Bloodchild and Other Stories

Throughout this collection, physical contact is used to look at communication, identity and loneliness. This is epitomized by each story’s treatment of the skin. In “Bloodchild,” close physical proximity is directly connected to a character’s feelings about another. Gan, who loves T’Gatoi, shows this by curling up against her body, which is said to be cool and velvety, underscoring the juxtaposition of her alien nature with Gan’s human one. Thus, the reader knows that Gan’s love for T’Gatoi transcends the boundaries of their species. Lien, Gan’s mother, on the other hand, takes care to stay away from T’Gatoi. Lien’s former closeness with the Tlic was signified by them lying together while Lien sipped from the eggs; now that Lien resents T’Gatoi, she no longer has contact with the latter.

Physical contact also plays a role in abating Valerie Rye’s loneliness in “Speech Sounds.” In a world where clumsy gestures have replaced formal communication, gestures of, and on, the body are the premiere way to communicate emotions. Rye, who lives alone after the death of her family, is intensely isolated. When she meets and has sex with Obsidian, she feels happiness for the first time in three years. Here, skin contact is directly synonymous with interpersonal connection.

For Noah Cannon, bodily contact is not only a means of connection but a literal means to happiness, as well as a source of communication. Like Rye’s world, in Noah’s world, humans must use their bodies to gesticulate in order to be understood by the aliens that have landed on Earth. However, communication is far more effective between the two species when a human is enfolded by a Community and literally wrapped up in its body. Aliens and humans speak by using the skin as a surface to write on. The act of enfolding, or skin-to-skin contact, also produces a euphoric sensation in both species. For the alienated Noah, who is ostracized by other humans, being enfolded means literally being part of a Community, so it can be said that the happiness she feels is symbolic of the happiness of belonging somewhere. Skin is therefore an important metaphor for feelings of belonging, love and loneliness.

Depictions of aliens abound in science-fiction literature, and are often used to symbolize unknown forces, foreign cultures and marginalized social groups. Butler uses aliens in both “Bloodchild” and “Amnesty” as a way for the protagonists of those stories to confront their own understanding of familial loyalty and community. Both the Tlic and the Communities are modeled after creatures entirely foreign to human physiology and social organization: the Tlic are giant centipede-like creatures with an entirely-maternal society, while the Communities are somewhat like sea anemones and cannot be said to be a single individual but are instead referred to as “individuals,” with each of the Communities being able to literally influence another through an exchange of some of the individuals in itself.

Both Gan and Noah grow close to their alien interlocutors. Gan ingests some of the Tlic’s eggs, symbolizing his acceptance of some of their alien-ness while also allowing him to recognize the strangeness of members of his own species and even his own family. Gan feels more estranged from his brother, Qui, than he does from the seductive and powerful T’Gatoi.

Meanwhile, Noah, who was previously imprisoned by the Communities upon their arrival on Earth, is particularly close to her employer, as seen when she is “enfolded” in that Community, as a means of comfort. After leaving the Communities at age twenty-three, Noah was captured by the human government and tortured for information about the aliens, which she didn’t have. She returned to the human world a stranger, and remarks that she feels anger and resentment towards her own species for knowingly subjecting her to cruel treatment. Both Gan and Noah feel loyalty towards humanity on the one hand and the aliens on the other. However, the two characters are used by Butler to show how what initially appears alien can become a source of friendship or love. Noah and Gan do not have to choose between humans and aliens; instead, due to their ambivalent status as members of both clans, they act as mediators toward maintaining peace in the face of the unknown.

Because so many of these stories deal with the aftermath of some cataclysmic event, it makes sense that reproduction is used as a central motif for exploring the general health of a population. In “The Evening and the Morning and the Night,” humanity’s reliance on science backfires drastically, as the attempt to cure all diseases results in a generation of children with Duryea-Gide Disease. In this case, humanity’s self-destruction literally manifests through reproduction. Thus, the protagonist, Lynn, is intensely ambivalent about having children, because she is scared of their future as DGD sufferers. At the same time, she perceives the forced sterilization of DGD carriers as a non-consensual violation of their humanity. Her fiancé, Alan, remarks that he chose to be sterilized. The ability and right to reproduce is used throughout this story to remark on the degree of humanity afforded to marginalized populations. Forced sterilization was a common practice in eugenics, and was used on the disabled population, prisoners and people of color. It is estimated that by the 1960s, over 64,000 people had been forcibly sterilized in the United States. Access to reproduction is a marker of who counts as human and who is afforded human rights.  

It is also only through procreation by two DGD parents that unique females like Lynn and Beatrice are born. These DGD carriers have the ability to influence other DGD patients and curb their destructive impulses, instead channeling them into creativity. With this reversal, Butler suggests that the destruction caused by humanity’s elite and powerful groups can be challenged by society’s most vulnerable populations, if these groups are allowed to flourish. Since reproduction and fertility is largely associated with women and femininity, this motif also begs the question of what the world would look like if its hierarchies were dismantled and reorganized, and whether there are any traits unique to women that a society with women as leaders could benefit from.