The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea: Toxic Hierarchy in Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed
By Crystal Anderson
“Anything to do with Humans always seems to involve contradictions;” as we are “horror and beauty in rare combination”
..wrote Octavia Butler in her novel collection Lilith’s Brood.1 Butler (1947 – 2006) was the first successful black woman author of science fiction, “grim fantasy”2 and afrofuturism; her novels encompassed landscapes anywhere from plantations to post-apocalyptic wastelands to living spaceships. This article is the first in a series that examines how Butler crafted civilizations where multiple systems come and go and how their dissolution comes about via the human insistency of toxic hierarchy.
Wild Seed, the first book in Butler’s Patternist series, is ultimately about the struggle between the characters Doro and Anyanwu, a being who would be seen as a god and the woman who pushes back against that ideology and loses. Wild Seed is also about what happens to us when we have no choice in our circumstances, when we are overpowered to the degree that resistance is a principle rather than a feasible outcome.
The book is initially set in the year 1690 amongst the Ibo peoples of Nigeria. We are introduced to Anyanwu, an immortal able to shape-shift into any living thing. Butler says she based Anyanwu on “the myth of Atagbusi, who was an Onitsha Ibo woman. She was a shape- shifter who benefited her people while she was alive and when she died a market-gate was named after her, a gate at the Onitsha market. It was believed that whoever used this market-gate was under her protection.”3 Anyanwu is then found by Doro, an ancient Nubian skin- changer who builds communities people with special abilities, people he calls “seeds.”4
1 Dawn, p. 153; Adulthood Rites, p. 4272 Interview with Writers & Books (2003)
For thousands of years, Doro has been gathering people with various telepathic abilities. In the time that the book takes place, he is growing a series of villages in America, where there is more space and less change of interference from normal. Anyanwu is coerced into going with Doro from Africa to America, to a fictional village called “Wheatley.” Butler has said that Wheatley was named due to wheat being its main crop. However, it is impossible not to think that Butler also considered associating the village with the slave and poet PhyllisWheatley. Wheatley’s poems express gratitude at her circumstances, rather than the revulsion we would expect from a slave.. She writes in her poem “On Being Brought from Africa toAmerica,” 'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, / Taught my benighted soul to understand ...”5 Such a thankful outlook is in keeping with the gloss covering Doro’s pocket communities: they are places of freedom from the tyranny of normal humans.
To further understand how Doro establishes this same kind of loyalty, it helps to take a look at how Doro markets his image. Langston Hughes, one of Butler’s favourite poets, wrote “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and it expresses the ancient connection blacks have to Africa:“I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. / I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. / I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.”6 The image inHughes’ poem feels so old and wise; this is someone who has seen the dawn of humanity.
3 Interview with Randall Kenan (1991)
4 Butler, Mind of My Mind, p. 334 Wild Seed p. 121
5 Wheatley, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45465/on-being-brought-from-africa-to-america6
Interview with Stephen Potts (1996);
Hughes, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44428/the-negro-speaks-of-rivers
Certainly Doro has done these things but he would also have “His people” see him as “Master” or a god and obey him (which ultimately means to breed, make more telepaths.) 7
Obey him and he will provide a life better than those of the slaves spread out on plantations all around them. Disobey him, and he will take your body, “wear it back to their hometown so that their people can see and be warned.”8 It is the type of society where if one does not obey out of loyalty and love, they will do so out of fear. Though Wild Seed is a fantastical story, it is still reminiscent of oppressive societies where suicide and submission seem to be the only choices that can be made by its people.
Now to further understand why Doro segregates special people is to understand the very human, biological need to domesticate food production. When Doro changes bodies, he is eating, replenishing his incorporeal form. Throughout its existence, humanity has reshaped much of the wild to improve food production.9 It is from watching early humans learn to breed crops and animals that Doro learned to domesticate and breed people with telepathic abilities; people that provide him with a greater degree of nourishment ... and also pleasure.10Leaping from the body of one telepath to another is like eating a really nice steak; leaping in rapid succession between many bodies is the equivalent of a multi-course meal at a well-to- do restaurant.
Thousands of years later, Doro observes that things are not any different - plantation owners in the antebellum South breed slaves for labour. He reasons that his system is better, more honest as he gives his people life, education and land. He protects them from the larger system that would enslave them or burn them for being witches.11
7 Butler, Wild Seed pp. 12-15, 17, 19, 27, 37, 41, 114, 124, 146
8 Butler, Wild Seed, p. 97
9 Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, pp. 98, 158, 185, 388
10 Butler, Wild Seed, pp. 99-100, 129, 163, 189, 250, 337; Mind of My Mind p. 337
Butler has said of Doro that he “was me giving myself a chance to play God in a whole new way. Think of it--here is this character who cannot die. I mean, even the vampires in vampire stories can die. In fact, they work very hard at not dying. Doro could not die and had no choice but to kill, and the people that he most enjoyed being with were the ones he had to regard as food.”12 From the perspective of Isaac, one of Doro’s sons, Doro’s way of breeding and eating “isn’t wrong here. [...] Not very many things are forbidden here. Most of us don’t believe in gods and spirits and develop those who must be pleased and feared. We have Doro, and he’s enough. He tells us what to do, and if it isn’t what other people do, it doesn't matter – because we won’t last long if we don’t do it...”13
But Anyanwu is able to perceive what Doro is really doing and is against it. Perhaps this is because Anyanwu was not born into Doro’s society, but born free and powerful. The only reason she leaves for America is to protect her African family. She reasons that if she goes, Doro would be too preoccupied in America to return for her people. So for a time, Anyanwugoes along with Doro’s system, even taking Isaac as a husband at Doro’s directions. For fifty years, they make a life together, breed with each other and the others that Doro assigns them. Anyanwu is complicit but she never stops regarding Doro as an “abomination,” sees him consume the consciousness of his people and wear their skin.
Eventually, once Isaac is dead, Anyanwu escapes, as if she was always waiting for the chance. She looks at herself and thinks “Doro had reshaped her. She had submitted and submitted and submitted to keep him from killing her [...] that she could somehow prevent him from becoming an animal. He was already an animal. But she had formed the habit of submission.” Anyanwu shape-shifts into a bird, then a dolphin and flees. She runs for three hundred years and for three hundred years, Doro hunts her.14
11 Wild Seed, pp. 63, 91, 98-99, , 114, 18912 Interview with Stephen Piziks (1997)13 Butler, Wild Seed, p. 119
Let’s do a little dwelling on this for a bit, as Butler would say.15 White men hunted humans they saw as property for hundreds of years in North American. Like Doro’s villages, America has a veneer of “land of the free, home of the brave.” America means opportunity and Doro’svillages meant being free of persecution. But underneath, Europeans and then Americans set about clearing out the indigenous peoples that already lived on the continent. Then to build the new infrastructure, 12.5 million Africans were captured and sent over for slave labour (though 1.8 million died before they could reach America).16 Even the White House was built by slaves.17
We also need to consider that historical figures we’ve held dear were not actually so. George Washington has been portrayed as the virtuous forefather who led the American colonies to victory against the tyrannical British monarchy. Except Washington owned slaves, and one slave in particular he hunted for the last three years of his life. In 1796, his slave Ona Judge escaped from the Mount Vernon plantation after learning she was to be given as a wedding present to Washington’s granddaughter. Washington had her chased and reasoned that Judge was a possession who could have inspired other slaves to flee. She needed to be made an example of. He never caught her.18
14 Butler, Wild Seed, pp. 179-181
15 “The Lost Races of Science Fiction”16 Fox
17 Ambrose
18 Pruitt
Unlike Washington, Doro reclaimed Anyanwu . By the end of three hundred years, Anyanwu had taken on the form of a white man and gathered freed and runaway slaves. She lived as she did in Africa – as a protector of people. When Doro finds her, he sets about dismantling her safe-haven, threatening to kill the people of her community. Anyanwu’s response is to begin killing herself, turning her regenerative abilities against her own body. What else does she have but to end this struggle on her terms? Doro decides he doesn't stand to be without her in the world; he makes concessions; he will kill less and leave any children of hers alone, that she will again be complicit.19 Anyanwu accepts because there is some glimmer of a chance that she can continue gathering people in need.
Butler’s point in Wild Seed is that true freedom is not obtainable in many circumstances. The freedom Doro said his people had was an illusion. He could ask anything of them and they were in no position to contest his will. Butler has said that “we don’t always have choices. It certainly is a point of conflict. And all too often even when we do have choices, they’re not necessarily the ones we want. You know--devil or the deep blue sea choices.”20
Eventually, Doro is overthrown, but not by Anyanwu. Doro is defeated by a society of stronger people that arise from the very fabric of his own dominion. How and why this works, how Butler addresses regime change, is the subject for Part 2 of this series.
Meet the writer Crystal Anderson
...is a poet and nonfiction writer who currently lives in England but is originally from San Antonio. She moved to England to attend The University of Manchester and, in 2016, obtained a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and specialized in the use of mental illness in poetry. Her poems have previously been published in Picaroon, Lighthouse and Another North. She has poems forthcoming in the journal Abridged. Crystal is also a stay-at-home mother, which gives her fodder for her blog Poet:Parent.
WORKS CITED
Stephen E. Ambrose, “Founding Fathers and Slaveholders: To What Degree do the Attitudes of Washington and Jefferson Toward Slavery Diminish Their Achievements?,” Smithsonian Magazine, November 2002. Available athttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/founding-fathers-and- slaveholders-72262393/
19 Butler, Wild Seed, pp. 195, 199, 220, 25120 Interview with Stephen Piziks (1997)
Octavia E.
Butler, (1991) Interviewed by Randall Kenan for Callaloo Vol. 14, No. 2 (Spring), pp. 495-504. Available athttp://speculativefictions.web.unc.edu/files/2016/01/InterviewOctaviaButl er.pdf
(1997) Interviewed by Joan Fry for Poets & Writers, March / April. Available at http://www.joanfry.com/congratulations-youve-just-won- 295000/
(1997) Interviewed by Stephen Piziks for Fantasy Magazine. Available athttps://curiousfictions.com/stories/2159-steven-harper-an-interview-with- octavia-e-butler
(2004) Interviewed by Joshunda Sanders for Africana, 24 February. Available at https://inmotionmagazine.com/ac04/obutler.html
“A Conversation with Octavia Butler,” (2003) Interviewed for Writers & Books. Available athttps://web.archive.org/web/20141109232657/http://www.wab.org/if-all- of-rochester-read-the-same-book-2003-2/if-all-2003-a-conversation-with- octavia-butler/
Clay’s Ark, Grand Central Publishing, 1984. Rpt. in Seed to Harvest 2007, pp. 453 - 624.
Mind of my Mind, Grand Central Publishing, 1977. Rpt. in Seed to Harvest, 2007, pp. 255-452.
Patternmaster, Grand Central Publishing, 1976. Rpt. in Seed to Harvest, 2007, pp. 625-765.
“Positive Obsession,” Bloodchild and Other Stories, Sevenstories Press, 2003.
"’We Keep Playing the Same Record’": A Conversation with Octavia E. Butler,” (1996) Interviewed by Stephen W. Potts for Science Fiction Studies 70 vol. 23 (3) available athttps://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/potts70interview.htm
Wild Seed, Grand Central Publishing, 1980. Rpt. in Seed to Harvest, 2007, pp. 1-254
“The Lost Races of Science Fiction,” Transmission Magazine, 1980. Rpt.as “In 1980: Octavia Butler Asked, Why Is Science Fiction So White?” inGarage Magazine issue 15 (2018). Available athttps://garage.vice.com/en_us/article/d3ekbm/octavia-butler
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Norton & Company Inc., 1999.
----- The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal, Harper Perennial, 1992.
Alex Fox, “New Research Reveals the Transatlantic Slave Trade’s Genetic Legacy,”Smithsonian Magazine, July 28, 2020. Available athttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/study-reveals-brutal- genetic-legacy-slave-trade- 180975423/?fbclid=IwAR3SVj7BnJEQJ_iG4EBozytLH8MXWXYIlr4gA igKjJ9vhSFt8S9nMNoiXcI
Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Available at
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44428/the-negro-speaks-of- rivers
Sarah Pruitt, “When One of George Washington's Enslaved Workers Escaped to Freedom,” History, February 8, 2017. Rpt. February 18, 2020. Available athttps://www.history.com/news/george-washington-and-the-slave-who-got- away
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