Wild Seed

The tradition of the slave narrative, from contemporary accounts to modern recollections, contains a strong and necessary political element of serving to humanize those who were dehumanized. Octavia Butler’s fantastic account in Wild Seed upends this tradition, considering the perspectives of both the enslaved and the enslaver, interrogating modes of asymmetrical power as she goes.

White supremacist economic models brutally reduce humanity to two factors: race and suitability for labor. They erase tribal and historic identities and replace them with an identity based on raw functionality. Thus, both white and black members of the system have their identities defined by its designers. When traditional slave narratives evoke political empathy, they often leave these underlying identities intact. Leaving them uninterrogated. In this way, their enslaved characters struggle for agency as their slavers struggle to maintain their own in an unbreakable cycle. Wild Seed turns this description of identity on its head. Both Doro and Anyanwu may transform themselves into white people at any time and may perform most forms of labor as they judge without coercion, as they deem it necessary. In addition, their unnaturally long lives mean that they maintain their complex identities throughout trauma and external upheaval.