Suffering from a massive compensation syndrome.

In 17th century West Africa, an immortal woman named Anyanwu encounters another immortal for the first time, a man named Doro. But while Anyanwu is a healer who uses her powers to help others, Doro is a brutal manipulator who has been gathering people with paranormal powers and attempting to breed a race of superhumans under his iron fist. Anyanwu is the only other immortal he has ever found, and he intends to use her as "breeding stock" to make more. The novel follows centuries of their power struggle after Doro takes Anyanwu to the New World, as she strives to protect those under Doro's control and he strives to bend her to his will.

This is the chronologically earliest novel in Butler's Patternist series, though it was the fourth to be published. I was assured by leading experts (i.e. book club friends) that this is a perfectly good entry point to the series, so I started here and do not actually know yet what happens next!

It's the kind of book where it's hard to sit down and think of what to write about it, because it has so many layers that are worth thinking about and talking about, and they're all woven together so tightly and effectively that I'm not sure where to start pulling threads to unravel everything the book does. Butler had a gift for writing stories that resonate deeply with real situations without being simplistic, didactic one-to-one mappings. The speculative narrative and the real world historical setting illuminate each other in complex ways, and all the while Butler never loses sight of the characters as people with their own specific hurts, flaws, and needs. She makes it look so easy.

spoilery thoughts

The obvious comparison is to her stand-alone novel Kindred, published just the previous year, which had a contemporary Black American woman time-traveling to the era of slavery. Anyanwu also travels from a life of freedom to the New World under slavery. Against this backdrop, Doro acts as a master over "his people" in the eugenics program—and he definitely uses the phrase to indicate ownership, not kinship. His program isn't legal slavery, but it is inextricably entwined with it; sometimes Doro buys enslaved people who have the powers he's looking for, and if they wanted to leave, how could they? Even if Doro didn't catch them, they'd only be fleeing into a land where they'd be assumed to be runaway slaves. Anyanwu's powers are a match for Doro's, so saving herself is an option, but he controls the lives of everyone she knows and cares about. What this book shares most strongly with Kindred is a devastating portrayal of how people can be trapped into compliance with systems of oppression.

The book's religious themes are also complex. Anyanwu does not pray to gods, as she feels she has all the power she needs within herself, but she does not see herself as superior to other people either. Meanwhile, Doro shamelessly plays the part of a god over his people because it serves his purposes and he can get away with it. But not a loving god. Rather he reminds me of the way people will sometimes talk about the so-called "Old Testament God": bloodthirsty and hypercontrolling, demanding absolute obedience and destroying anyone who gets in his way. In which case his favorite son Isaac plays the corresponding supposed role of Jesus: the "good cop" son who draws Anyanwu into trying to appease his father. If this is a distorted image of Christian theology, well, distortion and misuse of Christian faith are certainly a deliberate theme in the book, as Anyanwu overtly calls out Christian enslavers for their hypocrisy.

On a deeper and unspoken level, the book comments on the thought processes underlying patriarchal power structures. Doro has the power to kill and he uses it to control others without a second thought; might makes right. Anyanwu could also use her powers to kill if she chose to, but it doesn't even occur to her. Instead she heals—but everything she has goes to other people, all her nurturing and self-sacrifice. She has total control over her own body's inner workings (while Doro doesn't even have his original body anymore!), and she uses herself as a scientific test subject to learn to heal wounds and diseases, suffering pain and injury so others can recover. She always puts others first, and the rightness of this is so ingrained in the assumptions of the characters that nobody ever questions it. Even when she escapes Doro temporarily, she keeps coming back to him, in part because she can't bring herself to leave others unprotected.

The fact that Doro and Anyanwu both have male and female bodies at different points in the story made me think about how patriarchy isn't defined by anatomy, but by power dynamics. I would not describe either of them as trans characters, but there is a trans resonance with the way Anyanwu remains confident in her womanhood regardless of her physical form, and in the many ways she remains vulnerable to misogyny even when people who don't know her read her as a man.

The bond between Anyanwu and Doro is both twisted and deeply understandable. They're the only two immortals; everyone else they know grows old and dies. They're lonely. Doro wants someone like him, but he can't get that by force, much as he has been trying. Anyanwu's well of empathy seems boundless, but somehow excludes herself. Her threat of suicide makes sense as it's the only way she can escape the cycle of returning to him again and again—she can't trust herself not to keep going back as long as she is like him. And the only way she can be unlike him, as she sees it, is to sacrifice her immortality and die.

The book's protagonist is a healer, and I think one of the book's core questions is who deserves healing, and who is too far gone to ever be healed. Doro tries to punish Anyanwu by forcing her to bear a child by Thomas, an uncontrolled psychic who is so deep in addiction and depression that he has become physically repellent. To Doro's surprise, Anyanwu responds with empathy (her greatest superpower, I think) and begins to heal Thomas's physical and mental wounds. Doro's reaction—to murder Thomas and possess his body—is the moment when he tells on himself the most. He intends to show power and cruelty, and he does, but he also reveals himself as a desperately isolated person who yearns to be healed, to be transformed from something repulsive into someone loveable. The book has the courage to leave it less than settled how possible that really is for him.

So, I guess I'll be continuing this series! I have been warned that not all of the books in it are this good. I'm sure I will cope somehow.