Susana M. Morris discovered the novels of Octavia E. Butler on the shelves of her local library in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, when she was 15.
“I’d never heard of her,” Morris recalls on a call from her office at Georgia Institute of Technology, where she teaches in the school of literature, media and communication. “I was not really exposed to a lot of Black literature in school. But I was a voracious reader. My favorite genre was fantasy and science fiction, fantasy in particular, and it felt weird to me that I could not read about characters who were like me. I wanted to read about little Black girls who were defeating dragons and things like that.”
They may not have been dragon slayers, but the Black female characters Morris found in Octavia Butler’s novels were the powerful drivers of gripping narratives. Morris was hooked from the start.
“I don’t want folks to think of me as a unique kind of reader,” Morris says, noting that many people of all races and backgrounds “have picked up Kindred, The Parable of the Sower, or another of Butler’s books and seen a version of themselves reflected there. That’s what good literature does. . . . I always tell folks that I love Jane Austen. I love Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, I’ve seen all the film adaptations. But I know for a fact that Jane Austen was not thinking of me when she wrote those books. She was not thinking of Susana Morris, Black feminist.”
With Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler, Morris hopes to nurture a broader and deeper understanding of Butler’s life and works among a general readership. As a young scholar and teacher, Morris first focused on the works of Toni Morrison; Butler’s books were a private pleasure. But in 2010, Morris brought Butler into her classroom. She now teaches a course on Butler every semester. In 2016, she discovered that Butler had left behind a vast archive of material after her unexpected death in 2006 at the age of 58. The existence of such an archive, Morris says, inspired her.
“I wanted to read about little Black girls who were defeating dragons.”
“She wrote thousands of pages of journals from childhood, and regularly from high school until right before her death. She wrote about her feelings in high school—who was cute and who wasn’t. She was very raw about her feelings. She ruminated on political figures. There might be a journal about finances, one for recording interior dialogue; there’s a journal devoted to the Xenogenesis series. Her archives are meticulous. She kept every receipt, every shopping list, the medications that she was taking. It’s a treasure trove.”
In fact, the breadth and depth of archival material was a bit overwhelming. Morris decided to focus on creating “a kind of cultural, intellectual biography.” Positive Obsession weaves the rich internal life recorded in Butler’s journals with an examination of social and political currents swirling around her to illuminate the characters and concerns of Butler’s novels. From the Civil Rights Movement through Black Power, women’s liberation, queer rights and Reaganomics, Butler was a calm eye in the storm, observing all and imagining bold futures. “When you read her books,” says Morris, “you get a kind of blueprint for thinking about all the ways in which human beings organize our societies. But it’s not done through anthropology or sociology, though she was well-versed in those things. It’s done through literature.”
Butler was born and lived most of her life in Pasadena, California, outside of Los Angeles. Her mother was a domestic worker and her father, who died when Octavia was 7, shined shoes. Butler was painfully shy, overcoming it to some degree as her career as a writer demanded public interaction. She was not a good student, but public libraries saved her. She eventually got a junior college degree. Butler had dyslexia, and Morris suggests that she may have been autistic.
“She found that people would look at her race and gender and then want to have reductive conversations with her.”
“She remained single for her life,” Morris says. “She did not have children. She was very close with her mother, her aunts, her cousins, but she did not have a traditional, heteronormative partnership experience. She writes a little bit about going on dates or having trysts. She was not scandalous at all, like Ernest Hemingway or Byron, Richard Wright or James Baldwin. Hot tea, as the kids would say. . . . Her life was pretty wholesome.”
Probably the most unusual thing about Butler was that she—a tall, shy, Black woman born in 1947—chose to write science fiction, a genre then overwhelmingly dominated by white men. “The big names of her time, like Isaac Asimov and folks of that stature, were not necessarily cruel to her,” says Morris. “It was more that they just didn’t consider her. She writes about being relegated to side tables or always being asked to talk about race, which was not what she always wanted to talk about. She found that people would look at her race and gender and then want to have reductive conversations with her.”
The force of Butler’s determination to write comes through powerfully in Positive Obsession. She began to win awards and gain recognition relatively late in her career, and in 1995 Butler was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called “genius award.” Today she is hailed for novels like Kindred (1979), an examination of the complicated legacy of slavery in which a young Black woman inexplicably time-travels between 1970s California and the pre-Civil War South; and The Parable of the Sower (1993) and The Parable of the Talents (1998), which now seem eerily predictive in their depiction of their young central character navigating anarchic social collapse, devastating wildfires in California and the rise of an authoritarian regime.
Exploring the genesis of these novels and others, like her own personal favorite, Wild Seed (1980), has led Morris to view Butler as not only a great writer, but also one of the foremost intellectuals of the 20th century, one who, Morris writes, “routinely envisioned futures with Black women at the center, changing the course of human life and culture, modeling how those who are often dismissed and erased have the knowledge to shift the landscape of our world.”
Read our starred review of ‘Positive Obsession’ by Susana M. Morris.
“Studying Octavia Butler was initially really personal,” Morris says. “As a Black feminist scholar, I’m interested in the interior lives of Black women. Octavia Butler was someone who was thinking so rigorously about the concerns of the day. She called herself a news junkie. . . . She read widely and promiscuously across genres, everything from psychology to sociology to anthropology. She harbored a lifelong interest in becoming an anthropologist, because she was so interested in studying other people. She was someone who really lived a life of the mind. School was hard for her. She was not an excellent school student, but she was an excellent student of the world.”
Though Positive Obsession is slim for a biography, clocking in at under 300 pages, it conveys a rich and nuanced understanding of the author’s positionality in and impact on the world. “It was not easy being an architect, an astronaut, an engineer, and an innovator,” Morris writes. “Octavia did not grow up in the world we have now, flawed though it may be. But she did help positively shape the world that we are now inheriting—by centering Black women as heroines, not as sidekicks or vehicles for others’ growth; by crafting cautionary tales that charge us all with creating the future we want to see; and by being an example of what persistence matched with brilliance can do.”
Morris hopes readers of Positive Obsession will be excited “to put down my book and pick up her books.” And she hopes other writers will take up where she has left off: “As I write in the author’s note, there are many versions of Octavia’s story: the story of her life in Seattle, the story of her travels, the doorstopper [biography] beginning with the doctor in the hospital catching her at birth, to the coroner at her death. I want to read all those versions. But I don’t think I have to write them. Her life was so interesting and rich that there is room for all.”
Author photo of Susana M. Morris by Chrissandra Jallah.