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Wikipedia talk:Wiki Ed/LaGuardia Community College/ENG103 Octavia Butler's Wild Seed (Fall 2015)/week 09 team4

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Week 09: Sandbox for Team 4

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Backgrounds

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In an interview with Larry McCaffery and Jim McMenanin, Butler acknowledged that writing Wild Seed helped lighten her mood after finishing the grim fantasy that was her slave narrative Kindred. [1] She became interested in writing a novel about the Igbo (or Ibo) of Nigeria after reading the works of Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe. [2] Wild Seed involved a substantial amount of research because Butler had assumed that the Igbo were one people with one language, only to find that they communicated in five dialects [3]

Among the sources Butler consulted for the African background of her novel were The Ibo Word List, Richard N. Henderson’s The King in Every Man and Iris Andreski’s Old Wives Tales. [4] A mention in Henderson’s book to the Onitsha legend of Atagbusi, who was believed to be able to transform herself into large animals, became the basis for the character of Anyanwu. [5] As Butler told McCaffery and McMenanin,

"Atagbusi was a shape-shifter who had spent her whole life helping her people, and when she died, a market gate was dedicated to her and later became a symbol of protection. I thought to myself, "This woman's description is perfect—who said she had to die?" [6]

In an interview with Rosalie G. Harrison, Butler revealed that making Anyanwu a healer came to her after witnessing a friend dying of cancer. [7]

The character of Doro, Butler revealed in a later interview with Randall Kenan, came from her own fantasies as an adolescent “to live forever and breed people.” And while she had already named him, she later discovered that his name in Nubian meant “the direction from which the sun comes” which worked well with her heroine’s Igbo name, Anyanwu, which means “the sun.” [8]

Butler scholar Sandra Y. Govan notes that Butler’s choice of an authentic African setting and characters was an unprecedented innovation in science fiction. She traces Butler’s West African backgrounds for Wild Seed to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Aye Armah’s 2000 Seasons, noting how the novel makes use of West African kinship networks to counteract the displacement of Africans during the Middle Passage and their dispersal once arrived in the New World. [9]

Revision of origins stories

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Scholars have noted that Wild Seed revisits a variety of myths. While most see Doro and Anyanwu’s creation of a new race as an Afrocentric revision of the Judeo-Christian story of Genesis, [10] Elizabeth A. Lynn and and Andrew Schapper focus on the novel’s Promethean overtones, [11] with Lynn comparing it to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. [12] Finally, John R. Pfeiffer sees in Doro’s “ voracious... appetite for existence” a reference to the Faust myth and to vampire legends. [13]

References

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  1. ^ McCaffery, Larry and Jim McMenamin. “Interview with Octavia Butler.” Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Print.
  2. ^ Govan, Sandra Y. “Connections, Links, and Extended Networks: Patterns in Octavia Butler's Science Fiction”. Black American Literature Forum 18.2 (1984): 82–87. < http://www.jstor.org/stable/2904132 >
  3. ^ McCaffery, Larry and Jim McMenamin. “Interview with Octavia Butler.” Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Print.
  4. ^ Govan, Sandra Y. “Connections, Links, and Extended Networks: Patterns in Octavia Butler's Science Fiction”. Black American Literature Forum 18.2 (1984): 82–87. < http://www.jstor.org/stable/2904132 >
  5. ^ Govan, Sandra Y. “Homage to Tradition: Octavia Butler Renovates the Historical Novel.” MELUS 13.1/2 (1986): 79–96.<http://www.jstor.org/stable/467226 >
  6. ^ McCaffery, Larry and Jim McMenamin. “Interview with Octavia Butler.” Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Print.
  7. ^ Harrison, Rosalie G. “Sci-Fi Visions: An Interview with Octavia Butler.” In Butler, Octavia E., and Conseula Francis, ed. Conversations with Octavia Butler. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. Print.
  8. ^ Kenan, Randall. “An Interview with Octavia E. Butler”. Callaloo 14.2 (1991): 495–504. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2931654 >
  9. ^ Govan, Sandra Y. “Connections, Links, and Extended Networks: Patterns in Octavia Butler's Science Fiction”. Black American Literature Forum 18.2 (1984): 82–87. < http://www.jstor.org/stable/2904132 >
  10. ^ Govan, Sandra Y. “Homage to Tradition: Octavia Butler Renovates the Historical Novel.” MELUS 13.1/2 (1986): 79–96. Web. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/467226 >
  11. ^ Lynn, Elizabeth. A. “Vampires, Aliens and Dodos.” Washington Post. 28 September 1980. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1980/09/28/vampires-aliens-and-dodos/2d7b2f7c-5013-4bd1-b959-65f35fdbdb0a/>
  12. ^ Lynn, Elizabeth. A. “Vampires, Aliens and Dodos.” Washington Post. 28 September 1980. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1980/09/28/vampires-aliens-and-dodos/2d7b2f7c-5013-4bd1-b959-65f35fdbdb0a/>
  13. ^ Pfeiffer, John R. "The Patternist Series." Magill’s Guide to Science Fiction & Fantasy Literature (1996): 1-3.
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