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Things that are on my mind,
besides drafting (and drafting) my novel, of course.
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Reading Protagonists With Perspectives Outside Your Own
Reading Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed shifted my perspective forever. I’ve read important novels by Black authors that I’ve treasured and written extensive papers on, my favorite being Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. But always with the idea of Black History, the search for and work toward Black equality, and the Black experience in America being top-of-mind. And I was always a white woman reading from the outside looking in.
Never have I sat down to read straight-up fantasy and science fiction from a Black author, like Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed. Wild Seed has a strong Black woman as the protagonist, and I was that strong Black woman. I walked in her body and saw with her eyes and felt with her being. Because of the fantasy nature, I was free to relax and just be absorbed into the character.
I know Butler’s work has messages about the Black experience in there, but it’s more nuanced and presented as her life as she moves through space and time. Reading Butler was so exciting and enjoyable, I began to seek to inhabit lots of characters I might have hesitated to explore before.
I suppose, to some, this might seem obvious and a real white-girl revelation, but I’m guessing I’m not the only one who believed the lie that I couldn’t get into books with protagonists who weren’t like me (even though we’ve been asking people of color to get into white writers forever). I’m so glad Octavia Butler, who was a multiple recipient of both the prestigious sci-fi Hugo and Nebula awards among others, persevered to produce her legendary books for us in the 1970s. I’m also glad my friend Ellen Jones put Wild Seed in front of me and said, “Read this.”
I may be naive, but I felt that the timing of reading Butler, which went along with my reassessment of how I understood the Black American experience during Black Lives Matter, ushered in a feeling of understanding. It made me think we should meet each person first as an individual with a perspective that is theirs alone, then find our commonalities, and, last, get to know to our differences. But the idea of just inhabiting each other’s experiences a little bit without an expected conclusion or outcome — just being part of their experience — feels like a new place I can grow from.
I think people of color have been trying to present this distinction to me throughout my life, but I just hadn’t done enough to internalize what they were telling me. When you are growing and changing, it is hard to say what will make the message click and suddenly be something you can apply and practice easily with an understanding that comes from a deeply rooted, non-superficial place, but, for me, it was after I’d laid down some fertile soil, but it was Butler who planted the seed that would grow there.