I.

We’re reading Bloodchild by Octavia Butler in the afrofuturist book club I joined last week. Last night we talked about “Speech Sounds.” Bernie Julia’s guiding question:

AS YOU’VE BEEN READING OCTAVIA BUTLER’S SHORT STORIES, DO YOU FEEL SHE LEANS TOWARD DYSTOPIAN OR UTOPIAN VISIONS FOR THE FUTURE? DO YOU FEEL HOPEFUL OF WHAT’S TO COME IN THE FUTURES SHE ILLUSTRATES? HOW DO HER CHARACTERS FEEL? IN YOUR OPINIONS, HOW DOES THE DYSTOPIAN OR UTOPIAN VISION IMPACT HER WORK AS AN AFROFUTURIST?

Which made me think about Parable of the Sower/Talents (when am I not?). Because that shit is dark. Like that shit is bleak bleak. But within that world there was Earthseed. And God was Change.

Octavia Butler’s journal pages often circulate online, especially the colorful ones where she wrote notes to herself about using details to regulate pacing and making people FEEL! FEEL! FEEL! Speech Sounds–all of her writing–is the fruition of those notes…she writes so matter of factly, with so many concrete details that as the reader, you can’t escape the reality of her characters, no matter how “dark.”

When Lilith wakes up on the Oankali ship in Dawn, she’s in complete denial about what happened on Earth, what happened to her family, what’s happening to her. She’s afraid of the Oankali because they are so alien and “ugly.” But they don’t let her leave the room she was awakened in until she’s used to the one Oankali. Until she accepts that they are not human, that she is in the presence of extraterrestrials and won’t try to hurt them.

So when Octavia Butler writes these characters in these intense situations, and you go there with her, you accept that reality not as good or right, but as reality. And you find new possibilities together, too. This is how it is. Not that it is how it should stay, and not a phrase used as justification for the status quo, but this is the situation at present. Knowing the truth of a situation as a tool to connect you with your own agency. Dealing with a traumatic event and not accepting what happened to you as okay, but accepting that it did happen to you. And there’s no changing the fact that it did happen to you. And so, now what?

II.

During the meeting, I think about mourning. In Speech Sounds, the characters we meet have survived a disabling pandemic. Many people died. Some of the survivors can no longer speak their own language, some can no longer read or write. Rye, the protagonist, can’t read but she can speak. She meets Obsidian, a man with a car and an LAPD uniform (“meet” is an understatement saying nothing of the jarring events preceding and following their introduction…lol). Rye realizes he can’t speak, but he can still read. She can’t.

"He could read, she realized belatedly. He could probably write, too. Abruptly, she hated him--deep, bitter hatred. What did literacy mean to him--a grown man who played cops and robbers? But he was literate and she was not. She never would be. She felt sick to her stomach with hatred, frustration, and jealousy. And only a few inched from her hand was a loaded gun. 
She held herself still, staring at him, almost seeing his blood. But her rage crested and ebbed and she did nothing."

Obsidian has a similar moment of jealousy when he is realizes Rye can speak, but that envy ebbs and flows away like hers did. How long have they been living with the effects of their pandemic? and how few people they’ve interacted with since this Event? Was there space for mourning? Acceptance? It doesn’t feel like there was. The feelings are too fresh.

By the end of the short story, Rye witnesses Obsidian’s death, the death of a woman, and the woman’s murderer. She meets the woman’s children next, now orphans. Rye realizes they can speak and that she can teach them more. They can form a unit together.

So the children are not Rye’s family (upon meeting them she gives up her original mission of searching for remaining members of her family and seems relieved to spare her self from the potential tragedy of finding them dead). In fact, the children might not ever become her family, but that isn’t her goal.

Her goal is for them to have a future. Her goal is to teach.

III.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs talks about this in Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals:

"What does it mean to function as a group in a changing environment? How can we organize ourselves intentionally to combat the imbedded isolation of late capitalism? It seems like the dolphins (and out other interloping sharks...the manta rays) have something to tell us. From mothering as an emergent strategy in massive dolphin super-pods to pantropical synchronized swimming as a model for being prepared for large-scale direct action, the dolphins are educating us on how to squad up, or pod up."

She goes on to say:

"What if school, as we used it on a daily basis, signaled not the name of a process or institution through which we could be indoctrinated, not a structure through which social capital was grasped and policed, but something more organic, like the scale of care. What if school was the scale at which we could care for each other and move together. In my view, at this moment in history, that is really what we need to learn most urgently."

And then:

"In a striped dolphin school, only up to one-third of the school is visible at the surface. What scale and trust would it take to rotate our roles, to work not to fulfill a gendered lifetime ideal (husbandwifemotherfatherdaughterson) but to show up and sink back, knowing there is enough of all forms of nurturance to go around in cycles? Striped dolphin schools don't bother with shallow water, they go deep off the continental shelf. What would it mean to go deep with each other? What are the scales of intimacy and the actual practices that would teach us how to care for each other beyond obligation or imaginary duties."

IV.

Dystopian stories always seem to emphasize The Local. In Speech Sounds we have: 
Police/Law and Order as a crumbling institution.
"Family" as a crumbling institution.
Accepting these as truths, the people here can still collaborate, drawing on the skills of others to form a stronger unit. 
Not police, not family. A kind of school.