THE FIRES OF FUTURE PAST - THE PROMISE OF OCTAVIA BUTLER'S PARABLE OF THE SOWER

The Bobcat Fire, Los Angeles, 9.17.20, by Kevin Cooley for Harper’s Magazine...

Apocalyptic fires in California fueled by climate change. Collapsed cities wracked by neoliberal precarity. A drug epidemic. Mass incarceration. A sinister right-wing president-elect dead-set on rolling back civil rights. Given all these uncanny parallels, one understands why Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower is back in conversation, though for some of us the novel has never left the room.

Parable of the Sower is not absolutely peak Butler — that distinction belongs to her early masterpieces Kindred and Dawn — but the novel is the best of late Butler — Butler at her post-apocalyptic fiercest. Published in 1993, the novel is set in a future California (2024!) undergoing “a slow-motion apocalypse: global warming, economic depression, and neoliberalism’s accelerative hollowing-out of the public sphere have conspired to leave America in a state of near-total collapse.”¹ Our narrator is Lauren Oya Olamina, a searching black teenager whose gated-community provides her family with a modicum of protection from the Hobbesian chaos without — until an attack by drug-addled pyros destroys her home and her family and sends her on an impossible trek through the post-apocalyptic wasteland. Parable of the Sower was The Road before The Road was The Road, and in spite of all her vulnerabilities, a resourceful (and occasionally ruthless) Olamina survives against all odds, gathering a like-minded community that the novel makes abundantly clear will form the nucleus of a future utopian religion, Earthseed, whose Ad Astra God-is-Change “bible” is quoted throughout the novel.

LA’s catastrophic fires have provoked a lot of talk online about how Butler’s Parable of the Sower predicted our perilous social-political-climatic present. Writing about the novel at the height of the recent fires, Leah Stokes, a political scientist focused on environmental policy, described Butler as “a modern day Nostradamus. If only we’d listened.”

Stokes and others ain’t wrong. Butler’s Parable is eerily prescient — its apocalyptic future bears more than a family resemblance to our apocalyptic present.

And yes — if only more had listened, especially those in power.

But it’s important to emphasize that certain folks did listen to Parable. Parable of the Sower, after all, is not only a post-apocalyptic novel — it is also a critical dystopia and like many critical dystopias it maps, warns, and hopes. And despite the novel’s horrors — trust me, Butler is not one to pull punches — many of its most avid readers have been inspired by the novel’s deep hoping — its utopian imaginary. See EARTHseed Permaculture Center and Farm (respect, Pandora Thomas). See Octavia’s Bookshelf in Pasadena which became a mutual aid hub during the fires.

As Nikki High, owner of Octavia’s Bookshelf explains, the novel is much more than its grimmest elements or its uncanny extrapolations: “So much about Parable of the Sower was rebuilding,” she says. “Lauren Olamina left a blueprint.”

Lauren Olamina left a blueprint.

I believe this profoundly. Butler left us a seed bank from which a better future might rise out of the ashes.

Let me finish with one aspect of Butler’s blueprint, Butler’s seedbank, that is not much mentioned. Our protagonist Olamina suffers from what the novel calls hyperempathy syndrome. She feels what others around her are feeling — their pain, their pleasure — which in a world as septic as the world of Parable of the Sower is a severe disability. But it is also the source of Olamina’s resilience, of her communitarian genius; it is what allows her to pull together from the wrecked remnants of the old world something that will survive into the future.

It’s no accident that Butler chose to give her protagonist this superpower, and no other. This neural novum is Butler’s canniest move and one that we should all listen to while there’s still time. Butler suffers no illusions as to how vicious the world is and how much more vicious it could become and yet she still insists that the way forward is not violence or power — the only way forward is compassion and we-feeling. In a world of pain, in pain, future or present, hyperempathy might seem like a paradoxical gift, more like a curse — but the alternative, no compassion at all, no we-feeling, is precisely what threatens to destroy everything in Butler’s future-past and our future-present. Butler’s blueprint, her Earthseed, is unequivocal: a community, a future that isn’t predicated on empathy isn’t a future worth fighting for, but will be one that we will all burn in.

As many of you must have heard, the recent LA fires destroyed entire sections of Altadena, the historically black community where Octavia Butler is buried. Butler’s grave appears to have escaped undamaged.

The seed survives. It survives in Butler’s novels. In the dreams and projects her words have inspired.

Whether we survive depends on what we choose to listen to, on what can be salvaged and nurtured in the flame.

In order to rise

From

its own ashes

A phoenix

First

Must

Burn².

1. Gerry Canavan’s Octavia E. Butler, University of Illinois Press, pg 132

2. Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower.