Close Reading 3 of 12 (Humanity, a Mirror in Octavia E. Butler’s Dawn)

As part of my MFA, I have to complete twelve close readings. This is number three. For this reading, I chose to write about Octavia E. Butler’s Dawn, the first book in her Xenogenesis Trilogy. If you haven’t readDawn yet but you are planning to, this essay may contain some spoilers that you might otherwise wish to avoid. Just an alert!

I wasn’t trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological ston...