WHY STEAL WHEN YOU CAN HONOR: SHATTERING THE RACIAL POLITICS OF CITATION
or Octavia Butler
1
Back when I was a young writer I met one of my literary heroes: Octavia Butler. This was 1999 and I’d been invited to the book launch for Parable of the Sower, and during the few minutes we talked, naturally, I gushed: about how important she was to me as a writer of African descent; about her magnificent oeuvre; about her latest novel and about some technical awesomeness she had pulled off in her story “The Evening and The Morning and the Night”, and at the end of my encomium I blurted out that I intended to steal that technical awesomeness for my own work.
I’ll never forgot how she looked at me, her face formal and yet her eyes kindly, full of forbearance.
Why steal, she said, almost whispering, when you can honor?
I still remember how embarrassed I felt -- you would have thought someone had dipped me headfirst in a vat of industrial strength shame (no sulfuric burns quite like it). What I don’t recall, however, is my response: whether I apologized or affirmed her statement or simply threw myself into a deep hole and waited for the earth to roll over me.
2
This past week two different people wrote me about a story I had just published. Both were complimentary about the work, explained how they “loved” some aspect of what I’d written and how they planned to steal said feature for their own writing.
I said what I always say in these moments: one cannot steal what is freely given.
I meant it, too. After all, what writer hasn’t “borrowed” from other writers –what writer doesn’t owe a bottomless debt to all the other writers that inspired them?
All true.
But also: Butler.
3
I don’t use that stealing line on anyone anymore.
I understand that for a lot of folks, including my younger self, I’m-gonna-steal is a way of giving praise, signaling a kind of respect.
If you like it, do you.
I just don’t use it myself.
Because of what happened with Butler?
Of course.
4
I mean, for reals, she wasn’t wrong.
One cannot steal what is freely given and the fact that all writers “borrow” is well and good, but they sure as fuck hit different when you belong to a community that has spent its entire history in this “New World” being stolen and stolen on.
This is true of people of African descent and it’s true of indigenous communities and true of many other communities as well.