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I had marked this as "Read," but having just re-read it (?), I'm not sure I had ever read it before. Unlike the other Octavia Butler books I've marked as "Read," I don't own an old copy of this one. In any case, the story and the characters seemed new to me.
The central characters are Anyanwu and Doro. Anyanwu is a woman from somewhere near Benin (West Africa), and she has very unusual powers. Unlike Butler's Xenogenesis books, here there are no space aliens — only humans with genetic mutations that give them powers, mostly of the psychic sort. Although Anyanwu is the focus of the story, Doro is the engine that makes everything happen. He is an African man, centuries old and completely immoral. He exists to collect and breed people whose genes hold the potential for these extra-human powers, and he's already been doing it for a long time before he meets Anyanwu and takes her to America in the 1600s.
Doro bends people to his will, but he has a charisma that makes them love him as well as fear him. The story made me think a lot about enslavement and power. He creates communities of both black and white people and compels them to produce children, sometimes with him and often with each other. He's breeding for high-level telepathy, and he's playing it by ear, using his sense of people's latent potential. He has his reasons. Often the resulting children become highly disturbed, even insane, when they reach adulthood. It's all rather horrifying.
Anyanwu meets Doro again and again in her long lifetime (he travels a lot among his far-flung communities), and while she (possibly only she) is not mentally enslaved by him, he controls her in other ways. Throughout she remains strong and resistant, and looking back, I think it was brilliant of Butler to show us the character of Doro and his awful work through Anyanwu, who I found entirely sympathetic. Even so it's hard to take, because clearly sometimes Anyanwu desires Doro sexually even though he's been using her and tormenting her for so long.
There's a lot to think about here concerning sexual consent and sexual power. There is never a graphic sex scene, but Butler conveys the desire and satisfaction that Anyanwu (and other people) get from sexual encounters with Doro. Sometimes Anyanwu just submits, when she's in the midst of hating him intensely, because his powers threaten her children. At other times, though, she really wants him. This is creepy and disturbing and fully believable.
The central characters are Anyanwu and Doro. Anyanwu is a woman from somewhere near Benin (West Africa), and she has very unusual powers. Unlike Butler's Xenogenesis books, here there are no space aliens — only humans with genetic mutations that give them powers, mostly of the psychic sort. Although Anyanwu is the focus of the story, Doro is the engine that makes everything happen. He is an African man, centuries old and completely immoral. He exists to collect and breed people whose genes hold the potential for these extra-human powers, and he's already been doing it for a long time before he meets Anyanwu and takes her to America in the 1600s.
Doro bends people to his will, but he has a charisma that makes them love him as well as fear him. The story made me think a lot about enslavement and power. He creates communities of both black and white people and compels them to produce children, sometimes with him and often with each other. He's breeding for high-level telepathy, and he's playing it by ear, using his sense of people's latent potential. He has his reasons. Often the resulting children become highly disturbed, even insane, when they reach adulthood. It's all rather horrifying.
Anyanwu meets Doro again and again in her long lifetime (he travels a lot among his far-flung communities), and while she (possibly only she) is not mentally enslaved by him, he controls her in other ways. Throughout she remains strong and resistant, and looking back, I think it was brilliant of Butler to show us the character of Doro and his awful work through Anyanwu, who I found entirely sympathetic. Even so it's hard to take, because clearly sometimes Anyanwu desires Doro sexually even though he's been using her and tormenting her for so long.
There's a lot to think about here concerning sexual consent and sexual power. There is never a graphic sex scene, but Butler conveys the desire and satisfaction that Anyanwu (and other people) get from sexual encounters with Doro. Sometimes Anyanwu just submits, when she's in the midst of hating him intensely, because his powers threaten her children. At other times, though, she really wants him. This is creepy and disturbing and fully believable.