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Octavia E. Butler: Groundbreaking African American Woman Writer

Victoria Pudova, Class III


Technically, Black History Month is over. However, learning the history of a group of people is never truly over. An author who examined racial struggles and injustices through science fiction is African American writer Octavia Estelle Butler. She faced many obstacles and challenges, from racial prejudices and financial struggle, to discrimination from her teachers and classmates. Despite having endured such a difficult childhood, Butler became one of the most astounding science fiction writers in the field, leaving her mark on the literary world. She once said, “Every story I create, creates me. I write to create myself.” It is through her writing that she found herself.

Born on June 22, 1947, in Pasadena, California, Octavia E. Butler was raised by her mother who worked as a maid to support them. Her father passed away when she was young. She was dyslexic but from an early age she loved to read books and decided to pursue writing when she was 10 years old. She was pulled out of school early on but her mother wanted her to have an education and so she never let Butler go astray. In plenty of interviews and articles, Butler always claimed that her mother was a huge inspiration for her and was the reason she gained her love for reading and writing.

To pursue her dreams of being a writer, she took on low-wage jobs, such as being a dishwasher and a warehouse worker. She had earned an associate degree from Pasadena City College and worked with famous American writer Harlan Ellison at the Clarion Fiction Writers Workshop. This is where she practiced and perfected her craft. In 1976, she released her first novel called Patternmaster which follows a group of people with telepathic powers called Patternists. Three years later, Octavia E. Butler released a novel called Kindred that escalated her career. The book follows the storyline of an African American woman who goes back in time to save her ancestor who is a white slave owner. This book was influenced by the ideas of the Black Nationalist Movement (1950-1970). This was a political movement led by Martin Delany during which African Americans advocated for economic self-sufficiency, race pride for African Americans, and black separatism. Butler explores and highlights the struggles that African Americans have faced and how they were able to overcome them to gain their rights, further encouraging her readers to honor their ancestors.

Being so loved by the literary community, Butler received many literary awards, including the 1984 Best Story Hugo Award for Speech Sounds, a short story. For her novel Bloodchild, she received the Nebula Award. Later on in 1995, Octavia E. Butler became the first science fiction writer to receive a “Genius Grant” from the MacArthur Foundation and used this money to buy a house for herself and her mother. She moved to Seattle, Washington, in 1999, facing a serious writer’s block several years later due to her ill health and the medication that she took. Before dying on February 24, 2006 at the age of 58, she released her last novel called Fledgling in 2005. Fledgling follows a 10-year-old, African American girl named Shori who is, in the simplest of terms, a vampire. The riveting story is meant to symbolize and distinguish society’s social and racial workings.

Octavia E. Butler was said to have a “positive obsession” towards being an aspiring writer. She once said, “I used to give up writing like some people would give up smoking.” This is an interesting analogy and only goes to demonstrate the passion that Butler had for her work. In a society where she struggled with her racial identity, faced discrimination, and dealt with financial trouble, she found her outlet through writing, wanting to reach and speak out about the racial injustices in society, along with the history that comes with it. “I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure,” she had stated. Where most writers wrote science fiction for the magical aspect of it, Octavia E. Butler wrote science fiction as a way of expressing her inner beliefs and concerns. To this day, Butler remains influential. Having mentioned Mars in her novel Parable of the Sower, NASA has named the touchdown site of the Mars rover Perseverance after Octavia E. Butler. Her work continues to inspire scientists and engineers around the world. The literary world had lost an eloquently influential writer when she had died.

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