In our moment, it may be hard to imagine, but when Octavia Butler was living, she was known as a pessimist among critics and fans. This interpretation of her has now been lost to recent critical history. If you search for Butler's words on pessimism, the main quote that comes up is her describing herself as "a pessimist if I'm not careful." This is the quote that everybody turns to in order to describe Butler the optimist, the prophet, the saint of surviving, adaptation, and hope.
This quote allows us to continue the general feeling that pessimism is an undesirable and immature stance antithetical to living or change. Usually, within this is a kind of distaste for depression. People oftentimes describe so-called pessimists as defeatists who wallow in sorrow. Interestingly enough, this particular distaste for pessimism usually comes from people struggling against their own personal depression, even if they won't admit it. In that way, it makes sense. If one is personally struggling with hopelessness, what one would crave from their literature is an antidote to what ails them. They would want literature that deals with the dark but gives a mature stance on hope and possibility. What we generally want from Butler is for her to be a healer —a dark healer for sure, but with stories that give us a balm wrapped in razor-sharp realism.
Yet, even in this often-quoted statement, I hear a wink when she describes herself as "a pessimist if I'm not careful." Why not simply describe herself as an optimist or a realist if she is negating pessimism? One could take the "…if I'm not careful" to mean that pessimism is a constant force in her psyche that she remains vigilant toward. However, I hear a sense of irony in her statement. A jab at her own self and her reputation. Tananarive Due wrote of a conversation with Butler,
During our visit, we asked her how she felt about being described as a pessimist. First she joked in faux surprise, as if she were taken aback—"Moi?" But then she circled back to the truth with a sigh. "Look at us. Look at us," she said emphatically. "We're not really that long-term."
We see Butler respond to her reputation as a pessimist with humor and a wink. Yet, this time she does not deny the description. Instead, she responds, "Look at us." What others would call pessimism, she simply called looking at the truth. This is what real pessimism is—not the cartoonish descriptions of writers wallowing in their own sadness or being devoted killjoys. The pessimist is really just one who will not stop looking. Even when what we see is incredibly uncomfortable and hopeless, the pessimist does not avert their gaze. More importantly, the pessimist points out what they see and asks others to see as well. "Look at us. Look at us," Butler demands.
What is interesting about Butler is that she shows that pessimism does not only exist for its own sake. The pessimist tends to be someone who is not necessarily braver, but who, for some reason, cannot look away when others gladly do. Others look away because it is too terrifying or too depressing. Others try to look away and their mind's eye will not allow them. Similar to Olamina's hyperempathy in the Parables, the source of pessimism is a sensitivity that oftentimes does not feel like a gift. To be unable to not feel means that one is forced to reckon with everything they feel. The source of Butler's pessimism is vulnerability, with both the good and the bad that comes with that.
On the way to visit a sick friend, Butler encountered a bloody fight between two men while riding the bus. Upon seeing these two men fight for no rational reason, she felt hatred for their ignorance and wondered "whether the human species would ever grow up enough to learn to communicate without using fists…" She then thought of the first sentence to her short story, "Speech Sounds," which considers a world where everyone loses the ability to speak. Her encounter with this fight left her more depressed than she already was, grieving for a dying friend. She did not want to look at this scene or her friend slowly dying, but she could not look away from either. She wrote, from this place of hopelessness and hatred, a short story about the struggle to communicate in a world without words. Writing was a process of reckoning with this feeling of hopelessness. In her afterword to this short story, Butler writes of this experience:
'Speech Sounds' was conceived in weariness, depression, and sorrow. I began the story feeling little hope or liking for the human species, but by the time I reached the end of it, my hope had come back. It always seems to do that.
She did not write from a place of hope. By either refusing or not being able to look away from her hopelessness, she discovered the jewels of what she did not expect to find. In not looking away from pessimism, Butler finds and creates an unintentional source for the hope people find in her work. For Butler, pessimism is not the antithesis to hope then, it is a passageway. A portal. The hope that pessimism produces is not one of utopic vision, it is a hope that one cannot simply envision by will of spirit. The possibilities generated from pessimism are absolutely unforeseeable unless one is willing to pay the costs of not looking away. In this way, pessimism is less of a mood and more a method or a way of living. Pessimism is the refusal to look away.
Not looking away is precisely how Butler produced her novels that feel like prophecy to us now. Octavia Butler's stories are a medicine in these times of cascading terrors. It has become a refrain to tell folks looking for answers on our moment to go read the Parable texts. When Trump won his first election on the phrase "Make America Great Again," Butler's texts were seen as prophetic. Of course, that is only one of the book's predictions that resonate with us now. Her characters' experience with devastating climate change clearly resonates. Perhaps most poignantly, it is the beginning of Parables of the Sower, as we experience a community clinging to any sense of normal as their society collapses around them that feels hauntingly familiar. As new horrors emerge daily, we all still have to wake up and go to work for survival, as if we are not experiencing profound changes to the world order.
As readers, we wonder how Butler could have seen our world so clearly from her distance. Yet, in her lifetime, Butler treated her process of speculation as something that could—and should—be done by anyone, as long as they followed certain methods. She thought and researched deeply about history to understand the patterns of how societies react to crisis and can descend into fascism. She also researched many other topics across the medical and environmental sciences. In "A Few Rules For Predicting The Future," she wrote of a conversation with a student while signing books. The student asked if she truly believed in the problems she wrote about in Parables. "'I didn't make up the problems,' [she] pointed out. 'All I did was look around at the problems we're neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.'"
Her prophetic texts arise from a method she named "histofuturism." Her tips emphasized learning from the past and using it to project a future that could be possible if we did not resolve these issues. She describes Parables as an "if-this-goes-on story" instead of the other forms that science fiction can take (such as "what if" or "if only"). Yet, she did not write the story as a mechanical reflection of enduring patterns. That would be more manifesto or treatise than novel. For her, a key part of predicting the future was understanding the centrality of unintended consequences and surprises. So, her speculations were not simply projecting her knowledge of the past and present. On this she wrote, "Some of the most mistaken predictions I've seen are of the straight-line variety." For Butler, time is not a straight line working towards an inevitable direction. Instead, time is change and for Butler, change is neither good nor bad, but full of surprise and shock. For an author so interested in predicting the future, her account of speculation emphasizes the future's unknowability.
As readers, we wonder how Butler could have seen our world so clearly from her distance. Yet, in her lifetime, Butler treated her process of speculation as something that could—and should—be done by anyone.
The unknowability is the source of Butler's hope from pessimism. One way to think about how this might be so is to consider the statement, "anything is possible." This is a statement screamed by the eternal optimist, those who believe they can shape the future with unshakable belief. Yet, the "anything" does not necessarily mean good. The other image that comes up with "anything is possible" is one finding themselves in absolute darkness. In the darkness, we shake because anything can happen. The anything invites visions of terror, of violation, dismemberment, and death. The unknown has terrors we could never know or imagine and that frightens us. Yet, the unknown could also contain wonders beyond our wildest dreams. In our culture, we generally imagine the optimist and the pessimist as split between those who see wonder and those who see terror. Butler reveals a form of pessimism that is not merely the opposite of the optimist. For Butler, looking at the terror and hopelessness can produce the marvelous. Yet, Butler's marvels are not found because she looks for them, they are found in the very process of looking at and through terror.
In this way, Butler's pessimism is anything other than defeat or fatalism. Her pessimism was her willingness to not look away from the terror of this world. It is her embrace of the fundamental connection and tension between terror and change that gives her stories their dynamism. Change reveals that systems of domination can be resilient, grow, and metastasize into something worse. Domination is capable of mutation. Yet, change also harbors the terror of uncertainty, of what cannot be foreseen until one embraces the fullness of change. And in that unforeseeability are the seeds of the beloved community that we hope for but have trouble imagining. This is only possible in the radical embrace of change, of uncertainty, of the unknown.
With this spirit, Butler gave an answer to the student who continued to ask her about the problems she poses in her novels:
"Okay," the young man challenged. "So what's the answer?"
"There isn't one," I told him.
"No answer? You mean we're just doomed?" He smiled as though he thought this might be a joke.
"No," I said. "I mean there's no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There's no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers—at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be."
Even in speculating on futures and fantastical worlds, her perspective refused to look away from terror. This includes the ultimate terror that sits underneath all of our decisions: who we are and how we choose to be in the face of the unknown. Against the optimism of the utopic thinker, Butler made terror into an ally of her imagination. Once an ally, terror reveals parts of the unknown that can be a source of wonder and possibility. While others look away, the pessimist that is forced to look is bestowed with an unintentional gift. Within the terror of the world is also the marvelous. To continue to look means the possibility of glimpsing the marvelous, the surprise, the unforeseeable. We can be the marvelous, if we choose to not look away.
