User:Aitantv/Octavia Butler (1980) Wild Seed

Bulter, Octavia (1980) Wild Seed. Available at: https://www.bol.com/nl/nl/p/the-patternist-series-wild-seed/9300000008257063. Downloaded: 11th Nov 2022.

MAIN TEXT

• "She could have broken his grip easily, but she did not. “I’ve come a long way today,” he told her. “This body needs rest if it is to continue to serve me.” "(Butler 1980)

+ Note: The fatigue of the journey - the awareness of the body as a vessel to transcend time and space

• "“I kill, Anyanwu. That is how I keep my youth, my strength. I can do only one thing to show you what I am, and that is kill a man and wear his body like a cloth.” He breathed deeply. “This is not the body I was born into. It’s not the tenth I’ve worn, nor the hundredth, nor the thousandth. Your gift seems to be a gentle one. Mine is not.” (Butler 1980)

+ Note: A hungry god who dveours and wears the body of his prey.

• "Without a word, she walked away to another smaller building and returned with two large yams. Then she led him into her kitchen and gave him a deerskin to sit on since he carried nothing other than the cloth around his loins. Still in her male guise, she courteously shared a kola nut and a little palm wine with him. Then she began to prepare food. Besides the yams, she had vegetables, smoked fish, and palm oil. She built up a fire from the live coals in the tripod of stones that formed her hearth, then put a clay pot of water on to boil. She began to peel the yams. She would cut them up and boil the pieces until they were tender enough to be pounded as her people liked them. Perhaps she would make soup of the vegetables, oil, and fish, but that would take time. “What do you do?” she asked him as she worked. “Steal food when you are hungry?” “Yes,” he said. He stole more than food. If there were no people he knew near him, or if he went to people he knew and they did not welcome him, he simply took a new strong, young body. No person, no group could stop him from doing this. No one could stop him from doing anything at all."(Butler 1980)

• "When she woke him, the house was full of the odor of food and he got up alert and ravenous. He sat with her, washed his hands absently in the bowl of water she gave him, then used his fingers to scoop up a bit of pounded yam from his platter and dip it into the common pot of peppery soup. The food was good and filling, and for some time he concentrated on it, ignoring Anyanwu except to notice that she was also eating and did not seem inclined to talk. He recalled distantly that there had been some small religious ceremony between the washing of hands and the eating when he had last been with her people. An offering of food and palm wine to the gods. He asked about it once he had taken the edge off his hunger." (Butler 1980)

"She stared down into the constantly moving water, then away at the distant shore. The shore seemed even farther away now, though Doro had said the ship was not yet under way. Anyanwu felt that she had moved farther from her home, that already perhaps she was too far away ever to return." (Butler 1980)

+ we cannot understate the importance of the journey in sci fi as well as the diasporic experience. The distance between one's origins and one's destination is what creates the diasporic void, the emptiness, displacement, or longing that must somehow be filled.

"How could she live among these strangers? White skins, yellow hairs— what were they to her? Worse than strangers. Different ones, people who could be all around her working and shouting, and still leave her feeling alone." (Butler 1980)

• "Everyone ate well that night. Anyanwu ate better than anyone, because for her, the flesh of the fish told her all she needed to know about the creature’s physical structure— all she needed to know to take its shape and live as it did. Just a small amount of raw flesh told her more than she had words to say." (Butler 1980)

• "Her dolphin body was wonderfully agile. She seemed to fly through the air, plunging back smoothly and leaping again without strain or weariness. This was the best body she had ever shaped for herself. If only dolphin speech came as easily as dolphin movement. Some part of her mind wondered why it did not, wondered whether Doro was superior to her in this. Did he gain a new language, new knowledge when he took a new body— since he actually did possess the body, not merely duplicate it?" (Butler 1980)

+ after generations of acculturation, when the original seed mutates and becomes one with the surroundings - the body of the other is possessed.

• "He would have only his own special ability lodged within her small, durable body until he began to hunger— hunger in a way Anyanwu and Isaac could never understand. He would hunger, and he would have to feed. Another life. A new body. Anyanwu would last him no longer than any other good kill." (Butler 1980)

• "Anyanwu was glad that some of the food and the white people’s ways of eating it were familiar to her from the ship. She could sit down and have a meal without seeming utterly ignorant. She could not have cooked the meal, but that would come, too, in time. She would learn. For now, she merely observed and allowed the interesting smells to intensify her hunger. Hunger was familiar and good. It kept her from staring too much at the white woman, kept her from concentrating on her own nervousness and uncertainty in the new surroundings, kept her attention on the soup, thick with meat and vegetables, and the roast deer flesh— venison, the white woman had called it— and a huge fowl— a turkey. Anyanwu repeated the words to herself, reassured that they had become part of her vocabulary. New words, new ways, new foods, new clothing . . ." (Butler 1980)

"There was only the alien furniture: the desk, the bed, the great wooden cabinet beside the door— a kas, it was called, a Dutch thing for storing clothing. There were two chairs and several mats— rugs— of heavy, colorful cloth. It was all as alien as Doro himself. It gave her a feeling of hopelessness— as though she had come to this strange place only to die. She stared into the fire in the fireplace." (Butler 1980)

AFTERWORD, SANDRA Y. GOVAN, POST-ANALYSIS ESSAY

• "While there are no androids, aliens, spaceships, or alternate worlds, Butler instead uses the sciences of biology and anthropology to examine ideas like the limitations of immortality, the evolution of a mutant species through selective breeding, the ethics of such genetic manipulation, and the development of community when people are scattered, gathered, and scattered again." (Govan 1980)
• "With carefully crafted anthropological renderings Butler creates vivid images that resonate with the central touchstones from African-American historical experience: the legacies of an Africa only dimly remembered; the horrific slave trade which included the Middle Passage; the brutality of American chattel slavery. Additionally, for many African-American readers, and others who possess wide reading experience within the African-American literary tradition, there is recognition of a kinship linking Wild Seed to that historical literary canon." (Govan 1980)
• "Butler does not romanticize Africa. The people Anyanwu has lived among for centuries possess the same attributes and foibles of people the world over. They can be loving and kind; they can also be arrogant or jealous; they fear what they don’t understand; they are hostile toward those manifesting difference. They often recast their fears and wonder at specific phenomena as powerful magic or religion; they sometimes sought Anyanwu’s counsel as an oracle— one through whom a god spoke, and they sometimes attacked Anyanwu as a witch, forcing her to kill in order to save herself." (Govan 1980)
• "Who cannot understand her terrible feelings of isolation and loneliness as when contemplating the endless sea and the thought of leaving her homeland behind, Anyanwu feels called to seize control of her life." (Govan 1980)
• "Magnify Anyanwu’s experience by the hundreds of thousands, by the millions, and the devastation to body and spirit the slave trade exacted on its black victims is abundantly clear. What Butler also makes abundantly clear is the negative consequences trading in human cargo exacted on whites as well." (Govan 1980)
• "Butler allows us to see that even powerful negative forces can be undermined; that indeed, everything must change; that there is a redeeming power in the human spirit, a redeeming power in the human capacity to give, to sacrifice, to love." (Govan 1980)