Wikipedia talk:Wiki Ed/LaGuardia Community College/ENG103 Octavia Butler's Wild Seed (Fall 2015)/week 09 team2

Plot
Wild Seed is a story of two African immortal individuals. Doro is a spirit that can take over other people’s bodies, killing anything in his path, and Anyanwu is a woman with healing powers who can also transform herself into any human or animal shape. Doro senses Anyanwu’s abilities and wants to add her to one of his seed villages in the New World, where he breeds super humans. Doro convinces Anyanwu to travel with him to America by telling her he will give her children she’ll never have to watch die. Doro plans to impregnate her himself, but also wants to share her with his son Isaac. Isaac has very strong telekinetic powers and is one of Doro’s most successful seeds. By partnering Anyanwu and Isaac, Doro hopes to obtain children with very special abilities.

Doro discovers that when Anyanwu transforms into an animal, he cannot sense or kill her. He feels threatened by this ability, and starts to wonder whether he has enough control over her. Anyanwu sees Doro’s disregard for his people and his barbaric ways frighten her. When they arrive at the seed village, Doro tells Anyanwu she is to marry Isaac and bear the children of whoever Doro chooses. Anyanwu eventually agrees once Isaac convinces her that she could be the only one to get through to Doro.

Fifty years later, Doro returns to the seed village. His relationship with Anyanwu has deteriorated, and one of the only things keeping him from killing her is her successful marriage to Isaac. He has come home because he senses that Anyanwu’s daughter, Nweke, is going through the transition of fully coming into her powers. During her transition, Nweke attacks Anyanwu. Trying to protect Anyanwu, Isaac accidentally kills Nweke and suffers a heart attack. Anyanwu realizes she is too weak to heal Isaac and he dies. Afraid that Doro will kill her now that Isaac is not n’t there to protect her, Anyanwu transforms into an animal and runs away.

After a century, Doro finally tracks Anyanwu down to a Louisiana plantation. To his surprise, Anyanwu has created her own colony, which in many ways is more successful than Doro's. She protects her people until Doro’s arrival, at which point he forces his breeding program on her community. One man he brings to mate with one of Anyanwu’s daughters ruins the harmony of the colony, and several deaths result. Anyanwu becomes tired of Doro’s control, since his immortality makes him the only permanent thing in her life. She decides to commit suicide. Her decision causes Doro to have a change of heart. In desperation, he agrees to compromise as long as she goes on living. From that point on, Doro no longer kills as carelessly, and does not choose his kills from the his people that he should be protecting. He also stops using Anyanwu for breeding; from now on she helps him in his quest to try and find more promising seeds, but is more of an ally and partner than his slave.

Anyanwu as strong black female protagonist
As Butler scholar Ruth Salvaggio explains, Wild Seed was published at a time where strong black female protagonists were virtually nonexistent outside of Butler’s novels. By creating the powerful character of Anyanwu, Butler's portrayal superseded stereotypes of women in the science fiction genre. Lisbeth Gant-Britton describes Anyanwu as “a prime example of the kind of heroines Butler depicts. Strong-willed, physically capable, and usually endowed with some extra mental or emotional ability...they nonetheless must often endure brutally harsh conditions as they attempt to exercise some degree of agency.”

Anyanwu's story is also a key contribution to women's literature in that it illustrates how women of color have survived both gender and racial oppression. As Elyce Rae Helford explains, "[b]y setting her novel in a realistic Africa and America of the past, [Butler] shows her readers the strength, the struggles, and the survival of black women through the slave years of United States history."

Like many of Butler’s strong female African-American characters, Anyanwu is put in conflict with a male character, Doro, who is just as powerful as her. Butler uses this type of mis-match to display how differently males and females demonstrate their power and values. Since Anyanwu’s way, J. Andrew Deman notes, “is the way of the healer” rather than of the killer, she does not need violence to demonstrate her true strength or power. As Gant-Britton states, Anyanwu’s true power is shown many times during the story but it is definitely displayed when she threatens to commit suicide if Doro does not stop using her to create new species, making Doro submissive “to her will in the name of love,” if only for a moment.

Wild Seed as alternative feminist narrative
Though published in 1980, Wild Seed diverts from the typical Second Wave “future utopia” narrative that had dominated the feminist science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. As L. Timmel Duchamp argues, Wild Seed as well as Kindred provided an alternative to the “white bourgeois narrative, premised on the notion of sovereign individualism” that feminist writers had been using as the prototype for their liberation stories. By not following the “all-or-nothing struggle” of Western fiction, Wild Seed better represented the hard compromises that real women must accept to live in a patriarchal, oppressive society.

Anyawu as a representation of cyborg identity
Scholars view the shapeshifting Anyanwu as a fictional representation of Donna Haraway’s “cyborg” identity as defined in her 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Specifically, Anyanwu embodies Haraway’s “lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints” as her shapeshifting abilities compete with Doro’s genetic engineering. Anyanwu’s hybridity, her capability to represent multiple simultaneous identities, allows her to survive, to have agency, and to remain true to herself and her history in the midst of excruciating oppression and change.

Stacy Alaimo further argues that Butler uses the “utterly embodied” Anyanwu not just to counteract Doro’s “horrific Cartesian subjectivity” but to actually transgress the dichotomy between mind and body, as Anyanwu is capable of “reading” other bodies with her own. As such, she illustrates Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledge,” wherein the subject (knower) does not distance itself from the object (known) and thus offers an alternative way of experiencing the world. Anyanwu’s body, then, is a “liminal space” that blurs traditional divisions of the world into “nature” and “culture.”

For Gerry Canavan, Anyanwu’s obvious pleasure and joy in cannibalizing the Other into the Self (especially animals, and particularly, dolphins) presents us with an alternative to the cycle of violence and desire for power offered by the superhuman Patternists (and, by metaphoric extension, human history). Hers is a communion with Otherness that allows for an expansion of consciousness rather than the mere repetition of patterns of domination.