In the afterword to ‘Bloodchild’, her self-described ‘pregnant man story’, Octavia Butler writes that she wanted to challenge herself to write a story of a man becoming pregnant ‘as an act of love — choosing pregnancy in spite of as well as because of difficult circumstances’.1 ‘Bloodchild’ imagines a world in which humans (called Terrans) inhabit a planet dominated by aliens (called Tlic) and live in an arrangement whereby in exchange for their accommodation on the planet, Terran males are required to host Tlic babies in their bodies to perpetuate the Tlic species. ‘Bloodchild’ tells the story of Gan, a young Terran male’s coming of age, which is signified by his acceptance of implantation by T’Gatoi, a Tlic family friend who has been grooming him to host her eggs since his conception. While Butler labels the relationship between Gan and T’Gatoi as one of love, twice mentioning the idea of choice on Gan’s part, her portrayal of the power structure in which Gan lives and the interpersonal dynamics within the story undermines this characterisation of Gan’s relationship to T’Gatoi and makes apparent that Gan’s decision to comply with T’Gatoi at the end is in fact not born out of love, but resignation.
Butler’s own description of the story as a ‘love story between two very different beings’ (p. 30) has not been met without contention, with critics such as Martin Japtok and Elyce Rae Helford finding the relationship between Gan and T’Gatoi, and Tlic and Terran more widely, to be one of exploitation, rather than symbiosis.2 Alyse Eve Weinbaum for example, notes that the system in which Gan and his family live — wherein all human lives are ‘flattened and homogenized’ to serve Tlic interests through the commodification of their reproductive capacities — is reminiscent of chattel slavery.3 It is precisely these unequal dynamics between Tlics and Terrans generally that characterise the story as one of domination and subjugation, and thus problematise the notion of love in the world Butler presents.
That Gan and T’Gatoi are not equals is evident from the beginning, not only because of the troubling difference in age between them but because, as Gan observes, T’Gatoi is the only being who ‘stood between us and the hordes who did not understand why there was a Preserve’ (p. 5). This gives T’Gatoi immense power over Gan’s family, and breeds in Gan himself an attitude of intense gratitude and servility towards her, demonstrated by his repetition of the same sentiment only moments after his first utterance of it: ‘only she stood between us and that desperation that could so easily swallow us’ (p. 5). Butler illustrates the privileged position that this gives T’Gatoi in Gan’s household through her unrestricted use of their bodies to ‘warm herself’ for example (p. 4). The metaphor of eating in Gan’s observation particularly highlights this inequality as the notion of Terran edibility signals their commodification by the Tlic, indicating their state of powerlessness, which Gan himself is aware of. By presenting us with a relationship of Terran ownership by Tlics rather than mutuality from the outset of the story, Butler creates a situation wherein love cannot be a free choice on the part of the Terrans, which the story’s overtones of sexual exploitation reinforce.
Butler’s use of the first person limited perspective is also effective in highlighting the unequal dynamics of the story as using a young Terran’s voice to narrate the story demonstrates the extent of T’Gatoi’s indoctrination of Gan. One way Butler depicts this is through the way Gan describes T’Gatoi’s body poetically, despite it being figured in violent terms. After describing how T’Gatoi’s ‘three metres of body’ moved, using verbs like ‘twisting’, ‘hurling herself’ and ‘whipped’, Gan concludes ‘I loved watching her move’, characterising her movements as beautiful through poetic language: ‘when she moved that way […] she seemed ‘aquatic’, like ‘something swimming through the air as though it were water’ (p. 9). The dissonance between Gan’s reading of her body, which is very clearly figured as threatening by the violent verbs Butler ascribes to T’Gatoi’s movements, and the reality of it exemplifies the alteration of Gan’s perception as a result of T’Gatoi’s grooming of him. Through the contrast between Gan’s perception of events and the reader’s, Butler depicts Gan as the victim of grooming, which challenges a reading of their relationship that asserts love as the emotion experienced by Gan towards T’Gatoi, however affectionately he may behave with her.
Martin Japtok notes that because Terran bodies perform such a vital function for Tlic — literally serving as their ‘means of (re)production’ — ‘there is no real danger of Tlic killing off large numbers of humans’.4 This renders the service of ‘protection’ provided by T’Gatoi to Gan’s family a false one. That T’Gatoi’s repeated presence in Gan’s house is therefore unnecessary and performative figures her as an intruder, and further frames her use of the family’s bodies, either to warm herself, discipline them, or offer them eggs, as violative. The threat T’Gatoi’s body poses to Gan’s family can be seen in Gan’s description of how his mother, wrapped in T’Gatoi’s body, tried ‘from that impossible angle’ to look up to T’Gatoi’s face (p. 7). Because T’Gatoi’s body is described in phallic terms, and all Terrans are feminised by their reproductive function regardless of their sex, T’Gatoi’s weaponisation of her own body to subdue the members of Gan’s family, such as her stinging of Gan’s mother as a corrective measure resembles the sexual violence outside of the world of speculative fiction. This is exacerbated by T’Gatoi’s insistence on the family’s continual consumption of eggs, which are proven to have sedative qualities, thereby resembling date rape drugs. By alluding to popular forms of sexual violence in her characterisation of T’Gatoi, Butler presents T’Gatoi’s relationship with Gan as especially exploitative, which undermines the idea of true love in the relationship.
Japtok also notes that in the system in which Gan lives, Terran compliance with Tlic is not up for debate; instead, the question is ‘what kind of existence humans will live while they serve Tlic reproductive needs’.5 This is evident in Gan’s realisation during his post-implantation talk with T’Gatoi that the rifle, signifying suicide, would be ‘Qui’s ‘away’’ (p. 29). Two elements of this scene are particularly unsettling and highlight the power imbalance between Gan and T’Gatoi: Gan’s confession that he would not have shot T’Gatoi because ‘She stood between us and her own people, protecting, interweaving’ (p. 27) and the marked change in T’Gatoi’s language towards Gan. The first is disturbing as it demonstrates that despite all he has seen, Gan still views T’Gatoi as a hero. This is doubly significant at the end of the narrative as it represents both the pacifying quality of Tlic eggs, as Gan observes that the fluid that entered him with T’Gatoi’s egg meant that he could remember his feelings of anger ‘without reviving them’ (p. 30), and it is also representative of the result of years of T’Gatoi’s grooming as the sentence is almost identical in structure to the sentences with which Gan expresses the same sentiment at at the beginning of the story.
T’Gatoi’s use of the verb ‘destroy’ to refer to Gan’s consideration of suicide highlights her commodification of him, underscoring the fact of Gan’s disenfranchisement. Rather than the verb ‘kill’, which denotes humanity, or at the very least sentience, she asks Gan if he would have ‘destroyed’ himself, a verb which is typically reserved for non-human, and further, non-sentient beings. That Terrans are destroyable, like machinery, demonstrates T’Gatoi’s perception of Gan as object only. Gan’s objectification is emphasised by Butler’s ending the story with the absorption of Gan’s identity into T’Gatoi’s. This is represented by T’Gatoi referring to Gan as ‘N’Tlic’, the title designated for Terran who have been implanted rather than the familiar address of his name which she has been using throughout the story: ‘I won’t leave you as Lomas was left — alone, N’Tlic’ (p. 29). Whereas Lomas is named, which affords him a level of dignity, Gan becomes N’Tlic to T’Gatoi, underscoring the fact that in ‘choosing’ to serve T’Gatoi, Gan has completed his life’s purpose in T’Gatoi’s eyes. The transparency of T’Gatoi’s objectification of Gan in contrast to her earlier concealment of it demonstrates her feeling of security in the certainty of their relationship due to Gan’s reversion to his pre-implantation mindset. By ending the story cyclically despite what Gan has come to know to be the truth about his relationship to T’Gatoi, Butler emphasises Gan’s lack of access to freedom, illustrating that his decision to allow T’Gatoi to implant in him cannot be an act of love.
Although Butler proposes ‘Bloochild’ to be a love story, her depiction of Gan’s relationship to T’Gatoi erodes the plausibility of her claim. Not only is love something that cannot be arrived at freely in a state of duress, which is undoubtedly the one occupied by Gan when he chooses to host T’Gatoi’s eggs, the powerful way in which Butler portrays the steps that lead to Gan’s compliance presents Gan’s relationship with T’Gatoi as abusive. It is Gan’s horror at what Terran bodily sacrifice truly entails, and what that would mean for his siblings, that propels Gan to allow himself to host T’Gatoi’s eggs and mother her children. Thus, if ‘Bloodchild’ is a love story, it is a story of familial love only. The complicated dynamics in the story demonstrate that ‘Bloodchild’ is indeed a number of things, as Butler asserts. However, romantic love, freely given, between Terrans and Tlics is necessarily precluded from being one of those things by the imbalance of power between the species, meaning that Gan’s decision to carry T’Gatoi’s children cannot be viewed as an act of love.
Bibliography
Butler, Octavia, ‘Bloodchild’ in Bloodchild and Other Stories, 2nd ed (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005)
Japtok, Martin, ‘What is “Love”? Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild”’ in Human Contradictions in Octavia E. Butler’s Work, ed. by Martin Japtok and Jerry Rafiki Jenkins, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) pp. 51-70
Weinbaum, Alys Eve, ‘The Afterlife of Slavery and the Problem of Reproductive Freedom’, Social Text, 31 (2013), 49-68
- Octavia Butler, ‘Bloodchild’ in Bloodchild and Other Stories, 2nd ed (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), p. 30. Subsequent references to this edition to be made in text.
↩︎ - Martin Japtok, ‘What is “Love”? Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild”’ in Human Contradictions in Octavia E. Butler’s Work, ed. by Martin Japtok and Jerry Rafiki Jenkins, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) pp. 51-70 (51).
↩︎ - Alys Eve Weinbaum, ‘The Afterlife of Slavery and the Problem of Reproductive Freedom’, Social Text, 31 (2013), 49-68 (61).
↩︎ - Japtok, ‘What is “Love”?’, p. 56.
↩︎ - Japtok, ‘What is “Love”?’, p. 56.
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