✿ In part 5 of the series, I give you . . . Octavia Butler! Butler wrote Black disabled protagonists at a time when white sci-fi authors were equating (read: erasing) race with aliens characters. (I recommend reading Butler’s 1980 essay “The Lost Races of Science Fiction,” linked here.)
I’ve been working on a podcast about Butler’s Parable series and the character of Lauren Olamina as a disabled educator—out sometime next year when my partner has time to sound design the episode—so I will just directly lift some of the text from that instead of coming up with something new for this substack post. I’m also still really sick with yet another flu/cold bug and can’t think properly through the cognitive fog plaguing my brain:
Disability is everywhere in Butler’s fictional worlds. I first read Butler in my early twenties. I wrote two papers on her in undergrad. (They weren’t very good.) The papers were, however, my first attempt at understanding the themes of disability Butler was so fascinated by. I didn’t name disability outright in my writing. I wrote instead about her other beloved theme mutual interdependence, or symbiosis—about people needing one another to survive.
In interviews, Butler consistently described herself as “a little bit dyslexic.” But in her journals, misspelt or extra words littered the pages. She didn’t like to give readings because she “[tended] to read things that [weren’t] there.”1 In school, teachers believed her to be lazy or criticized her for not trying hard enough. “Oh, but I was trying—desperately,” Butler explains. She hated labels and doubtlessly would have described herself as having a learning disability—“[l]abels bore the heck out of me,” she insisted—but it wouldn’t be unreasonable to read her as a person with disabling experiences.2 Butler also had trouble with her health which had been impacted greatly by poverty, grueling temp jobs she took to support her writing, and unstable access to healthcare.
In her journals, Butler often spoke about her health concerns. In 1973 she wrote, “I should stay healthy! The bother and worry of being sick and not being able to afford to do anything but complain about the pain and hope it goes away is Not conducive to good (or prolific) writing.” “I wish I felt well,” she wrote in 1994. In 1999 again she journalled about her health: “I have pains and too much tiredness [...] Maybe I don’t have that much longer to live.” By the 2000s, side effects from a medication she was taking for high blood pressure got in the way of her writing almost completely: “I’m taking a medication that flattens out the world for me. It makes [...] writing an exercise in frustration [. . .] I don’t know what to do, but this is horrible. There has to be an alternative.” Weeks before her sudden death in February of 2006, she confessed, “I can’t go on this way.”3
Below are just recommendations without the review since I don’t have time to go reread then provide an overview of each book. But please do read Butler. You won’t be disappointed!
✿ Kindred (1979) - - Limb loss, slavery and racial violence, trauma
✿ Dawn (1987) - - Cancer and alien genetic traders (The cancer theme is inspired by Henrietta Lacks, I assume.)
✿ Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) - - Hyperempathy syndrome (A really interesting fictional disability.)
✿ Fledgling (2005) - Amnesia (To be honest, I’m not sure if I read the protagonist Shori as disabled. Upon my first-reading, I interpreted amnesia being used more as a plot device, but I’ve included it here anyways.)
and more!
RECOMMENDED PAIRED READING: Sami Schalk’s article on Butler’s archive and disability themes is a must-read for any Butler fans out there: “Experience, Research, and Writing: Octavia E. Butler as an Author of Disability Literature.”
And also, Gerry Canavan’s Octavia E. Butler (2016). Hit me up if you want pdfs of either of these.
And also also, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (2015) edited by adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha.
Conversations with Octavia Butler. Edited by Conseula Francis, University Press of Mississippi, 2010.
From the Archive: Octavia Butler (1947-2006), 1998.” Radio Wolinksy, December 2 2018, https://kpfa.org/area941/episode/from-the-archive-octavia-butler-1947-2006-1998/.
These quotes from Butler’s journal come directly from Sami Schalk’s amazing archival work. See, “Experience, Research, and Writing: Octavia E. Butler as an Author of Disability Literature.”