I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.
Interpretation
Octavia Butler emphasizes the importance of understanding the emotional impact of slavery rather than merely focusing on genealogical facts.
In this quote, Octavia Butler articulates her intention to evoke a deep emotional and psychological understanding of the horrors of slavery. She suggests that the legacy of slavery is not just a matter of historical facts or ancestry but is instead tied to the profound emotional scars it has left on individuals and communities. By urging people to feel the weight of these experiences, she highlights the need for empathy and awareness regarding the continuing effects of slavery today.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the historical implications of slavery in a classroom setting.
What I'm working on now - I'm back to fantasy, although considering that it's me, I'm turning it into a kind of science fantasy. It's a vampire story - but my vampires are biological vampires. They didn't become vampires because someone bit them; they were born that way.
Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.
Here I was into astronomy, and here into anthropology, and there I go into geology. It was much more fun to be able to research and write about whatever I wanted to.
There is no end To what a living world Will demand of you.
You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.
Better to stay alive," I said. "At least while there's a chance to get free." I thought of the sleeping pills in my bag and wondered just how great a hypocrite I was. It was so easy to advise other people to live with their pain.
Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.
When I was a boy we didn't wake up with Vietnam and have Cyprus for lunch and the Congo for dinner.
I believe history will come to view 9/11 as an event on par with November 22, 1963, the date on which John F. Kennedy was murdered, cutting short a presidency that was growing ever more promising. Dreams died that day in Dallas; it is easy to imagine the 1960s turning out rather differently had President Kennedy lived.
I've met many Holocaust survivors who find the era infinitely compelling because they have this deep hunger to understand how it all could possibly have happened.
As a Jew, there's a need to keep that atrocity alive. There were Catholics and gypsies and homosexuals who died in the Holocaust, too. It's amazing that people allowed this slaughter to take place. There's a need to make these films and reiterate it happened.
One day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.
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