Wild Seed

Anyanwu has the extraordinary ability to transform herself into an animal. However, this is a power touched by perversity—“abomination,” as Anyanwu’s tradition would have it. Anyanwu comes across many things in the world that she finds to be an “abomination.” Some of these prescribed ethical concerns will correspond to the reader’s own, such as Anyanwu’s prohibition against bestiality and incest. Others are less universal. “If your people wish to debase themselves by drinking the milk of animals, I will turn my head,” says Anyanwu to Doro, in arguably her strongest reaction to an ethical taboo in the book (130).

These abominations have to do, each in one way or another, with animal sexuality. Likewise, what defines Doro in his most extreme cruelty is animality. She dismisses the idea that her influence “[...] could somehow prevent him from becoming an animal” because “he was already an animal” (211). So, too, does Anyanwu have taboos against the transsexual coupling that could be so easy for her to have with Doro. Nevertheless, she is never freer, and Doro is never more perplexed and disarmed by her, than when she is indulging her animal, sexual side. She manages to escape from Doro’s grasp for a hundred years by becoming an animal.

Butler suggests that such sexual indulgence—such “animality”—is not a solution to Anyanwu’s human problems. In order to overcome Doro, Anyanwu eventually turns to normatively female weapons such as an obligation to teach mercy, raise families, and perform social obligation, along with a frightening willingness to self-negate in service of these goals.