Missing Witches - Octavia E. Butler： Diversify Or Be Destroyed

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00:00:44.020 And one last thing before we start.

00:00:46.640 The stories we tell require a general content warning.

00:00:49.660 It's just a fact of this terrain of interrogating what is missing.

00:00:54.680 We promise to hold those moments with care. 1.00

00:00:57.800 You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 1.00

00:01:00.920 Be a witch. 1.00

00:01:02.460 Be a witch. 1.00

00:01:04.480 You must be a witch. 0.78

00:01:07.900 This episode is about Octavia E. Butler. 0.99

00:01:12.540 Prophet. 0.99

00:01:14.080 Worldbuilder.

00:01:15.200 Door opener. 1.00

00:01:16.960 Progenitor of the magic that is Afrofuturism. 1.00

00:01:20.900 Novelist. 1.00

00:01:22.240 Writer of books that make portals.

00:01:24.420 what adrian marie brown calls visionary fiction writing that visions the future that opens it

00:01:31.480 with new possibility or that offers a terrifying warning and so pushes the mind to face dark truths

00:01:37.400 and oppose the vision of the possible they present resist horror futures in the present by having

00:01:43.800 them in our sights someone who thought through the way which hunts happen and what makes someone

00:01:51.180 different enough to be powerful or a target. In Wild Seed, her shape-shifting ancient narrator

00:01:59.980 learned quickly that it was not good to be too different. Great differences caused envy,

00:02:06.580 suspicion, fear, charges of witchcraft. She told us about these times, our times, decades ago,

00:02:15.260 literally in her 1990s earth seed novels a president of the united states under the make

00:02:21.080 america great again banner in the name of christianity uses language from the witch hunts

00:02:26.980 to call forth a rabid fear in his followers fear rooted in the deep iniquity and plagues and planet

00:02:34.440 sickness and power distortions of their world fear that the leader turns toward scapegoats

00:02:41.320 vulnerable people, and the Bible-thumping president keeps himself arm's length from

00:02:45.880 the gangs that form in his name. And a spark once lit rages. Earthseed is both the name of the

00:02:53.840 series, and it's the name of the philosophy that diverges from Christianity in that world.

00:03:00.580 It's a religion of noticing, channeled and created by a young black girl.

00:03:05.620 earth seed says when a parent stability disintegrates as it must god is change

00:03:12.280 people tend to give in to fear and depression to need and greed when no influence is strong

00:03:19.620 enough to unify people they divide they struggle one against one group against group for survival

00:03:27.440 position power gangs with machine guns take kids from their parents high on their power 0.52

00:03:33.740 and righteousness, they rape and brutalize and bully people. In interview, Octavia said,

00:03:41.480 you have to think about what kind of world you want to live in, and I don't think there's a

00:03:45.440 person alive who would want to live in the world that I've written about. But we can arrange it.

00:03:51.240 The problems that I write about are problems that we can do something about. That's why I write

00:03:56.280 about them. Earthseed takes place in the 2020s, and as I read it, this fictional world and real

00:04:01.840 moment collide. Gangs with automatic assault rifles show up to intimidate people playing

00:04:08.020 bingo. People dressed up joyfully reading books to kids. They attack people who are queer,

00:04:14.560 who are Unitarian, who are black, who believe they are seeds, who bury their dead with the 0.94

00:04:20.920 trees and visit them there. Earthseed says, create no images of God except the images 0.87

00:04:28.040 that God has provided. They are everywhere. In everything, God is change. God is change.

00:04:38.200 Seed to tree, tree to forest, rain to river, river to sea, grubs to bees, bees to swarm,

00:04:45.580 from one, many, from many, one. Forever unite, growing, dissolving, forever changing.

00:04:52.220 the universe is god's self-portrait octavia is a prophet in these books predicting the worst of

00:05:01.120 the world we live in and she is channeling a prophet's voice and vision in the character of

00:05:06.880 olumina the scribe and narrator and change maker of earth seed octavia inhabits these very different

00:05:14.140 women's voices and worlds anyanmu in wild seed and lilith and lilith brood but always remains 0.98

00:05:21.580 a mother of ideas and stories, and a fearsome protector of children, and a visionary witch.

00:05:28.920 Witch as in, one who sees cause and effect quickly and at a distance, maybe, to paraphrase

00:05:35.400 artists from Medios Faro. Across her novels, these black women narrators are watching the 1.00

00:05:41.260 things they foretold come to pass, and noticing how the right words change the outcomes.

00:05:47.620 She believed in and demonstrated the truth

00:05:50.200 that any of what she called a positive obsession,

00:05:54.320 including writing, can shape change.

00:05:58.280 From childhood, Octavia took the bus almost every day

00:06:01.400 to write in the Los Angeles public libraries.

00:06:05.320 And surrounded by those book portals,

00:06:07.800 she was sustained in her belief in her own power.

00:06:11.560 And so she called forth new worlds there,

00:06:14.120 in her journal, in the library.

00:06:16.700 in a journal entry she wrote before the final book of the Lilith's Brood series, Imica, was

00:06:22.060 published. A series that bowled me over with its astonishing humanism and frankness, weaving utterly

00:06:28.780 new human-alien relationships and commingled post-apocalyptic futures, and also, like,

00:06:35.560 finds a sidelong way to offer perspective into the psychology of enslavement, to trace that

00:06:41.680 experience in all its unfolding repercussions and complexity and subtlety. Anyway, in a journal

00:06:49.600 entry she wrote at that time, she wrote, I shall be a best-selling writer. After Imigo, each of my

00:06:56.980 books will be on the bestseller lists of L-A-T-N-Y-T-P-W-W-P, etc. My novels will go on to the above

00:07:06.740 lists, whether publishers push them hard or not. Whether I'm paid a high advance or not, whether I

00:07:14.440 ever win another award or not, this is my life. I write best-selling novels. My novels go on to

00:07:21.380 the best-seller lists on or shortly after publication. My novels each travel up to the

00:07:28.280 top of the best-seller lists, and they reach the top, and they stay on top for months.

00:07:33.600 at least two she writes each of my novels does this so be it see to it i will find the way to

00:07:42.340 do this so be it see to it she continues in smaller handwriting like she's trying to get it

00:07:49.940 all on the same page my books will be read by millions of people i will buy a beautiful home

00:07:56.720 in an excellent neighborhood i will send poor black youngsters to clarion or other writers

00:08:02.060 workshops. I will help poor black youngsters broaden their horizons. I will help poor black 0.97

00:08:07.860 youngsters go to college. I will get the best of health care for my mother and myself. I will hire 0.95

00:08:14.720 a car whenever I want. I will travel whenever and wherever in the world that I choose. My books will

00:08:22.040 be read by millions of people. So be it. See to it. I think this is a masterclass in vibrant word

00:08:30.400 magic. But honestly, the writer in the library conjuring her future was enough for me to love

00:08:36.080 her, to want to read everything she wrote, and to try to talk about her here. Because that's all we

00:08:42.740 want to do here at Missing Witches, folks, is delve into the lives, art, and ideas of people

00:08:48.340 who are calling out to us, all kinds of folks, especially women and queer people, who we sense

00:08:55.180 with a kind of electrical pulse can teach us about the magic in their crafts and lives and

00:09:00.840 in the universe. As Gabrielle Weiss said of his mother Leonore Carrington in last week's episodes,

00:09:07.200 she was not a witch, but the idea of witch that she went looking for opened doors in herself.

00:09:14.460 And that door opening was a witchcraft she was constantly practicing.

00:09:19.280 this is where we want to play an idea of witchcraft that opens doors in ourselves 0.92

00:09:29.600 through the psyche to write the world we follow these real women and queer people because we

00:09:35.340 believe they are progenitors for ideas and stories and art that opens doors to futures

00:09:42.020 we want to believe in live in conjure forth and sometimes that happens by showing us the

00:09:48.860 darkest doors and the people who can meet us there and be lights of hope for us even there

00:09:55.180 because in the darkest of times in the past they were there too and in meeting them we can root

00:10:02.160 them deep in ourselves and to meet them and survive we need to seek and cherish each other

00:10:09.380 that's the portal we go through earth seed says embrace diversity unite or be divided robbed

00:10:17.240 ruled, killed by those who see you as prey. Embrace diversity or be destroyed. Octavia wrote more than

00:10:26.420 a dozen books along with dozens of essays and short stories. She was the first black woman to

00:10:32.340 receive the highest honors in the science fiction and fantasy genres and she was the first ever

00:10:37.800 science fiction writer to win a MacArthur Genius Grant. She was prolific from the 70s up until her

00:10:44.080 untimely death in 2006. She died from a fall following mounting hypertension, a disease that

00:10:51.600 takes its roots in the body under the extreme pressure of stress and that disproportionately 0.58

00:10:56.580 kills black women. As fiercely brilliant and strong as she was, she was sick with the sickness 1.00

00:11:03.960 of our time. Legacies of slavery and racism and sexism, ableism, heteronormativity,

00:11:11.900 weighing on her hard-working heart and nervous system,

00:11:16.800 tapped in as it was to all the feelings of the world,

00:11:20.760 visionary that she was.

00:11:22.660 I hope the energy that she is and was felt or feels the wave coming,

00:11:29.820 the millions of readers,

00:11:32.380 the minds slipping through portals she left with her steady crafting.

00:11:36.420 She made it to the New York Times bestseller list for the first time in 2020.

00:11:40.280 she was published by the library of america in 2021 in octavia i found a new favorite all-time 0.95

00:11:48.600 novelist i wish i'd read her in school i love all these fucking books kindred earth seed wild 0.91

00:11:55.400 seed lilith's brood these have been my night worlds recently and though there is so much 0.98

00:12:00.600 darkness and violence and terrifying pasts and futures in them i still felt held by a stable

00:12:08.960 presence at the heart of them. In every one I've read, there is a narrator who is honest in their

00:12:15.220 fears, sorrows, and complicated joy, who is brave and strong even when brokenhearted,

00:12:23.200 who is fierce in their love and protection of children. There is this Black woman in every

00:12:30.180 story who, even in my COVID trauma stance, jumpy from the news, protective of my exhausted brain,

00:12:37.600 I trust to take me all the way through the worst of the world.

00:12:42.400 Sometimes these narrators feel like Octavia herself, 0.64

00:12:46.100 like Olamina in Earthseed, tall, plain,

00:12:49.860 channeling a positive obsession with telling the truths she sees. 1.00

00:12:54.400 Prophetic.

00:12:56.300 But other times I imagine, I feel this metanarrator,

00:13:01.000 this person whose spirit guides these books

00:13:03.480 and holds us in their love and honesty,

00:13:05.800 is Octavia's mother.

00:13:09.680 Emma Rothberg wrote

00:13:10.920 Emma Rothberg wrote

00:13:15.720 Octavia Estelle Butler

00:13:17.820 was born in Pasadena, California 0.94

00:13:19.820 in 1947. 0.61

00:13:22.500 She grew up poor,

00:13:24.400 very poor,

00:13:25.600 in a city that,

00:13:26.500 while not segregated legally,

00:13:28.100 was segregated in fact.

00:13:30.280 Her father,

00:13:31.380 who worked as a shoeshiner,

00:13:32.640 died when she was seven,

00:13:34.200 and Butler was raised by her mother who worked as a maid and her grandmother.

00:13:39.940 Butler remembered accompanying her mother to work at wealthy homes in Pasadena

00:13:44.220 and having to enter through the back door. 0.79

00:13:48.120 Her mother, who only had three years of formal schooling, 1.00

00:13:50.940 worked incredibly hard to make sure Butler had more opportunities 1.00

00:13:54.240 and a better education than she had.

00:13:56.820 parenting in its countless variations is concrete world-changing magic

00:14:04.900 daily hourly we create and negotiate the world for and with these young stars all brilliance

00:14:13.060 and funny ideas and tenderness and total chaos distant parent figures might be a source of

00:14:19.880 human narratives and complexes about distant sky gods. But parents who gave everything of

00:14:26.940 themselves, transmuted all their own pain, not only to provide but to cherish and educate,

00:14:34.680 they make the future better for all the threads and connections in the web of life that spool

00:14:40.020 outward from that child, which is to say, for all of life. Everywhere, they are among the gods of

00:14:49.860 world making change. Octavia writes about parenting in a way that shows she knew this

00:14:55.480 in her bones. This unpaid labor that is invisible to so many, maybe because it's so close to

00:15:02.440 us, is a site of epic transformational power. Tiny gestures here raise the world.

00:15:10.540 Rothberg again. Butler attended Pasadena Public Schools where, as a shy and frequently lonely

00:15:16.900 student who struggled with dyslexia she felt left behind. Her teachers interpreted her slower

00:15:23.140 reading as an unwillingness to do the work rather than a sign of her struggles with dyslexia.

00:15:29.120 When she was given books to read in school she found them boring and unrelatable and she begged

00:15:35.460 her mother for a library card. She recalled her mother looked surprised and happy. She immediately

00:15:41.540 took me to the library and got me a card. From then on the library was my second home.

00:15:47.900 Butler graduated from Pasadena City College with an associate's degree in 1968 and continued taking classes at California State and at UCLA.

00:15:57.560 She took writing classes, but she also studied anthropology, physics, psychology, geology, among other subjects.

00:16:05.020 She loved learning and recalled, you're always realizing there's so much out there that you don't know.

00:16:10.940 octavia's mother got her a library card and believed in her power to find and then create

00:16:18.960 better stories than the ones she'd been given octavia once wrote i taste books taste knowledge

00:16:27.000 and for that matter taste life experiences as some people taste warring or food and maybe she means

00:16:33.920 that like anyanwu in wild seed that she tastes books like anyanwu tastes other animals or

00:16:40.380 medicines or people even, and then can see how they work and transform a part of herself with

00:16:47.160 that new knowledge. Or maybe she had synesthesia and she literally tasted new flavors as she read.

00:16:55.080 Anyway, across her novels, Octavia considers how we taste knowledge, cross our senses over,

00:17:01.280 pour into other lives and fears and feelings. The alien on Cali in Lilith's Brute, including

00:17:08.820 Louis' own mixed-race child, also taste knowledge with their tongues and look for ideas to enact 0.54

00:17:15.320 their trades that send them evolving forward across space-time. Octavia is writing invitations

00:17:22.680 on the one hand for us to travel through stories in order to embody another, and on the other

00:17:30.500 making clear the brutal power imbalances that can exist in all these transactions.

00:17:36.840 Gabrielle Bello wrote,

00:17:38.480 Butler was accustomed to the weight of others' bigotries. 0.99

00:17:41.720 She grew up with insecurities about her body,

00:17:44.500 some of which stayed with her into adulthood.

00:17:47.000 Her body was large.

00:17:48.320 She was six feet tall by the time she was a teen.

00:17:51.140 And her voice was deeper than that of the girls around her.

00:17:54.600 Its gentle, rumbling tone and pitch

00:17:56.660 varying from androgynous to masculine.

00:17:59.780 And students teased her mercilessly.

00:18:02.600 Some of them called her a boy, others a lesbian.

00:18:06.320 Butler did not identify as gay, as she told Larry McCaffrey and Jim McMenamin in 1998.

00:18:13.400 But she ruminated about her sexuality and sense of gender, at times musing that she might indeed

00:18:19.460 be what others called her and even twice going to a gay and lesbian services center to talk about

00:18:24.520 such things, at which point I realized, nope, this ain't it. I'm a hermit. I like this. I identify

00:18:32.140 as hermit sometimes. Like Hannah Gadsby, I identify as tired. Octavia never, in her private

00:18:40.040 papers or correspondence or anywhere else, expressed that she was lesbian, despite that

00:18:45.560 title being applied to her in major publications after her sudden death at age 58. Dr. Sammy

00:18:51.080 Schalk wrote, people read Butler as lesbian, queer, because she was tall, dark-skinned, 0.99

00:18:56.560 deep-voiced woman who valued her writing more than romantic relationships. I appreciate that

00:19:03.120 folks want to claim her. We love her. Hell, if I could find a way to claim she was my distant

00:19:07.940 cousin, I would. But when we call Butler a lesbian, we erase her identity as a masculine 1.00

00:19:13.900 of center of black woman. We collapse gender expression and sexuality. We allow the absence 0.55

00:19:21.520 of public relationships with men to signal lesbianism rather than asexuality or another 1.00

00:19:26.520 term that wasn't available to her. Octavia exceeds simple categories. If we tell the truth about her, 0.62

00:19:34.120 we are required to trace outside margins, to expand, to gather, and include. Gabrielle Bello

00:19:41.640 continues, when I first heard Butler speak, I was surprised for a moment by her androgynous voice,

00:19:47.120 then fell in love with that bashful, articulate figure.

00:19:51.200 How we naturally sound should not matter, but it always cruelly does.

00:19:55.840 As a trans girl, I knew, still know, what it felt like to be nervous every time I opened my mouth to speak,

00:20:02.500 lest the sound not match my appearance, as hormone therapy does not affect our voices after puberty.

00:20:09.200 Knew what it was like to practice before making every phone call after coming out as trans,

00:20:13.680 to record myself each day to see if I sounded passable,

00:20:18.040 to prepare to be told,

00:20:19.940 sorry, sir, may I speak to Gabrielle,

00:20:21.820 to be asked to prove my gender in a hospital in Tallahassee,

00:20:26.220 to be afraid each time I opened my mouth in public

00:20:29.040 that someone would frown or flee or flip out.

00:20:33.760 The clip of Butler I'd seen was from 2002,

00:20:37.020 nearly two decades past,

00:20:38.520 yet I felt I was right there with her for a moment,

00:20:40.900 and admiring her and hearing the midnight music all at once.

00:20:45.420 Octavia said, I'm Black, I'm solitary, I've always been an outsider. 0.99

00:20:51.940 Maybe these days she'd embrace the idea of neuroqueer. 0.89

00:20:56.720 As a dyslexic Black woman, I can imagine the generative possibilities of that space,

00:21:01.960 as defined by Nick Walker, Athena Lynn Michaels-Dillon, and Rémi Yergaud,

00:21:07.680 might be appealing to a world builder like herself.

00:21:10.900 Or maybe not, but this part of their definition of what it means to neuroqueer

00:21:15.660 sounds like it has space to embrace Octavia's writing.

00:21:20.580 To neuroqueer, the verb as in engaging in practices intended to undo and subvert one's own cultural conditioning 0.83

00:21:30.880 and one's ingrained habits of neuronormative and heteronormative performance

00:21:36.780 with the aim of reclaiming one's capacity to give more full expression

00:21:41.840 to one's uniquely weird potentials and inclinations.

00:21:47.280 Octavia's characters and questions, their family shapes and philosophies

00:21:51.940 subvert cultural conditioning and give expression to uniquely weird potentials.

00:21:58.940 Octavia was a door opener, not just with her stories,

00:22:01.660 but with the steady bravery of her life.

00:22:04.820 In the interview with Jacinda Sanders, she tells this story.

00:22:09.140 When I went to Peru, I climbed Juanapichu, the taller of the two peaks you see when you see Machu Picchu.

00:22:15.440 It's an easy climb for anyone who is okay, you know.

00:22:18.560 I mean, even if you're not in very good shape.

00:22:20.920 But I managed to hurt my knee hiking.

00:22:23.900 I kept saying, this is high enough.

00:22:25.940 This is high enough.

00:22:26.960 Why don't I go back down?

00:22:28.520 I got all the way to the top, crawled through the little cave and got to the top of the mountain and came back down.

00:22:34.100 That's what I mean. It's a good metaphor for writing, because there will always come a time

00:22:38.960 in writing a novel, for instance, a long undertaking like that, when you don't think

00:22:43.560 you can do it, or you think it's so bad you want to throw it away. I tell the students that there

00:22:49.000 comes a time when you want to either burn it or flush it. But if you keep going, you know,

00:22:54.220 that's what makes you a writer, instead of an I wish I was a writer.

00:22:57.820 octavia says keep going listener go all the way through when she started writing she'd get up at

00:23:07.480 2 a.m every morning to write and then went to work in a series of odd jobs including potato chip

00:23:13.840 inspector dishwasher telemarketer she was writing and submitting short stories and getting rejections

00:23:21.220 when she decided to write a novel instead and this was pattern master purchased by double day

00:23:26.640 and published in 1976. Patternmaster became the first in the Patternist trilogy, which is actually

00:23:33.420 the last in the timeline of the world of the Patternist stories. The world of these stories

00:23:38.600 stretches from ancient Egypt into the deep interstellar future. These books think about

00:23:44.240 minds and abilities that are outside the norm, that diverge. People who can hear thoughts or

00:23:50.760 see the trace of other times and lives written across a space, or take in knowledge about other

00:23:56.000 bodies and use that information to reshape themselves. People who struggle with their

00:24:02.240 strange other vision and are solitary and outsider with it. She said, I wrote myself

00:24:08.920 in. Since I'm me and I'm here and I'm writing, I can write my own stories and I can write

00:24:15.220 myself in. From all the word witches out there, strange and solitary as they may have

00:24:21.600 been. They call on us to write ourselves in. Write versions of the world where the truth as you know

00:24:28.600 it exists. Write your dreams. Write your spells. Write to your local newspaper and to your fucking

00:24:35.420 congressman. When you feel powerless, when you can't see your power, write a world where a 1.00

00:24:41.840 version of yourself faces the brutality and inequality you see and everything you fear.

00:24:47.540 And with your unique, weird, magical self, you save the world.

00:24:52.800 Words are power. Use them to call your power back.

00:24:58.320 Octavia wrote herself into the genre she loved and knew needed to go further.

00:25:03.400 And in doing so, she helped conjure whole new modes of making and dreaming. 0.78

00:25:08.460 She's an early pillar of Afrofuturism. 1.00

00:25:12.440 A kind of hyper-sigil work, I think. 0.97

00:25:15.140 which UCLA defines as a wide-ranging social, political, and artistic movement that dares to

00:25:20.680 imagine a world where African-descended peoples and their cultures play a central role in the

00:25:25.980 creation of that world. Ayanna Jameson is the creator of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network.

00:25:32.660 She describes the transformative power of reading Octavia. Someone who includes me in their

00:25:38.640 understanding of the universal, Jameson says. I was like time traveling. Like this is the

00:25:44.700 definition of afrofuturism i think i think octavia felt that her mother and her grandmother were

00:25:51.600 really the archetypal heroines or heroes that were not being written about that they had real

00:25:57.120 heroics and real survival because they were still here she's saying i think that the past is not

00:26:04.000 past that it's present and everything happening in the present is simultaneously rooted in the past

00:26:10.600 It's not like you can erase one.

00:26:12.860 She knew that she needed to write it,

00:26:14.420 and there was something really pressing on her soul to get it done. 1.00

00:26:19.640 Afrofuturism is time-traveling. 0.70

00:26:22.660 The past is not past. 1.00

00:26:24.740 It presses on our souls to take its meaning and rootedness

00:26:27.940 in the present for the future.

00:26:30.220 Listener, what past is pressing on you?

00:26:40.000 The cornerstone of Earthseed is, all that you touch, you change. All that you change,

00:26:47.920 changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change. She believes in shaping change,

00:26:57.080 understanding that you are changed too, adapting and crafting with the change potential in the

00:27:02.760 world. Adrienne Marie Brown says, I found myself over the years returning to this quote over and

00:27:08.340 over. It helps me so much when change comes and it's unexpected, and especially when change comes

00:27:14.060 and it's undesired. Adrienne Marie is a Butler scholar who co-hosts a podcast called Octavia's

00:27:20.040 Parables, which we talked about a bit last episode, and she co-edited this book of stories called

00:27:25.720 Octavia's Brood, helping to nurture the seedlings in Octavia's work by asking activists to write

00:27:32.400 visionary fiction in Octavia's honor, making the relay, as Haraway puts it, between activism

00:27:39.340 and imagination work, because both can feel disheartened without the other. But together,

00:27:46.380 activism and a visionary poetics can offer revelatory joy, a sense of power, as we'll see

00:27:54.540 in our next episode.

00:27:57.500 This is one of the real faces of alchemy,

00:28:00.720 of magic, 1.00

00:28:01.920 of powerful fucking witchcraft. 1.00

00:28:06.700 Octavia channeled with an urgency 1.00

00:28:08.300 both in the dark possibilities of things she saw coming

00:28:11.240 and of the other things she saw too.

00:28:14.940 Our way through.

00:28:19.240 Ayanna Jameson says,

00:28:20.740 there are always these little kernels of hope in her writing.

00:28:23.720 always this open-ended possibility that even if things look bleak right where we're standing

00:28:29.160 it's not magically all going to get better but we're still going to be together and we can still

00:28:35.580 choose our family our loved ones we can still choose to do things that will add to our collective

00:28:42.980 survival instead of just whatever is supposed to be our individual bounty the things we've acquired

00:28:48.840 and the things we have amassed.

00:28:51.200 That there is another way to be in this world.

00:28:55.840 There is another way to be, and we can choose it.

00:29:00.160 It doesn't just happen magically,

00:29:02.720 but that choice, every time we make it, is magic.

00:29:07.580 Magic in the way it resounds.

00:29:11.240 Choosing collective survival, collective care,

00:29:13.880 is the subtle craft that weaves the past to the future.

00:29:17.640 earth seed says embrace diversity unite or be divided robbed ruled killed by those who see you

00:29:25.840 as prey embrace diversity or be destroyed embrace diversity or be destroyed embrace diversity

00:29:37.020 or be destroyed

00:29:47.640 I deal with all these people that think that they're reasonable people and they're completely

00:29:53.880 not. So I like to do this little check-in. It's like, am I a reasonable person? Do I create my

00:30:01.040 own narrative for reality at all? Anyway, I've been assured that I'm a reasonable person, so

00:30:07.700 somehow I escaped. But that's what also what gaslighting does, right? That up and down ride

00:30:14.040 of not agreeing on reality acting with a kind of love and then and then the discrediting where

00:30:22.280 you're like wait a minute oh maybe it's me maybe i i maybe i just need to do more take on more do

00:30:28.080 better i've been thinking like yeah the gaslighting of slavery to the subsequent way that the world

00:30:33.800 the world is systemically gaslighting right yes that's my that's my segue into octavia butler i

00:30:40.820 guess because that's part of why she just describes it from these subtle perspectives

00:30:45.160 we feel the experience very differently like it's in the context of an alien human relationship and

00:30:52.920 she can kind of take you through the rage of being colonized by an alien species and having your

00:30:59.800 choice taken away she's just giving you these different windows and feelings on

00:31:03.620 the control over the truth somehow yes and and i mean that i guess i guess we're podcasting now

00:31:11.280 i don't know where you're going to cut into this i don't know either i may have to do an intro but

00:31:16.080 i just now we're doing it because yeah yeah that that's what i wanted to say is that like

00:31:23.800 in this world of fiction that octavia inhabits she was like characterized as very shy by all

00:31:30.900 accounts, but obviously not in her writing, like not in her work, like not shy at all,

00:31:37.160 not shy at all. But this notion, like whether we're talking about it from a gaslighting

00:31:44.720 perspective or from this like liberatory nature of fiction is like creating your own reality.

00:31:52.340 And based on my understanding, you know, Octavia deals a lot in these, the space that all we

00:31:58.180 which is, you know, in the center of the binary. And so we can find too with this idea of creating

00:32:04.020 our own narrative. Are we gaslighting the people around us? Or are we like Octavia, are we doing

00:32:11.220 like a visionary fiction of what we wish our world or our lives or ourselves were like?

00:32:19.120 I watched an interview with her where someone was asking her about science fiction and why

00:32:24.860 science fiction or whatever the question was, you know, something like that. And I want to get it

00:32:28.200 right. She said, there are no closed doors. You can go anywhere with it. And I love this notion

00:32:38.720 being applied to, you know, fiction, but also to witchcraft, to our craft, to the cauldron that,

00:32:46.960 you know, is our lives, that there are no closed doors and you can go anywhere with it. And that's

00:32:51.800 why somebody a visionary person like her would go into this quote science fiction speculative

00:32:57.700 fiction visionary fiction yeah those stories I mean they open doors for what we can do you mean

00:33:05.060 you think of any story that's impacted you in your life what resonates with us I think is like

00:33:11.580 that that too is in the world like oh shit this experience that I is is outside of my universe

00:33:21.580 is also in the universe and that is just like a shattering of bubbles you know and makes this

00:33:27.740 huge wave I think and that's part of why I think that making fiction making art in a visionary

00:33:34.880 sense in a sense of a visionary poetics that's so core to Afrofuturism and that's why everyone

00:33:40.860 felt when the first times you saw images even of Afrofuturism in movies or whatever that you 0.63

00:33:46.680 felt like that wave of like okay fuck yes like let's imagine the world from this entire shift

00:33:53.340 like please let's root it in africa and african stories in african creating of the future what 0.96

00:33:59.440 does that look like can you please unclench me from this american nightmare of a vision 0.96

00:34:04.680 and just center me somewhere else like make a crack in this reality fucking please you know 0.97

00:34:11.020 Yeah, because the gaslighting narrative was this notion of savagery. And that was the word that was pushed, savages, like non-humans, even to animals. And with something like Afrofuturism, it just blows that away. It just blows it away. 0.98

00:34:31.540 And we talk about this all the time. Like we, we learn about African traditions, not because we necessarily want to take them on or claim them, you know, appropriate them, but because everything that we learn dismantles that lie, that gaslighting lie of white supremacy. And I think that like Octavia has taken this to this whole other level.

00:34:54.560 I love her books so much. Like, I love them so much. And I didn't know that I would because I was afraid of the truths in them, to be totally honest. It's hard to read a story about slavery at any time, you know, or it's hard to read a story about apocalypse or the brutality of these gangs and the just terror of that and how close it brushes with our contemporary reality.

00:35:24.560 But I was really astonished to find that I didn't just keep going because they were great and I knew I wanted to write about her and understand why she had this electric pulse power with people to understand the ideas in them.

00:35:40.940 but then also i just fucking fell in love with the narrator and so then to hear that she was

00:35:46.380 writing believing that her mother and her grandmother were archetypal heroes because 0.80

00:35:52.880 they were still here it was like yes that's who that's who's carrying me through yes we like all

00:36:01.320 the final girls who made it to the end of the horror movie right like they are the heroes of

00:36:07.200 these stories one of her characters goes back in time to periods of slavery and i think that that's

00:36:13.740 like as much as time travel is this you know quote unquote science fiction i think we all

00:36:20.760 live inside of this like that's what ptsd is almost you know right like time traveling back

00:36:27.000 to our our traumas our bodies return to that moment our physicality returns to that moment

00:36:34.860 when we have something like a trauma or PTSD from a trauma.

00:36:39.020 And I think that that's like an amazing way to articulate that

00:36:43.240 is to have this character actually go back in time

00:36:46.320 to sort of illustrate trauma stays in our bodies, in our DNA,

00:36:51.040 and certainly informs our culture, the society that we live in.

00:36:57.000 Certainly everything that happened before has led to this moment.

00:37:00.540 Oh, and I heard actually speaking of, I heard maybe it was Adrianne,

00:37:04.860 Marie Brown yeah who said that Octavia wrote her series backwards so she would write the last book

00:37:14.760 and then work backwards to see how she or how the story got to that point and I think that that

00:37:21.940 that's an example of this too like being somewhere and then trying to figure out how we got here

00:37:28.960 yeah yeah i do want to read something and i love again listeners if you if you're able

00:37:37.440 um we would love for you to go and like check out uh on youtube or whatever like an interview

00:37:43.880 with octavia butler because her voice is so interesting and as a deep voiced woman myself

00:37:51.300 when when you first hear it it almost sounds like an altered recording like i i wasn't looking at

00:37:56.700 the screen, I guess, you know, and, and her voice came on and it was like so deep and thoughtful

00:38:03.260 that I thought it had been like somehow digitally adjusted, but that's just how she speaks. So

00:38:08.320 anyway, I'm going to read this quote, but I would love for listeners to go and like hear what

00:38:13.220 Octavia Butler's voice sounded like so they can imagine it in this. This is from Parable of the

00:38:19.800 talents. Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be

00:38:27.660 controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to led by the opportunists who 1.00

00:38:35.880 control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. 1.00

00:38:43.620 To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. 0.86

00:38:49.100 To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

00:38:57.760 I mean, I feel like there's not a time in the world where this couldn't have been like decreed.

00:39:03.920 It's such amazing and important advice because she's talking about how we choose our leaders.

00:39:11.220 The world she describes or the sort of social philosophy of Earthseed that's channeled by a teenage girl at first, the vision is very much like God is change. And then the other piece of it is like humanity needs a vision that unites it.

00:39:30.040 And that vision can be spreading humankind across the stars and changing in the ways

00:39:36.640 that are required by those environments.

00:39:39.160 So it's not that there's this end result, like humans will establish a colony.

00:39:43.620 It's that this lifeness of us, of our Earth, is destined to live across other places and

00:39:52.260 to be changed by those places.

00:39:55.280 Yes.

00:39:55.540 I think we have to stop thinking of ourselves, humans, as evolved and reframe that as evolving, you know, because that's where we get this sense of superiority.

00:40:09.500 We're done.

00:40:10.500 We have evolved.

00:40:11.880 We are evolved.

00:40:13.300 I'm not done until I've evolved a wingsuit.

00:40:17.440 I'm working on it.

00:40:18.700 May had her coat open. She was four the other day in her stroller. She was like, I'm going to jump, mom. I've got my wingsuit on.

00:40:27.080 I'm going to go for it.

00:40:28.940 I'm going to do it. I'm going to fly.

00:40:31.780 And that, you know what? And she can in the Octavia sense. This is one of my favorite tidbits about her story is that she saw a movie called Devil Girl from Mars.

00:40:44.640 Yeah.

00:40:44.860 and she thought to herself like she was a child she went to a movie theater she saw this movie

00:40:49.940 and she thought to herself i can do better than that yeah and so and so she did like she did

00:40:56.940 that's the kicker for me is like how many of us like oh i could do better than that but then we

00:41:01.540 don't you know but then we don't and i think like that is one of the fundamental messages that we

00:41:08.540 get from octavia that we can filter to the missing witches coven is like if you think you can do

00:41:13.720 better you can write a better story than that you can be a better parent than your parents were

00:41:19.540 i love this just because she ended up writing how many how many novels like over a dozen novels 0.72

00:41:25.360 like dozens of short stories and essays yeah because she like saw a shitty movie and said

00:41:31.900 i can do better than that it was like that sucks yeah so this again it's like this is like reassuring

00:41:39.320 that we can see something. And then that's the moment that flips some kind of switch and puts 0.83

00:41:45.780 us into action. Yeah. And then it's a cascading effect, like Ayanna Jameson and other people,

00:41:53.460 all these writers describe this moment, these Black writers going to the science fiction section

00:41:59.120 and there's a leading character with an African name. There's a Black woman on the cover.

00:42:04.500 there's a story that combines a history that is resonant and makes sense and is not just this

00:42:12.920 wall of white of white-centered stories of white-centered voices this like choking wall

00:42:19.160 and then and then they too are like I can do that I can do that I can do better than what

00:42:26.780 this is you know yeah and the world changes yes yes because of fiction we live in a world of fake

00:42:36.080 news you know like yeah right propaganda is another form of fiction again you know there

00:42:42.960 are good kinds but when we see a visionary like Octavia who also is like she hasn't just placed

00:42:55.060 these stories in some faraway planet where we don't talk about what actually happened on the

00:42:59.860 earth like she's integrating our real human history she described her work as cautionary tales

00:43:05.860 you know but she's like this this happened here and this is where we can get to or this is what

00:43:11.880 we can try to do i think fiction that tells the truth about being fiction is much more powerful

00:43:18.360 in some ways or more honest than you know fiction that tries to tell you

00:43:25.060 that it's literal truth. And then it's the action of that fiction, right? The story of the world

00:43:30.440 that tries to tell you it's literal truth is one thing. I mean, everyone, every political party is

00:43:36.400 trying to construct a vision of the future, all using to tell stories about how we'll then enact

00:43:41.580 regulations about how we'll then behave to each other. But then the truth comes out in the action,

00:43:48.240 right? And in the action you inspire. Does the way that you set that wave out into the world,

00:43:54.540 both in your regulations and just in how people are lit up by you does it give birth to violence

00:44:02.120 and brutality and cruelty and deliberate ignorance to bullying you know then it's probably an evil

00:44:10.300 story it's a it's a bad fiction you know that's like a spell that needs to be disarmed somehow

00:44:18.160 yeah i'm not sure if you said it exactly this way but this is this is what i'm now looking for

00:44:23.580 is an honest fiction and again this is one of those that's what she does it's so honest it's

00:44:31.440 like you're it's just so clear-eyed yeah and we love a paradox in witch land of course so an honest

00:44:39.040 fiction i think is is exactly what we need i both have been like just terrified thinking about

00:44:48.000 what the religious right has been emboldened to do in terms of its bullying in the last

00:44:56.580 eight years and decades, she brings that home in fiction in a way that is so revealing of what

00:45:05.100 the present is and gives such depth to what the terror of this present moment really is.

00:45:09.340 And then at the same time, it's like, you know, you see religion declining in the United States

00:45:14.780 and people increasingly claiming no religion that, in fact, the rise of the religious right

00:45:21.120 and the brutality of it, its actions, tell a story about what kind of fiction it is. 0.99

00:45:28.360 And people are saying, no fucking thank you. 0.98

00:45:31.060 Yeah, no, no. 0.99

00:45:33.860 That's what happened with Anne Rice, right?

00:45:35.980 Like Anne Rice, the interview with the vampire author, she went through this stage where 0.74

00:45:42.120 she claimed christ and all my writing will be devoted to christ and then some years later she

00:45:48.020 was like i can't do this i can't be a part of a religion that is is homophobic and that that was

00:45:55.940 the line for her she was like this religion is homophobic and i can't do this anymore you know

00:46:01.640 so sometimes it's just like one thing you know for me it was feminism for me it was like i don't

00:46:07.860 understand why there are no women in this and if they are they're they're you know side characters

00:46:15.180 or birth givers you know no agency that was the line for me and for everybody I think there's

00:46:21.100 going to be a line where it's like I can't be a part of this anymore whether it's a religion or

00:46:25.480 a hate group you know yeah there's that line for those people who are there too that are just like

00:46:32.000 you know what i can't do this yeah well right because eventually people will treat each other 1.00

00:46:39.840 like shit if they have a philosophy that allows them to treat another like shit to scapegoat 0.97

00:46:45.980 another then eventually someone you thought was safe you thought you were in a safe bubble if you 1.00

00:46:52.660 are in a context where those are the rules of the road you will be treated like shit yeah you will 1.00

00:46:58.740 be broken. You will be hurt. Your rights will be taken away because there is no fundamental 1.00

00:47:03.200 protection of rights. Your partner will be raped. Your children will be abused. Your children will 0.99

00:47:08.540 be exposed to ideas that you didn't control. They'll be terrified. It comes for us all once

00:47:14.340 that's the rhetoric, because that rhetoric is infinitely multiplying until we stop it with care.

00:47:19.920 Yes. And stopping it with care. Sometimes I see these people and they're like,

00:47:23.940 you know dressed up in the rebel flag and and they're they're white supremacists and and they

00:47:32.620 don't look like happy people who should be an exemplar of what supremacy looks like and sometimes

00:47:40.260 I just look at these pictures or whatever and I think to myself like how sad that the only

00:47:47.560 self-worth you can conjure is when you decide that you as a whole, as a group, are better than

00:47:58.100 another group, whether that's a different religion, a different sexual orientation,

00:48:03.980 a different race. Imagine if the only place that you could get your self-worth was from thinking

00:48:11.320 that you're better than somebody else for nothing that you've accomplished, just the nature of

00:48:15.740 your birth i'm it makes me sad it makes me think like i wish you if you loved 0.89

00:48:22.300 any part of yourself you would see that this is sad and ridiculous and you would stop 1.00

00:48:27.820 yeah stop being so ridiculous white supremacist so dumb stop stop i mean i can't again we we exist 1.00

00:48:40.260 in our coven bubble i can't imagine honestly that there are any white supremacists who are 1.00

00:48:44.660 even listening to this podcast right now no i imagine that they're probably avoiding it if

00:48:50.640 you're like teetering on the edge of white supremacy you're probably not like googling 0.97

00:48:55.020 missing witches yeah then and then listeners join us just hearing us all go fucking stop 0.97

00:49:02.080 this is a fiction that is not visionary let's say that the fiction of white supremacy is not 0.93

00:49:09.180 an honest fiction it is not a visionary fiction it has no use in the world but it does have 0.97

00:49:16.340 consequences it has no use but it certainly has fucking consequences and again these are the 0.68

00:49:21.240 fictions that sometimes create the world that we live in and i'm just so glad that we have someone 0.92

00:49:28.500 like octavia who saw something that was not good and said i can do better and then did it people

00:49:36.680 are discovering and discovering i think about zora neale hurston who again like died penniless

00:49:42.100 with some acclaim but like not as much as she would go on to garner after her death and this

00:49:49.060 is the real work of visionaries is to to create something that outlives them you know yeah kindred

00:49:56.860 her novel where the black woman narrator in the present which is like a present in like

00:50:03.620 the 80s I want to say is just snapped back into time snapped back into this role where she is

00:50:11.960 herself and has to try to keep a white violent slave owner alive because she realizes he is her

00:50:21.220 ancestor so for her to be born she's she's snapped back every time his life is threatened and she has 0.99

00:50:27.240 to choose whether she saves him or not and then she's stuck there and it's fucking a nightmare 0.97

00:50:32.200 And so you're in this body getting yanked back and forth in the writer's incredible description and ability to put you there. And that book is now read in schools all across the United States. And I mean, put it on your reading list. It's not there already, teachers and everyone. 0.85

00:50:51.080 But just that, I love to imagine that she could feel that wave coming. All of those readers, all of those minds being put into these bodies to understand the choices that her grandmother and her line, her family, had to make to survive under these just like gaslighting, body-breaking conditions.

00:51:17.220 If we were to get rid of every bad thing that ever happened to us, we would no longer be who we are. So we have to evolve from that place, knowing that everything that happened led to our existence. Not just the joy, but everything that has ever happened has led to our existence. And we have to contend with that.

00:51:39.700 Any closing messages?

00:51:40.840 I think, you know, look for an honest fiction and a visionary fiction, not a fiction of hate.

00:51:47.580 Choose not only your leaders, but make all your choices with wisdom and forethought if you can.

00:51:53.500 Allow your imagination to exist outside of reality, because that's what a visionary does.

00:51:59.200 So be it. See to it. Is she right?

00:52:03.180 So be it.

00:52:04.240 So be it. See to it. And blessed fucking be.

00:52:07.260 Blessed fucking be. 0.99

00:52:08.380 oh we never talked about libraries thank god for libraries thank you librarians 0.98

00:52:15.020 we love you we want you to be funded and we want people to go and use their libraries these are

00:52:21.400 public spaces use your library services they want you to they want you to use libby take out the 0.64

00:52:27.020 tools take out the toys just come to use the internet we don't have any fucking public space 0.57

00:52:34.380 go to your library and it's it's like one of the few places in the world where there's no 0.92

00:52:41.500 expectation that you spend money yeah at all exactly and what what other closing thoughts

00:52:47.640 do we have i'm i'm just here to yell about public space now i don't even remember what those

00:52:53.240 episodes about public space and octavia butler god damn i love her so much go read all her books

00:52:59.580 And yeah, just listen to the interviews. 0.70

00:53:02.200 Let her voice shudder through you with its power.

00:53:06.740 Her speaking voice is so rad.

00:53:09.580 She's so rad. 1.00

00:53:14.020 Let us fuck it. 1.00

00:53:15.720 Be a witch. 1.00

00:53:16.140 Be a witch. 1.00

00:53:17.000 Be a witch. 1.00

00:53:18.080 You must be a witch. 0.89

00:53:20.740 The Missing Witches podcast is created by Risa Dickens and Amy Turok

00:53:24.840 with insight and support from The Coven

00:53:27.740 at patreon.com slash missingwitches.

00:53:31.920 Amy and Risa are the co-authors of Missing Witches,

00:53:34.440 Reclaiming True Histories of Feminist Magic,

00:53:37.360 which is available now wherever you get your books or audiobooks.

00:53:41.420 And of New Moon Magic,

00:53:43.420 13 Anti-Capitalist Tools for Resistance and Re-enchantment,

00:53:48.380 coming fall 2023.

Missing Witches - October 09, 2022

Octavia E. Butler： Diversify Or Be Destroyed

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