Chi-ming Yang, Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, specializes in histories of race, empire, and East-West cultural exchanges. Yang’s scholarship spans chinoiserie, cross-species encounters in art and poetry, and her recent work on blackness, abolition, and Atlantic slavery, have been published in Early American Literature, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, British Art Studies, and The Journal of the Walters Art Museum.
Yang’s latest book, Octavia E. Butler: H is for Horse, is a homage to the childhood genius of Black science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler. Bringing to view a selection of Butler's unpublished writings and drawings, this book traces her fascination with human-alien symbiosis to her early empathy with horses and other marginalized creatures.
You were a fan of Octavia E. Butler before you started researching your book, even conducting your university lectures on Butler’s Dawn (1987). What is your personal favorite Octavia E. Butler book and why?
That is a very hard question that I get asked a lot, actually. And I do love Dawn, but if I had to pick a favorite, it would probably be Wild Seed, which came out in 1980. And it's part of her Patternist series. And I love it because the protagonist, Anyanwu, is a very long-living shapeshifter from Africa who can send what Butler calls flesh messages to different animals, so that she can actually become a dolphin or become a bird and inhabit the animal perspective. The book begins back in the 1600s and 1700s during the Atlantic slave trade and tracks this very long history of African diaspora, which is a period of history that I teach and research. I have to say, too, because I'm interested in Butler’s love of horses, I find her horsiest book, Clay's Ark, because it's set in the desert landscapes of San Bernardino and the Apple Valley area where her grandmother's ranch used to be. That’s one of her more horrifying books, so it's not for everybody. But Wild Seed and Clay's Ark are two of my favorites.
What was your motivation to begin your journey in researching and writing your book, Octavia E. Butler: H is for Horse?
The motivation has a lot to do with my mother, actually, who lives 10 minutes from the Huntington Library, where all of Octavia Butler's archives are. I started researching the book at a difficult time because in 2017, my mother was diagnosed with leukemia, and I left my teaching job for a year and a half to take care of her. It was a really rough time. But in the snatches of free time I had, I found a kind of lifeline by reading Octavia's manuscripts and her cancer research; one of her characters, a young mixed-race woman named Kira from the novel Clay's Ark, actually had the same type of blood cancer, AML, as my mother. And Butler had done all this research into AML, you know, in the 80s. Reading her research felt therapeutic for me. And while I was reading through Butler's cancer research, I came upon these amazing large horse drawings that she had done as a child, probably in high school. I realized that she had taken each one of these horses and named the breed after a character from Charles Dickens' David Copperfield. And that started my detective work going; I just knew that I needed to find the source horse picture book, from which she traced these horses. I didn't plan to write a book about her. I kind of stumbled across these amazing, unpublished drawings and writings, and then just kept reading and reading and reading. And at some point, I thought, wait a minute, I have all this material, and I'm so drawn to her childhood; when your parents get sick, you become their parent. I was thinking a lot about what it means to be an adult child. What does it mean when a parent becomes like your child? Childhood is something that Butler reflected on throughout her life and used as an inspiration for a lot of her novels.
Throughout your book, there are numerous illustrations and photos you discovered in your research. What was one of your most treasured Octavia E. Butler illustrations or photos in the book?
Oh, I love that question because there are so many photos, and I feel very lucky that I was able to get permission for a lot of these color images for the book. Probably my favorite one of hers is her senior yearbook photo because she used an ink pen, probably years later, to draw her secret childhood aliases on either shoulder. One of her secret aliases was a horse figure that she named Silver Star. And she would draw these stars or SS for Silver Star on all her notebooks. But the fact that she inked it on herself, felt like she was kind of tattooing herself; it also tells us that she reread her yearbook and thought a lot about her teenage years, for better and worse. As much as she was bullied in school, it was also just such a creative time for her to channel all of the anger and all of the misfit feelings into her creative worlds.
There are several chapters where the reader gets to discover more about the relationship between Octavia Estelle (or "Junie") and her mother, Octavia Margaret. Was there anything that you found that surprised you about their relationship?
I found it so moving to come across these written notes between the two Octavias, between Octavia Senior and Octavia Junior. Sometimes those took the form of Hallmark greeting cards, which she kept all those years. My mother also sent me a lot of Hallmark cards. They are a physical trace of their communication. I also discovered this note, this handwritten note on a scrap of paper that her mother had written to her to explain to Octavia Junior what it was like to grow up without electricity in Louisiana as a girl. To see her mother transmitting that family history and knowledge down to her daughter was really incredible. She didn't have that much formal schooling. So to see her mother's handwriting, it's shaky, you know, there are misspellings, but it's so wise and loving. It’s the same thing when you see her mother's handwriting in her senior yearbook. I don't think a lot of people get their parents to autograph their yearbooks. But on the front page, her mom makes sure that she signs Octavia Margaret Butler, and writes what a wonderful daughter Octavia Estelle was. To see her mother's handwriting in her yearbook, you can sense all the pride of what it meant for her to, as a single parent, raise this bookish girl who was on her way to being an accomplished writer.
What is something you hope your readers will gain after reading Octavia E. Butler: H is for Horse?
Well, first, I hope that people will feel inspired to want to read more of Butler, because I often hear that people know who she is, but haven't necessarily read her works. Or they've read one book. I also hope people can appreciate how much the Black and Asian communities in Pasadena meant to her growing up. She went to a relatively integrated high school at John Muir. And those interracial friendships and solidarities are something she writes into a lot of her novels. I think especially now, at this moment, when Altadena is still recovering from the fires. I'm sure everyone feels how important mutual aid and community are, and more than ever, given the state of affairs in the country. I hope that's something that comes through, that she was a writer of strong Black female protagonists who are oftentimes also mixed- race girls and women. And she does write in quite a few Black Asian romances into her novels. I think that has a lot to do with what kind of multiracial community she envisioned as a way to heal a very damaged planet.
Octavia Lab: The Octavia Lab, named after the award-winning science fiction author Octavia E. Butler, is a do-it-yourself makerspace located inside the Los Angeles Public Library's historic Central Library. Octavia Lab provides library cardholders free and unlimited access to state-of-the-art design, fabrication, preservation, and story-telling technologies.