Shape-Shifting to Heal in Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed by Dr. Briana Whiteside

This book chapter was originally published by Temple University

Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed (1980) models engaging discourse on how Black women can use their bodies as sites of trauma and therefore sites of healing that can shape-shift to resist subsequent oppression or even prevent it. Butler acknowledges that power in unhealed hands is dangerous, and she challenges Black women to do the work of identifying and healing emotional and spiritual wounds. Where such authors as Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison, to name a few, provide community for their Black women protagonists to heal, Butler tasks her protagonist Anyanwu to create a healing space within herself to respond immediately to her trauma. Consequently, she writes Black women’s bodies as recovery spaces that double as “borderguard[s]”^[1]