Writing to Power: Frances Harper, Harriet Jacobs, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Octavia Butler
This is the first essay in a four-part series I'm publishing throughout Women's History Month—on women, writing, and what it costs and requires to do this work with our whole selves. The complete version of this essay is live on my Substack, Canon & Culture, where I write about books, power, and representation. You can read it in full here. What follows is an excerpt.
There is a steadiness I find in the women whose writing endures across time. Their work carries a keen awareness of the dynamics around them. They know the cauldrons of power—how they churn, where they constrict, and where and for whom they leave room for movement. Whether they are writing about something they know well or something speculative, their words are tuned to the systems in which they live. Among them are Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Harriet Jacobs, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Octavia Butler—writers separated by centuries and genres but united by a shared attentiveness to power.
To grow up a Black girl who loved science fiction was to notice, early, how rarely the genre imagined girls like her. That absence carried its own kind of instruction: stories do not appear on their own. Someone decides who gets to tell them and which ones are published or greenlit. It is no surprise, then, that Butler's novels return to power again and again, examining who wields it, who negotiates it, and who survives beneath it.
In Kindred, the main character Dana is pulled backward to a time when slavery in America was thriving. She's forced into proximity with the violence that makes her existence possible. In the Parable books, Lauren Olamina builds belief in the middle of collapse. In the Xenogenesis trilogy, survival depends on negotiating terms set by beings whose help alters the definition of humanity itself. The power Butler explores in these novels is hardly ever pure. It's often tangled with compromise, danger, and responsibility.
Butler's heroines aren't dominant in the way we may stereotypically see a protagonist; instead, they are resourceful. They make something of what is available. They assess conditions as they are rather than as they wish them to be. They build within constraint. Writing, for Butler, becomes a laboratory for studying power without pretending to possess it.
Harriet Jacobs, writing in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, approached power with a different but equally deliberate strategy. Jacobs knew that the audience most likely to be moved by her account was not enslaved people, who already knew its horrors, nor white men, who held direct control over the system she described. She wrote toward Northern white women—women who occupied a complicated space within patriarchy, constrained by it yet near to its benefits.
Jacobs's narrative lingers over her internal conflict in ways that can feel almost suspended. Before describing the choices she made under threat from Dr. Flint, she addresses her reader directly, inviting her into the moral tension of the moment. The vulnerability and exposure are not incidental. She uses them as persuasive devices. By revealing her shame, fear, and calculation, Jacobs refuses the stereotype of enslaved women being either morally lacking or emotionally impervious. She writes herself as fully human, and in doing so, she places her reader in a position where indifference becomes more difficult to sustain.
Emotional transparency in Jacobs's work is neither spectacle nor confession for its own sake. It is strategic. Power in this context is not seized. It is engaged through empathy, carefully crafted and deliberate.
Sometimes stories do as much for liberation as marching, lobbying, and resisting.
Harper, Jacobs, Butler, and Adichie do not offer a single method but a plethora of devices, strategies, and approaches to draw from. They are a lineage of writers who understood this. They teach us that to write with that awareness is not to posture as powerful. It is to acknowledge the currents already present and to decide, deliberately, how one's work will enter them.
Read the full essay on Canon & Culture: jevonbolden.substack.com/p/writing-to-power-frances-harper-harriet.