Wild Seed

“Anyanwu’s ears and eyes were far sharper than those of other people. She had increased their sensitivity deliberately after the first time men came stalking her, their machetes ready, their intentions clear.” 

No matter how fantastic the Anyanwu’s and Doro’s science fictional abilities are, Butler situates them within the real world of trauma and reaction. She and Doro have already experienced multiple “deaths” before this one; their chief superpower is their ability to live on and learn from them.

“You exist and you are different. That was enough to attract me.” 

The connection between Anyanwu and Doro has many facets. Importantly, it is one of dominance and coercion. Yet both are special, drawn together by the trauma of having lived multiple lives and deaths. Thiers is a codependent relationship.

“It had been so long since something had happened to her that had not happened before—many times before.” 

It is tempting to think of Anyanwu as all good, Doro as all bad. Yet Anyanwu thrills to her own power and difference in her own way. Butler tempts us to imagine that, given another thousand years of life, she would have the same aloof attitude toward human life as Doro.

“Sometimes, one must become a master in order to avoid becoming a slave.” 

The issue of slavery is surprisingly subtle for a book who’s first half is set within the slave trading routes of Africa in the year 1690. Yet the first slavers we meet are of African descent, with the at least partially sympathetic Doro among them. These words are his.

“He was like an ogbanje, an evil child spirit born to one woman again and again, only to die and give the mother pain.” 

The literal translation of ogbanje in the Igbo language is “children who come and go.” In other stories (like those of modern writer Chinua Achebe) the ogbanje is born to a mother only after several of her children have died. This parallels Doro’s tragic origin, giving credence to the Odinani myth. 

“In my years, I have seen that people must be their own gods and make their own good fortune. The bad will come or not come anyway.” 

After years of speaking as a conduit to the gods to her people, this comes as an extraordinary confession from Anyanwu. She is the god they worship, and she is bored in the role.

“Her second husband had been arrogant, contemptuous, and brutal, yet he had been considered a great man. She had run away from him as she now wished to run away from Doro.” 

Anyanwu has subjected herself to many marriages and births in her time. Some of them were happy and some of them were not. As a result, she has become expert in the use of her power within them, and deft in escaping them when she could not use that power. Doro represents a great challenge in this regard. He is no less a bad husband than her mortal spouses, but far more powerful.

“He had described to her the wide, seemingly endless world that they had to cross, but despite his description, she stared at it in silent awe. The sound of the surf seemed to frighten her as it mixed with the screaming of slaves being branded.”

Her first view of the Atlantic is one of sublime terror, capable of subduing even a god with its power. Anyanwu’s voyage across the ocean will be gentle compared to what many Africans sold into slavery would endure in the crossing.

“I assure you, I am the most efficient cannibal you will ever meet.” 

Doro and a Christian English slaver, aware of Doro’s power, discuss the meaning of the Eucharist. Doro points out that, though cannibalism is practiced among some African tribes as a form of ritual, Christians have no problem performing a similar ritual with the body of Christ. When it come to purely destructive economic murder, however, Doro reminds his English counterpart that his methods are far more terrible and commanding.

“Will I see, someday, what you are like when you are not hiding in another man’s skin?” 

Anyanwu is beginning to discover that there may be little mystery to Doro, and that his humanity may be entirely in question. He may be, in fact, the evil spirit she first judged him to be.

“Other men can lie or make mistakes. But the flesh can only tell me what it is. It has no other story.”

Anyanwu’s power is at its strongest when it is vampiric. For instance, she can only become a dolphin after having tasted dolphin flesh. Butler takes pains to soften the strangeness of this condition on Anyanwu’s power, yet the similarity to Doro’s use of his power cannot be ignored. They are both vampires, in their fashion.

“Swimming with them was like being with another people. A friendly people. No slavers with brands and chains here.” 

When Anyanwu swims with the dolphins, she feels a freedom she does not feel among her human counterparts. Yet the initial suggestion that she might mate with one of them is “abominable” to her at first. This is a taboo, like many others, she will learn to shed.

“But Anyanwu never learned to forgive his unnecessary killings, his casual abuse when he was not courting her, his open contempt for any belief of hers that did not concur with his, the blows for which she could not retaliate and from which she could not flee, the acts she must perform for him no matter what her beliefs.” 

Anyanwu’s resentment of Doro is less one of rejecting his casual negation of life, and more about the constraints on her own freedom. She is more likely to think of the drinking of animal milk as abominable than she is to mourn the death of a child Doro has killed.

“If I have to be white some day to survive, I will be white. If I have to be a leopard to hunt and kill, I will be a leopard.” 

A few best-selling slave narratives of the 19th Century have to do with “passing,” the ability of light-skinned people of African descent to be mistaken for white people. This act of desperate necessity on the part of those passing becomes an existential problem for those who accept the “ruse.” If someone can be white simply by declaring themselves so, then there is no actual difference between the enslaved and those who are not.

“You’ve come to think I couldn’t touch you. That kind of thinking is foolish and dangerous.” 

Doro periodically reminds Anyanwu of her place within his cosmology, and frequently refers to attempts to subvert that cosmology with the terms one would use for a child. The infantilizing of women is a universal characteristic of paternalistic dominance.

“His parents were all that he could recall had been good about his youth [...] His were a tall, stately people—Nubians, they came to be called much later.”

It is not until well past the mid-point of the book, during Nweke’s deadly transition, that we come to learn that Doro really does have a human origin, one immersed in pain and pathos. It is this core of humanity to which Anyanwu finally appeals in order to secure her freedom.

“Doro had reshaped her. She had submitted and submitted and submitted to keep him from killing her even though she had long ago ceased to believe what Isaac had told her—that her longevity could somehow prevent him from becoming an animal.” 

If Doro is an animal, then there is no appealing to him, and no chance that his rule will ever be benevolent or trustworthy. Animality holds a dual function for Anyanwu, being both a bastion of freedom and an abominable curse. It is at once a laudatory and a derogatory term.

“Occasionally, he had forgiven people who ran from him, people who were bright enough, strong enough to keep ahead of him for several days and give him a good hunt. But he forgave them only because once caught, they submitted.” 

Doro’s approach to his people has a predatory streak, as revealed in this musing form Doro’s perspective. Nevertheless, he is beginning to doubt his resolve to kill Anyanwu, even as he intellectually charts a plan to do so.

“‘She was never my slave.’ ‘She thinks she was. She doesn’t think she will be again though.’” 

In this conversation between Stephen and Doro, the word “slave” is finally used to describe the way in which Doro views his subject. Though Doro actively seeks out and does business with slavers, it is telling that he does not view himself as one of them.

“‘You die constantly,’ she said […] ‘I never die,’ he said.” 

Anyanwu has a fundamentally different view of Doro’s power than does Doro. He sees himself as immortal, whereas she sees him as dying a thousand deaths. With each death, she suggests, a part of him dies as well.

“Among my people, children are wealth, they are better than money, better than anything.” 

With this statement, Anyanwu finally finds a home in the values she shares with her people. She acknowledges that she and Doro have a similar need to be around others like them, but values more the people who fulfill that need.

“It makes me wonder what I am—that I can do this and still know myself, still return to my true shape.” 

Unlike Doro, Anyanwu fears losing herself to transformation. Her ancestral memory is progressive and narrative, whereas Doro’s is broken apart, rendered blank in some places by the trauma of his past. She fights to retain her humanity where he, up until now, has not.

“Because of her, he was no longer alone. Because of her, life was suddenly better than it had been for him in centuries, in millennia.” 

This realization represents a return to contentment for Doro, placing Anyanwu from a subject to something more complex. She becomes not only a lover, but the mother he lost back when his humanity was still intact. This is a trope all too familiar to women in relationships, in which the woman must perform multiple, burdensome moral roles in order to redeem a fallen man.