I initially approached Octavia Butler’s “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” with a bit of trepidation. Reading disability stories makes me nervous, especially when I’m reading them from authors I like. I’m always afraid I won’t like the author anymore by the end of the story. I’m afraid of the cliches that will show how much the author doesn’t like me. Will the disabled character be reduced to a platitude of darling and threadbare innocence, a backdrop against which the real characters are allowed to be genuine and heroic? Will the disabled character be a horror? The one-dimensional villain made bitter by the betrayal of his body? Will the disabled character reassure you? Serve to make you so grateful that this is not your life, this is not your body, this is not your mind, you are not diseased, you are pure? Will the disabled body be nothing more than a metaphor, a blackboard upon which the author and intended audience may scribble interpretations of their own existence? Will the story serve to remind me that I am not the intended audience?
The abled and ableist temptation with stories about disability is to interpret them as metaphors—the story isn’t, cannot be, about disability; it must be about some other social ill for which disability stands in as a metaphor. It is my intention then to interpret the text straightforwardly first, in the context of crip theory, the intersection of anti-blackness and ableism, and the historical violence against disabled bodies and people of color via eugenics and institutionalization.
It is necessary to acknowledge that Octavia Butler herself was disabled. She was dyslexic and wrote and read very slowly (most articles that refer to her dyslexia, including the one linked, are themselves ableist and condescending). While it is unclear whether she was familiar with crip theory, “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” addresses concerns fundamental to crip theory and disability activism, such as eugenics and institutionalization. She even addresses frustrating and condescending ableist attitudes and internalized ableism, as demonstrated in this conversation between two characters:
“‘No ordinary person can concentrate on work the way our people can’
[…]
“‘What are you saying? That the bigots are right? That we have some special gift?’
“‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s hardly a bad characteristic, is it?’
‘It’s what people say whenever one of us does well at something. It’s their way of denying us credit for our work.’”
(Butler, 55)
In Sami Schalk’s “Interpreting Disability Metaphor in Octavia Butler’s ‘The Evening and the Morning and the Night,’” she, while giving credit to others who have analyzed the text as a metaphor only for race, points out that the intersection of race and disability plays an important role in the text. Though the text rarely refers to race, the character Alan describes his last name as Nigerian (Butler, 40). Schalk points out the many ways in which race, disability, and class intersect in the real world, resulting in similar oppressions to those DGD’s face in Butler’s story (144). DGDs are stereotyped as violent and unpredictable, facing discrimination and isolation, eventually only able to find companionship with each other. Likewise, both the disabled community and the black community face discrimination that often results in their deaths at the hands of the police. The intersection of blackness and disability is especially lethal.
The institutionalization of DGD’s—something which is viewed as inevitable—can be compared to the school to prison pipeline. No matter how well the DGD’s manage their illness, they will end up in an institution, and only the luckiest will go somewhere like Dilg, a cutting-edge institution described as a “retreat.” Most will end up at a place like the one where Naomi, Alan’s mother, was housed: “Places like that . . . well, sometimes if patients were really troublesome—especially the ones who kept breaking free—they’d put them in a bare room and let them finish themselves. The only things those places took good care of were the maggots, the cockroaches, and the rats” (Butler, 55). There is not much hope for DGDs, not many reasons to stay alive. Most are expected to be sterilized (another reference to eugenics, both of people of color and disabled people), and they voluntarily sterilize themselves. Beatrice, the woman at Dilg, refers to DGDs who reproduce as “irresponsible,” and says “Most DGDs have the sense not to marry each other and produce children. I hope you two aren’t planning to have any—in spite of our need” (Butler, 61). Alan states that “they should pass a law to sterilize the lot of us” (41). Internalized oppression is powerful.
“The Evening and the Morning and the Night” often feels hopeless and discouraging, and even the thread of hope Butler weaves into the story near the end seems tiny, making the reader question whether it will be enough, whether the characters will survive. She does not reassure us. But the hope is there, and it is in community. To survive, the DGDs must depend on one another. The paradigm shifts. As Schalk states: “The story’s move to offer the possibility of a different, but still meaningful life is critical to its intervention in terms of both disability and blackness, as disabled people and black people have both been assumed to have less to contribute to society and to experience inherently more difficult lives. For people with disabilities, this sentiment is so severe that there is a pernicious cultural belief that people with certain kinds of disabilities are better off dead” (Schalk, 147).
Works Cited:
Butler, O. E. (2005). Bloodchild and other stories. New York: Seven Stories Press.
Lopez, German. “There Are Huge Racial Disparities in How US Police Use Force.” Vox.com, Vox Media, 14 Nov. 2018, http://www.vox.com/identities/2016/8/13/17938186/police-shootings-killings-racism-racial-disparities.
Mizner, Susan. “Police ‘Command and Control’ Culture Is Often Lethal – Especially for People With Disabilities.” American Civil Liberties Union, Aclu, 11 May 2018, http://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform/reforming-police-practices/police-command-and-control-culture-often-lethal.
Perry, David. “Police Killings: the Price of Being Disabled and Black in America.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 22 June 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/22/police-killings-disabled-black-people-mental-illness.
“Phenomenal Writer Octavia E. Butler: From Dyslexic to Mastermind.” IAmPMAG, phenomenalmag.com/phenoms/phenomenal-artists/phenomenal-writer-octavia-e-butler-from-dyslexic-to-mastermind.
Schalk, Sami. “Interpreting Disability Metaphor and Race in Octavia Butler’s ‘The Evening and the Morning and the Night.’” African American Review, vol. 50, no. 2, 2017, pp. 139–151., doi:10.1353/afa.2017.0018.
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