Radio Imagination celebrates the life and work of Pasadena science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006). Organized by Clockshop, the program centers on ten contemporary art and literary commissions that explore Butler’s archive at the Huntington Library. New work will premiere alongside performances, film screenings, and literary events throughout the year.
Clockshop’s next Radio Imagination event is on Thursday, March 10. Writer Tisa Bryant will moderate a panel discussion on Octavia E. Butler’s Los Angeles, hosted by ALOUD, presented by the Library Foundation of Los Angeles. Panelists include Ben Caldwell, Ayana A. H. Jamieson, Douglas Kearney, and Nisi Shawl.
In this interview, we sit down with Bryant, one of the commissioned Radio Imagination writers, to talk about her work, the Octavia E. Butler papers at the Huntington Library (@TheHuntington), and what she hopes to learn from this upcoming panel discussion.
Clockshop: For somebody who has never read your work before, what do you recommend they should start with to get an idea of your writing?
Tisa Bryant: That’s a great question and pretty easy, because there’s not that much. There are lots of small pieces online. One piece is on the Reanimation Library’s website - it’s a project and a kind of re-purposing of text from out-of-print and obsolete books, like those old Time Life kind of reference books. It’s a project by Andrew Beccone. People were invited to come into the library, select books that they wanted to work with, and scan or photocopy and create new texts - to reanimate these materials. And I think that’s kind of a developing process for me.
My first chapbook actually reflects that, but with a different intention. The chapbook is called Tzimmes - that’s also a really good place to start. In that book, there was a confluence of events - genealogy research, a number of friends, or relatives, or friends of friends were being diagnosed with breast cancer, or having breast cancer scares, and I was invited to a Passover seder potluck - my first seder. I was just like… “Um… yo! What’s supposed to happen here?” And I’m such a nerd, so I was looking things up…
TB: Right, and I was like, “Are we going to follow this haggadah, or this haggadah?” But what I ended up doing was kind of blending this recipe that I found for sweet potato matzo balls - which were delicious, and culturally specific on the one hand. Then, just thinking about the body’s inheritance, and thinking through breast cancer, I remembered a film by Yvonne Rainer that I had recently seen, called MURDER and Murder. In it, Yvonne Rainer, or the character of her, played by her, explores her breast cancer - it’s all about breast cancer. So that kind of combined into Tzimmes, which means either this stew of fruit or meats, or to make a big deal about nothing. That book is structured on all the different parts of the seder, but kind of blends Yvonne Rainer, Barbados genealogy and breast cancer… and cooking!
C: Wow, that seems like such a disparate grouping of subjects, but they all find connection through your research process and the way you re-mix them together. How did you decide on the source materials you used for Tzimmes, or for Unexplained Presence, for that matter?
TB: Well with both works, Tzimmes & Unexplained Presence, there were real coincidences - real chance. The only research I was doing with Tzimmes was genealogy research and the rest of what was going on at that time just kind of strangely resonated with it. You know, I’m making matzo balls, I’m thinking about breast cancer, I’m thinking about metastasizing, and if you’ve ever worked with matzo meal, it just kind of goes all over the place - so it was just a confluence.
C: In Unexplained Presence, you pull black figures from the background of your source materials into the foreground and give them more subjectivity. For Butler, who was a writer who specifically foregrounded black characters, what do you think about her treatment of race and racial dynamic in her books?
TB: I think Butler does the inverse splendidly. I love the way Butler backgrounded Kevin in Kindred, when he and Dana get separated for several years, and we never learn what happened to him. He can’t talk about it. I think Butler performed a critical intervention through rewriting a “master narrative,” going against what would usually be lionized as heroic survival. Instead, trauma and silence. He is backgrounded, perhaps made into a new myth, a difficult and unusual one, that would require one to pull him forward and imagine what he witnessed and experienced as a progressive white male writer and husband of a black woman from 1975, trying to survive the antebellum south with his humanity, his ethics and morals, intact. Here, she shatters the mythos surrounding the white male abolitionist and demands we try again. What a crucial and enduring task she left for writers to take up.
C: Can you talk a little bit about your current novel, The Curator?
TB: Well, the shorthand of what I say is that it’s about black female subjectivity. It’s a walk, and it’s also a novel of wish fulfillment and curation. The wish fulfillment is in imagining a black female auteur from the ‘50s, the likes of whom I’m told never existed, which I don’t believe. And the curation is: How do we see the world, and how can we make our lived realities - and I’m going to paraphrase something I just read that Toni Cade Bambara supposedly said - how can we make the realities of our lives irresistible, and irresistibly true, so that they’re not these kinds of market-driven constructions, or myths coming from somewhere else. That we all have point of view and perspective and the way that we experience our built environments, our relationships, our homes, how we encounter art, and how we put all of that together into a world. So maybe The Curator is a novel of black female world-building, on foot.
C: What have you been attracted to so far in Butler’s archives at the Huntington? Where did you begin your investigation?
TB: Well, I started with a real curiosity about the letters that Octavia Butler received from Toni Cade Bambara. I had no idea they knew each other, and so those were the first letters that I read. And then I found that Ayana Jamieson had already written this beautiful article about those letters and about that friendship, and so I had to reconnoiter a little bit and go, “Okay, so what else do I want to know?”
I am still curious about her friendships with writers, and with black writers in particular, but she also has this incredible research process. Just from looking through the finding aids, you can see she researched everything - about all these different African cultures, and languages, and foods, and then medicine. All of these different social issues come up, so when I saw that there was a box of just her library call slips, I decided to start there. As a library nerd, an inveterate book snatcher, how best to get close to her sense of “radio imagination” than to see how she moved through the library?
C: It’s remarkable to think about how much of what’s there [at the Huntington] is because she thought, “You know what? This is important. Somebody’s going to want to look at this later,” or maybe, “I may need this later.” Even her first stories - you can read a story from when she was 12 years old and see the same themes come up in her novels that were published decades later.
TB: I’m glad that you said that, because we all wish that she had lived a much longer life, to have seen more of an expression of where she was going with all of her earliest experiences and enduring curiosities, but you know, that’s the truth of being a person. But being a creative person, your poetics or aesthetics - those things that are the root of why you make art - are old! And they keep evolving and finding new expression as you keep going. Even though Octavia Butler had been writing for such a long time, when she really starts to get traction, she’s already getting into her 30s, and kind of hits peak in her 40s and 50s, and it’s just inspiring. It helps to kind of recalibrate how you measure and meter your time and your creativity - it’s a long road.
I’m working on this other piece about black women and travel, that actually started for me here at Clockshop when I was in the My Atlas series that Sasha and Mackenzie put together. In thinking about travel, there were a couple of things I noticed going through Octavia’s papers - she got around. She didn’t drive, but she went to all of these different places. She went to Peru, she went to Maryland, she went to all of these different conventions for sci fi, and it just really made me think about black women’s mobility as a function of imagination. This kind of autodidacticism - this self-directed intensity of learning as a way to change your situation and your circumstances, but to also always be imagining yourself in a future - a future that might not be in the same place - that these efforts are toward another kind of motion - there’s the motion of the mind, and then body. To me that’s really evidenced in every bit of her papers.
C: What are you looking forward to talking about at the ALOUD panel on March 10?
TB: I’m really excited about the panel, because these four different people - Douglas Kearney, Ayana Jamieson, Ben Caldwell and Nisi Shawl - all have different vantage points on Octavia Butler and what she means to place, what place means in her work, and what this place means in her work: Los Angeles and Pasadena.
I’m so excited to see and hear how they talk about all these different kinds of “Los Angeleses.” So with Ben Caldwell and his being part of the LA Rebellion filmmakers, I am so curious about who she knew then. Who knew her? I kept situating Octavia Butler in Pasadena, and I don’t think I was aware that she lived near Leimert Park, or in Leimert Park. Ben was saying, “Oh yeah, she lived nearby.” That situates things really differently in that she was a part of different community events - we hardly ever talk about her within that context, so I’m really excited about that, as well as getting into a more topographical discussion.
C: You’re so right. We most often hear about her being a hermit and working in solitude, but that’s not necessarily the full story.
TB: Right. She may not have talked to you that much…
And I think that’s actually really important to understanding her, and something that’s really important to my own creative process. Writing is happening from you, by yourself, but it doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
Sharing things with people and being of a massive network, and that that network is always drawing people and ideas to you, as much as emanating out towards others is really important. The fact that Octavia Butler came up with this phrase, “radio imagination” to describe her creative process and the way her mind works is just genius. We can talk about the rhizome, we can talk about cosmology, we can talk about network, but that “radio imagination…” That you’re signaling out, and you don’t know who is getting that signal back… Research does that too. Once you open up that channel that you’re looking for something, all of a sudden, it all finds you.
How uncanny is that? Why does that happen? There’s a lot about energy that we don’t understand, and I kind of love that she kept exploring that through the Patternmaster series and even through Parable of the Sower.
My appreciation for her and her writing, especially now being so close to her intimate life of the mind in a way that few people will get to know her, is intense.
And that is connected to the next book. So when I finish The Curator - which will be promptly (laughs) - the book that I’m starting, and I just actually started writing something for it yesterday, is about doing archival research, and the grief and desire and longing that comes out of doing that research. Something happens to you, but there’s often no place to put that, and no one to talk to about it.
When I met Sue Hodson [Curator, Literary Manuscripts at the Huntington], I asked her about it, and she was like, yeah, we all talk about that: what it is to be this close, and speaking of a kind of reanimation or conjuring, or being a medium, or channeling, or whatever. An immortality. She’s still here to me, Octavia Butler is, and any of these folks that you’re getting that close to through this depth of research with their things - their writings, their papers, in their hand, their stuff… they’re with you. Where do you put that? What is that phenomenon?
For more information about the panel at the Los Angeles Public Library, visit: http://clockshop.org/event/the-butler-legacy-and-los-angeles/.
For more information about Radio Imagination, visit: http://clockshop.org/project/radio-imagination/
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