Octavia Butler's Parables

"I like living and I like being free"

For at least the past year, a chorus has insisted that we should be reading Butler’s Parables: Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. In part, it’s simply coincidence. The Parables open in 2024 and map a period we can call our present and possible futures. Alaska secedes from the U.S.; Kenya and Tanzania are at war; the U.S. and Canada are at war; Christian nationalists take over the U.S.; company towns return; enslavement is, if not legal, accepted; economic catastrophe destroys public institutions; houselessness increases; and the lower middle class and middle class are no longer safe from arbitrary violence.¹

For Butler, the Parables were a blend of fantasy and “prophecy.”² She looked at the world in the 1990s and mapped a possible trajectory if humans continued to follow the same trajectory. What she described as “the Pox” named “climatic, economic, and sociological crisis.” In our now of Mpox and bird flu, of our ongoing abandonment by political classes, of the obscene accumulation of wealth by some and the increasing precarity of most of us, of genocides across multiple geohistories, and of ongoing ecological devastation, Butler’s Parables resonate.

Lauren Oya Olamina, the main focus of the books, is a new Black Moses, a name given to Harriet Tubman. But where Tubman imagined and pursued freedom, Lauren—Gerry Canavan points out that readers tend to call the character Lauren while Butler always thought of her as Olamina—pursues survival. I don’t want to simplify what feels like a minor difference. If I were more generous, I would simply point out that Tubman begins life enslaved, and so escape and freedom are pursuits and vernaculars. Lauren, though born into devastation, witnesses the end of a kind of possible life: though her parents—her father and stepmother—are university instructors, their lives are precarious. Survival, not freedom. Perhaps I’m emphasizing this point because I wonder what happens when survival becomes a vernacular that drowns out freedom.³ I would be a terrible reader if I did not point out that in Parable of the Talents, Lauren says, “I like living and I like being free.” Perhaps one day I’ll write about what Lauren considers freedom.

I wonder how we are reading Butler now. I wonder how I am reading her. I am, of course, removed from the immediacy of the world she imagined, which is mostly centered on the United States. (For how Butler is being read from the U.S., see Jessica Marie Johnson, Scott Nakagawa, and this series introduced by Sasha Ann Panaram.) And much as many USians on social media are insisting that “the world order,” whatever that is, has changed, their gaze extends to North America and Europe, leaving out Asia and Africa. Or including Asia and Africa as victims. Since I cannot live my life as someone else’s afterthought, I have to find my own way to think with Butler.⁴

A few things stick with me.

i. Survival

In conversation with Françoise Vergès, she mentioned the skills needed to survive.

Recently, I convened a school called the Nomad Colony on the question of repair. And the first question I asked was, what do we know to repair with our hands? What kind of repair? What are your tools? And the answers were about self-care and theory, and I said, no, I’m talking about what we can do with our hands. What can we repair with our hands? And there was total silence because it’s really easy . . . to take the tool as an abstract notion. I said: imagine that tomorrow we have to flee, to maroon. Who can build a roof, for instance, among us? Nobody knew how to. We were doomed because we were talking about ‘marooning’ and we could not even build a roof over our heads – the first thing you need is to have a roof, to be protected. I asked who knows how to make a fire? Nobody. It went on like that. Practically everyone knew how to repair bikes, but for instance, when it came to sewing, very few knew how to do it and so I said, okay, I can be the tailor because I know how to sew – at least I know that.

In the Parables, survival depends on developing practical skills.

When Lauren’s friend Joanne says, “We’re fifteen! What can we do?” Lauren answers: “We can get ready. That’s what we’ve got to do now. Get ready for what’s going to happen, get ready to survive it, get ready to make a life afterward.”

Three things: Ready for what’s going to happen; ready to survive it; ready to make a life afterward. Each of these might require a different kind of readiness. It might be—it probably is—that different people can prepare in different ways. Each according to their ability. Each according to their disability. Preparation is not a task for any one individual, but a way to gather people.⁵

In her survival bag, Lauren—as we first know her—carries seeds to plant food, to start a garden or farm. She also has a knife (or knives), a gun, and money. Essentials, but those seeds are what hold me. They are metaphors for Earthseed, her belief system, but they are also practical. Material. People need to eat. To grow food. To save seeds. To share seeds.

People also need to know how to do practical things: to sew clothes, to chop wood for fires, to repair broken furniture, to mend bicycles, to build roofs, to brew alcohol, to purify water. From Nairobi, I suspect those people who work in the jua kali sector—building furniture, creating clay pots, shaping metal gates, repairing cars, weaving baskets, sewing clothes—will be the most valuable people in catastrophic times. They know how to build and repair.

ii. Building

Mariame Kaba offers this anecdote:

Early on in my activism . . . I was a major brat to people who I proudly proclaimed were sellouts because they had to be accountable to private funders and to “the man.” Those were heady days.

Then, one afternoon I won’t soon forget, as I spouted off about someone or other being a “sellout,” one of my mentors asked me a question that helped shape the trajectory of my activism and organizing.

“What have you built?” he asked. I must have looked perplexed. So he asked me again, “What have you built?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I answered.

“Come back and talk with me when you’ve figured it out,” he told me.⁶

If my (limited) social media is any evidence, we are at a moment when a lot of people have anointed themselves judges of what counts as “the work.” For every “x is resistance” post I’ve seen—or read, though I read fewer and fewer—I’ve seen multiple “x is not resistance.” An endless parsing of what is and isn’t and isn’t and is and is and isn’t and isn’t and is.

Much as I value discourse—I am, after all, mostly a language person—I find this endless parsing not very useful.

To echo the question asked by Mariame’s mentor: “What have you built?”

In Parable of the Sower, Lauren recruits others to build Acorn, a community where others can join, where food can be grown, where the dead can be remembered, where children can be nurtured, where Earthseed can be a practice of how to imagine life beyond earth’s constraints.

Lauren builds.

In Parable of the Talents, deprived of Acorn (that’s a spoiler), Lauren tends to dreams. She speaks hope and futures to others. She offers them something to hold on to, something to look forward to. (I’m being abstract to avoid spoilers.)

Lauren builds futures.

Building is not a one-time event. Instead, it is an accumulation of many things, including failures and disappointments. And—I learn from Mariame Kaba—a willingness to learn. And the capaciousness to build with those who show up.

It might be that three people show up to something you’ve planned. Build with those three people. It might be that an action seems limited in scope—a one-day boycott, for instance. Perhaps another boycott might last two days. Perhaps the one after that might last four days. Each action is an opportunity to learn and build.

Building needs steady, repeated work. Even when that work is interrupted and perhaps destroyed by those with destructive, oppressive power. Building persists.

iii. Tending to the Dead

In Riotous Deathscapes, Hugo ka Canham asks, “What happens when we think of death not as an end but as continuity and expanded relation?” He insists, “The earth that bears the dead is a space of black sociality.”

Also thinking with the dead, Christina Sharpe writes,

What does it mean to defend the dead? To tend to the Black dead and dying: to tend to the Black person, to Black people, always living in the push toward our death? It means work. It is work: hard emotional, physical, and intellectual work that demands vigilant attendance to the needs of the dying, to ease their way, and also to the needs of the living.⁷

Biko Mandela Gray offers “sitting with” as a method—method is not quite the right word—to honor stolen lives and to avoid reproducing the violence of suffering and death as spectacle. He writes,

Sitting with these lives, then, requires that we commit to staying, to not moving on, and that we do not abstract away from them. These lives aren’t materials for making theory. They instead point us toward the violence of making theory, toward the violence of making abstractions, which is to say, sitting with these lives and deaths means we behold them in their opacity.⁸

At Acorn, the community Lauren helps to found, the dead are tended to. Oak trees are planted to remember the dead. And, ashes from the cremated are used to plant more trees. The dead are tended to. Gathered in one place, as the unforgotten. As the ancestors. Relations are forged and nurtured between the living and the dead.

iv. Teaching

Your teachers
are all around you.
All that you perceive,
All that you experience,
All that is given to you
or taken from you,
All that you love or hate,
need or fear
Will teach you—
—Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

In Parable of the Sower, Lauren tries to discuss the future with her friend Joanne. Joanne panics. Lauren’s father offers this advice:

It’s better to teach people than to scare them, Lauren. If you scare them and nothing happens, they lose their fear, and you lose some of your authority with them. It’s harder to scare them a second time, harder to teach them, harder to win back their trust. Best to begin by teaching.

An enthusiastic Black woman on TikTok forages for food. Video by video, she shows us what the natural landscape holds. Its bounty. Its possibilities. Enlarging palates trained by grocery stores and local markets. A good friend forages. Things I know as weeds are treated with respect. As food. Other people online discuss wild mushrooms and wild roots and wild vegetables; the medicinal qualities of this bark and that flower.

In the first few years of the Rona pandemic, people conducted experiments with harvesting wild yeast to bake bread, possibly to brew other substances. The digital opened possibilities to teach about gardening and crotcheting and baking and sewing and fucking.

Many people who had never considered themselves teachers were teaching.

In both Parables, teaching is central. Lauren’s daughter writes,

Every member of Earthseed learned to read and write, and most knew at least two languages—usually Spanish and English, since those two were the most useful. Anyone who joined the group, child or adult, had to begin at once to learn these basics and to acquire a trade. Anyone who had a trade was always in the process of teaching it to someone else. My mother insisted on this, and it does seem sensible.

Most people that Lauren encounters in the Parables do not know how to read and write. Many of them are poor, homeless, escaped slaves, escaped workers, survivors of violence. Many of them are considered disposable by the state.

What happens if we read the Parables not as the possible future of a destabilized middle class—and this is one way they are being read—but as a series concerned, centrally, with people already deemed disposable?

In some of the commentary I’ve read, Lauren’s disability is mentioned, but many of the other characters in the books—poor, illiterate, homeless, formerly enslaved, abused—are rarely discussed. I wonder what this focus on Lauren is doing. I wonder what this focus on a heroic figure obscures about the roles of companions in the books. After all, a central, repeated message in the books is that people are stronger when they work together. Traveling as a group is safer than traveling alone. Living as a group is safer than living alone. Or, to cite Mariame Kaba, everything worthwhile is done with others.⁹

v. Weeding

In one of my favorite scenes from Parable of the Talents, Lauren and her travel companion Belen Ross arrive at a farm to find a woman weeding. Lauren—dressed as a man for safety, though I think a trans or nonbinary reading is within the books—offers to weed in exchange for food. Belen—Len—doesn’t know what a weed looks like, so Lauren teaches her. They weed and are fed.

Weeding sucks. Every gardener I know hates doing it. Especially weeding that is done by hand instead of using chemicals. It really sucks. No matter how clever the tools you use.

But.

Weeding is also tending the earth. It reduces competition for nutrients so desired plants can grow. Weeds—without flowers and seeds—can be left to dry on top of the soil, to decompose and return nutrition to the earth. Weeds can be used to make a fertilizing tea. Many weeds are food.

Weeding is boring and tedious. And necessary. Weeding is carework.

I think it’s easy to take Lauren as a heroic myth, the Black girl who imagines a system—Earthseed—that experiments with collective survival. I am not very interested in those types of heroic figures. I am much more interested in the practical Lauren. The one who gives flesh to carework. The Lauren who carries seeds to plant, teaches people deemed disposable how to read and write, insists on tending to the dead, and weeds the earth so that plants can flourish.

1. Gerry Canavan explains the trajectory of Butler’s Parables. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/theres-nothing-new-sun-new-suns-recovering-octavia-e-butlers-lost-parables/. For a longer engagement, see Gerry’s book on Butler https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p082160.

2. I’m citing Gerry here. We’ve spoken. I can use a first name!

3. As a child in Moi’s Kenya, I learned survival as a vernacular. It took a long time for me to imagine freedom. Luckily, my mothers’ generation had witnessed the British colonial flag come down and the Kenyan flag rise, and they had freedom dreams to sustain their struggles. Their freedom dreams ensured that those of us born in survival mode learned how to want and pursue more than survival.

4. Kenya is not immune to what happens in the U.S. of course. When empire farts, we all smell it. And, more practically, remittances from the U.S. are part of a safety net for many families. Still, I cannot let myself live as a footnote in empire’s imagination.

5. If I were writing something longer, I’d point out that Lauren’s father helps her prepare for what is going to happen; others help her to survive, first at Acorn and then when Acorn is stolen and turned into a prison camp; and yet others help her get ready to make a life afterward. It’s a rather mechanical way to read across the Parables. But it works. I use “others” to avoid too many spoilers.

6. Mariame Kaba, “We Can Only Survive Together,” in Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care.

7. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being.

8. Biko Mandela Gray, Black Life Matter: Blackness, Religion, and the Subject. Biko sits with Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, and Sandra Bland, all victims of U.S. state violence.

9. Mariame attributes this quote to her father. It’s simply much more elegant to cite Mariame than to write, “As Mariame Kaba’s father taught her and as she teaches us.”