Octavia Butler grew up helping her mother clean rich white folks’ homes, experiencing anti-Black hatred from white employers at an early age. Instead of internalizing the trauma, however, Butler fought back.
She dreamed up worlds where heroes looked like her. But Butler soon discovered she was dyslexic, making reading and writing difficult. And as a sci-fi fanatic, she was frustrated that the genre’s only representation of Black people was oppressive.
Daring to shake things up, she embraced her disability and started writing.
Precious few Black women writers were crafting sci-fi novels in the 1970s. By writing Black-centered stories, Butler invaded a white, male-dominated industry.
She mixed traditional elements of sci-fi with Black history and African mythology, simultaneously sewing in real horrors we face from an anti-Black society.
In 1979 Butler published Kindred, the story of a modern-day Black woman who time travels back to the pre-Civil War era to save her ancestor, a white enslaver she despises, but who is crucial to her survival.
Kindred was heavily criticized, but Butler wouldn’t be silenced. She wrote several other critically acclaimed novels, revealing the unimaginable extent our people will go to survive.
Butler reminds us of one important truth: Black people have the power to change the narrative. She let the world know that we too dream about and belong in the future.
This is why she’ll forever be known as the mother of Afrofuturism.