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erable during the day” as her
father explains to her (72). Shori is easily one of Butler’s most intriguing
characters. Severely injured, she awakens alone in a dark space, an unusually
strong and determined survivor who we found out relatively early is also
a vampire. The novel’s riveting opening scene makes it impossible for us to
turn away from her. “I awoke to darkness. I was hungry––starving!––and
I was in pain. There was nothing in my world but hunger and pain, no other
people, no other time, no other feelings.... It hurt to move. It hurt even to
breathe.... And I was so hungry” (7). From this point on, we are as
attached to Shori, to her efforts to survive, to discover her identity, to find
out what has happened to her and to her family, as her symbionts are to her.
The family’s goal in creating Shori is to enable her to enable her
people, the Ina, to withstand sunlight. Insofar as strong sun and the light of
day are still deadly to the vampire community in her novel, Fledgling is
linked to the popular legends and folklore handed down and used repeatedly
in books, television programs, and movies. Readers and filmgoers will
recall these basics: Vampires can’t see their reflection in mirrors; they can
only be killed with a wooden stake through the heart (although I think I also
https://www.51lunwen.org/euroliterature/remember a silver bullet). Vampires are the living dead and sleep in comfortable
coffins all day. They wear capes, only go out at nightfall, drink
human blood, and their bite converts other people into vampires. But
barring the need for human blood and the inability to withstand daylight,
most of the similarities of Butler’s vampires to popular mythology end.
Butler goes her own way, creating, as she customarily does, an entirely
credible community with individuals motivated by some of those universal
Page 42 Obsidian III Literature in the African Diaspora
Sandra Y. Govan
human attributes that drive us all—love, hate, fear, family, hunger, pride,
and prejudice.
The Ina of Fledging are not the vampires of human legend, the
vicious mindless bloodsuckers who attack people on crowded city streets,
then drain and discard them or bite and convert them to initiate them into
the vampire clan. Shori’s father tells her, “You need to know that it’s best
to avoid cities. Cities overload our senses––the noise, the smells, the lights
... They overload us in every possible way” (75). The vampires who
people this novel are not monsters preying rashly upon humans, intent on
wiping us out. They are not from a parallel world; they do not exist in some
alternate universe or on a separate timeline from humankind. Nor are they
alien invaders. The Ina live on Earth, spread across cultures, continents,
and centuries, simply co-existing with human beings when left alone to live.
They are not, however, human beings but an entirely separate species.
They have a written history that dates much further back than ours; they
have their own myths, legends, beliefs as have most other cultures on the
planet.
On the question of cosmology or beliefs, Butler’s wry humor comes
in sideways as she deftly works into the story the current reiteration of the
Darwinism versus creationism debate. Were the Ina created by the mother
goddess who gave them Earth until they were ready to go home to paradise?
Or, as Shori’s fathe