Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison Gave Us New Eyes to See

A FEW YEARS ago, an acquaintance and I found ourselves debating the value of art in a capitalist society—a suitably light topic for a summer evening. My companion believed strongly that art must explicitly denounce the world’s injustices, and if it did not, it was reinforcing exploitative systems. I, ever the aesthete, found this stance reasonably sound from a moral perspective but incredibly dubious otherwise.

Then, as now, I consider art’s greatest function to be its capacity for expanding our conceptions of reality, not simply acting as moralistic propaganda. After all, the foundational thing you learn in art history is that the first artists were mystics, healers, and spiritual interlocutors—not politicians.

We started making art, it seems, to cross the border between our world and one beyond. Prehistoric wall paintings of cows and lumpy carvings of fertility goddesses serve as the earliest indications of our species’ artistic inclinations, blurring the lines between religious ritual and art object. Even as the world crumbles around us, I am convinced we must hold onto art’s spiritual properties rather than succumbing to the allure of work that only addresses our current systems.

This is not a case against protest art per se, but it is a case for reclaiming artists’ ability to connect us with our soul’s longings and ferry our imaginations across as yet uncharted rivers. However, it’s important to acknowledge that imagination, and the freedom we ascribe to or derive from it, does not exist in a neutral space. Imagination as an elemental force must be intentionally cultivated and fed, lest our dreams become too small or too beholden to an existing power structure.

In my first Sojourners column (“The Point of Art,” July 2019), I tried to suggest that all imaginative energy has the potential to communicate something miraculous. Artmaking mirrors the creation narrative found in Genesis, specifically the appearance of something where there once was nothing at all. The hopeful political implications of creative processes can then be located in process itself (not the finished artwork) because the space of possibility is a direct antagonist to the status quo.

Or so I thought. It is now 2020, and I realize that for us mortals, there is no “something from nothing.” Any idea we have, no matter how ingenious, likely has roots somewhere else. Being connected to history is not at all problematic, but an issue arises when we are unconsciously shaped by the imaginative prejudices and constraints of that history. This tension has been magnified after a summer in which three very interesting events have occurred: nationwide spells of civil unrest, the release of Hamilton to streaming, and a renewed interest in the work of science fiction writer Octavia Butler.

Beyond Hamilton

In trying to make sense of how these happenings might relate to one another, Toni Morrison has wisdom to contribute. Her essay collection Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination reveals the presence of Blackness in classic American literature (Poe, Cather, Twain, Hemingway, and others) and pulls Black characters into the foreground, while exposing the American imagination. Early in the collection, Morrison writes, “imagining is not merely looking or looking at ... it is, for the purposes of the work, becoming.” Imagination is dynamic, and all of our imaginations are, in some way or another, shaped by trauma and the desperation of the present moment—and America’s complex racial history. This means, unfortunately, the dreams we weave for the future will be entangled with the allure of acceptance by the dominant culture, instead of a radical dismantling of all hierarchies, unless we are wise and careful. Perhaps this is why, when Hamilton became available for streaming, and I watched it multiple times, I was struck with the sacrilegious thought, “Is this the best we can hope for?”

Please do not misunderstand me: Hamilton is excellent. The costumes are lush in their specificity; the actors are talented beyond belief; the music is brilliant and clever and emotive. And so on. The Tony Awards have already said as much. The $75 million Disney paid for the rights to the filmed performance says the same.

I’m not bothered by the accusations that the musical plays fast and loose with historical accuracy either. A friend and I discussing this subject agreed that expecting Black and brown artists to faithfully recreate history is unfair. Let artistic license have its day, we say. Stop expecting us to use art to teach white people things they should already know when Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette features a delicious New Wave soundtrack and purple Chuck Taylor high tops, but no class analysis. Let Thomas Jefferson spring to life in the form of a biracial Black man. Vive la révolution! But, on the subject of said revolution, it seems that our visions for inclusion and precedent-defying diversity are, quite simply, incomplete.

For better or ill, Hamilton owes as much to our first Black president as it does to Ron Chernow’s biography—with all the former’s attendant hopes and subsequent broken promises. The picture of a young Black boy rubbing President Obama’s head, marveling at the similarity of their hair textures, is seared into my memory. So is Aaron Burr singing about the “room where it happens,” while Leslie Odom Jr.’s excellence electrifies the theater. When Obama was elected, many African Americans were so happy to be included in the American narrative that we could not, as Jelani Cobb wrote in The New Yorker, “conceive of the limitations of [a Black presidency].” We’d made it into the room where it happens. Unfortunately, when we got there, we realized the architecture was not meant to hold us. We were in the room, but the room was both corrupt and corrupting, determined only to prove how much it hated our presence by electing an incompetent individual shortly thereafter.

Watching Hamilton now, thoroughly disenchanted with this country as I am, reminds me of New York Times culture writers Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris’s astute observation that we have moved beyond the age of representation. Morris says, in the podcast Still Processing, that if the Obama era “was about being seen,” the Trump era is “about being heard.” In 2020, Hamilton looks like brilliant and slightly outdated protest art. Its banners read, “We are beautiful. We are dazzling. We are what America looks like ... And it would be silly not to include us in your government (or your award shows).”

A seat at the table is necessary, of course. We must be seen before we can be heard. These days, though, it seems that many of us are far less interested in inclusion and more excited about bringing abundance to our communities. We are more enthused by the prospect of cultivating places where we might love and be loved than by convincing people to love us. Some of us are bold enough to want a seat on the moon.

Contextual Good

As you may imagine, shaking off our inherited imaginations and looking beyond the crises around us is no easy task. But it is necessary. Scholar Robin D.G. Kelley frames the issue in clear terms, suggesting that “the most radical art is not protest art but works that take us to another place, envision a different way of seeing, perhaps a different way of feeling.” Shocking words in a time such as ours, when justice demands we march and place our bodies on the line. Who has time to think, to feel? I am speaking directly to my POC friends and comrades when I say: We do. Or rather, we need to make time to think and feel, discern and dream. Ours is a reactionary age, and yet, as 20th century intellectual Theodor W. Adorno writes in his essay “Resignation,” “thinking is actually the force of resistance.” Careful contemplation is the only methodology for seeing beyond the perils of immediate circumstances and creating a world that is truly free. A liberated imagination is the enemy of “whiteness.”

The question then becomes, which artists have done this? Who has thought beyond the present in search of the past and future? In the world of speculative fiction, no one answers this better than Octavia Butler.

Born in the late 1940s, Butler honed her earliest imaginative impulses as a means of escape from the realities her mother and grandmother faced by virtue of poverty and Blackness. The stories she wrote became a haven from the racism her family experienced, allowing her to carve a path that both honored and departed from their struggles. Unsurprisingly, many of Butler’s fictional worlds are dystopian in nature or exist in another dimension, and as such are not particularly comforting. Terrifying, in fact, might be a better word. In Kindred, for example, the main character is yanked through time to face her enslaved ancestors, but the force pulling her into the past never reveals itself. In Parable of the Sower, a Baptist minister’s daughter creates a new religion amid a series of environmental and economic disasters, in a place where violence and death are shockingly common.

As if that weren’t discomfiting enough, the most frightening entities in these stories often prove to be human beings, not aliens or other life forms. But in a world where police murder unarmed Black people, rape culture continues to rear its scaly head, and climate change threatens eco-collapse, Butler’s books feel both prophetic and real. And despite the grim tone of her books, Butler actually points a way forward by centering Black women as moral agents and committing to science fiction as an ethical experiment. Instead of handing readers a clear guide to right and wrong, Butler pulls these dualisms into conflict and tension. Her characters are often faced with morally impossible choices and must navigate these choices as best they can.

By watching these women pick their way through a mass of ethical quandaries, we begin to see how fragile our societies are, and how human greed and selfishness can create a world with few good options. Good, in Butler’s world, is contextual and must be fought for. It belongs to no group of people and is, at least in Kindred and Parable of the Sower, connected to survival. Racism and misogyny are certainly addressed, but Butler is far more interested in that which plagues us as a species, how we organize ourselves, and how complicated life can be.

The abyss that separates us from ourselves 

The renewed interest in Butler and her work at this particular time might seem strange unless you understand the historic link between science fiction and the civil rights movement. Nichelle Nichols’ story is, perhaps, the most famous example. Nichols, who played the iconic character Nyota Uhura in the original Star Trek television series in the 1960s, was talked out of quitting after its first season by none other than Martin Luther King Jr. As legend has it, King told Nichols that her work on the show was critical for reimagining the world as it might be, rather than how it was.

The main characters in Kindred and Parable of the Sower (both Black women) are equally astounding for their courage and intelligence and, most importantly, because they have the audacity to assume they have the right to be in a story without explanation or apology. Such clarity of purpose would have been bold in 1979 when Kindred was first published and is bold even today. There was no blueprint for a Black female science fiction author—then or now—just as there is even less of a blueprint for remaking the world we live in.

But if we take the provocations of Butler’s work seriously, just as we have taken Hamilton and this year’s marches seriously, we begin to see that imagination goes far beyond simple statements or didactic messaging. It is about complexity. Art can do that, if we let it.

So, how do we get there? I take great consolation in the words of the Desert Fathers and Mothers who lived experimental lives, who had no wish to “be ruled by men” nor to “rule over others themselves.” Separating themselves from the known world allowed them to, as Thomas Merton writes, “cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves.” When we bridge this gap, our work becomes rooted in wisdom and love of the world instead of fear or anger or despair. And make no mistake: It is work. Untangling our imaginations from empire is work. Reconfiguring our personal relationships to power structures is work. Being willing to give up our various privileges and worldly desires is work.

Imaginative labor is not something I’d considered seriously until reading Butler’s now-legendary list of life goals (nearly all of which she accomplished) and the very important words undergirding them: “So be it. See to it.” The former is the mysterious, declarative, creative act. The latter is the muscle required to build the worlds we want to see. May we, in our making and unmaking, learn to think outside intellectual and artistic holding patterns and envision futures that are intergalactic in scope.

So be it. See to it.