Week 12: Diverse Positions and Diverse Thinking!

I Live with You illustrates an interesting concept about 'becoming a whole new you'. The story is told through a secondary character who looks exactly like the main character, becomes her. Although the reader can interpret this story in multiple ways, after sleeping on it, I began to think about it in the context of split personalities in society.

What if the secondary character and the main character were one person all along; a part of one woman's personality? To set up the story, the narrator describes her target as " Just my size. Just my look". The narrator also repeatedly emphasizes that no one will notice when she takes over the main character's life, and the way the narrator's plan plays out is impossible to be interpreted as a literal story. However, the narrator repeatedly states "I saw that nobody noticed you". The only way no one would notice her shift in clothing style, even while at work, is impossible, so I interpreted this narrator's repetition as nobody noticing the main character struggling with multiple personalities.

During their first contact, the narrator, "right away [found] a nice place in your attic." The only way a person could live in another person's attic, bumping and groaning in the night and "[buying] new clothes and [taking] away the old ones," without getting caught is if this person existed in her mind, and she was at least a little aware of it, however, her bolting the bedroom door shut hints that when she's her more outgoing self, her introverted self doesn't remember what happened. After all, if I noticed my quarters in my button box and my wardrobe wasn't the same, I'd call the cops immediately because I know I'm not living with multiple or split personalities. Instead, she bolts the bedroom door shut because she doesn't remember what her outgoing self has done, and thinks there might have actually been a minor intrusion that's making her paranoid.

While the depiction of split personalities in the book vs reality might be different, creatively interpreting this text made me a little bit more consciously aware of other people's experiences navigating life. 

Questions from Blood Child

what’s your reaction to the text you just read?

The feeling of disgust quickly ramped up as I arrived at the climax of the story. There’s a sense of reflective perversion when Octavia injects social commentary within the motifs of the text (some of which I identify as slavery and gender role issues). It’s almost as if Octavia knows that what she’s reflecting in her story is a necessary evil — it’s clear personal experiences while being a woman of color has driven her to write this moving piece. 

What connections did you make with the story that you read?

Octavia discusses many different shades of gender roles in everyday life. In general, Bloodchild reverses gender roles. In Octavia’s world, it’s the men who give birth and women (aliens) who impregnate male (humans). This simple, yet ironic switch of gender roles opened up massive opportunity for the author to interject her point of view on gender issues. She starts with impregnation and giving birth. In our world, bearing a child is both painful and dangerous, but men often don’t see it that way. For example, when Lomas came to the house in unimaginable pain and ready to give birth, T’Gatoi had no emotional attachment. In fact, those babies being birthed were not even her own, so it seemed she cared even less.