Octavia Butler's Last Flight

[bibliogramma]

Fledgling, Octavia Butler

This was Octavia Butler’s last published work, and I am deeply saddened that there will be no more new books. She left us far too soon, with so much more to say.

In Fledgeling, Butler takes the body of vampire legend and literature and turns it completely upside-down, turning the mythos of the predatory and solitary night stalker into a tale of an ancient and complex society of long-living, blood-drinking humanoids called the Ina and their at least nominally willing human symbionts.

Many of the topics that Butler has examined in her earlier works – among them identity, kinship, sex, gender, race, relationships between individual peoples, races and species, change and transformation, power, coercion and free – are strong themes in this book.

The story begins with a single, self-aware being, alone, in pain, and without memory of the past or knowledge of origins, with little more than the urge to survive as a guide to self-definition. These twin instincts – self-preservation and self-identification – drive the narrative as the protagonist seeks her identity, her past and her future, struggling all the while to discover who it is that has robbed her of so much of her past, and why.

In terms of identity, what you see is most definitely not what you get – the protagonist, Shori, appears, in human eyes, as a weak and traumatised black, female, human child, but she is instead a powerful, decades-old near-immortal who lives by exchanging intense, erotic pleasure for human blood. As she begins to form her own family of human symbionts, the narrative travels into uncomfortable places, depicting a sexual relationship between an adult white male and a black female child – who is actually older, stronger, and not human at all, and whose saliva contains substances that are both addictive and beneficial to humans, offering them improved health and longer life in return for their blood.

Shori, we discover, is the future – or at least one possible future – of the Ina, her melanin-rich skin (the gift of a mixture of genes from a black human) giving her the ability to walk by day as none of her Ina cousins can. And yet this human “taint” marks her as an outcast and potential target among those of the Ina who reject change and value “pure blood” over new potentials, tradition, no matter how limiting, over technological advances that bring greater freedom..

Triply Other – black among whites, Ina among humans, genetic experiment among Ina, Shori is kin to both species but welcomed by neither, and must find her own sense of who she is.

And that’s just the stuff that’s easy to put into words.

Thinking about this book after reading it, I wondered what Butler might have been saying about the history of black Americans in this story. Our initial view of Shori seems in so many way like the situation of black Africans brought to America as slaves, cut off from families and societies, their history torn from them, struggling to survive in physical bodies marked by their new world as weak, childish, not fully human – yet all the while, bearing within greater strength and power, and ancient traditions and wisdoms. I may be completely off the wall here, but I think I see in Shori’s quest for identity, family, security and recognition some sense – nothing so obvious and crude as allegory – of the issues faced in the journey of black people in North America toward all of these things.

And it seemed to me as I finished reading that Shori’s journey wasn’t over. Maybe Butler intended to give us more, or maybe she intended us to think about it ourselves. We likely will never know.