Recovering from Amnesia in Octavia Butler’s Texts

Abstract

En Three novels by Octavia Butler, the first famous African-American speculative fiction writer, feature characters who suffer from memory loss. All three novels begin with the isolated and forgetful individual who in the course of the narrative recovers some memory of the past and uses it to build or reconstruct family ties. The article analyzes the way those amnesiac subjects are represented and the types of amnesia they suffer from. It also looks at some elements of what is retrieved in order to trace back the roots of certain recurrent motifs. Finally, it questions the figure of the Black woman fighting to recover her memory and use it as basis to construct a community.

Keywords

• African-American literature (20th and 21st centuries)
• amnesia
• memory
• speculative fiction