In Praise of Junie...

Octavia E. Butler, an astonishing writer of great insight first became known to me when I was in my twenties. I started with a borrowed copy of the Patternist book, Clay's Ark, which at the time was rather hard to find. A sci-fi fanatic as a kid, I gobbled it up. I found her work surpassed any and all speculative fiction I'd been exposed to. I often trolled used bookstores looking for tomes in that series, happening upon the odd copy as a treasure slyly reveals itself when the seeker is ready.

And then I read Kindred and my awe deepened exponentially. Of course it was intellient...but it was also textured and complex, with an almost visceral frame of reference. Her work, that particular work followed the emotional threads of her protagonists more profoundly than any other writer I'd ever sampled. I read through much of it with my mouth agape.

This was someone, a woman and a person of color, who wove the details of her race, gender and later I came to belatedly discover her sexualty, not as simplistic badges of identification but as elements of her considerable range of character...they were combined flawlessly in each and every story she conjured. The particulars of who she was...they weren't presented in bluntish, raw form...rather they were interleafed in alien but well realized juxtapositions. She was painter with words, using her prose to draw out meaning and beauty, lightess and dark, subtle ironies and angst, here finding just the right shade of fear, there the proper tone of reverence.

And all this was done within the context of the fantastic, on stars and on earths we have yet to know. She used the unfamilar to highlight aspects of our society that have become regarded as common, tiresome and tedious. It's a troubling banality to say that we have problems with color, race , gender and sexual orientation in America...that humans spanning the globe have difficulty with whatever is different. Her skill, her grace was to block out for us potentially divisive truths in allegories that we could understand universally...provocative moral tales for us all to cleave to. She shined a bright, crystalline light onto subjects that transcended the mundane aspects of our reality; she used story in the highest office...to help us work out who we are and what is right in any country, in any century, galaxy or alternate universe of our imagining . She was literally, at over 6 ft tall, a towering literary prophet.

I was born on her birthday, June 22, and strangely I always considered her a sister I'd never met; kith.

Mi hermana, ma soeur, menya sistra, I will miss you.
Thank you for your persistence, your positive obsession.