Junot Diaz on Octavia Butler

 Another writer prison introduced to me was Junot Diaz. Dominican born writer of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and This is how you lose her, of which I read with fascination - an American way life far removed from Indiana.

For Boston Review, he wrote an essay on Octavia Butler's Kindred and its television adaptation, Octavia But­ler’s Blasphemous Solidarities. Butler is one of the writers I did not get to in prison, still think I should, and wonder if I will find the time.

I write this post since while reading Diaz's essay, I thought this is something we should all think about as Americans. Here goes:

or those who do not know her (and apparently there are still plenty who don’t): Octavia Estelle Butler is one of our greatest writers, though in the larger culture she is described as the first Black woman to write science fiction professionally. That biographeme—Black Woman Science Fiction Writer—defined Butler her entire career in spite of the fact that her extraordinary and most well-known novel, Kindred (1979), was not science fiction at all, but a neo-slave narrative that Butler herself described as “grim fantasy.” Butler died in 2006, at the age of fifty-eight, far, far too young, publishing fourteen books (fifteen if we count the posthumous collection, Unexpected Stories). They radically transformed multiple canons—U.S. literature, African diasporic literature, feminist literature, science fiction, speculative fiction—but also radically altered the imaginaries of generations of readers and artists. Now with Kindred on television, in an eight-part series by FX on Hulu, a different set of audiences will have the opportunity to discover Butler for themselves.

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Kindred, you see, is also a horror novel. (Then again, what neo-slave narrative isn’t?) But it is a horror novel of a very particular kind. What gets quickly revealed is that Dana is summoned to the past every time her white ancestor’s life is in peril. At any of these crux moments Dana could choose to let the young slaver die, kill-whitey style, but then Dana’s ancestor Hagar would not have been born, and neither would have Dana. In other words: a Black woman has to keep a white slaver alive long enough for him to rape her ancestor into existence. As Canavan aptly describes it, “Dana, is alive after slavery and despite slavery, but also because of slavery, a compromised and morally fraught position that forces her to make deeply unpleasant choices in the name of preserving the circumstances that led to her own birth.”

It is this impossibly vile “compromise” that is Kindred’s true heart of darkness. It demonstrates why Butler has many imitators, but no equals. The novel takes aim at the consolatory reflex among many in the African diaspora who insist that white supremacy is Other, is whitey (and friends)—reminding us, emphatically, gruesomely, that white supremacy is us too.

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In the end, that’s the wisdom of the novel—that unless we are willing to tolerate radical solidarities with what is abominate in ourselves and others we will never really understand the complex oppressions that made us, and that continue to afflict us today.

While it looks like Hulu’s Kindred will not receive a second season, I am not completely discouraged. I have faith that others will attempt to adapt this book again, along with the other thirteen behind it. Some will be drawn to the task because they love Butler; others will come specifically because they understand that in this age of endless precarity and extreme social fragmentation, when all are encouraged to indulge in anti-solidaritous thinking, we need Butler more than ever: on the page, on the screen, everywhere.

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