Octavia Butler's "Bloodchild" as Environmental Literature

 

 

Octavia Butler's short story "Bloodchild" has often been read as an allegory of slavery, a reading that no doubt often represents a projection of authorial intent based on the fact that Butler is an African American author. Butler herself insists it is rather her "pregnant man story." In the story, an adolescent male protagonist, Gan, becomes intimately implicated in the reproductive cycle of an alien family, with which his own human family co-habits in a kind of multigenerational symbiotic relationship, yet one in which the humans are subordinate. In addition to being a story about unfreedom and subordination, "Bloodchild" is a love story, and for this reason it reads more comfortably as a story about gender than as one about slavery. If the story is a parable of American slavery, it could too easily be read as suggesting that slavery was somehow symbiotic--somehow a love story--and further, that racial difference is analogous to species difference. Nevertheless, many readers have persisted in thinking the story can illuminate something about racial oppression and slavery, and they are not categorically wrong. Misreadings along this line are all too possible, but such are the hazards of great literature. 

In addition to being her pregnant man story, Butler says the story was inspired by her horror of botflies. Botflies can lay their eggs under your skin, and if the "bite" is not treated, the larva later emerge from your festering flesh. In the story, the alien matriarch's eggs must incubate in Gan's abdomen, before being removed surgically. Like many of Butler's other stories, "Bloodchild" is darkly ecological. Her characters are biological and material beings first and foremost. They are ensnared in fleshly, mortal webs of interdependence--symbiotic, parasitic, predatory, or reproductive. Of course the characters are also characters, which is to say they are selves. But whether they are human or radically alien, they seem to be written into existence mainly to question the very experience of selfhood. Selves merge or split, dissolve and re-form. They are multiple, plastic, partial, or liminal. It is as intriguing and horrifying as it sounds, but it is also illuminating. If nature writing is about coming to terms with our entanglement in webs of relation to the living world, "Bloodchild" is a valuable intervention in the genre, and one that can illuminate the intersection of race and nature in American culture.

Paul Outka's Race and Nature: From Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance traces what Outka sees as two predominant modes of environmental experience in American cultural history. One is the romantic sublime, in which an Emersonian or Thoreauian subject merges with nature through an immersive wilderness experience. The other is the traumatic "naturalization" associated with the horrors of slavery and racial terrorism. Against Emerson's depiction of the transcendent and pure experience of nature, Outka juxtaposes a horrific description from Crevocoeur's 1782 Letters from an American Farmer of an enslaved man gibbetted for murder and being eaten alive by vultures. It matters little whether Cevocoeur's account was strictly true; horrors unspeakable enough abound in the annals of Atlantic slavery. The point is, "becoming one with nature" may be sublime when it's on your own terms, but at the other extreme this now hackneyed phrase could as easily describe the worst kinds of dehumanizing atrocities. Racialized slavery came to require the illusion that the enslaved were inhuman, subhuman--indeed, a part of nature, and to be exploited as such. It was an illusion belied, of course, by the inhuman (or all-too-human) violence that was required to manufacture it. No one ever gibbeted an ox.

For Outka, this "traumatic sublime" within African American memory goes some significant way toward explaining the conspicuous whiteness of Western environmentalism and nature writing. It is undeniable that American environmentalism, or at least the predominant variety of it, has been mostly a white thing. However, the African American writers who have most poignantly expressed the experience of oppression and racial terrorism have frequently turned to a kind of environmental language that mirrors American nature writing in a non-obvious but fundamental way. Literary theorist Leo Marx, in his book The Machine in the Garden, made an influential study of a trope in American literature that he called the "idyll interrupted," and though his study neglected black authors, his framing can help illuminate an otherwise obscured mode of environmental writing which grapples with something like what Outka calls the "traumatic sublime." 

In Marx's interrupted idyll, a scene of pastoral perfection is set only to be intruded upon dramatically by "the machine"--the steamboat crashing into Huck and Jim's raft on the Mississippi, or the locomotive intruding on Thoreau's Walden Pond or Hawthorne's Sleepy Hollow. The interrupted idyll, Marx argued, is a particularly American representation of anxiety about the threat industrialism posed to nature and to the spiritual and cultural grounding afforded by a life lived in contact with it. It is remarkable that Marx did not look to African American writers as well, where compelling examples abound of the interrupted idyll, albeit a distinct variety. Frederick Douglass offers an early example in My Bondage and My Freedom where he describes the natural freedom that ironically characterized his childhood under slavery. 

…if cold and hunger do not pierce the tender frame, the first seven or eight years of the slave-boy's life are about as full of sweet content as those of the most favored and petted white children of the slaveholder. The slave-boy escapes many troubles which befall and vex his white brother. [...] freed from all restraint, the slave-boy can be, in his life and conduct, a genuine boy, doing whatever his boyish nature suggests; enacting, by turns, all the strange antics and freaks of horses, dogs, pigs, and barn-door fowls, without in any manner compromising his dignity, or incurring reproach of any sort. He literally runs wild; has no pretty little verses to learn in the nursery; no nice little speeches to make for aunts, uncles, or cousins, to show how smart he is […] our sable boy continues to roll in the dust, or play in the mud, as best suits him, and in the veriest freedom. If he feels uncomfortable, from mud or from dust, the coast is clear; he can plunge into the river or the pond, without the ceremony of undressing, or the fear of wetting his clothes [...] His days, when the weather is warm, are spent in the pure, open air, and in the bright sunshine. [...] In a word, he is, for the most part of the first eight years of his life, a spirited, joyous, uproarious, and happy boy, upon whom troubles fall only like water on a duck's back. 

Of course it is not the locomotive or steamboat or the smog-belching mill-works but rather slavery that interrupts and beclouds Douglass's boyhood idyll. 

I learned by degrees the sad fact, that the "little hut," and the lot on which it stood, belonged not to my dear old grandparents, but to some person who lived a great distance off, and who was called, by grandmother, "OLD MASTER." I further learned the sadder fact, that not only the house and lot, but that grandmother herself, (grandfather was free,) and all the little children around her, belonged to this mysterious personage, called by grandmother, with every mark of reverence, "Old Master." Thus early did clouds and shadows begin to fall upon my path.

The imagery of "clouds and shadows" and darkening skies is used so frequently in literature and story-telling more broadly it hardly needs explanation. However, the frequent recurrence of this literary device in attempts to explain the experience of racial oppression is noteworthy. W.E.B. Dubois's well-known concept of "the Veil," which he frequently pairs with the imagery of a darkening sky, is a particularly striking example. "I remember when the shadow swept across me" he wrote in The Souls of Black Folk. It was in the "early days of rollicking boyhood" when he first felt the stigmatizing gaze of his white peers and realized that he was "shut out from their world by a vast veil." (SBF I) The atmospheric language recurs as he reflects on the world and the life that inevitably awaits his newborn son. 

"I can see him now, changing like the sky from sparkling laughter to darkening frowns, and then to wondering thoughtfulness as he watched the world. He knew no color-line, poor dear—and the Veil, though it shadowed him, had not yet darkened half his sun." (SBF XI) 

Martin Luther King would use similar language in his Letter From the Birmingham Jail: 

…you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she cannot go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky…"

If one could speak of a generalized black idyll interrupted, it is perhaps most succinctly captured in the title of Richard Wright's poem, penned in 1935 and recently made more famous by Ta-Nehisi Coates, "Between the World and Me."

And one morning while in the woods I stumbled

    suddenly upon the thing,

Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly

    oaks and elms

And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting

    themselves between the world and me.... 

Wright's poem makes admittedly short work of the idyll, focusing rather on the interruption, here again not a mechanized monstrosity, but "the thing," "the sooty details of the scene" of a recent lynching, which rise and come to life in their ghastly horror to not only utterly overwhelm any possible beauty or sublimity of the natural world, but to strike at the very possibility of being in the world, of having a world. As with Marx’s interrupted idyll, the discrete experience, the particular event, or the single instance comes to pervade the entire landscape of life, calling forth a holistic interposition between self and world, between subject and object. Racial oppression becomes a kind of miasma, mirroring curiously the new type of atmospheric, world-pervading environmental threats that emerged in 20th century America--the Dust Bowl, smog, nuclear fallout, or climate change. Wright's formulation, "between the world and me," sharpens and focuses the imagery of the veil and the beclouded skies. What is being expressed, it seems, is not just a feeling of foreboding, nor even a sense of great fear and danger in any simple sense. This version of the interrupted idyll rather conveys an existential impairment of the very link "between the world and me." While racial oppression may be distilled in discrete instances, the effect of the instance is smeared out through time, and operates at a more totalizing level, which ultimately finds expression as a lamentation of world-loss that is quite similar to the lamentations of nature-alienation so prevalent in the broader corpus of American environmental literature.

Of course a certain irony or even contradiction is at work here. The historical black self is on the one hand alienated from nature but on the other hand all too close to nature, the black body having been ascribed a primitive subjectivity and systematically subjected to the "materialization" of violence. One could perhaps resolve this contradiction by supposing a difference between "the world" and nature, such that the world is the social world and nature is the natural one. This would seem, at least on the surface, to be the way Ta Nehisi Coates has appropriated the phrase in his book. "Between the world and me" seems to mean for him between the white world and me, and surely that means between me and the larger social, cultural, built world--such as it exists for Coates. And isn’t this white world of people just the world that environmentalists and nature writers have been trying to critique, or unwind, or escape? And wouldn't alienation from the human world therefore be altogether different from alienation from nature? In answering 'no,' we need not rely on the philosopher’s point that “everything is natural” and therefore the distinction does not hold up to objective scrutiny. More significant is that it doesn't hold up to subjective scrutiny; it fails to account for the deep imbrications between the social and the natural in experience, and particularly the deeply social preconditions for the experience of nature that environmental culture prizes. 

Wilderness enthusiasts often exalt the inhospitableness and "otherness" and even the very real danger of wild spaces and extreme environments, but it is important to recognize that these celebrations have typically come from those whose place in the human world confers a baseline sense of safety and belonging--key components of what we now label as "privilege." Racial oppression and the terrorism that aims to produce the opposite of safety and belonging predictably produce also a sense of alienation from place and earth. This comes sharply into focus in Souls of Black Folk when Dubois endures the tragic death of his infant son. 

We could not lay him in the ground there in Georgia, for the earth there is strangely red; so we bore him away to the northward, with his flowers and his little folded hands. In vain, in vain!—for where, O God! beneath thy broad blue sky shall my dark baby rest in peace,—where Reverence dwells, and Goodness, and a Freedom that is free?

Dubois's experience is his own, of course, and it cannot be presumed universal. African-American literature has often sought to speak the unspeakable, to convey oppression in all its lived experience, and partly for the edification of white readers. But in doing so this literature runs the risk of binding blackness to victimhood. To the contrary, African-American history offers plenty of examples of individuals and communities who have claimed place, created belonging, and forged deep connections to nature, frequently in the face of extreme forces of alienation. Some of the most dramatic historical examples are the communal place-making of maroons in the mountains, islands, and swamps of the Caribbean and the Eastern seaboard. At certain moments in certain places, inhabited wildernesses became places of refuge and collective resistance, and thus potentially places of belonging and relative safety. 

Heroic exceptions aside, however, only a little attention to the historical African American experience is necessary to understand why literary celebrations of wilderness as a space of freedom and transcendence have come overwhelmingly from white writers. In addition to being celebrated by white writers as a space of perilous otherness, wilderness has been often celebrated as a timeless space of transcendence, of pure presence or pure perception--a space in which to escape the social and the historical. But here again, wilderness is Janus-faced; it is both a timeless, de-socialized space and a space heavily layered with historical memory--a space where the collective, national past is called forth. In white American memory, the wilderness has been celebrated as a resurrection of the frontier--a space of opportunity, self-sufficiency, and expansive freedom. However, if wilderness can be an especially powerful setting for re-enforcing a collective identity by bringing the past to life, it becomes apparent how divergent such "wilderness experiences" may be. If we return to Richard Wright's interrupted idyll, we see this illuminated in the starkest way.

The ground gripped my feet and my heart was circled by
    icy walls of fear--
The sun died in the sky; a night wind muttered in the
    grass and fumbled the leaves in the trees; the woods
    poured forth the hungry yelping of hounds; the
    darkness screamed with thirsty voices; and the witnesses rose and lived:
The dry bones stirred, rattled, lifted, melting themselves
    into my bones.
The grey ashes formed flesh firm and black, entering into
    my flesh.

Perhaps we could hazard a distinction at this point between nature writing and ecocritique. Not eco-critique as a secondary scholarly exercise, but closer to Timothy Luke's usage of the term: ecocritique as the contestation of the politics of nature. If nature writing is marked by the positive, effusive, and sustained celebration of nature and natural experience, clearly it is a body of literature historically beholden to social privilege. But ecocritique might encompass a more complex corpus of environmental literature contending with conflict, loss, estrangement, and alienation from some crucial aspect of existence, which we often call, for lack of a better word, nature. As such, ecocritique is neither contemporarily nor historically under a white monopoly.

"Bloodchild" is a science fiction horror story mixed with an intimate interpersonal drama. In other words, it's about as far from Thoreau as you can get. But what happens if we insist on reading it as nature writing anyway? In "Bloodchild," nature is at once much too near and utterly out of reach. Nature is the alien overlords with whom the humans live in involuntary symbiosis. Nature is the larvae growing inside Gan's stomach. Nature is the larger oppressive society of alien species that makes any notion of escape unthinkable. The humans in the story have a hidden stash of weapons, but it is clear that these represent realistically only the possibility of suicide. On the other hand, if we think of the kind of nature that nature writing celebrates--spacious nature, wilderness, forests and rivers and landscapes stretching out toward the horizon--this nature is conspicuously absent in Butler's story. The reader is led to assume that a vast biosphere does exist on this alien planet, outside of the "preserve" where the story is set. But not only does escape seem impossible, there is no place to escape to. Whatever nature lies beyond the horizons of this world is deadly, hostile, and utterly alien. If environmental writing is about capturing the sense of a surrounding world or the sense of immersion in a living environment, "Bloodchild" does this well but rather hideously. The natural and the social are monstrously amalgamated. The environmental pathos of the story is one of claustrophobia, of entrapment, of being environed. It is the opposite of nature writing as we know it, and that is why it is such a valuable intervention in the genre as it grapples with the intersecting politics of race and nature.

-Jake Greear