. For example, Mrs. Sims’s God is rigid and racist, and she shoots and kills herself rather than face the future. (Sower, 21). In fact, the voters respond out of fear by electing a conservative president, Donner, who eliminates basic outreach, such as the space program, environmental programs, and worker protection laws. For the first half of the text, Lauren’s personal transformation is internal, documented in her personal journal as prose and poetry. She does not verbally share her plans. In this way, Lauren is able to function both within a structured community yet operates very differently outside social structures in her personal writing. Her Robledo family participates in accepted religious and academic structures; her father is a Baptist minister, and both parents teach at a local university. Yet in her journals and inner life, Lauren formulates a belief system guided by planning for surviving the destruction of all she has known. Since her own beliefs have shaped her to adapt and anticipate the future, Lauren has insight that her community will be destroyed a year before it occurs. When Lauren’s gated community is eventually overrun by paints who burn the town and kill most of the people, she crosses the threshold and separates from what she has known. When she kills in self-defense, she experiences the rituals of death/rebirth because of her hyperempathy. Although everything is in chaos, liminality contrasts to the unstructured randomness of chaos, where chaos is random and leads to destruction. For example, the “paints,” who thrive on chaos and destruction, light fires and kill those they think represent the wealthy class. They are in opposition to the social structures they hate, yet are merely reactionary and love violence. They are not liminal persona, those who are transformed by the process of liminality as they separate from status markers, question norms and structures, and in the process work to improve society by eliminating oppressions.

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For each killing and each crossing, Lauren’s anti-structural religion, Earthseed, is a record of how she reshapes her identity. After the deaths of her brother Keith and her father, Lauren adopts her father’s identity and preaches her first sermon on Earthseed to her local community. She gives a lecture on “perseverance,” which is an important tenet of her belief system. She relates the parable of the “importunate widow” who demands justice in the face of great odds and overcomes resistance through sheer persistence (Sower, 124). This parable takes a female underdog who is successful through sheer willpower, creates a new identity as a hero for justice. This kind of belief in herself propels Lauren as she escapes her neighborhood destruction (Sower, 127). She initially shelters in a burned garage of a ruined house surrounded by garbage; here she embodies the grotesque body, defiling herself by covering her clothes and identity with dirt and filth. She emerges the next morning, as a liminal presence, dressed as a man, and as she crosses further thresholds, embraces identities as homeless poor, as killer, as good Samaritan, and finally, as the leader of the Earthseed community. Throughout both Parable texts, Lauren is fearless in facing hard truths arising in front of her. It is this courage that propels the action of the text and this kind of leadership is the powerful dynamic that creates the action. She moves from a lone survivalist to become a compassionate religious leader. She leads an emerging community traveling down the highway from the Los Angeles area toward Oregon. She treats the fellow travelers she chooses to join her group with respect, honesty, and clarity and without domination. The individual group members speak their emotions freely, and Lauren answers with honesty. Lauren then takes on the role of a survivalist leader as she determines where they will sleep and what they do. In its formation on the road, Lauren’s community is mobile, and this helps develop a community as the group is at risk and must be flexible and mindful of each other. Once the core community trusts each other, Lauren begins outreach to others, speaking to strangers on the beach (198), and helping those attacked (208), which attracts Bankole and other mature individuals who are drawn to a community who care about others. As the community itself grows, we see that they are able to attract good people who have been abused and are among the more vulnerable. That vulnerability itself is what makes it strong, because members of the community do not want to replicate the abuses they suffered. During this process they select two women whose father was a pimp (225), and Bankole takes care of a baby whose mother died (231). Lauren gets food for a mother and child who attach themselves to the group. Because this community is mobile and survivalist, Lauren’s beliefs make sense to them. They need each other for protection and need to have values they can agree to follow. There is a healthy skepticism in this group because they question the values of Earthseed, constantly interrogating the values

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presented for signs of oppression. Turner discusses how individuals who are homeless or outlaws have major roles in myths and tales of important values, such as “robbing from the rich to give to the poor” is an attempt to remove class oppressions. The liminal persona of this type often embodies the character of communitas in relating to individuals (Turner, The Ritual, 111). Lauren’s hyperempathy adds an extra layer of sensitivity to the community, since she feels the emotions of others. She discovers several people within her new community who are also “sharers.” This vulnerability creates an especially mindful mindset within the community. We see that early on, Lauren is writing the philosophy of Earthseed based upon her own lived experiences. Thus, she is thinks outside the social structure. The God she addresses has no gender, and her relationship with her God is based on a partnership and interaction. Lauren writes: “Why is the universe?/To shape God/Why is God; To shape the universe” (Sower, 72). One’s universe is based on one’s participation in the creation of it. Earthseed appears based on the best practices of several religions. Free will and self-determination are essential factors. Lauren writes, “All that you touch,’ You change/All that you Change’ Changes you./The only lasting truth/Is Change. God/Is Change” (73). Earthseed and liminality intersect in that both are outside established social structures. Where liminality causes one to go across thresholds and through death/life experiences on a metaphoric and symbolic level, Earthseed gives recommendations for actively preparing for the changes coming and gives advice on how to embrace these changes rather than resist them. Liminality has to do with change caused by a rejection of oppressive, established structures, involving a process of crossing thresholds. Earthseed asks each individual to be an active agent in the process of change. Lauren and her survivors will respond to their experiences in their everyday lives. Some events can be prepared for, which will enable the believer to anticipate better the next time. Both liminality and Earthseed embody humanistic principles, and in the process of both, there is a concern for a community where all are equal and all are striving for fairness and equality. Lauren’s lover Bankole sums it up best when he says, “It sounds like some combination of Buddhism, existentialism, Sufism, and I don’t know what else” (Sower, 239–40). Buddhism doesn’t make a god of the concept of change, but the impermanence of everything is a basic Buddhist principle. For example, the Buddha spent the last forty-five years of his life teaching lessons of acceptance, submission, and respect for all people, regardless of race, sex, age, and class. The goal was to establish a principle where all are equal and where humility is strength. In a like manner, Gandhi developed the doctrine of nonviolence and truth and became a powerful political and economic leader (Turner, The Ritual, 197). In the Christian tradition there are individuals such as the Wesleys, with the belief of plain living and high thinking, as well as Saint Francis, and the Quaker George

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Fox, emphasizing a simple, unostentatious lifestyle without distinctions of worldly status. Lauren explains that the basic principles of Earthseed “are to learn to shape God with forethought, care, and work; to educate and benefit their community, their families, and themselves, and to contribute to the fulfillment of the Destiny” (Sower, 240). Lauren’s shift from her father’s Baptist religion is a critique of that religion. She removes the hierarchy of the established church, where God is male and has a list of rules cut in stone. For fundamentalist Christians, straying from the rule constitutes sin, and the sinner deserves punishment. In contrast, there is no fear in Earthseed, no sin, and no punishment from God. At the end of Parable of the Sower, there is a return to structure as they create an Earthseed community on Bankole’s land. This is an ongoing liminal space, and they will be free to continually shape their own realities and destinies. Because they have all suffered under racial and gendered oppressions in society, individuals within the community are all wounded, and that suffering is recognized and accepted. Healing rituals such as the planting of trees surround that pain. Butler ends Parable of the Sower with a ritual of healing. So today we remembered the friends and the family members we’ve lost. We spoke our individual memories and quote Bible Passages, Earthseed verses, and bits of songs and poems that were favorites of the living or the dead. Then we buried our dead and we planted oak trees. Afterward, we sat together and talked and ate a meal and decided to call this place Acorn. (Sower, 298–99)

There is freedom and healing in this ritual, where the words spoken are freely chosen from many sources, and no particular source is praised above the others. We see healing in the behavior of closure and recognition of loss. There is the ritual of planting oak trees as a recognition of a future life-affirming symbol. There is a communal meal, a sharing of food with each other, and a community decision about the name of the place. This is the kind of community that Butler advocates; it promotes the survival of a community that does not oppress, that is linked by a common respect. The Earthseed followers are oppressed only by their past experiences, from which they are in the process of healing. We have seen Lauren perform the beliefs of Earthseed by acting out their very principles, so we know that they are sound principles. Earthseed will continue to embrace change every day, and the community

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will observe these changes with honesty and courage as they adapt and embrace them. This appears to be the solution to Butler’s concern with power and hierarchical oppressions. She has created an alternative system based on change. This novel has removed materialism and capitalism from the core values. There is an acceptance of hybridity and change. The vision present in Parable of the Sower that Earthseed’s destiny is to exist among the stars becomes a reality in Parable of the Talents. In fact, some critics find Talents to be “a sustained reconsideration of the commitments of the first novel” (Canavan, Octavia, 134). The reason is posed as a recurring question that wonders how space exploration is viable, given the myriad of problems existing on planet earth (Canavan 134). Yet, that is the very conclusion of Talents. Lauren uses her wealth to fulfill the Earthseed Destiny by financing “the first shuttles [leaving] for the first starship assembled partly on the Moon and partly in orbit” with Justin Gilchrist on the ship, whom we first meet in Sower (Talents, 363). Butler leaves us with Lauren’s final journal entry about her legacy, “I have not given them heaven, but I’ve helped them give themselves the heavens. I can’t give them individual immortality, but I’ve helped them to give our species its only chance at immortality. I’ve helped them to the next stage of growth” (Talents, 363). Most significantly, NASA itself has reiterated Octavia Butler’s vision, when, on February 18, 2021, the Mars Rover Perseverance touched down on Mars, and NASA named that site the “Octavia E. Butler Landing.” Thus Earthseed, with the aid of scientists, and through the lens of Octavia Butler, has found a home among the stars. Butler would have been proud of the name Perseverance, since that was the parable Lauren spoke about at her father’s memorial service, and since that is one of the essential beliefs of Earthseed. The very first writing of Earthseed in Parable of the Sower reads: Prodigy is, at its essence, adaptability and persistent positive obsession. Without persistence what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all. (Sower, 1)

Butler’s definition of “persistent positive obsession” is another phrase for Perseverance. This is a far better name than that of the first starship that actually takes off at the end of Talents, named Christopher Columbus, over Lauren’s objections. That carries with it a reference to empire and colonization, as well as the historical confusion about where one has actually landed or the actual identities of the individuals one may encounter on this new frontier. Butler thus leaves us with a future that will undoubtedly be confounded by the mistakes of the past. In an interview with Butler, however, she reveals her own conflicts about the future. Butler argues that although the Acorn

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community represents the most logical way to halt the damage we’re doing to the Earth, she acknowledges that Lauren’s truth is only part of the answer (Canavan, Octavia, 136). In Parable of the Talents, betrayals and poor communication darken the differing viewpoints created by using multiple of voices. The text is primarily narrated by Lauren’s daughter, Larkin, who was taken from Lauren shortly after birth and raised in a fundamentalist home. She spends her life knowing her Uncle Marcus, Lauren’s brother, who never tells Lauren throughout the volume that he knows her daughter and where she lives. This is an ultimate betrayal, since Marcus knows that Lauren’s primary focus is trying to find and communicate with her daughter. The other voices in the text include Lauren and Bankole’s journals. We see through Larkin’s commentary how she has been lied to and deceived by the Christian America beliefs, but also by her uncle Marcus, who tells Larkin that Lauren was killed at Acorn. We see the flaws of humanity on full display. Larkin’s perspective is that of the fundamentalist view and although Lauren and Larkin do meet, they never actually communicate on a very deep level. Larkin was raised by the Alexandra family, who never actually loved her, and of whom Larken herself has spent her life being criticized (239). Her “mother,” Kayce, was very rigid, with what appears to be a Puritan ethic. She was punished by her family for creating mask stories (294). Larkin is aware that her family doesn’t love her, yet she does not see that her own views are shaped by Marcus, and Christian America’s view of Lauren. A background in patriarchal Christianity causes Marcus to fight Earthseed from the beginning. Lauren allows him to join her community and to preach the Bible as he sees fit, yet members of the Earthseed community debate with him, and he loses every debate since the Earthseed community shows him the contradictions in the Bible. Marcus is also a follower of Jarret, because Jarret combines religion and politics to achieve great power. At the heart of the fundamentalism of Christian America is fear, a primary shaper of human thought and action. The Christian America movement in the text reflects the often intolerant and narrow view of Christian groups in America today. Philip H. Jos gives insight into Marcus’s behavior: Marc sees his family killed when he is fourteen and endures enslavement and prostitution. The idea that God is change does not provide him what he needs to keep an overwhelming sense of vulnerability and fear at bay. Marc simply must believe in an unchanging God who will heal all wounds in the next life. (Jos “Fear” 411)

This is not to say that Marcus’s response to his violence is the only response possible, but it is a plausible response. The God of religious fundamentalism

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is seen as the lawgiver, as recorded in the Bible, and following God’s word is all that is necessary to enter into his Kingdom. God is portrayed as the embodiment of hierarchy: absolutely male, omnipotent, and moral and ethical judge. Believers are to sit in fear of his negative judgment, which is sometimes expressed as wrath. This religion is based on one’s faith in the Bible and commandments. There is a belief in things that cannot be seen. In contrast, Lauren’s religion is based on scientific evidence, such as things that are visible, that occur in life, thus they can be tested and explored. This is accompanied in Earthseed by a rigorous critical analysis of the participants. These two religions are a contrast between the authoritarianism of the patriarchal world and the liminal world of creative possibilities. Lauren’s Earthseed is borne out of a courageous worldview, where there is no safe or secure lawgiver to tell one what to do. In contrast, it is based on a practical partnership with reality, where one faces what is fearful, and makes insightful choices. Lauren, through the poetry of Earthseed lays out the dangers of ignorance: Beware. Ignorance Protects itself. Ignorance Promotes suspicion. Suspicion Engenders fear. Fear quails, Irrational and blind, Or fear looms, Defiant and closed. Blind, closed, Suspicious, afraid, Ignorance Protects itself, And protected, Ignorance grows. (Talents, 225)

Ignorance operates in contrast to Earthseed. “God is Change” is a challenge to the believer to respond with creativity and insight, which brings wisdom. Rather than taking full credit for the belief system, Lauren insists that the truths of her belief “existed somewhere before I found them and put them together. They were in the patterns of history, in science philosophy, religion, or literature” (Talents, 138). Lauren argues that rather than rigid, “God is Pliable—Trickster, Teacher, Chaos. Clay. God exists to be shaped. God is Change. This is the literal truth. God can’t be resisted or stopped but can be shaped and focused” (Sower, 22). This is a call for living in the present and for taking responsibility for one’s life, in contrast to mindlessly following a

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list of commands. It is a concept of being an active partner with God, rather than simply believing that God exists. In fact, Earthseed followers participate with God in their lives. It is clear, however, that members of the community do not need to follow certain beliefs. The members share in a communal life, and in the education of the community. Skeptics are welcomed, including Marcus. This implies an active partnership with God in contrast to the idea of doing “good work” to please a distant God who will make final judgments on every single aspect of one’s behavior. This is also in contrast to Lauren’s father’s Baptist faith. The God of Earthseed is not concerned with heavenly reward; instead, individuals are required to be participate actively in their lives here and now. This God asks people to accept responsibility for their own circumstances and to pay attention to ways they might improving those circumstances. This is also denying the politics of victimization with a belief in one own’s agency. Clarence W. Tweedy argues that Lauren’s Earthseed is thus similar to the “call and response” of African American spirituality, where the audience participates in the shaping of the sermon by participating interactively (Tweedy, “The Anointed,” 7). Thus, he argues, there is a link to Black theology. For example, during the gatherings, individuals are speaking, and “others repeated in soft voices, ‘God is Change. Shape God.’ Habits of repetition and response have grown up almost without prompting among us” (Talents, 58). Hampton further argues that Butler’s use of religion” encourages readers to question social values that mark marginalized bodies” (Hampton, Changing, 85). He uses the Black Church as a specific example that has shaped itself according to the needs of the Black community. Hampton claims that as the bodies move across space, “their treatment and value also shifts depending on their ability to adapt. It is a body’s hybridity that allows it to become valuable as a liberated subject” (101–2). He also argues that in not using a gender for God, Butler is making religion more democratic and establishes a sense of equality between men and women (85). Lauren continues her liminal position in Talents since she represents anti-structure, a belief system that calls for a freedom of identity in contrast to the limiting and controlling Christian America of Jarret. Lauren remains a loving persona, finding her way through systems that limit and control. Christian America initially sues Lauren, who countersues, and then CA drops the suit to settle with her (Talents, 355). This provides Lauren with the money necessary to pursue the destiny of Earthseed. In Parable of the Talents, there is a seventeen-month enslavement of the Acorn residents by Christian America terrorists who rename it “Camp Christian” and impose their rigid doctrines. Acorn is invaded by Christian fundamentalists who forcibly enslave Lauren and her mainly Black and Latinx community. This enslavement is illegal, but allowed to happen, along

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with confiscating their personal property, separating married couples, and instituting forced unpaid labor and sexual exploitation. It is justified because slavery is equated with rehabilitation and welfare, in the same way that it is justified in capitalist labor supply chain as employment. Talents also presents the incident of forced enslavement for Lauren and Earthseed believers of Acorn. The religious fundamentalists of Christian America enslave the community, which is made up of primarily mixed-race people, some who have previously lived under enslaved conditions during their lifetimes. Even though this enslavement is not legal, nor is the theft of their property, nor collaring and rape of free individuals, the slavers believe it is justified because since those enslaved were living lives antithetical to the extreme religious fundamentalism that has overtaken the country. Through planning and foresight and an act of nature, Lauren and Acorn residents become free again, yet the community disperses until the end of the novel, when Lauren brings many members back together when Earthseed has reinstated itself. The versions of slavery brought into the present in these two texts reveal the systemic oppressive hierarchies within US structures. These slave narratives reoccur, especially right after the end of Sower, when Butler almost imagines a utopic version of community, which reinforces the struggles of the permanent underclass of disenfranchised people of color. This is the recognition Butler wishes to achieve. Lauren’s movement north can be a retelling of the narrative of enslaved people escaping to the North, as well as current narratives of immigrants escaping north and attempting to cross the US border. This is part of the larger narrative that Butler is undercutting. Undergirding all of these narratives is a need for survival and a belief in capitalism, which is ironically the cause of enslavement in the first place. Patricia Hodge positions this in terms of dystopias and utopias when she writes that this “brings to the foreground the reality of the existence of dystopian elements that sustain the utopia of a capitalist economy of unlimited choices” (Hodge, “Contemporary,” 4). The most extreme example is that of Mary and Allie, a lesbian Earthseed couple who get turned in by Acorn members to the authorities of Camp Christian after a sermon on the depravity of unnatural types of sexuality. The punishment for this same-sex love is to be lashed electronically over and over, until Mary dies. The violence of this death is in stunning contrast to the sweet love these two have found after a lifetime of suffering, and makes the killing of the Camp Christian slavers appear necessary. What appears to save Lauren is her commitment to her belief in Earthseed, and she remains loyal to her original Earthseed community from Sower. Lauren continues to find individuals who listen and believe in her philosophy. She also keeps in touch with the earlier community and helps them. For example, she helps Allie and Justin Gilchrist move to Portland, and she finds a home for Travis and Natividad (Talents, 348). She also convinces Harry to join them. In Portland,

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she is able to bring her group back together. She continues to conducts workshops on her religion. She is also always meeting new people, and is a magnet for others. Lauren is always trying to help others. This is set in contrast to Larkin and Marcus, living under the rigid structure of Christian America, who are both distrustful, and are operating under lies. Lauren meets a women, Len, and begins conducting workshops with her. (351). Thus, Lauren is able to maintain an anti-structural community within a larger, rigid, social structure. Lauren functions successfully as a liminal persona within a system that is oppressive and out to destroy her freedom. Lauren is successful within the system, accusing Jarrett of oppressive practices and winning. She uses the law to protect her beliefs and those of her followers. She is able to maintain her liminal status. She experiences both community and communitas. Lauren has an active, rather than passive, belief that shows itself in political activism, which requires hope born of looking at possibilities, and being willing to work through the difficulties. Through the character of Lauren, Butler shows how a liminal persona and a liminal community can operate within an oppressive system and use the legal system, the current system of justice, to maintain its freedom and identity. The liminal persona is exalted for simplicity and truth and exposes the systemic evils caused by both a hyper-capitalist economy as well as the forms of slavery re-created in that economy. Sower shows contemporary forms of slavery that “exploit populations for labor with the hyper-capitalist takeover of democracy” (Hodge, “Contemporary,” 2). This explains why, when Lauren first meets Travis and Natividad, she compares them to enslaved people in the antebellum era, because they were domestically employed in a white household. Travis’s mother was employed in the same household, making the family permanently inherited property. Travis reveals that his mother would sneak books from her employer’s library. Lauren thinks, “Oh course. Slaves did that two hundred years ago” (Sower, 218). Lauren then meets Emery and Grayson, fugitive debt-slaves and learns of their physical and psychological torment. Lauren had previously just had an historical notion of this, yet comes to understand that “cities controlled by big companies are old hat in science fiction” (Sower, 123). Lauren eventually comes to realize that the institution of slavery has been metamorphosing throughout modern history under the shadow of late capitalism. Debt slavery has become a reality through the state-capitalist nexus given the disintegration of labor, and state, and federal laws. Butler points to the continuation of slavery by linking chattel slavery with both historical capitalism and contemporary global economic slavery. Her friend and lover, Bankole, tells Lauren that slavery always existed in different forms, when her associations with the ex–debt slaves causes her to think about the reappearance of slavery. Bankole argues that “None of this is new” (Sower, 292).

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Kevin Bales brings this concept into the present when he says that “There are more slaves alive today than all the people stolen from African in the time of the transatlantic slave trade” (Bales, “Disposable,” 9). In 2017 the International Labor Organization stated that there are an estimated 40.3 million modern slaves in the world, with a large section enslaved in forced labor in both private and public sections, held in debt bondage and exploited in forced labor imposed by state authorities (Bales, “Disposable,” 9–11). At one point in Parable of the Sower, Lauren finds her brother Marcus as a shackled slave, put up for sale. In a twisted reworking of history, Lauren buys her brother in a private slave auction, thus forcing her to recognize that modern types of slavery are not new, but are instead current versions of an institution that constantly metamorphoses under capitalist needs of the time. The Parable texts function as a liminal mirror to expose both the systemic evils caused by a hyper-capitalist economy as well as the forms of slavery re-created in that economy. The text shows contemporary forms of slavery to “exploit populations for labor with the hyper-capitalist takeover of democracy” (Hodge, “Contemporary,” 2). Butler makes it clear that the acceptance of distancing from slavery can blind us to the various forms in which it persists today. Slavery has evolved from the transatlantic trade and plantations to global trafficking and prostitution, including warehouses in “third-world” nations, through the process of indentured slavery, bonded labor in India and Pakistan, and immigrant sweatshops in Los Angeles and New York. Butler shows how modern slavery involves a re-coding of race by assimilating mainly the underprivileged, non-white population into a pool of labor through economic coercion. Butler also makes it clear that there is a correlation between race and poverty that has been perpetuated by a capitalist system with its roots in colonialism and slavery. Thus, Butler uncovers how the institution of slavery now includes new notions of race in a multiracial world to “make America great again” (Talents, 31). Today the journey is a contemporary myth of freedom in America that awaits the immigrant from the poorer periphery nations inhabited mainly by those dark-skinned populations that were once enslaved or colonized. The large-scale migration is reminiscent of the transport of millions of African slaves across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World. Butler is claiming that the ideology of racial superiority that sustained colonialism and capitalism has cemented itself in contemporary unequal global political, economic relationships. She illustrates this through her description of the crowd of people, of disposable labor, travelling as a “heterogeneous mass—black and white, Asian and Latin” (Talents, 176). The connection is clear that the utopia of a capitalist economy of unlimited choices does not exist and has never existed. Butler also incriminates late capitalism for its role in sustaining slavery in both Sower and Talents. As the economy rapidly declines, multinational

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conglomerates take over entire cities, privatizing them and using the population as a labor source. Debt slavery become a reality through the statecapitalist nexus given the disintegration of labor, and state and federal laws. Butler points to the continuation of slavery by linking chattel slavery with both historical capitalism and contemporary global economic slavery. Butler is asserting that twenty-first-century slavery was not born in a vacuum, but is part of a linear historical trajectory where it manifests itself in new forms. For some of these very reasons, and against the emphasis on capitalism and materialism in American society, US homelessness and tent encampments have become a phenomenon in the last several decades. Some arose out of protests such as the Occupy Wall Street campaign of 2011, a movement challenging the shared ownership of the means of production within capitalism. Yet there are more permanent anti-structural tent communities that create alternative self-help communities, and some are coopted by state and market actors. The National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH) Tent Cities in America: A Pacific Coast Report, 2010, discussed by Manuel Lutz, finds that tent communities have evolved into organized and stabilized communities in order to serve unhoused people; these tent communities organize makeshift shelters to seek the benefits of community, including security, safety, and human exchange. I compare the homeless communities in the Parable series to current studies of homeless communities and tent cities such as “Dignity Village” in Portland, Oregon; “Safe Ground” in Sacramento, California; and “Camp Quixote” in Olympia, Washington. I refer specifically to Manuel Lutz’s article, “Uncommon Claims to the Commons: Homeless Tent Cities in the US” to analyze ways residents of these encampments empower and support each other emotionally and physically. The mobile and homeless communities and the anti-structural establishment of Acorn on Bankole’s land, and the success of the tent communities depends upon resisting the colonial agenda through mobility and lack of property ownership. These homeless communities set up their own rules and code of conduct to create a social order and to argue in favor of the principles of grassroots democracy and collective decision-making. Their unhoused lifestyle is also a form of protest in a society where land is treated as a commodity and where the non-propertied are sometimes governed in dehumanizing ways. Theorists of homelessness, Rowe and Wolch, for example, find that “anticipation in the informal communities may actually increase individual choice and self-determination and provide access to resources” (Rowe, “Social,” 196). Each of these cities has between sixty and one hundred residents. They have set up their own rules and codes of conduct to create social order (NCH Tent Cities in America). These rules define the rights and duties of each individual who becomes a resident ranging from acceptance of basic mutual respect, nonviolence, prohibition of

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drugs, and mandatory security shifts (Sparks, “As Much”). Other governing principles include: grassroots democracy for collective decision-making, and daily, weekly, or monthly mandatory assemblies. These assemblies decide all aspects of community life in consensus or by majority vote. There are leaders called “elders,” an elaborate division of labor with functions such as “head of security,” “tent master, “donations master,” and “arbitrator” (Lutz, “Uncommon”). Often these are rotating positions, and voted on by the collective. Their identity politics is not ideological or cultural, but rather based on shared needs and the maintenance of their common shelter resource. Many people living in tent communities are not revolutionaries, but rather abide by phrases such as “Tent city is family; this is home” (Lutz, “Uncommon”) Communal values are followed and renewed continuously. Some camps have written rules that need to be learned on a daily basis, reinforcing how to become a “good camper.” There is an emphasis on mutual respect and personal freedom, in contrast to the hierarchical and often demeaning routines of the shelter industry where homeless individuals have to justify themselves on a constant basis. There may also be sanctions imposed on campers in order to enforce the social order. These include being banned from the camp, on either a temporary or permanent basis. Social tensions and outbursts culminating in sanctions often tear heavily on the social fabric of the camps. Tent communities provide a structure for a more self-determined life of empowerment, engagement, and protest. The kind of camp that Lauren Olamina established as Acorn is similar in that there are communal rules that are agreed upon and voted upon, and duties are performed by each member. In Parable of the Talents, there are actions that unify the community, such as when families plant trees in memory of the dead, and when the entire community gathers to discuss solutions to problems in the community (Talents, 57, 65). Furthermore, each member of the community takes a turn at standing “watch” periodically at night. Lauren lays out the requirements for the community: Everyone works here, kids and adults. You’ll help in the fields, help with the animals, help maintain the school and the grounds, help do some building. . . . There are other jobs—building furniture, making tools trading at street markets, scavenging. You’ll be free to choose something you like. And you’ll go to school. (Talents, 72)

Other requirements including “You’ll come to Gathering every week” and everyone will share the profit from the sale of the crop . . . after someone has been a member for a year” (Talents, 72). My analysis reveals the empowerment found in breaking with social structures as a way to empower the self, to destabilize hierarchies, and to expose

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social and economic injustices, through Victor Turner’s theories of liminality, which illuminate the integrity of anti-structural communities. Discussed alongside Octavia E. Butler’s Parable texts, we see fictional and real communities positioning the power of the poor and homeless through the leadership and ethical models of the disenfranchised. In general, both groups reveal that a self-determined group of people is better than those externally managed.

Chapter 5

Fledgling1‌‌

The protagonist of the Parable series, Lauren Olamina, and Shori Matthews, the protagonist of Butler’s last published novel, Fledgling, both operate in a wider society of conservative hierarchical values. Both young Black women use the liminal process to separate from these social structures and become liminal leaders. Where Lauren must struggle against an extreme religious/ political mindset, Shori is fighting amnesia as well as racism within her own community. Both women end up successful through the use of the liminal process where they take on new identities and cross thresholds as they gradually become leaders of their own communities. Where Lauren becomes the spiritual leader of humans who travel to outer space at the end of the novel, Shori is a mixed-race vampire fighting for the integrity of her DNA who signifies the emergence of a race of Black and mixed-race vampires. Others note that both young women suffer from disabilities, such as Shori’s total memory loss and Lauren’s hyperempathy, and both are challenging a powerful white male hierarchy (Canavan, Octavia, 163, and Hampton, Changing, 117). Octavia Butler’s final science fiction novel, Fledgling (2005), explores ways her liminar protagonist, Shori, undergoes ritualized transformations while in exile from her home community. During this process, she engages in psychological, physical, political, and social transitions through what Victor Turner and Mikhail Bakhtin would describe as carnivalesque identities and communities. Shori, the lost child of an ancient species of near immortals who live in dark symbiosis with humans, produces subversive and grotesque sites of home and family in this process. In a state of separation and amnesia, Shori awakens outside her gated community and moves back and forth over metaphoric thresholds. She reverses hierarchical race and gender positions as she creates a world that opposes traditional vampire lore and the American family. Furthermore, Shori’s act of “biting” victims for their blood feeds them a venom that has physical and psychic healing properties, thus creating a grotesque communitas relationship. 73

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Victor Turner’s understanding of the concept of liminality and the transformations that occur when one separates from social structures and shifts the realm of anti-structural liminality is crucial to any reading of Octavia E. Butler’s novels, but especially for her final science fiction novel, Fledgling (2005). Liminality occurs when individuals oppose social and political structures that constrain their personal freedom and growth. Thus, they seek liminal spaces and places that generate a sense of liberty and creativity and that offer the potential for social and political change and renewal. Much of Fledgling is a quest narrative, and, on the level of genre, Butler mixes the vampire narrative, the Gothic, and the slave narrative with science fiction, under the umbrella of the bildungsroman, as Shori learns about herself, her ontology, her family, and her community. The quest, through the lens of the liminal process and the bildungsroman, sees her trying to recover her individual memories as well as her familial and community relationships. She strives to discover why her maternal and paternal villages were destroyed and many of her family members killed. Her search for her identity is part of a larger search for genealogical and communal connection and history. As a Black female vampire, Shori’s liminal identity enables her to question and subvert her Black female agency outside a normative white and male structural presence. Fledgling focuses on Shori, a fifty-three-year-old woman who appears to be ten years old. The novel opens with Shori waking with amnesia, and across the course of the novel, she strives to recover her memory. The Ina vampires drink blood to survive and, for this purpose, form relationships with four or five humans who then become “symbionts” in order to limit draining too much blood from any one human. The venom produced during this bite is of great benefit to the humans, because it contains powerful immunity-boosting properties and extends human life up to two centuries. Shori’s family alters her DNA by mating a Caucasian Ina vampire with an African American, thus creating a singular African American Ina vampire in a Caucasian culture. Shori’s hybridized, progressive DNA ironically results in the more highly valued darker skin, which ultimately saves Shori’s life and the lives of some of her relatives. Some Ina vampires praise the power of Shori’s diversity, as one Ina argues: “They thought mixing human genes with ours would weaken us. You proved them very wrong” (Fledgling, 231). The Silk family, however, oppose the hybridic mutation because they believe it ruins the purity of the Ina vampire race, and members of this family attempt to annihilate Shori and her kind. During her quest, personal memory and cultural memory are important, as is the ability to record it. Bound with this is a quest for justice—for the recognition of human/racial equality. The quest for justice, aided by Shori’s DNA, empowers Shori to locate those responsible for the deaths of her

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matriarchal and patriarchal families. The trial in the last third of the text helps Shori achieve justice, as determined by the Council of Seven, through a form of trial by jury. The Council finds the Silk family guilty of the murders when a Silk family member also kills Shori’s symbiont, Theodora, to prevent Shori from testifying. As punishment, the Silk sons are forced to reside with Ina families, which leads to the eradication of their family name. Butler’s chief aesthetic and cultural mode allows her to operate in the synthetic space between a number of racial, cultural, and gender constructs. Interpretations of Fledgling focus on Shori’s belonging to various race, class, gender, and species citizenships rather than on the power of the liminal spaces operating between these citizenships. I argue that it is the liminal process the protagonist follows as she belongs to, then ritualistically breaks from, that allows her to grow and participate in psychological and social transitions that transcend constricting social power structures. Susana M. Morris examines the authorial role of Butler herself as a writer “of color,” explicating the social limitations of African Americans historically. Other approaches to Fledgling, such as those by Ali Brox and Pramod Naya, emphasize the racial otherness of the vampire figure, as one who embodies the fears and anxieties of society. Brox argues that this “Third Space” of Shori’s identity causes her to “emerge as the symbol of change” (Brox, “Every,” 399). Naya moves beyond racial configurations altogether as he positions the text within a “post-humanist” society where the protagonist coevolves through her own biological network (Nya, “A New Biological,” 796), reminiscent of the “Third Space” of which Homi Bhabha writes in The Location of Culture, a space of instability, uncertainty and ambivalence. Stephanie Smith argues that Butler’s use of violence toward Shori’s Black body reinforces the experiences of enslaved people in America, and I extend her argument by stating that Shori’s amnesia reflects the unrecorded and ignored memories of those enslaved people. This chapter aligns most closely with Marty Fink’s, as he stresses the concept of a third space: that of the interrelationship between humans and vampires. This space, he argues, offers the most comprehensive and productive application of ways the protagonist corresponds to an identity based on social norms and structures. Fink argues for the addictive nature of these relationships as similar to addictive human relationships. Like Fink, I examine Shori’s identity in relationship to her symbionts, yet, unlike Fink, I do not see the relationship as limited to addiction. but rather, as a form of community. Furthermore, I focus on Shori’s liminal identity as a force of change in relation to the social, political, and personal structures of racism, sexism, and xenophobia that operate in the text. I assert that Turner’s theoretical concept of liminality clarifies the ways that social structures are restrictive. I further contend that the liminal process best governs the thresholds and ritual

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experiences that allow Shori to determine a complex sense of a restructured self. Her newly formed identity is then ready to merge back to a social structure at the end of the novel and to alter that structure as she merges with it. It is the liminal experience that offers the most useful medium for exploring Shori’s quest and her struggle against racial oppression and genocide. Butler’s intergeneric mode destabilizes Fledgling, allowing it to exist in a liminal space between several literary, historic, and religious narratives. Shori’s early behavior in Fledgling reflects her status in the Bakhtinian cosmic terror: The pain of my hunger won over all my other pain. I discovered that I was strong in spite of all the things that were wrong with me. I seized the animal. It fought me, tore at me, struggled to escape, but I had it. I clung to it, rode it, found its throat, tasted its blood, smelled its terror. I tore at its throat with my teeth until it collapsed. Then, at last, I fed, gorged myself on the fresh meat that I needed. (Fledgling, 2)

After waking and discovering that she has amnesia, Shori kills the first human she comes across by ripping him apart, and when she meets her first human partner, Wright, she bites him orgiastically and then has sex with him. Shori has become part of the lowest human form—the base material world—where, according to Bakhtin, a new birth can take place. In Shori’s degraded state, the “confines of the body and the outer world” are exaggerated and distorted in order to make way for a new identity (Bakhtin, Rabelais, 19). Narrative genre is another way Butler posits her discourse both within, as well as outside, vampire lore. References to vampires and the walking dead have been recorded from the earliest civilizations. The most famous early vampire narrative is Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), which references the evil supernatural dead in late nineteenth-century England. The text of Fledgling combines and recombines these conflicting narrative genres in ways that both break and speak back to traditional genres. By presenting, then deconstructing, elements of the vampire genre, the text disrupts the reader’s sense of narrative stability and creates a liminal space of indeterminacy. Thus, the text itself demonstrates the failure of binary thinking and presents a dynamic approach to narrative discourse. It becomes a liminal space where, in the absence of clearly demarcated narrative directives, the reader participates in a monstrous phenomenology, reading monstrous texts, where monsters themselves are deconstructed, adapted, and “Frankenstein-ed” together. Lynette James argues that Butler’s Fledgling complicates social concerns such as “racism, sexism, xenophobia” and other forms of sexual expression in ways that render Bram Stoker’s Dracula simplistic. In Butler’s vampire world, vampires are born vampires; they are not humans who transform into

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a vampire through a bite. Stoker’s Count Dracula is a figure of destruction, violence, and domination, occasionally able to pass as human in his attempt to hunt and convert human prey. In contrast, Butler’s vampires are biologically born into their species rather than attacked and transformed by other vampires. Sexuality in Dracula is seen as desecration, not because the titular vampire is polygamous and has three wives but, rather, because his attempts to seduce a married human woman into his coven monstrously violates social ethics surrounding sex. Sexuality is a natural act in Butler’s world, where partners cross gender and species boundaries. The literary vampire genre has origins in Germany in the eighteenth century and in England in the nineteenth century. John Williams Polidori’s famous story “The Vampyre” was cribbed from Lord Byron. James Robinson Planché wrote The Vampire in 1820, and, by the nineteenth century, vampires had appeared in the British and continental cultural psyches. Later in the century, Karl Marx uses the vampiric to reference the bourgeoisie economic predation of the working class; Conan Doyle wrote “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire,” and T. S. Eliot includes a vampirish banker in The Waste Land. Ina vampires live in same-sex communities and are partnered with human symbionts whose lives are dependent upon them. Shori attempts to limit her coercion over humans in that she is careful with how much blood she draws; she also shows empathy for her human symbionts. Finally, Shori hopes to avoid conflict whenever possible once she discovers that she can kill. Shori’s significant differences from the conventional vampire narrative serve to make her a moral, conscientious, and stronger being in her literary liminality in the service of liberating others in her society. Shori’s father, Iosif, also positions Ina vampire life outside the margins of traditional vampire literary and cultural legend. For example, Butler’s vampires deviate from conventional representations superficially: they are not afraid of garlic, mirrors, holy water, and crucifixes. Iosef argues that books and movies have the vampire myth wrong, especially of vampires living in the country, and he argues: “Vampires in books and movies usually seem to be trying to kill people or trying to turn them into vampires. Since we don’t do either of those things, we don’t need cities” (Fledgling, 69–70). Iosef further explains that the original myth of vampires attacking humans occurred because, when Ina were killed and buried, their bodies regenerated underground, and they “came out of our graves confused, mad with hunger” to attack, bite, and even kill humans; this behavior caused humans to believe they were able to walk about as the Undead” (Fledgling, 189). In another example, Shori and her first human symbiont, Wright, return to a destroyed all-female community where Shori lived with her mother and other females. There they find a crucifix, and Shori’s behavior reverses the vampire myth

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forewarning the touch of a silver crucifix. The sight of the crucifix does not stir any memories in Shori; in fact, she touches it and finds it absolutely meaningless, as Wright explains: “You should not only be afraid of it but it should burn your skin if it touches you” (Fledgling, 60). Therefore, Butler’s Ina vampires operate outside the traditional vampire genre on multiple fundamental levels. Part of Shori’s quest in the novel is to find a home, and she states many times that “I wanted that—a home. . . . That felt right, felt good” (Fledgling, 127). Finding a home is complex in this novel, as Butler complicates “home” by situating Ina vampires outside both the traditional vampire genre and twentieth-century human history. Butler likens the Ina vampires’ degraded social and political status to that of other homeless and racially persecuted groups, such as the Jewish population during World War II and the African American population during the global slave trade from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The reader discovers that Shori’s Ina family originates in the mythic “vampire country” of Romania and Transylvania and then became scattered all over “Europe and the Middle East for millennia” (Fledgling, 130). Furthermore, many Ina died in the middle of the twentieth century during the Holocaust. Fledgling is Butler’s attempt to narrate a science fictional history of African American historical loss. As Shori embodies the loss of personal and cultural memory, her narrative reflects an aimed recuperation of historical memory of enslaved African Americans and of erased names, lives, and history. Butler underscores this history of loss when Shori meets her relative Hayden Gordon, who stresses the importance of recording this history: For a while, it seemed that we might not survive. I think that’s when some of us began to find a new use for writing we had developed for secret directional sign, territorial declarations, warning of danger, and mating needs. I think some of us were writing to leave behind some sign that we had lived, because it seemed we would all die. (Fledgling, 189)

Fledgling is a testament to an American historical loss and to writing. Gordon’s desire for history is the same drive that leads Shori to recover her lost past and Butler’s own pursuit for codes to recover both Shori’s history as well as the African American history of enslaved and silenced Black voices. Butler further complicates Shori’s ideal of “home” by positioning the text within conventional Christian ideology and the science fiction genre with the “Ina theory that claims the Ina were sent here from another world” (Fledgling, 130). Shori discovers, in fact, that the Ina creation myth was written on clay tablets about ten thousand years ago, showing that the Ina had displeased the mother goddess, who sent them to earth to “grow strong and wise” and

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then return to her planet (Fledgling, 187). Human and vampire origin stories conflate as the mythic vampire homeland is located in the mythic Christian heaven and not in Romania. Thus, Butler posits the Ina vampire world as existing in a liminal space between several Judeo-Christian ideologies and histories and other racially persecuted peoples as well as between several historical and religious discourses. RITUALS AND SYMBOLS Turner describes the symbols and symbolic rituals of the liminar experiences during the liminal phase. The initiate crosses markers, sites, or thresholds that indicate the separation phase or movement away from structure into anti-structural ambiguity. These sites or thresholds are commonly symbolized by the passage from one phase of experience into the next and include objects such as doorways, gates, fences, and mirrors. For example, Shori awakens in a cave, outside her structured Ina gated community. Once she leaves this cave, she moves back and forth over passageways, involving real and metaphoric gates in a process of altering or reversing hierarchical positions; in the process, she creates her own subversive spaces. The spatializing potential of the houses and communities of which she is a part allows Shori to negotiate her interiority, and, finally, her narrative, in ways that the bulk of Butler’s criticism has not adequately confronted. Shori experiences death and rebirth through the process of belonging to three different home sites that are destroyed: her matriarchal community, her patriarchal community, and her cousin’s community, the Gordon family. Thus, the plot is connected to genre and to her character as she journeys throughout the text. The African American essentiality of the text is thus hardwired genetically and narratologically to Shori’s body and her story. Lacking stable sites for identity, African Americans, particularly those defined by white structural norms, can be resistant to cultural transformation since they have been defined by the dominant culture. The liminal process exacerbates this transformation. Once Shori leaves her cave, she discovers “the burned remains of several houses and outbuildings” where she and her mother and sisters had lived (Fledgling, 5). Shori begins a series of transformations that involve a liminal crossing over thresholds as she begins to formulate her own identity. First, she crosses the highway, and finds “a metal gate” that she climbs over (Fledgling, 7). She is spotted by a passing car. Its driver, a white human motorist named Wright, offers her assistance and is alarmed at her physical condition. In order to transport her to a hospital, Wright locks her into his car, whereupon Shori bites him on the neck to gain control over him

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(Fledgling, 10). Wright finds this experience highly erotic, and they proceed to have sex. By crossing these thresholds, Shori is on her journey to discover who she is, her Ina vampire history, and her purpose. Shori’s monstrous, Black, vampiric body and her personal quest of an identity engages the often silenced histories of enslaved people in America. Shori’s bildungsroman develops as Butler interweaves her journey into larger racial and cultural narratives and themes. Once in Wright’s house, Shori encounters a liminal threshold in the form of a mirror. Mirrors have been used throughout time to represent sites operating between worlds. Turner includes a “mirror” among the “sacred articles” he describes as reflecting a “kind of initiation” into liminality (Turner, “Betwixt,” 239). Mirrors can be viewed as a movement from one space, passage, or phase to the next. Turner also describes efforts by a human to “mirror” humankind generally. Thus, they represent a social or narrative self-commentary. In fact, the text itself can be viewed as a mirror of social power dynamics as they relate to race, gender, and vampire lore. For example, Lewis Carroll, in Alice in Wonderland, propels Alice’s passage through a “looking glass” as she slips from one world into another. The literal mirror then, in Turner’s theory, reflects Lewis Carroll’s passage between worlds or states of being (for a more detailed discussion, see Turner, “Betwixt.”). At this point in the novel, Shori enacts a private performance in the world; the mirror reflects her pivot into her exploration of public identity. In other words, she moves from her current state of amnesiac privacy into the realm of discovering a public persona. The mirror is Shori’s portal into the myths and reality of her identity, which she will uncover and create by the end of the novel. Shori is the “lady in the looking glass” who faces herself without blinking and experiences the drama of death, creation, and re-creation. Thus, identity and genre merge. Wright initially positions Shori in front of the mirror to prove that she is a vampire and will thus have no reflection. Shori is visible in the mirror, yet she does not recognize the “lean, sharp-faced, large-eyed, brown-skinned person—a complete stranger” with canine teeth (Fledgling, 18). The extended “canine teeth” identify her as vampire, yet her visible image positions the traditional vampire myth as false. The mirror thus reflects both the truth and falsehood of vampire lore and provides Shori with an opportunity to function as an agent of change. Shori’s image propels her into her personal exploration of vampire mythology in human history, popular culture, and literature. Shori faces a public image of herself as monstrous. After an extended study of literary and historical references to vampire myths and legends, however, Shori concludes that the classic image of “a cloaked figure with long, sharp teeth and long, dark hair” is “nonsense” (Fledgling, 30). Ironically, when we meet Shori’s father, he is a “a tall, spidery man . . . and visibly my kind

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except that he was blond and very pale-skinned—not just light-skinned like Wright, but as white as the pages of Wright’s books” (Fledgling, 61). In other words, he could have just stepped out of the pages of Stoker’s Dracula. This moment links race and identity to narrative and narratological conventions. The reader, therefore, must reside in a space between literary vampire myths and Butler’s revised myths—in a third space where they overlap. Shori’s next phase is to collect her personal symbionts, the humans who will supply her with much-needed blood and to whom she will supply a powerful life-lengthening and immunity-boosting venom. Her bite is physically pleasurable for humans and often leads to sexual intercourse. Her symbionts will also form a community with each other and with her. Typically, humans are first bitten against their will, yet in leaving the symbionts and vampires physically and psychologically dependent upon one another, the next feedings often end up being consensual. Through Shori, the reader observes the Black body as problematically reinforcing the violent events that Black people enacted during slavery as well as positing white erotic fantasies of Black people as animalistic or wanting violent sex (Smith, “Octavia,” 390). Smith admits that the symbiotic relationship in Fledgling dissolves hierarchical practices, because the relationship between vampire and humans involves compassion, concern, and tenderness. She also stresses the vampire bite as forcing questions of dominance and power dynamics (Smith, “Octavia,” 389). While appreciating the more compassionate aspects of this view, I argue that rather than becoming weaker and more controlled, the vampire biting exchange creates a community through the communal bonding of vampiric Ina and their human symbionts. The humans who choose to remain with the Ina, and all do, develop a lifelong relationship, and they nurture each other in an intimate emotional bond. Thus, in contrast to Stoker’s white male vampire with his brood of white female vampires, Butler’s human symbionts are chosen across a broad range of races, genders, ages, and income status and are awarded biological benefits for partaking in the relationship through the life-enhancing Ina venom. In this way, Butler emphasizes relationship, mutuality, and community in contrast to Stoker’s notion of an all-powerful dominant male with helpless converted victims. In Fledgling, liminal personae thus come together to form “homogeneity and comradeship” across boundaries (Turner, The Ritual, 96). The Ina ritual of creating a community of symbionts can be described as a polygamous marriage. A human symbiont, Celia, explains to Shori that it is “about the closest thing I’ve seen to a workable group marriage” (Fledgling, 127). In spite of the intensity of the bond, this relationship is polygamous. After Wright has sex with her, Shori bites an older white woman, Theodora; Theodora immediately tries to bite her back and moans in sexual satisfaction, then promises to leave

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her balcony window open in the hopes that Shori will return (Fledgling, 25). As Celia explains, each symbiont loves his or her vampire but could also enjoy “relationships with one another, too, or with other nearby symbionts” (Fledgling, 127). Furthermore, the vampires must also engage in sex with each other in order to procreate. This intimate emotional and physical bond is therefore not exclusive, yet it remains inextricable. There is also a power exchange. A vampire bite will cause the human symbiont to obey that vampire, yet Shori acknowledges that her symbionts also have “some hold on [her] beyond blood” (Fledgling, 48, 137). Thus, both symbiont and vampire have power over one another, yet it is not absolute nor even exclusive. The human/ vampire bond is one of nonexclusive communities where power dynamics exist, yet where difference in needs are acknowledged and respected. For Butler, the body is the site of agency. Marilyn Mehaffy and Ana Louise Keating argue that Butler uses the body as enacting a revisionary social project. They argue that Butler’s focus on the body frames a critique of corporeal hierarchies. Butler’s fantasy bodies are displaced or difficult to visualize, and this foregrounds the situational realities of the characters. While the joint vampire-symbiont relationship presents possible nonhierarchical relationships, the Ina society itself reenacts racial hatred against the Black body during slavery. Although Shori’s father initially tells her that Ina do not care about race, and that this sentiment was borne out by the number of ethnic and mixed-race symbionts in many families, Shori eventually discovers that the destruction of three of her familial communities, including the murder of her father, brother, and many of their symbionts, results from racism among some Ina who want to keep their race pure. In An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1854), Arthur de Gobineau documents nineteenth-century racism against Jews and African Americans and argues for the superiority of the Aryan race. Similarly, in White Supremacy and Negro Subordination (1861), John H. van Evrie explains the subordination of the Black race as a cornerstone to democracy. Butler critiques these types of attacks upon the racialized body. After the third home site, the Gordon residence, is attacked, Shori captures one of the killers and discovers that these men are paid by the Silk Ina family who want to annihilate Shori’s family because of their DNA experimentation (Fledgling, 292). Because the characters reside outside the familiar socially structured realities of race, gender, and sexuality, Butler can critique stereotypes of the Black body and reclaim the body as a source of knowledge (Mehaffy and Keating).

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LIMINAL SITES The performance of the liminal process involves crossing through passages and over thresholds that provide the liminar with new identity possibilities. After her initial experience with Wright, Shori moves through doorways inside and outside homes, which generate liminal zones of new performance, play, and transformation. After her first night with Wright, Shori leaves the next night and passes through the doorway, a threshold of that house, and crosses over a balcony and over another threshold, a window. These crossings mark a new blood taking and her sexually and emotionally charged relationship with Theodora, an older, white woman, who gladly submits to Shori’s biting and, later in the novel, moves into Shori’s new community (Fledgling, 25). Crossing these thresholds in the forms of doors, gates, and windows causes Shori to further discover her lost, latent, and submerged sexual identity. As Shori moves from one household into the next, she takes two other women as symbionts as well as a Black male and, at the end of the novel, has made promises to mate with the Ina vampire Gordon brothers. By subverting normative, heterosexual, monogamous family structures and relationships, Shori constructs an alternative space of power that changes with each relationship, as her identity continues to transform. These pairings are bound by physical bodies but foreground a more global community; pure egotistical dominance is denied, and the shared power within the relationships dissolves hierarchies. In emphasizing the importance of physical sites as a corollary of psychological sites, the text reveals the ways in which Shori’s identity is formed by crossing these thresholds. Revisiting these sites restores Shori’s memories. She recognizes them as sites of former identities. Her mind retrieves memories through these series of ritualized transformations in returning to her family homes. For example, when she returns to the site of her mother’s community of burned houses, she remembers that the innocent man she killed during the raid on her matrilineal family had been a friend of hers. In another instance, her experience when the Gordon community is attacked and destroyed allows Shori to relive the raid that killed her mother and aunts in the beginning of the novel. Thus, Shori partakes in a death/rebirth ritual that restores her memories throughout the text as she revisits sites of past and present pain. These specific sites represent the original social structure of which Shori was a part before the death of her mother and family members. Shori first confronts the death of her previous communities including her mother’s community, her father Ioseph’s community, and the home of her cousins, the Gordons. It is only during an attack on the third community, the Gordon

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home, that Shori prevents the destruction of the community. Although her mothers and fathers are killed because the attacks happen at night, Shori escaped because “unlike other Ina, she has dark skin and can be alert during the day” (Brox, “Every Age,” 393). Her black skin allows her to capture the men hired by the Silk family vampires and, therefore, prevent the annihilation of her last extended family. Crucially, she is awake when the killers come to destroy the new community that she has established with her patrilineal brothers and is thus able to awaken others. Her hybridized DNA stops the killing and saves her community. As Shori uncovers her past identity, she discovers her genetically blended Ina-human DNA, a mutation adapted with dark skin so that she can survive in the daylight, which will be transferred to her offspring. She has promised to mate with the two Ina Gordon brothers and is thus the progenetrix of a new race. Shori, as progenitrix, has intertextual and dictional echoes with Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, who describes his creature as “my hideous progeny” (Fledgling, 351). More significantly, Shori’s recognition of her physical empowerment allows her to use her own body as a performative space where hierarchical structures can be altered. She has reversed the hierarchy of social constructions, critiqued literary vampire myths, and enacted an agency denied to many Black people during the global slave trade and in the United States today. Butler creates community in her texts as a method of analyzing how power can be shaped in positive ways. Butler articulates a foundational principal of her writing when she argues that she always creates community, as I have mentioned previously. For this “social bond,” Turner turns to Martin Buber’s definition, which states that “community is the being no longer side by side (and, one might add, above and below) but with one another of a multitude of persons” (as quoted in Turner, The Ritual, 127). Turner argues that Buber’s definition of community presents “the spontaneous, immediate, concrete nature of communitas, as opposed to the norm-governed, institutionalized, abstract nature of social structure” (Turner, The Ritual, 127). I argue that the vampire bite, and the symbiotic relationship that follows, constitutes community in Buber’s sense of the word, generating a social bond equivalent to the communitas experience. Sex is integral to Butler’s communities. In explaining the sexuality of the text, Butler argues that “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” (quoted in Mehaffey and Keating). Butler’s writing therefore causes the reader to imagine and consider alternative forms of intimacy that reside outside accepted social norms as well as the complex power dynamics that reside in those constructions. Lauren J.

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Lacey argues that Butler’s protagonists must come to terms with power in the communities and respond by demystifying dominant structures rather than reinforcing them. Butler’s protagonists are powerful individuals, yet most contain physical or psychological weaknesses. Lacey correctly analyzes Shori as needing to increase her own agency, yet she sees Shori as searching for a nondestructive means to gain that power (Lacey, “Octavia,” 381). Shori discovers this power through the vampire bite: “They were first confused, then trusting and welcoming, eager for more of the pleasure that I could give them. It happened that way each time” (Fledgling, 26). In Fledgling, the physical bond of the vampire bite is powerful, and the exchange of body fluids (human blood and vampire venom) is powerful and mutually pleasurable. Power is an omnipresent force in Butler’s text, and Shori’s journey of self-discovery causes her to acknowledge and critique oppressive power structures. She is then free to use her own discovered power to complicate its uses and to extrapolate on how to share power. At the beginning of the novel, Shori is powerless and a victimized Black female vampire; by the end, she ultimately finds her personal power. Shori’s experiences with her symbionts reflect this denial of oppressive power. The vampire and the symbiont together engage in a highly mutual, pleasurable sexual relationship. Wright, Shori’s initial symbiont, is a twentythree-year-old man who is immediately sexually attracted to Shori, though clearly not intent on violating her without her consent. Shori first asks him if she can bite him and take his blood, and Wright says: “If I do, what will you let me do?” (Fledgling, 18). Shori begins to suck blood from Wright’s neck, causing his intense physical desire for her. Wright’s own physical desire operates simultaneously with his initiation of sexual intercourse with her. The biting scene described above suggests what Turner calls a “communitas” relationship where the two respond as individuals and partners, desiring the consent and pleasure of the other. The vampire bite is not always a reflection of communitas, however. After Wright has been bitten twice by Shori, he knows that he is both physically and psychologically addicted to vampire venom. Several days into their vampire-symbiont relationship, Shori gives Wright the “choice” of leaving because she knows he will become increasingly addicted to the venom. Wright, of course, already knows that it is too late for him to make a choice; in fact, leaving is inconceivable to him. Thus, Butler makes it clear that symbionts must “make up their own mind[s],” yet their ability to make objective decisions regarding the continuation of their relationship with a vampire is strongly influenced by their desire for, and dependence upon, the venom (Fledgling, 92). The consequences of ending such a relationship can, at times, prove fatal for the symbiont, as Shori’s father, Ioseph, notes: “They die of strokes or heart attacks because we aren’t there to take the extra red

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blood cells that our venom encourages their bodies to make” (Fledgling, 73–74). Furthermore, at one point in the novel, Shori bites one of her brother’s symbionts, Celia, once her brother is dead, for both psychological and physical reasons. The symbiont Celia needs a family, but her physical needs are even more immediate. Her body is shaking without the calmness and immune-enhancing properties from her symbiont’s venom. This physical need is not communitas since there is no mutuality involved, nor is it a committed relationship but, rather, a practical reaction to another’s physical needs. Butler herself argues for “body knowledge” and claims that the body can be refigured and reimagined for the continued survival and development of the individual. Butler thus rejects the fact that Shori’s world is a utopia, or an idealistic hybrid world consisting of abundant and glorious communitas. Wright will always be Shori’s first symbiont, but he will likely mate with her other human symbionts and have children with them. Furthermore, Wright will have to contend with Joel, another Black symbiont with whom Shori plans to mate, as well as the Ina vampire Gordon brothers, with whom Shori will bear children. Butler therefore asks us to consider the power dynamics within open sexual and familial relationships that are founded on both need and attraction and that can, conceivably, include jealousies, hatreds, and rivalries. To what extent may they involve dependence, domination, or abuse? To what extent are they mutual, pleasurable, and independent? Most relationships involve emotional support and physical needs, yet must all of these needs be met with a single partner? They imply an alternate form of sharing oneself among several individuals across race, age, and gender lines. Butler, however, stresses the bonding agent of communitas in these relationships. Shori’s father, Ioseph, stresses the mutual independence between vampire and symbionts when he advises her: Let them see that you trust them and let them solve their own problems, make their own decisions. Do that and they willingly commit their lives to you. Bully them, control them out of fear or malice or just for your own convenience, and after a while, you’ll have to spend all your time thinking for them, controlling them, and their resentment. (Fledgling, 73)

Thus, the complicated relationships between and among humans and Ina must be free of dominance in order to function well. Butler employs this relationship dynamic through a Foucauldian belief that power is a complex system of forces that is ever active and changing. The physical body, stronger than the mental construct, determines relationships. Lacey establishes the problems of using Michel Foucault to critique Butler’s text, however. Foucault’s argument, she contends, is invested in already

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stable patriarchal notions and structures of power, and Fledgling is based on an ability to shape power (Lacey, “Octavia,” 384–85). I would instead argue that the theories of Turner provide a more productive alternative. For Turner, in spite of the social structures and systems, individuals are in a constant process of becoming; they thrive in communities, but they also choose to separate from them. Butler shows that although hierarchy and dominance exist in all situations involving relationships, communitas is also possible among the best relationships. RETURN TO STRUCTURE Shori’s hybridized identity forces the Ina vampires to confront the racialized violence of their community. Her father initially tells her that Ina do not care about race, yet Butler illuminates racism’s operation within the Ina community through the Silk family’s desire for racial purity. Once the Silks are identified as the murderers of Shori’s family, the reader enters the final third of the text, which features the Silk family’s trial, presided over by the Council of Seven (Fledgling, 197). The Council of Seven determines just punishment. There are no prisons in this justice system; instead, punishment involves an amputation, which is temporary since the Ina body can generate new limbs in months. However, the punishment is amputation performed without sedatives or later managed with painkillers. A vampire has the choice to instead be killed via decapitation rather than experience amputation. In these cases, the body is burned in order to prevent regeneration. The harshest punishment is the complete annihilation of a family name. In one case, members of one Ina family are dispersed among other Ina families in order to erase the patronym. During the trial, Shori accuses the Silks of killing her relatives, thus exposing rampant prejudice in the family. Milo Silk, a 541-year-old vampire, shouts at Shori: “You’re not Ina. . . . You’re not, you have no more business at this Council than would a clever dog!” (Fledgling, 238). He later criticizes her future offspring: “What will she give us all? Fur? Tails?” (Fledgling, 300). Other Silks call Shori a “murdering black mongrel bitch” (Fledgling, 300). By comparing Shori to a mongrel dog, Silk expresses the belief that she is biologically inferior because of her mixed-species DNA. Ironically, the legend of vampires insinuates that they are actually hybridized human/ wolves. The Silks also reference race in defense of their killing, as when the Silk family lawyer, Katharine Dahlman, shrieks to the council: You want your sons to mate with this person. You want them to get black, human children from her. Here in the United States, even most humans will look

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down on them. When I came to this country, such people were kept as property, as slaves. (Fledgling, 278)

Butler explicitly evokes the violence of slave relations by targeting Shori’s Blackness as tainting future Ina vampires with a color associated with enslaved people. The irony of this comment is manifest since Dahlman herself is a vampire, a monstrous being, yet she views black skin color as the mark of a monster. The violence continues during the ten days of the trial when Dahlman kills Theodora in an effort to deter Shori from testifying at the trial. Ultimately, Dahlman is found guilty by the Council of Seven. The judgment is that Dahlman’s legs be severed at mid-thigh, to grow back after several months. Rather than accept this painful experience at her age, Dahlman chooses instead to be beheaded, with both her head and body burned. In an act of self-protection, Dahlman attempts to kill Shori, but Shori bites through Dahlman’s larynx and breaks her neck. Butler thus reveals the depth of revenge and violence that exists within societies, extending to the very cusp of death. The trial ends with a judicial victory for Shori, and the Silk family name is dissolved since the unmated males are adopted by other families. This victory is marred, however, since four of the eleven members of the Council supported the Silk family and voted against Shori (Fledgling, 305). Thus, a certain degree of prejudice toward Shori has survived through “the Dahlmans and a couple of other Council members” who voted against Shori (Fledgling, 286). Butler leaves the reader with a powerful indictment of racism and its violence through this incomplete resolution. As an agent of change, Shori exposes the structural racism and violence that operates silently beneath Ina society; the trial has temporarily stopped the racist murders of her families, but that is the best they can currently hope for. Shori uncovers the violent race relations that exist in societies, which she also finds cannot be completely eradicated. This is Butler’s final indictment of US hierarchy. Once the society is cleansed, and the oppression ceased, the liminal experience ends. The liminar is then reincorporated into society, endowed with social “rights and obligations” (Turner, The Ritual, 95). Since the liminar has reimposed ethical standards on the society, that society is now purged. It may not be purged for long, however, and, in Fledgling, the return to structure quickly becomes a return to violence and hierarchy. However, while discovering her own identity and sense of belonging, Shori also reveals the silent racism operating in the Ina race, which is then punished. On the last page of the novel, Shori claims: “They were all gone. The person I had been was gone. . . . I would restore what could be restored” (Fledgling, 310). Fledgling continues Butler’s commentary on the vital importance of change and the crucial dismantling of hierarchies. By participating in the liminal process, the

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reader also arrives at new insights into the violence and racism within society and the possibilities afforded through liminality. Examining the rigid social structures of the novel plays into Butler’s belief that human beings are hierarchical (centralized), yet must embrace change—must embrace liminality. Ultimately, Shori reveals herself to be a benevolent hero rather than an object of horror. She shows the reader that while we cannot permanently eradicate racism, we must vigorously fight against it throughout time. Thus, the understanding of Shori’s participation in the liminal process provides readers with Butler’s embedded belief that “change” ultimately overpowers hierarchy. By connecting Shori’s personal experience to a long history of racial hatred and violence, the reader can begin to break down and examine those hidden assumptions. Fledgling enables a shift toward reimagining race relations and violence as a catalyst to building non-oppressive personal relationships, communitas, community, and accountability. NOTE 1. Originally published as “Monster Studies: Liminality, Home Spaces, and Ina Vampires in Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling” in University of Toronto Quarterly 87 (Winter 2018): 214–33. Reprinted with permission from University of Toronto Press (https:​//​utpjournals​.press).

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Rowe, Stacy, and Jennifer Wolch. “Social Networks in Time and Space: Homeless Women in Skid Row, Los Angeles.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80, no. 2 (June 1990): 184–204. Salvaggio, Ruth. “Octavia Butler and the Black Science Fiction Heroine.” In Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler, edited by Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal. Yokine, Australia: Twelfth Planet Press, 2017, 186–200. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, and Jones, 1818. Slonczewski, Joan. “Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy: A Biologist’s Response.” In Luminescent Threads, edited by Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal. Yokine, Australia: Twelfth Planet Press, 2017, 149–55. Smith, Stephanie A. “Octavia Butler: A Retrospective.” Feminist Studies 33, no. 2 (2007): 385–93. Sparks, Tony, As Much Like Home as Possible: Geographies of Homelessness and Citizenship in Seattle’s Tent City. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009. St. John, Graham. Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance. New York: Berghan Books, 2008. Stanley, Tarsha. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Octavia E. Butler. New York: Modern Language Association, 2019. Stillman, Peter. “Dystopian Critiques, Utopian Possibilities, and Human Purposes in Octavia Butler’s Parables.” Utopian Studies 14, no. 1 (2003): 15–35. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. London: Constable, 1897. Tent Cities in America: A Pacific Coast Report. National Coalition for the Homeless, 2010. Turner, Victor. “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage.” The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press (1967): 93–112. ———. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975. ———. “Liminal to Liminoid in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology.” Rice University Studies. 60, no. 3 (1974): 53–92. ———. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969. Tweedy, Clarence W. “The Anointed: Countering Dystopia with Faith in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture 13, no. 1 (Spring 2014). Van Evrie, John H. White Supremacy and Negro Subordination. New York: Van Evrie, 1861. Wallace, Molly, “Reading Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis after Seattle.” Contemporary Literature 50, no. 1 (2009): 94–128.

Index

Adulthood Rites, 49–51. See Xenogenesis series African Americans, 20–27, 66–67,78–79 African myths, 20–27 anti-structure, 9, 67 Ashley, Kathleen M., 18 Autofuturism, 3

the Sower, 57–62; Parable of the Talents, 62–69; Patternmaster, 7, 19, 37–40; Survivor, 6, 16, 19, 34–37; Wild Seed, 6, 15, 19, 20–27 Canavan, Gerry, 5, 21–22, 29, 55, 62, 73 capitalism, 30, 52, 54 Carroll, Lewis, Alice in Wonderland, 80 Christian America, 65 Clay’s Arc, 30–34; animal themes, 30–34 colonialism, 25, 26, 43, 68 colonization, 47–48, 52 communitas, 15–16, 17, 20, 28, 36–37, 40, 73, 85 community, 15–16, 17, 30, 35–36, 40, 48, 53–59, 81–82, 84–85 “Cyborg Manifesto,” 32

Bakhtin, M. M., 12–13, 73, 76; Rabelais and His World, 12 Bales, Kevin, 68 Baptist, 61 Bhabha, Homi, 75 Blacks/African Americans, 20–27; enslavement, 22–27; violence against, 22–27 body, discourse, 2, 22–27, 81–84; bisexuality, 39; bonding, 50–51, 53–54; grotesque body, 12. See hybridity; polygamy, 81 Bonner, Francis, 43 Brox, Ali, 75, 84 Buber, Martin, 84 Butler, Octavia E., 2–7; Adulthood Rites, 49–51; Birth and childhood, 2; Clay’s Ark, 6, 16, 19, 30–34; Dawn, 15, 45–49; Fledgling, 14, 73–89; Imago, 15, 52–55; Mind of My Mind, 6, 15, 16, 19, 27–30; Parable of

Dawn, 45–49 debt slavery, 67, 69 DeGobineau, Arthur, 82 Doro (character), 20–27 Dowdall, Lisa, 53 Doyal, Arthur Conan, 77 Duchamp, Timmel, 21 dystopia, 30–34 Earthseed, Butler, and, 57–60 95

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Index

Earthseed: The Books of the Living, 57–58 Eliot, T. S., 77 empowerment, 27, 39 ethnicity, 34–35 Evre, John H., 82 Fink, Marty, 75 Fledgling, 73–89 Foster, Thomas, 44 Foucault, Michel, 86 fundamentalism, 63 girlboss, 29 God is Change, 5, 64–65 Govan, Sandra Y., 24, 35 grotesque body, 12 Hampton, Gregory Jerome, 4, 29, 73 Haraway, Donna, 32, 44 hierarchies, 16, 19, 27, 50 Hodge, Patricia Mary, 66–68 Holden, Rebecca J., 20, 32 homeless, 69 hybridity, 32, 24, 42, 51 hyper-empathy, 60 Imago, 52–55 immigration, 68 James, Lynette, 76 Jos, Philip, 63 Keating, AnaLouise, 82 Keenan, Randall, 10 Kilgore, Dewitt Douglass, 10 Lacey, Lauren J., 85, 86–87 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 12 Liminality, 11, 17. See Adulthood Rites, 49; Dawn, 45–46; Fledgling, 83; Parable of the Talents, 68; Patternist series, 22, 26–27, 30, 32, 39; Rites of Passage, 11, 17 Luminescent Threads, 5

Lutz, Manuel, 69 Magnone Sophia B., 33 Marx, Karl, 77 Mehaffy, Marilyn, and Analouise Keating, 24, 41, 82, 84 Melzer, Patricia, 3 memory, 74, 83 metamorphosis, 53–55 middle passage, 21 migration, 22–23 Mind of My Mind, 27–30 Morris, Susana M., 75 NASA, 62 Naya, Pramod, 75 NCH, Tent Cities in America, 69 Oankali, the, 45–49 Occupy Wallstreet, 69 Parable of the Sower, 57–62 Parable of the Talents, 62–69 patriarchy, 38, 40 Patternist series, 19–40 Patternmaster, 19 Polidori, John Williams, 77 Queer theory, 39 racism, 87–88 religion, 60–70 resistance, 46–47, 48–49 Rites of Passage, 1, 9. See Fledgling, 73–76, 79–82; Parables, 57–60; Xenogenesis, 45–46 ritual process, 21 Rowe, Stacy, 69 Salvaggio, Ruth, 29 Seed to Harvest, 19 sexuality, 3, 77 Shelley, Mary, 84 slave narrative, 20–27 slavery, 24–26

Index

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Slonczewski, Joan, 54 Smith, Stephanie A., 75 social structures, 19, 22 space travel, 62 Sparks, Toni, 70 Stanley, Tarsha, 4 Stoker, Bram, 76 Survivor, 19, 34–37 symbiosis, 13–14 symbiotic relationship, 81, 86

Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, 11; “Liminal to Liminoid in Play, Flow, and Ritual,” 1; The Forest of Symbols, 1; The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure, 1, 3, 12, 24, 44–48, 57–60, 88 Tweedy, Clarence, 65

telepathy, 28 Tent Cities in America, 69 third sex, 43, 49 threshold, 14, 22, 30, 33, 35 transformative possibilities, 27 transition, 27–8 Turner, Victor, 1–2, 9–15, 19, 73–74; “Betwixt and Between . . . ,” 11;

Wallace, Molly, 54 Wild Seed, 20–27

Van Gennep, Arnold, 10 vampire genre, 76–77; Ina vampire, 78

Xenogenesis series, 6, 41–55; Adulthood Rites, 49–51; Imago, 52–55; Dawn, 45–49 Yoruba, 22–24

About the Author

Lin Knutson is associate professor of English at Mississippi Valley State University. She has taught at Montana State University, West Virginia University, and the University of Iowa. She has published on Modernist writer H. D., Adrienne Rich, and Michelle Cliff, and she has coedited a volume of The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies for a special issue on the Caribbean. Knutson is working on a book project on Jewish American poet Adrienne Rich’s poetry after 1980, from a Marxist and postcolonial perspective.

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