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Octavia butler transgender12/7/2023 Butler’s prose was forthright and rhythmic. I found Parable of the Sower by chance in The Strand’s stacks. I’d visited home and jumped from my car’s window and swum through the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina, and then lived in shock in the desolation of the aftermath. I’d marched through Manhattan to protest Bush’s pre-emptive war with Iraq, foolishly thinking our collective uprising would have some kind of impact, bitterly disappointed when I discovered it did not. I’d watched smoke billow from the Twin Towers on 9/11 and then spent hours walking from midtown to Brooklyn, peppered in ash. I’d voted in my first presidential election and watched in confused horror as Bush was appointed by Supreme Court ruling. Tragedy had loosed me from my moorings, my understanding of what the world was and how it worked, and it sent me spinning: a drunk driver killed my brother Joshua in October 2000, and his killer was never held accountable for his death. I had more money, not much, but more than I’d had in college and high school, so I’d take the train to The Strand, where the stacks stretched on and on. I must have read Octavia Butler’s work for the first time in the early 2000s, when I was living in New York City as a young twenty-something, working as a publishing assistant. I sat quietly at my desk, swallowing their critiques whole, quietly ashamed of the pleasure I got from reading sci-fi and fantasy. They said the work was amateur, not serious, wasn’t about real people and therefore, real issues. I never really encountered any sci-fi or speculative fiction: when students submitted science fiction short stories or fantasy in creative writing workshops, my peers shunned them. It was good to study these artists, to seriously consider the kind of work I had been starving for in high school, but even though I attended school in the mid- to late 1990s, when Octavia Butler was a living writer, full in her artistic flowering, I never found her work in the bookstore stacks or on the syllabi of my courses. I read African writers and Black British writers and Black American writers and Black Caribbean writers, but all the work I read was poetry and literary fiction. I majored in English, and I sought out creative writing classes and literature classes that specialized in the African Diaspora. I didn’t encounter Octavia Butler’s fiction in university, either. I found sustenance in literary writers and in science fiction and fantasy writers, too, needing the escapism of that kind of storytelling, which I had been drawn to since I was a small child and first read Tamora Pierce and Robin McKinley-but the only science fiction and fantasy I could find in my school library were by Frank Herbert, J. I spent those years wandering through my school library stacks, finding books by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, Richard Wright, Gabriel García Márquez, and Margaret Atwood. I lived in my grandmother’s four-bedroom house with fourteen other relatives and watched my extended family bear the brunt of poverty and racism throughout my childhood and adolescence. I had grown up in a poor/working-class family in rural Mississippi, where I spent years eating government cheese, red beans, and rice, and drinking powdered milk. I never encountered her in my coursework, as my required reading looked nothing like the books I found in my personal reading: I read The Last of the Mohicans, Catch-22, and The Catcher in the Rye and little there resonated with the world I knew. By Jesmyn Ward I can’t remember when I first read Octavia Butler’s work.
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