Body Knowledge

When speaking in an interview, Octavia Butler responds to the interviewer's comment that the greatest deal of her own work depicts the body as the central communicator by saying that the body must be the clearest communicator in literature. "The body is all we really know that we have," Butler answers, and in her book Fledgling her notion of body as communicator is again seen clearly in the protagonist Shori. The narrative is based solely on the discovery by the main character of how her body works and deciphering what her impulses (like the need for flesh) mean in her existence. When Shori awakes in darkness, the scene is described by the way her body feels: "I curled my empty, wounded body tightly, knees against chest, and wimpered in pain...Gradually, I understood that I must be lying on the ground- on stone, earth, and perhaps dry leaves" (1). The visuals are given so clearly that the reader sees something (we don't know that it's a vampire yet) writhing in pain, probably in a dark cave. And we know this because Shori's body and the way she describes her own self is the strongest technique Butler uses to convey scene and message in the book.

More importantly in a critical social commentary, what is striking about Fledgling's narrative is that Shori as a black female vampire is narrating herself. Shori truly is "writing her body" in the Beauviorian sense, and it is inspiring for women reading the novel. Readers have to get over the whole vampire setting at first, but once examined Shori can be seen as example of how the body communicates every message inwardly and outwardly. She knows from her outward wounds that she has been hurt and she also communicates who she is through the physical act of feeding on other people's blood. Her own listening to her body and mind internally is one of the greatest ways in which decisions are made in her life as well as how she socially acts. When people on the outside talk to her, for example about being black, "I was about to protest that I was brown, not black, but before I could speak, I understood what he meant" (31). Internally she knows what things on the outside mean and what those things used to mean to her. Her life is full of those self-realization moments as the first chapters of the book and I suspect most of the book will consist of her finding out who she really is.

And just as she is learning about herself, she also learns everything about others first by feeding off them for her own physical needs. She knows their body- both male and female- by their almost identical response to when she feeds. They all, like Theodora Harden, "moaned- a satisfied little sound" (25) when Shori was eventually done feeding on them. They wanted more, not knowing that eventually they would be hurt by this feeling of pleasure. Her victims, because they were humans, were not fully attuned to their own bodies, so Shori had to make decisions for them. And, as Octavia Butler notes, "Some things we are afraid to know," one of those things being our own bodies. We refuse to oftentimes listen to what our bodies are telling us, instead using reason to make decisions instead of body messages. We work through the pain, rationalize feeling terrible so that we as humans can attain transient goals. It is only in the face of a character like Shori where women, and all humans, can see what we're lacking in "body knowledge."

The discovery of Shori's situation is a radical and relatively abstract way to think about a person defining themselves by a constant search for self. And as Butler notes, the self is the body- end of story. It might behoove humans to think about our own bodies first instead of what we think others want us to do or how to act. For ages African Americans' bodies have been used and defined by someone other than themselves. In fact, Shori is the perfect antithesis to the idea of slavery- she is not only in control of her own body but is able to control others' bodies as well. It is because she has the most body knowledge that she can have continual moments of discovery and survive on her own. One can learn a lesson from this protagonist, and I would venture to say that the world might make a little more sense if people treated their bodies with a little more respect than the work-till-you-drop mentality that so many of us are under. Shori is just surviving because that's what she needs; it might be time for humans to do the same as this vampire.