Bloodchild and Other Stories

“One of my earliest memories is of my mother stretched alongside T’Gatoi, talking about things I could not understand, picking me up from the floor and laughing as she sat me on one of T’Gatoi’s segments. She ate her share of eggs then. I wondered when she had stopped, and why.” 

At the beginning of “Bloodchild,” Gan is too immature to understand the tension between his mother and T’Gatoi. He doesn’t understand why his mother used to be friends with T’Gatoi, and why the closer he got to sexual maturity, the more Lien withdrew from T’Gatoi. At the end, when Gan is impregnated, he is able to understand the maternal feelings of love and protectiveness that his mother feels towards him. Thus, it becomes clear that she resents T’Gatoi because the latter is taking her child away. Gan becomes a sexual partner, which means a loss of childhood reliance on his mother. However, Lien also feels intensely guilty for giving her son away to T’Gatoi in order to preserve the rest of her family. She no longer takes eggs to absolve this guilt, as she sees the egg as a form of payment for her child. 

“The whole procedure was wrong, alien. I wouldn't have thought anything about her could seem alien to me.” 

As Gan watches T’Gatoi harvest grubs from the dying Lomas with seeming indifference to his pain, he remarks that the giant centipede-like creature finally seems truly alien to him. With this quotation, “Bloodchild” invites the reader to consider what it means for something to truly be alien for us. Gan is aware that he and T’Gatoi are of two entirely different species, but he implies that this has not prevented him from seeing T’Gatoi as family. This is perhaps due to T’Gatoi’s kind treatment of his human family, as well as her favoritism toward Gan himself.

“‘If we’re not your animals, if these are adult things, accept the risk. There is risk, Gatoi, in dealing with a partner.’” 

Gan asks T’Gatoi to let him keep their family’s gun, even though guns are forbidden on the preserve. Gan is asking T’Gatoi to show him that she thinks of him as a partner, worthy of respect and autonomy, as opposed to a breeding animal. In alluding to Lomas, Gan also reasserts himself as a human, and thus asks for a partnership with T’Gatoi despite the differences between their species, as well as their shared violent history. 

    “‘I was afraid.’

Silence.

     ‘I still am.’ I could admit it to her here, now.

‘But you came to me…to save Hoa.’

     ‘Yes.’ I leaned my forehead against her. She was cool velvet, deceptively

soft. ‘And to keep you for myself,’ I said. It was so. I didn’t understand it,

but it was so.” 

This exchange is the culmination of Gan’s coming of age, after he is freed from naïveté about the human role in Tlic breeding. Gone are the simple feelings about human-Tlic relationships, as well as his own understanding of his human family and T’Gatoi’s intentions towards Gan. As a sign of his maturation, Gan’s feelings become incredibly ambivalent. He is forced to acknowledge his simultaneous fear of and desire for T’Gatoi, as well as his urge toward self-preservation and his love for his sister. None of these emotions are logical or simple, and it is at the point of most ambivalence that T’Gatoi and Gan reach mutual understanding.

“Our people work instead of tearing at themselves or staring into space.” 

Here, Beatrice explains her belief that the single-minded focus of DGD patients is not inherently destructive and can be channeled into creative pursuits. This is part of convincing Lynn to stay at the Dilg ward and help guide the patients, which forces Lynn to reexamine what she thought about both the nature of DGD sufferers and her own identity.

“She obviously understood the perimeters of her body, was not so dissociated as to perceive herself as trapped in something she needed to dig her way out of.” 

DGD warps the relationship between a patient’s mind and body. For Naomi, Alan’s mother, this initially manifested in the destruction of the face, which is the site most commonly associated with identity and personality (e.g. the eyes as the windows to the soul). As Lynn watches Naomi, she remarks that Naomi doesn’t perceive her body as an enemy. She no longer feels like she’s being attacked from inside herself. This resonates with Lynn’s own fears about being a DGD carrier; she has always worried that her own body will betray her and attack itself as she starts to manifest symptoms of the disease. Even though she does not currently show active symptoms, Lynn’s feelings are parallel to a DGD sufferer’s condition, because she feels there is something foreign inside herself that she cannot control and wishes to excise. Seeing the calm, productive Naomi gives hope to Lynn, and helps her accept her status as a DGD female later in the story.

“‘If the pheromone were something only men had, you would do it.’” 

This accusation implies that Alan is not being supportive of Lynn’s abilities and her invitation to join the Dilg ward because he is not used to the idea of a woman having more social power. He is also uncomfortable with the idea of Lynn being able to coerce and control him with the pheromone, and Lynn’s accusation reminds us that this level of coercion is nothing compared to the power men regularly exert over women. The reader is invited to consider whether Alan’s discomfort is justified, a product of sexism, or both.

“I got along better with him than I had with my mother, so even now, especially now, I didn’t want to lose him.”

The narrator’s fear of losing her uncle comes from feelings of being abandoned by her own mother, as well as estrangement from the rest of her family. This feeling of particular closeness to her uncle is later vindicated by the knowledge that he is actually her father. Thus, instead of rejecting her mother and uncle because of their incestuous relationship, her fear of loneliness and of losing her uncle allows her to feel relief and happiness and to accept a new idea of family. 

“I had said that to him before dozens of times, obscurely. But I had never said it in just those three words. It was as though I were asking permission somehow. Is it all right for me to love you?” 

The narrator wonders this after she tells her uncle she loves him. This is an intensely ironic statement, since the narrator is motivated by her fear of losing his approval and affection but does not yet know the secret of her parents’ incestuous relationship and that it is actually her uncle who harbors intense fears of being rejected by her. 

“I believed what I had said before—that she had wanted a child to prove she was woman enough to have one.” 

The narrator believes that her mother only decided to have her as a social status symbol of her fertility. Because women are so often linked to maternity, a woman’s worth is sometimes tied to her ability to produce children. At this point in the story, the narrator believes that her mother didn’t feel competent to take care of a child and thought of her womanhood as deficient because of this. Thus, her choice to have the narrator was just a means of compensating for this, instead of a gesture of maternal love.

“Nor did she expect anyone to help her if she needed help. The people around her were all strangers.” 

This quotation establishes the brutal survivalist mentality most people have adopted in the story’s world. When other forms of language became impossible after the disease hit, it not only destroyed global infrastructure but affected the ability of people to feel kinship with other people. They no longer feel a communal bond based on shared humanity. This quotation suggests that communication is part of what makes us fundamentally human. 

“She had lost reading and writing. That was her most serious impairment and her most painful.” 

Valerie Rye had been a professor at UCLA and made a living from reading and writing; therefore, the disease’s effects on her are bitterly ironic. She describes the piles of books at her home in Los Angeles, books she can no longer read. Not only did Rye lose her ability to communicate, she also lost a fundamental part of her identity. Being a writer and researcher was as foundational to her as being a mother and wife. She differs from Obsidian, who can still wear his police badge and regain a semblance of his former life. Rye is forced to let go of the past and forge an entirely new identity for herself. 

“People like Obsidian who had not known her before probably thought of her as Wheat. Not that it mattered. She would never hear her name spoken again.” 

As she hands Obsidian her gold name symbol, Valerie Rye laments the loss of spoken language and at the same time resigns herself to the new world order. This moment of mourning and grief is made more poignant later when Rye meets the two orphan children and is able to speak her name aloud to them for the first time in years. 

“In all my thirteen years, I had never read a printed word that I knew to have been written by a Black person. My aunt was a grown woman. She knew more than I did. What if she were right?” 

Transcending racial and gender boundaries is an important theme that runs through many of Butler’s texts. This quotation gives insight into the impact that the lack of diversity in literature had on Butler. Even as a teenager, she is acutely aware of the limitations she might face being a black science fiction author. In the context of the essay, Butler is a successful author looking back at her self-doubt, and also at the tools she used to overcome it.

“I saw positive obsession as a way of aiming yourself, your life, at your chosen target. Decide what you want. Aim high. Go for it.” 

Butler chooses to describe her relationship to writing as an obsession, rather than a profession, a hobby or a pleasure. This choice indicates that she couldn’t stop even if she tried. While obsession commonly has negative connotations, Butler is redefining it as unwavering focus and dedication, and turns it into an essential tool for aspiring writers. This also shows the powerful relationship between authors and words, as well as the power of language to shape perceptions. 

“At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what ‘everyone’ is saying, doing, thinking—whoever ‘everyone’ happens to be this year.”

Along with the numerous other structural barriers faced by black Americans, one of the themes this essay grapples with is overcoming self-doubt through the power of imagination. This quotation is part of a rhetorical series of questions that Butler asks in frustration at being asked what good literature, especially science fiction, does for black people. In relation to the Afrofuturist tradition, science fiction is important because it allows anybody, even populations that are historically marginalized, to imagine alternative futures and explore new modes of living. This exercise is not mere escapism; instead, it serves the important function of facilitating critique of one’s real living conditions, instead of just following what everybody is doing without question. 

“The Communities could change one another just by exchanging a few of their individual entities—as long as both exchanging communities were willing.” 

Cultural exchange, willingness to listen and what makes up a community are all at stake in “Amnesty.” The Communities’ ability to literally change each other through the mutual consent of both parties stands in stark contrast to the treatment Noah receives from the six human recruits. The Communities trust and accept each other’s ideas and differences, which is manifested as a material exchange of individuals from each Community. The individuality of the recruits is not merely a given of the boundaries of each human, but as a sign of their particular rigidity and unwillingness to be open to new ideas and forms of life. Thus, the physiology of the Communities is meant to demonstrate the benefits of empathy, open-mindedness and genuine communication, all of which the human race must have in order to survive and learn to coexist with the aliens. Like the quotation above suggests, however, this can only happen if the human beings are willing. In this sense, the aliens display more humanity than many of the human characters.

“And so you let subcontractors abuse you. You try to help your own people to see new possibilities and understand changes that have already happened but most of them won’t listen and they hate you.” 

Noah’s employer wonders why Noah continues to be a mediator and translator for the Communities and humans, at the expense of being rejected by most of her own species and hurt by many of the Communities. As opposed to the biblical Noah, whose family is saved while the rest of humanity is destroyed, Noah Cannon sacrifices herself to ensure a future for the rest of humanity. The strangeness of Noah’s masculine name makes the reader consider whether Noah, as a woman, possesses characteristics that make her uniquely able to make such a sacrifice. This quotation is a great example of the collection’s concern with playing with gender traits and expectations. 

“‘Where else would I be but here at a bubble, trying to help the two species understand and accept one another before one of them does something fatal?’”

Noah responds to her employer’s concerns with this query. It is significant that Noah feels she only belongs in one of the bubbles, which are the habitats the Communities have created in the world’s deserts. The bubbles are artificial homes that bring together Earth’s environment with the alien’s technology. Like Noah, they represent a boundary and a site of hybridity that does not exist as quite an alien or human space. Like the biblical figure, Noah has accepted her fate as savior of the world, at the expense of her own life and happiness. Her role, in an inversion of the biblical Noah, is to save humankind before a disaster happens, rather than after. Her role as a savior figure is in part because she believes the two species can reconcile.

“‘The only difference between the way they treated me and the way the aliens treated me during the early years of my captivity was that the so-called human beings knew when they were hurting me.’” 

Noah Cannon is tortured inadvertently by the Communities because they do not understand human physiology. She does not believe that she has to forgive the aliens for anything. She is also captured and brutally interrogated by the human government right after leaving the Communities in the Mojave, which she sees as a fundamental betrayal. This brutal treatment at the hands of her own kind lead her to question what it means to be human and ultimately allows her to create bonds of loyalty and friendship outside the traditional bonds of country, family and species. 

“For hours, she’d been spilling her new story onto paper in that sweet frenzy of creation that she lived for.” 

Martha’s choice to endow humanity with vivid dreams comes at the expense of her own profession. Like Butler, writing is a fundamental part of Martha’s identity. She sacrifices her own personal happiness for the sake of humanity at-large. The creative role she plays in changing humanity is not unlike the writing she does, since she is a science fiction writer and creates new utopias on the page. Because of this, the dreams she imparts signify both an act of ultimate creativity realized and the dissolution of Martha’s identity. Thus, she chooses not to remember this encounter with God, as it would be too painful to remember such a self-destructive moment.

“‘You see what your life has prepared you to see,’ God said.”

Martha initially sees God as an older white man twice her size. As she remarks later, Martha grew up a poor, black woman in white America. When she thought of an omniscient and omnipotent God, she initially thought of the figure with the most power and influence in society; in this case, an older white male. His stature in particular represents his power and authority over Martha. It is important to remember that God only appears this way during their first meeting; in subsequent encounters, He eventually turns into a doppelgänger of Martha herself. This indicates that God’s first appearance is a version of messages Martha has internalized from society. As she grows to understand the implicit power in her position as an author, and her being chosen for this all-important task, her version of God changes to reflect this shift in understanding.

“She couldn’t decide whether it was an honor to be chosen to do a job so huge, so poorly defined, so impossible.” 

The role of imagination in doing the impossible is a large part of why Martha is chosen by God. As He says, He could have chosen somebody in more dire circumstances, but He chooses Martha. Though this is never directly stated, it is clear that Martha’s profession makes her suited for this job because of her creativity. However, Martha is also asked to think of herself in relation to other biblical figures like Job, because the task God is asking will require her to make a huge personal sacrifice. The skill of writing is intimately related to Martha’s task and also to her identity as a person.