We are about to shift from Octavia Butler, Kindred, SF and violence to reading and thinking about Laura Pérez, Chicana Art, spirituality and altarities. We will create a bridge here with the notion of alternative worlds.(See also parallel universe, multiverse, possible world.)
This is not the only thing spirituality can be about, but it is one thing. As Freeland helps us understand, art, violence, social justice and spirituality also have some affinities. Notice the term affinities -- perhaps another sort of "intertextuality."
Consider also the term ambivalence -- or ambi-valence -- having contradictory feelings and thoughts all at the same time.
This is the condition that Butler wants us to experience together with Dana as she tries so hard to act with integrity and honor in a situation that allows neither. In the end, when asked to collude with Alice's sexual exploitation and danger, she can only alter it with some self-conscious awareness of her complicity amid terrifyingly limited choices.
She cannot not be violated herself -- she contributes to violence even though she wants desperately to get outside this world of violence. She loses her arm, not in retribution, but in consequence. Octavia Butler says in a 1991 interview in Callaloo (498):
"I couldn't really let her come all the way back. I couldn't let her return to what she was, I couldn't let her come back whole and that, I think, really symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn't leave people quite whole."
Asked in the same interview about her own quite violent writing about violence (499):
"it probably comes from how young I was when I wrote it. I think it is a lot easier to not necessarily romanticize it, but to accept it without comment when you're younger. I think that men and women are more likely to be violent when they are younger."
Violence is something we generally want to have "out there" -- outside ourselves and our lives, if at all possible. When it is possible to forget it, we do our best, what some call a "willful ignorance." Butler refuses to let us forget violence, in others, around us, and in ourselves.
Rather than "othering" violence -- what Freud called "projection," in which what we find unacceptable in ourselves, we project onto others, making ourselves "innocent" of that which we then see only "out there," not in or with us -- rather than doing that, Butler creates worlds in which it is never possible to keep such "othering" up for long. It always falls apart, and usually it falls apart or ruptures in violent alterations, transformations and uses of power.
In feminist theory there are a number of terms that have simultaneously positive and negative meanings. Some folks will use them only one way or another, trying to keep their good and bad elements carefully managed and apart, while other theorists spend more time examining the problems with trying to pry them away from each other. At times prying them apart can be a form of "projection."
One of these terms is "The Other." It can be used to describe these processes in which projection occurs -- cutting off from oneself elements of humanity or animality one finds unacceptable and seeing them only in The Other. The complexities and ambivalences of these terms of projection are exactly what Butler explores in Kindred.
Or it can be used more respectfully, to honor in others that which one cannot understand, has not experienced, truly knows nothing about. In this sense, it acknowledges that humans and other sentient beings are not interchangable, that we each have depths and meanings that simple "understanding" cannot possibly encompass. Others are whole other planets, alternative realities in this sense.
And this sense can be deeply spiritual, or philosophical, or ethical. Sometimes used this way it is called "alterity." Pérez works at tracing out some of these uses in art forms and spiritual activisms in the subtitle of her book "the politics of spiritual and aesthetic altarities." Alterity -- altarity is her serious "joke" or intertextual engagement with these concerns.
Pérez also uses the "comma" to indicate difrasismo (15): "the coexistence of meanings, identities, and beings...the richness of signification as evocation rather than the literality of denotation." Two separate words are paired together to create meaning together, rather than apart. For example, in this Post's title I use the terms Other, Other to indicate the ambi-valent or possible worlds of meaning of the term Other; and pair alternative worlds and social justice to consider how these can work together in parallel, possible, multiple world meanings.
Each chapter in Pérez makes such pairings, in which parallel, possible, multiple world meanings can touch:
Invocation, Ofrenda
Spirit, Glyphs
Body, Dress
Altar, Alter
Tierra, Land
Book, Art
Face, Heart
Self, Other
We will be reading several of these for class. Please go ahead and read all of them, for yourself.
Class, yourself
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PICTURES:
at top of Blog: Yreina D. Cervántez: Homenaje a Frida Kahlo:
Courtesy of California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives, Dept of Special Collections, Donald Davidson Library, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9010, cema@library.ucsb.edu, (805) 893-8563; http://cemaweb.library.ucsb.edu/cema_index.html
next: Ester Hernadez, Mis Madres / My Mothers:
From http://www.esterhernandez.com/Gallery_main.htm
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In the Callaloo interview (1991) Butler also talks about how differently men and women understand her prize-winning short story "Bloodchild," in which, to live on another planet, humans have to become incubators for the eggs of another species (498):
"'Bloodchild' is very interesting in that men tend to see a horrible case of slavery, and women tend to see that, oh well, they had caesarians, big deal....I don't see this as particularly barbaric. I mean if human beings were able to make that good a deal with another species, I think it would be miraculous. Actually, I think it would be immensely more difficult than that."
Here is a little art fantasy built around Butler's "Bloodchild":
4 min - Jan 25, 2008 -
"...Octavia E. Butler. It is also the newest release of fruit on fruit action from Reid. So enjoy. :-P...Bloodchild Octavia Butler...."
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MUSIC: La Barranca, "Ofrenda," from Tempestad (1997/2004); website.
VIDEO TRAILER: from TV Series (1980-1990) Alien Nation.
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MUSIC: La Barranca, "Ofrenda," from Tempestad (1997/2004); website.
VIDEO TRAILER: from TV Series (1980-1990) Alien Nation.
10 min - Jan 17, 2008 -
Part 6...1989 TV shows openings. Alien Nation, and others....====
