On Vampires: Octavia Butler’s “Fledgling”
My first boyfriend’s nickname for me was “vampire.” We were 14, and we started dating during the first weeks of being in high school. He is Black, shorter than me. If my memory is correct, this was the only way we acknowledged our racial difference through fantastical creatures.
I think of this when reading Octavia Butler’s “Fledgling,” the beloved author’s take on a vampire tale. In it, Shori, our protagonist, a Black vampire, reckons with the loss of her family, of which she has no memory. We later learn that Shori’s families, both her mother and father’s extended families, are killed because of their genetic experiments that birthed Shori. She is one of the first Black vampires; her relatives are described as tall, pale, and blond. This is achieved via genetic experiments with human DNA to make Ina (the name of the species of vampire) stronger, to be able to wake during the day. This is due to the amount of melanin in darker skin.
The novel briefly mentions antebellum slavery, surprising given that Ina live for centuries. Many of the book’s characters would’ve easily been around during this time. One monologue from an older Ina reads, “When I came to this country, such people were kept as property, as slaves.” As popular vampire lore suggests, vampires turn to dust when exposed to sunlight. This is actualized by blistering sunburn in Butler’s world. Shori can stay awake during the day and even be exposed to small amounts of sun, though she covers herself in hoodies and jeans. Sunlight, in relationship to Blackness, is not a new concept (just look at a map of human skin color distribution). However, through the enslavement of people from Africa, a cruel stronghold is constructed between Blackness and sunlight, as labor took place in the sweltering regions of the American South. (This negative association between exposure to sunlight and labor transcends race — see, “redneck”). It’s also worth noting that as I am writing this, NASA announced that a spacecraft has entered the solar corona for the first time.
Perhaps the absence of slavery is about the more significant theme of amnesia. As previously mentioned, Shori suffers from complete memory loss after her village is burned, awakening in a cave at the beginning of the story with no memory. Butler abstracts these passages through the first person, as Shori relearns language. She discovers the burned remains of her village and can only wonder. After several days, Shori finds a state highway and hitches a ride from Wright — a husky white man in his late 20’s / early 30’s. She bites him and feeds on his blood (more on how that works later), which others her from humans, allowing Wright to identify her as some sort of vampire. Through Wright’s guidance, she slowly learns/relearns parts of human society as she hides in his home. She watches daytime TV and reads vampire lore online.
A noteworthy detail is that Shori appears to be a young girl, a slim figure standing at 4’11. We believe her to be 11 years old when her relationship with Wright begins. Shortly after he picks her up in his car, they have sex, an uncomfortable scene rendered in plain spoken detail. It’s a relief when we learn that Shori is actually 56 years old, young on an Ina timeline, but nonetheless an adult. Still, Wright is a problematic character in his participation in what is believed to be underage sex. This is never explicitly interrogated, and Wright becomes more essential to Shori as they become bonded through the feeding of blood and more sex.
Feeding is a recurring theme in the book. Ina drink human blood to feed. The humans, if this continues, become dependent on the Ina venom that is deposited during this process. They become what is called a symbiont to the Ina. The relationship between Ina and humans is mutually beneficial, which makes Wright and Shori’s relationship more complicated. It’s also important to note that feeding is a pleasurable experience for both the human and Ina involved. The power is not inverted but leveled.
Ina must have multiple symbionts to survive (the most common number seems to be 7). At night Shori ventures out into the Oregon countryside where she resides and feeds from humans a little bit at a time until she builds her family of symbionts. This process spans the entire novel, the choosing of a family through desire and eventually pleasure. Depending on who you ask, this is either utopian worldbuilding via what we know as polyamory or the creation of a cult. I think of my own excursions in polyamory, unfolding as I read the novel. The idea of choosing your family is a queer one (“Make Kin Not Babies! (Haraway)).
The darker side of this is the supposed story of Thomas Jefferson’s affair with an enslaved woman, which proved to be childbearing. It wasn’t until the modern-day that a DNA test proved the legitimacy of this, that it became a little-known fact (as opposed to rumor). Here, Jefferson chose his family via exclusion to maintain an image of whiteness.
The erasure of family presents itself in this story as grave punishment. Towards the story’s end, the Silk family, found guilty of targeting and murdering Shori’s family, are stripped of the right to continue the family name. The children of breeding age are to be adopted by other families (along with their symbionts) and given a new name. The elders are shunned from the rest of the Ina families. The ability to reproduce, to carry on a family name, to have honor, is what is taken away.
This brings to mind two things. One is the Indigenous American idea of long future, or “seventh generation” thinking, co-opted by laundry detergents and other green-washed cleaning products. (“look and listen to the welfare of the whole people and have always in view not only the present but also the coming generations, even those whose faces are not yet beneath the surface of the ground — the unborn of the future Nation (Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Constitution)). The governed world’s reaction to climate change has proved certain negligence, or at least an obliviousness, to future generations. By continuing to extract and burn fossil fuels, we are taking away the ability to carry on any family name, history, and the very ability to have someone read such histories.
The flip side is the current deliberation of human reproduction in the U.S. Here, childbearing bodies are denied access to reproductive care such as abortion. “The pleasure of being able to inhabit a sexual body shifting into the horror of never being allowed to be anything else” (Laing). To be forced to carry out a family name is its own kind of punishment, to carry on the legacy of the American experiment. Of course, the irony is that raising children in America is notoriously difficult as the infrastructure is insidiously not there.
Maybe Butler’s Ina societies provide some model for how to move forward, bound by both biology and choice. However, an important detail is that the Ina are not immune from capitalism. For example, Shori’s family owns several apartment buildings in Seattle, leaving her much financial power in the Ina world to build her own family. Wealth is almost taken for granted in the story. Still, it’s crucial that the almost entirely white Ina race/ species inherit wealth largely due to their extended life spans. They can build the infrastructure to house, feed, and entertain families of hundreds of people living in compounds. Blackness, then, is commodified by the Ina for their own gain, own survival. This is not to strip Shori of her humanity as a complex character, but an observation that she is being exploited as a Black being in a white world beneath the veil of science.
Violence becomes a significant theme in the work, both explicit and implicit. We experience these explicit passages through Shori as Butler writes first. On more than one occasion, she tears through the throats of both Ina and humans, in both defense and hunger. “Before he realized I was there, I was on his back, one hand over his mouth and nose, my legs around him, riding him, my other arm around his head under his chin. I broke his neck, and an instant later, as he collapsed, I tore out his throat. I wanted no noise from him.” I rubbed my own neck both as I read and retyped this passage, suddenly aware of my own body in a way that I wasn’t before (A similar effect can be felt looking at Rona Pondick’s “Marmot” sculpture or paintings of crucifixions).
The role of this violence initially turned me off from the book — a similar passage appears in the first few pages as Shori hunts for raw meat. What value is there in experiencing fictitious violence? I turn to Maggie Nelson’s “On Cruelty” and find a slightly enlightening passage: “If, at the very least, we are human, we must concede that humans evidence and ongoing interest in becoming, at certain times and in certain contexts, things, as much as in turning other people into things.” A reductive take is that by having Shori inflict violence on white and racially ambiguous bodies, there is a reclaiming of sorts, a reversal of the objectification associated with the enslavement of humans.
But there is also the fact that much violence is inflicted on Shori, whether through burning her home down, shooting her, or killing one of her symbionts through blunt trauma to the head. I have no theory, no intimate experience to wonder why a Black author would batter and bruise a Black character so thoroughly. The only anecdote I have is my experience with suicidal ideation, where I was obsessed with the body (my body) in pain. But even then, there’s nothing insightful I can draw from that experience, my own amnesia masking that time.
Nelson connects Butler (among a myriad of other female writers) and violence in that violence is a reaction to patriarchy. Nelson asks if violence can exist not as a purely reactive, gendered force but a force all on its own? I’m reminded of the female vampire, an archetype created by poet Jenny Hval, actualized through song. “Here it comes/ in the dampness of winter air between us, in the restlessness of hotel rooms, in the smell of Spanish wetlands, in the way you say: It hurts everywhere” (This “it” seems to be desire). Or, put more plainly, the popular quote by artist Maia Schwartz: “Menstruation is the only blood that is not born from violence, yet it’s the one that disgusts you the most.” Again, Butler’s visions of Ina compounds, separated by gender, appear, notably that of all female Ina dwellings.
Through these two artists, blood becomes gendered. Yet when has it not been? An overview of blood in contemporary art by Lydia Horne published in Art Papers this year exemplifies this difference: Men’s blood is seen as a comment on broader themes of humanity, while femme artists’ use of blood is often seen in direct relation to menstruation. “[…] a woman’s “leaky body” has been thought to possess a lack of control, the subject of contempt by men, who inhabit a superior “sealed body.” (This is a weak association, tethered to second-wave feminism through Judy Chicago and Judy Clark). More contemporary use of blood in artwork by Ana Mendieta and Takema Norris elevates feminine blood to the lofty aspirations of male artists.
But what is it that is so enticing about the use of blood, and by extension, violence, whether in art or literature? Horne’s conclusion is that “what’s most disturbing about the medium is not its visceral quality but instead its conceptual underpinnings: blood captures the pervasive anxiety among artists to endure through their work even after they’re gone.” Maybe time is the ultimate strength of the vampire, of the Ina. That makes Shori’s amnesia all the more devastating. It may be the key to understanding the violence inflicted upon her (I also think of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” in which the past of enslaved people is personified and must be directly confronted).
Somewhat tragically, Fledgling would ultimately be Butler’s final novel, published in 2005. The dream of immortality, of creating families that will live for centuries, for creating lineage, is all explored in Fledgling. She plants a seed of a character in Shori, who we presume will live long after the story’s end. Yet, Butler reportedly passed away alone, outside her home a year after publication. Instead, she leaves behind something freakier, gnarlier, a lineage of intellect for us to discover.
Works cited
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthuluscene. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2016
Butler, Octavia E. Fledgling. Grand Central Publishing, 2005.
“THE CONSTITUTION OF THE IROQUOIS NATIONS: THE GREAT BINDING LAW,
GAYANASHAGOWA.” Internet History Sourcebooks, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/iroquois.asp.
Horne, Lydia. “Bleeding out: On the Use of Blood in Contemporary Art.” Art Papers, 24 Nov.
2021, https://www.artpapers.org/bleeding-out-on-the-use-of-blood-in-contemporary-art/.
Laing, Olivia. Everybody: A Book About Freedom. W.W. Norton & Company, 2021.
Nelson, Maggie. On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint. Graywolf Press, 2021.
Nelson, Maggie. The Art of Cruelty: A Rekoning. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. , 2011.
“Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: A Brief Account.” Monticello.org,
