6/23: on my name, after octavia butler

yesterday we celebrated Octavia E. Butler's birthday, she would have been 78

The name Octavia means eighth: it is given to the eighth child in the family or a child born in the eighth month of the year. Octavia Estelle Butler was an only child, but named after mother, Octavia Margaret Guy, and after her mother, named after her grandmother, Estella, which comes from star. I’m writing this and thinking of Butler’s short story “Speech Sounds”—the first work she ever published—in which an epidemic has struck that has rendered a large portion of the population either unable to speak or unable to read. Foreclosed from voice, from words, from the characters wear pendants around their neck to signify their names.

After Octavia, here is how you spell my name, which comes from Greek ζωή, meaning life:

Around my neck is a fine chain assembled from my cells, my desires, and fragments of my womb. At my collarbone is a pendant made of hundreds of years of breath, wind, and bile. I take my necklace off and hold life in my hands, feel the formless pulsation of aliveness in my hands. It leaves a dew all over my skin. I bring my palm to my mouth—which hungers for speech—and I taste flesh, possibility, continuity, rupture. I imagine that I am in Octavia’s world: I have no speech, only the jewel of my name, only life and vibration, only anima and birth.

I want to hold my name, hold the sparkling adornment of life in my hands, but instead I watch the world turn over with death and dying. The name of life feels like a fantasy today, an open wound yesterday. I want to speak my name until the world can hear it again, until it can taste again the promise that the air makes to the vibrating cells of the living. But my name feels like an excessive heaviness around my neck. But my mouth can only burn with images of war. I taste in my name the betrayal of the dead, and my whole throat is parched, on fire, and the water of my name has dried up, and I taste only the powerlesssness of my name in the face of the slaughter. I reach for my mouth through Octavia. I think of “Speech Sounds,” where there is only the desperate gestures of bodies and the voices crying out into the blaze at the edge of life. Blessings to Octavia, I reach for you, for you loved my name but you also knew so deeply of the violence, and you were not afraid to stare at it with the eye of the pen.