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Writing Parables Into Reality

Maame Blue

 

Thirty-one years ago, in October 1993, Octavia E. Butler’s first novel in the Parable duology, Parable Of The Sower, was published. The novel opens on 20th July 2024, three decades into the (then) future. For us, these are very recent days. But for Butler’s hyper-empathetic protagonist Lauren Oya Olamina – a 15-year-old African American girl living in a walled-in Southern California community – it is a difficult, dangerous present. When we first meet her, Lauren shares her experiences through her diary, reflecting on what she believes about the world and the importance of Change, since losing the comfort that once came from her minister father’s baptist preaching.

‘All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God is Change.’1

 

In a constantly evolving and desperate world, Lauren finds that there is hope in the impermanence of things. It is the antithesis of what she has been raised to believe, that God is immovable; a port in the storm of chaos. Instead, she turns her eye towards the chaos, considering how to navigate with it rather than against it.

The world is at a tipping point. Climate change is ravaging nature, both environmental and human. Social inequity has exploded, pushing millions into desperate poverty that has spilled into a hostile environment of crime, addiction and sex trafficking of the poorest and most vulnerable. Lauren and other teenagers are taken on regular excursions to practise their gun skills, to better protect them from the very real dangers of violence that sit outside of their neighbourhood walls.

At the same time in our reality, on Saturday 20 July 2024, the world was still reeling from a global IT outage. The technology failure grounded planes, caused surgeries to be cancelled and blocked people’s access to money. It was a reminder of how interconnected we all are, whether we want to be or not. Separately, a little over a week later here in the UK, three children were murdered in a knife attack in Southport. And in the days following, racist rioting and violence took place across the country after it was falsely reported that the perpetrator of these murders was an asylum seeker. 

The rioters and their motivations are captured succinctly in a similar scene from Parable Of The Sower:

‘They have no power to improve their lives, but they have the power to make others even more miserable. And the only way to prove to yourself that you have power, is to use it.’2

For weeks afterwards in the UK, terror reigned in towns and cities. Black and brown people were indiscriminately targeted by thugs. Their businesses and cars were burned. Hotels providing temporary housing to refugees were broken into and vandalised. High street shops, book shops and public buildings all became casualties of what may have looked to some like sudden explosions of white supremacist anger and hatred of the ‘other’. But for many more of us, these racist riots were not a surprise; they were an inevitable consequence of race baiting rhetoric and anti-immigrant sentiment that had been splashed across the headlines of our biggest media outlets for more than a decade.

In Parable Of The Sower, the hateful attitudes and human desperation are hauntingly familiar, and we have to question how Butler’s fictional dystopia was such an accurate predictor for the future of human nature?

Perhaps the answer lies in human history; that we as a species have a tendency to repeat our mistakes, often speeding towards our own extinction in the process. Yet, Butler offers up more than just the inevitability of a dystopia, by letting the reader bear witness to Lauren’s growing belief system. One that insists that humanity can be an anchor point for itself, to avoid a destructive future and keep our communities thriving:

‘Embrace diversity.

Unite-

Or be divided,

robbed,

ruled,

killed

By those who see you as prey.

Embrace diversity

Or be destroyed.’3

 

‘United we stand, divided we fall’ might ring like an old cliche, but it’s truth persists. And in 1998, Butler maps out what a diversity-embracing community looks like in the second novel of the series, Parable Of The Talents.

Still in survival mode a handful of years after Parable Of The Sower, Lauren has lost the safety of her walled-in community. But she continues to write, recording her thoughts and her belief system, working through her experiences on the page, eventually sharing parts of it with new members of her community. Her new home of Acorn, built from scratch and hundreds of miles from her childhood home, is shared with like-minded people. Lauren leads them with the belief that it is only by working together that people can be safe, happy and healthy. 

But steadily, in the absence of governmental direction in the US, a new dictatorship begins to rise. The figurehead is a fire-and-brimstone preacher named Jarret, with a chillingly familiar rhetoric, penned by Butler eighteen years before it became synonymous with the 45th US President:

‘“Join us! Our doors are open to every nationality, every race! Leave your sinful past behind, and become one of us. Help us to make America great again!”’4

And just as the Insurrection of January 2021 was led by the emboldened followers of the 45th President, so too are the cult-like followers of Jarret in Parable Of The Talents, empowered to terrorise others with few consequences to their actions.

‘Choose your leaders

with wisdom and forethought.

To be led by a coward

is to be controlled

by all that the coward fears

To be led by a fool

is to be led

by the opportunists

who control the fool.’5

Butler’s Parable duology pulls the reader down into the depths of humanity, providing a kind of proof that we can survive more than we think we can, even though we shouldn’t have to. A world that feels dystopian; disconnected from the basics of human decency, fuelled by desperation and greed, does not need to be the only path ahead that we set for ourselves. If we allow it, we can live – all of us – safely, happily even. But it takes a willingness to be open to change. An understanding of the importance of embracing diversity. That attention be paid to who we choose to lead us and how. And always a persistence to keep writing, to keep learning, and to keep telling stories.

Notes

1. Parable Of The Sower, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993. Extract from p. 3: Earthseed: the books of the living

2. Parable Of The Sower, p. 143

3. Parable Of The Sower, p. 196

4. Parable Of The Talents, Seven Stories Press, 1998. p. 21

 5. Parable Of The Talents, p. 200

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