On Octavia Butler

Guest post by Evelyn C. White (Halifax), author Alice Walker: A Life

Born in 1947, Octavia Butler was a contemporary of the late Charles Saunders. As groundbreaking Black writers of science fiction/fantasy, they were rightly hailed as “griots” who continued the spellbinding storytelling traditions of West Africa.

The shy, only child of a devout, widowed mother in California, Butler achieved international acclaim for works such as Kindred (1979) and The Parable of the Sower (1993) that feature Black women protagonists. Indeed, a major critic declared the latter novel “unmatched” in its prescient portrait of the mayhem unleashed by Donald Trump. In 1995, Butler became the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur “Genius” Prize, among the most coveted awards in the US.

In A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler (2020), Lynell George delivers a poignant tribute to the author in a book crafted from documents she discovered in Butler’s vast archives (bus passes, shop-ping lists, diaries, utility bills, a receipt from “Tall Girl” Shoes). The statuesque author died unexpectedly, in 2006, after a fall outside of her Seattle-area home. She was 58.

The handsome volume is “not a biography, nor is it a study of [Butler’s] literary legacy,” writes George, a veteran Los Angeles journalist. “It is an examination of [her] … life path, her influences, her rituals, her quirks, and obsessions, and mostly her labor…. Butler made her own rules and stuck to them.”

An early proponent of self-help practices, Butler peppered her journals with affirmations to counter the dismissive response to her literary ambition. “Can’t you write anything normal?” a teacher once asked. In her staunch belief in her voice and vision, she blazed a trail for Afrofuturists such as Jamaican-born Canadian author Nalo Hopkinson, whose powerful works include Brown Girl in The Ring (1998).

In a 1970 journal entry, Butler pledged to secure “free and clear” $100,000 in earnings by January 1, 1975. Her strategy? “Will always write, no matter what,” she declared. “This is a fact of my life. Thus I must always leave time in my day for writing. Four hours at least.”

Among other menial jobs, Butler toiled as a potato chip inspector before her ascent to bestseller lists. She also sacrificed personal relationships. “I am lonely, I need other people now: friends and lovers,” she noted in a diary.

“It [was] a supreme act of self-love,” George writes about Butler’s hard-won success. Meditating on the stellar work of Charles Saunders and Octavia Butler, a time-honoured gospel song comes immediately to mind: “How Excellent is Thy Name.”