#mybodymyhome (iii) at the new inquiry
Octavia Butler’s Survivor (1979) is an orphan novel. It inhabits the world of the Patternist series, which started with Patternmaster (1976), and was followed by the prequels Mind of My Mind (1977), Wild Seed (1980), and Clay’s Ark (1984), a world that starts with the immortal Doro and Anyanwu and concludes with an ongoing, genocidal battle between their descendants—the telepathic patternists—and humans modified by an alien microbe—the clayarks. Survivor offers a different vision, a possibility that some left this earth-bound battle to travel to another world.
The protagonist, Alanna Verrick, is a bi-racial orphan, black and Asian, who chooses, at the end of the novel, to leave/live with aliens, “abandoning” her fellow humans.
Choosing is always strange in Butler—I’ll explore this at greater length in a subsequent post. The choice to survive in Butler’s works—“survival” is a key term for Butler and Audre Lorde—refuses a too-U.S. framing of agency as liberation from embedding.
The choice to survive requires facing the ethics of complicity. Butler’s works are resolutely anti-sentimental (is that the right term?). Lives end. Tough choices are made. Protagonists are never permitted to be unreservedly lovable or even likable.
Sanctuary is never utopia. Merely another moment of survival. That “merely” is needed, because Butler always reminds us that survival is precarious—even the near-immortal can—and do—die.
More than any other novelist I know, Butler emphasizes that the ethical choice always tears and fractures: truthtelling is breaking hard against things.
A promissory note from a gorgeous voice, who is still teaching me how to listen:
Thiefing sugar has never been easy—sharp cane stalk can cut cane cutters
