Blood Child - Octavia Butler

         Whats interesting is this initial concept of having left earth to escape enslavement from their own species. A clear symbolism for slavery, Blood Child discusses forced, expected, and socially normal families and marriages of humans to aliens. The discussion is if you are a slave but your master is a loving benevolent one, is it any better? Through the piece the family is easy and comfortable around t'choi but it is clear through their constant re-stating that it is only because they were raised with her there and were told that this is the norm. It is a system of being born into something and never knowing or experiencing the other side. They are still in a preserve and treated and traded like rare animals. They may  be loved but their purpose- the only reason they are protected in their little cage, is to breed for the aliens. They have little to no free will and if one of the aliens wished them to do something they would have no choice but to do it. The mother of the main character even promises one of her own children when she is very young, to be infested with flesh eating worms only to be teared open and consequently a parent of children they never agreed to have. Clearly an allusion to rape, it seems the aliens think its ok because they love them and it is the only way to have children so for their children's sake this process has to take place. They place the responsibility of their race on the humans and pressure them to bare their children with no consent. The topic of consent is discussed at the end when the main character asks t'choi to ask him- to give him the choice of bearing her children. In the end he does not want to and only agrees to save his sister. He is even content at the end because he thinks he has gotten the best deal out of it. Succumbing to their passive culture just as the other humans there do. They are certainly treated emotionally better than those in slave times of earth but they are still forced upon, bought, sold, looked down upon, trapped in cages, and severely injured and cut open. All of these acts -for the alien race- are completely normal and socially expected. When to a human its terrible and some of the most degrading and inhumane things you can do to a person. Perhaps the point is that they are not human and so slaveholders at the time of slavery were so inhumane that they were not human. They had emotions and concerns and feeling toward the slaves. They may even have had positive feelings and actions toward their slaves at times.
         Comparing this to Butler's Kindred, we follow Rufus as he grows up as a white child on a plantation in slavery time America. Dana believes she can helps to grow up to be a better person than his father. And sure, throughout the book he cares about Dana, protects Dana, and generally treats her better than he would any other black woman at the time. He has feelings, emotions and performs positive actions toward her, but still he does not see or treat her as human. We really root for Rufus through the book, hoping he learns his lesson- hoping that he corrects his faults and learns from his mistakes and becomes a better person but that just wouldn't be historically accurate. No, while Rufus likes Dana is a sense, he still does not view her as an equal and treats her extremely inhumanely. He never views his actions toward her as wrong, specifically his negative ones. He does however question why he treats her so much better. He often gets angry at her as she in not so compliant as the other slaves.  Though he loves her he holds to humanity or respect for her, and very similar to Blood Child, he too forces himself upon her- seeing it as his right- as socially acceptable and expected behavior.  She goes along with much of his abuse throughout the novel but at this moment decides no longer so be a slave, and stops him by killing him.
         The two pieces have a similar theme of masters who seem loving and semi-benevolent as long as their demands are met with compliance (or better yet eager willingness). The treat the enslaved humans as animals that they feed and take care of and use. No concept of an individual with they own thoughts opinions and decisions is recognized for the slaves in both stories. Perhaps the biggest difference is that the boy in Blood Child was eventually asked- though he was never really given much of a choice. They talk about trying to run but running inside a cage. They may not have been killed in Blood Child but there aren't many other differences than that to the slavery that took place in America.
           Incorporating this into another media would be a delicate process. Taking into consideration the impact of the story being told and the excuses and lies that are told to justify slavery and inhumanity in the current time, I would immediately assume a film. Perhaps I would not reveal what the humans looked like.  Make it seem as simply an interesting new idea for a syfy movie. It would do well to remove the original race bias that so many americans have- and then later on reveal the looks and race of the humans to be black. I think more sympathy can be drawn this way. I don't think a lot of sympathy can be found today in America. More people crave comfort, entertainment, and contentment now it seems, for than uncomfortable and intense topics that challenge their beliefs. This even seems to make some people more aggressive. This is only more reason to do it though. Racist America is aggressive and argumentative and ignorant- so met with arguments and force they will nat change their minds and opinions (which isn't to say force shouldn't be used to correct political/government action- or to show support and numbers and how much and how many people there are in support), but in order to even get someone so ignorant to listen- it must first appear as you're on their side, give them something they can relate to. I really wouldn't want to flip it and make the humans white. It would only give ignorant people an arguing point that the entire piece wasn't about racism. The problem with marketing it as a diverse and informative discussion to slavery in the past compared to today is it gets sent out and seen by the wrong demographic. The people that would watch it are not the people that need to watch it. Interesting that the people causing all the problems need to be tricked into simply being human.

Bridgette Olavage