Africentric transgressive creativity: A reader's meditation on Octavia Butler

Unlike predominant Butlerian scholarship located in Eureocentric and Science Fiction ideologies, my writing on Octavia Butler makes Africana womanist analysis central. It brings together literary, cultural, historical and theological research in an interdisciplinary exploration of hermeneutics of Butler's creativity. Since Butler's creativity communicates relations of power and knowledge and the historical conditions producing them in her literature, I locate Butler's fiction at the site of African American women's literary tradition for my reading of psios (telepathy) and conjuration. Furthermore, I have coined the term transgressive creativity as rubric, since it helps to delineate precisely what it is her narrative consciousness transgresses. The concept of transgressive creativity is a black womanist reading of meaning in Butler's fiction. It allows me to isolate, analyze, and interpret radical fissures and divergences in her temporal and spatial cultural critiques, an alternately exciting and destabilizing project. As example of her treatment of gender, I use transgressive creativity to examine her feminist philosophy, and by so doing have arrived at the conclusion that it would be more accurate to say that Butler's narrative feminism includes yet transcends Alice Walker's definition of "womanist." In fact, judging by her fine-tuned multicultural, multilingual, multiethnic, and often working class community of women, Butler's feminism is more akin to malidoma consciousness. Directly translated from the Dagara culture in Burkina Faso, malidoma means making friends with the stranger or enemy. Hence I argue that Butler's fiction imbibes a larger cultural ideological construct that is African American cultural philosophy or Africentrism. Rich threads of West African spiritual tradition are interwoven throughout complex metaphors in black women's fiction. Hence, this project excavates Butler's magic from science fiction's paradigm of impossible occurrence in order to show that, when grasped from the depth of traditional West African cosmology and Black women's writing, magic may be read as signification of re-inscribed (extant) possibility in the present-day rituals of spirituality throughout the African diaspora.