Octavia Butler: "Speech Sounds"/"A Few Rules For Predicting the Future"

(Originally discussed on 3/31/20)

I hope everyone is safe and well. I've decided to expand our reading group to include folks outside of Duke, as well as high school students who wish to receive feedback on their writing and critical thinking skills while school is still suspended. Going forward, we will convene electronically via Zoom (I will send out a link in the coming days). Our next meeting will take place during our usual meeting time of 7pm EST on Tuesday March 31. Prior to our meeting, please read Octavia Butler's 1983 short story, "Speech Sounds" and her 2000 essay, "A Few Rules for Predicting the Future" (hyperlinked). 

Butler, who passed away in 2006, was one of the most prolific writers within the canon of Black American literature. At the time of her death, she had published 13 novels, at least 8 short stories, and several critical essays. Butler is most widely known for her 1979 novel Kindred, which tells the story of Dana, a young Black woman living in 1970s LA who is frequently transported back in time to an antebellum Maryland plantation that houses both her enslaved Black ancestors and her slave-owning white ancestors. 

Butler's short story "Speech Sounds" is also set in late-20th century LA, though it takes place in the aftermath of a pandemic that causes sufferers to lose either their capacity to read or to write. Because the survivors of the pandemic are unable to effectively communicate with each other, they are more susceptible to uncontrollable bouts of rage and envy that are expressed through physical violence and incoherent screams. In her essay, "A Few Rules for Predicting the Future," Butler writes, "To study history is to study humanity. And to try to foretell the future without studying history is like trying to learn to read without bothering to learn the alphabet." My hope is that reading these two texts together will offer us a foundation for developing a new communal language that emerges in the wake of an unthinkable crisis, but is not reducible to the experience of trauma itself.

Now that we must exist in physical isolation from each other, we have the rare opportunity to identify the assumptions, violences, and gaps that otherwise go unnoticed within the language of our interpersonal relationships. The gift of our current circumstances lies within our ability to develop forms of communication that are structured by a grammar of care, urgency, and vulnerability. Recently, Fredric Jameson made the observation that "language is as specific as one's face." In some ways, the coronavirus has forced us to perform the most radical experiment upon the notion of identity--if we are literally reduced to the disorganized fragments of our language and our faces, how will we come to learn each other anew and in excess of the grammars that we call "race," "gender," "sexuality," and "class"?

I'm looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts. If you are a high school student who wishes to write an analysis of "Speech Sounds" and/or "A Few Rules for Predicting the Future," send me an email and we can discuss formatting and content.