Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements by Walidah Imarisha

My rating: 4 of 5 stars




Octavia Butler was the first well-known African American woman author of science fiction. Her work, always set in dystopic times and places very closely modeled on the contemporary US, nevertheless imagined other possibilities, including novel approaches to race, gender and species inter-relations. For example, Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993) uses the stories of an empath, a woman crippled by the pain of others, to argue that hope and regrowth must be possible, even at what seems to be the end of time. The book begins with words of wisdom from a holy book called Earthseed: The Books of the Living: "All that you touch is change. All that you change changes you."

Butler died in 2006; since her death, her influence and readership have continued to grow; indeed, those words of wisdom from the beginning of the Parable of the Sower have become an activist mantra of sorts, particularly among activists of colour in American cities. Octavia's Brood is at once a book and a project designed to introduce Butler's radical imagination to generations of new readers and activist-artists.

Octavia's Brood, the book, begins with Detroit-based co-editor adrienne maree brown's proposition that "All social justice work is science fiction. We are imagining a world free of injustice a world that doesn't exist yet." A tangible, printed companion an online presence (www.octaviasbrood.com) and a series of workshops, in which participants are invited to write science fiction as a part of their organizing and social justice work, Octavia's Brood is about the ways that art and culture allow us to time travel, to imagine others' lives, to revisit history, to cultivate alternative futures and alternative lives. Walidah Imarisha, Oregon based co-editor of the volume with adrienne maree brown, argues that science fiction is already at the root of survival for many people of colour in the contemporary americas: "And for those of us from communities with historic collective trauma, we must understand that each of us is already science fiction walking around on two legs. Our ancestors dreamed us up and then bent reality to create us" (5).

The collection is uneven--the idea of activism as science fiction is stronger than many of the stories that result from science fiction writing workshops with activists and social justice workers. But this does not really matter. As adrienne maree brown writes, "we hold so many worlds inside us. So many futures. It is our radical responsibility to share these worlds, to replant them in the soil of our society as seeds for the type of justice we want and need" (278). There is much to learn here.

Octavia's Brood is an important and necessary book, a crucial tool for teaching, thinking and (re)imaging past, present and future.



View all my reviews

ONE RIVER--Window on a Universe

Wade Davis.  One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

8 March 2010

How to characterize a book that cracks a window on an entire universe?  No summaries are possible. A dozen roads radiate from this point, each a potential and remarkable journey...

In One River, Wade Davis testifies to the intellectual, cultural and geographic origins of his own work and thinking.  A tribute to his mentor at Harvard in the ethnobotany program, Richard Evans Schultes, and another of Schultes' students, Timothy Plowman, with whom Davis worked, the book tracks two circuits of ethnobotanical research in the Andes and Amazon river basin--Schultes' work of the late 1930s, '40s and early '50s, and Davis' own introduction to Amazonian rain forest botany with Tim Plowman in the 1970s.  Written when Schultes was an old man, and just after the sudden and premature death of Plowman in 1989 from AIDS, this book traces the contours of lost worlds, of languages, cultures and lifeways stamped out by the obsessions and ravages of capitalism, the American "war on drugs" and widespread neo-colonial attitudes, in which an Indian not indentured or enslaved probably ought to be dead.

The book is tinged by great sadness--above all for the disappearance of worlds, lifeways, views, knowledge, habits and languages that it can only point to in small, piercing vignettes, as when Plowman explains to Davis, in chapter two, how the Kogi people, weavers, journey, as in a weaving, across the landscape (52ff).  Or Plowman's account of the perspectives that different languages hold.  For a group in Uruguay, one of the Gaurani groups, he explains, "the word for soul was 'the sun that lies within.' They called a friend 'one's other heart.' To forgive was the same word as to forget.  They had no writing, and when they first saw paper, they called it the skin of God--just because you could send messages" (37-8). 

Davis recounts one awful colonial history of destruction after another, but is able to separate insightful missionaries and clerics from ignorant proselytizers.  He gives a short (and terrible) history of rubber production, recounts a tale of the creation and marketing of cocaine from the 1850s onward, tracking America's embrace of false promises and then its overactive prohibitions and international "interdictions."

I find here a thousand stories I want to follow up on: I realize I need to find out much more about the rise and fall of the Incas and their remarkable building projects--dependent in part, upon seeing stone as a living thing (434-5):  "stones are dynamic." Likewise, I think now, having read this book, I'll make better sense of the work of Mick Taussig, and of Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff.  I want to look at Davis' photography (Light at the Edge of the World), and the films he's made with National Geographic.  I want to read Weston LaBarre on the peyote cult of the US Southwest--part of the last gasp of indigenous resistance against the totalizing spread of white culture and spirituality and the reservation system.  And I want to live and travel in South America, but as a much better informed and fluent Spanish speaker.  Too, I see the contours of another novel-sized tale that would take up my obsessions with flight and religious ideas in the story of the US evangelists in Ecuador in the 1950s, their attempts to placate and domesticate Indians already driven off and exploited by the Shell Oil Company at Shell-Mera (256-67).

The next ten years of life could unspool from here. I have a lot to learn from Davis' openness and curiosity, his generosity and attention to detail.  Let the work begin!