<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Reading Octavia Butler\u2019s Parable of the Sower<\/em> and Parable of the Talents<\/em> in Pandemic Times<\/p>\n\n\n\n 3 April 2020 <\/p>\n\n\n\n Hyeisoo\nKim<\/p>\n\n\n\n Apparently what is happening now and\nwill happen after this time are utopian \/ dystopian stories that have already\nbeen drawn by our imagination. Every day we see the news of this tragedy\nplaying out differently in different parts of the world. The poor will suffer\nmore than the rich. People commonly think viruses move indiscriminately across\nborders, bodies and class. Instead, the virus was moved around by privileged\nbodies who have the freedom to travel across borders. This crisis is actually\nenvironment friendly, and gets us closer to the utopian idea of universal basic\nincome, an idea that trusts human beings as inherently good. We don\u2019t know yet\nwhat effect the current pandemic will have on our economic, political and\nsociological system. But the crisis reveals that the current system won\u2019t last\nin the way we knew before. Change. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI won\u2019t be able to afford college. I won\u2019t be able to get a job or move out of my parents\u2019 house because no job I could get would support me and there are no safe places to move. Hell, my parents are still living with their parents.\u201d (Sower, 47)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n \u201cHelp us to make America great again.\u201d (Talents, 18)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Octavia Butler\u2019s dystopia is surprisingly close to the reality of our time, in terms of growing precarity, inequality, the onset of the climate crisis and the radical right. In Butler\u2019s Parable of the Sower<\/em> and Parable of the Talents<\/em> (1993, 1998), no story about specific catastrophic events is told but a story about amoral human behavior under the failure of central government is drawn. Marlene D. Allen makes the point that Butler\u2019s parables are unique because the devastation of the Earth and human beings is a result of our own denial. As Allen quotes from the book, \u201cWe caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into cries\u201d (Allen, 2009, 1355).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Parable of the Sower<\/em> is a written diary of a girl, Lauren,\nwho suffers from hyperempathy inherited from her mother\u2019s side. She grows up in\na walled community in the town of Robledo where she lives together with her\nfather, stepmother and three brothers. She inherited her curiosity for\nknowledge from her father, a trait eventually leading to her successes in Parable\nof the Talents<\/em>. Lauren is an almost mythical protagonist who figures as the\nmain character in both of the parables. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Lauren is a sharer, she feels other\npeople\u2019s pain and pleasure. She grew up in a self-protective community that was\nunder an ongoing threat of being attacked by drug addicts and scavengers from\noutside. At the age of eighteen, Lauren loses her family and friends during a\nraid on the neighborhood. Then she heads up North with Harry and Zhara, who\nalso survived the raid, to find a better life. Even though it is dangerous to\ntrust each other, the group steadily grows. Lauren observes, \u201cWe help each\nother. A group is strong. One or two people are easier to rob and kill\u201d(Butler,\n1993, 281). At the end of the book, Lauren and her group settle and make a\ncommunity called Acorn, based on her own religion of Earthseed. Early in Parable\nof the Talents<\/em>, Acorn is ruined by a group of Christian fundamentalists who\nare in support of a new president elect. Lauren is forced to roam the West\ncoast in search of her daughter Larkin, who was taken away from her during the\nraid on Acorn. In both books, Lauren shows an immense determination to develop\nand spread Earthseed. On a few occasions, other characters in the book ask\nLauren why she created Earthseed but she answers that she found the religion:\n\u201cAll the truths of Earthseed existed somewhere before I found them and put them\ntogether. They were in the patterns of history, in science, philosophy,\nreligion, or literature. I didn\u2019t make any of them up\u201d (Butler, 1998, 122).\nDuring her life, Lauren keeps questioning and shaping the idea of God according\nto her belief system or world view. Central to Earthseed, and in part to the\nfounding of Acorn, is the destiny of human kind \u201cto take root among the stars\u201d\n(Butler, 1993, 70), something Lauren wishes her daughter to witness. \u201cGod is\nchange\u201d, Lauren writes in her diary on multiple occasions. From this point of\nview Earthseed is able to capture the chaotic times surprisingly well. But as\nLauren\u2019s daughter writes \u201cThe problem with Earthseed has always been that it\nisn\u2019t a very comforting belief system\u201d (Butler, 1998, 245). So if not comfort,\nor a promise of salvation, what does Earthseed\u2019s god of change stand for? Peter\nG. Stillman argues, <\/p>\n\n\n\n Butler tries to place the reader, via Earthseed, into a world of post-identity politics, or at least into understandings that are post-identity\u2014because we human beings are not only our identities, we are always forming ourselves, developing our potentials, changing ourselves, as we act. (Stillman, 2003, 28)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The idea of change, in Earthseed, has\nsomething in common with Donna Haraway\u2019s concept of sympoiesis,\n\u201ccollectively-producing systems that do not have self-defined spatial or\ntemporal boundaries. Information and control are distributed among components.\nThe systems are evolutionary and have the potential for surprising change\u201d\n(Haraway, 2016 ,61). Both Earthseed and sympoiesis intervene in the\nevolutionary chain and embrace human beings to embody symbiosis and\nhybridisation. That is \u2018Change\u2019 and Change is unpredictable and deals \u2018with\nongoing reality\u2019(Butler, 1993, 201). Change lets us imagine a body full of\nwill, a will of their own. Lauren tells her friend Joanne, \u201cWe can all learn\nmore. Then we can teach one another. We can stop denying reality or hoping it\nwill go away by magic\u201d (Butler, 1993, 52). From that moment on, we can take\nroot and live among the stars. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I contend that Lauren\u2019s hyperempathy\nis limited to physical pain and pleasure and excludes the sharing of other\nsenses. People with hyperempathy are often abused in slavery markets as sharers\nwon\u2019t physically hurt their masters. Sharers receive all the pain they inflict.\nI wonder what the significance really is of being a sharer. Are they saviors or\nanti-saviors? Allen argues the following:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even though Lauren questions why some people might think of hyperempathy syndrome as a gift or a power, in Butler’s aesthetic it truly is, for the condition represents the ultimate power associated with sharing and empathy, which heretofore have often been regarded as weaknesses. (Allen, 2009, 1363)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Butler shows that empathy and sharing\nis not a feminine hysteria. But she also doesn\u2019t mystify its value, instead she\nshows its practical and brutal side. \nSharing happens on the level of lived experience. It is not\ncontemplative, reasonable, spiritual or ideological. It happens. \u201cNo one can\nstop Change, but we all shape Change whether we mean to or not\u201d (Butler, 1993,\n241). I find it interesting to read the parables\u2019 realism in parallel to the\ncurrent pandemic. It is time to Change. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDid you ever read about bubonic plague in medieval Europe?\u201d I asked.<\/p> She nodded. She reads a lot the way I do, reads all kinds of things. \u201cA lot of the continent was depopulated,\u201d she said. \u201cSome survivors thought the world was coming to an end.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n \u201cYes, but once they realized it wasn\u2019t, they also realized there was a lot of vacant land available for the taking, and if they had a trade, they realized they could demand better pay for their work. A lot of things changed for the survivors.\u201d<\/p> \u201cWhat\u2019s your point?\u201d<\/p> \u201cThe changes.\u201d I thought for a moment. \u201cThey were slow changes compared to anything that might happen here, but it took a plague to make some of the people realize that things could change.\u201d (Butler, 1993, 50)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Bibliography<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Allen, Marlene D. \u201cOctavia Butler’s\n“Parable” Novels and the “Boomerang” of African American\nHistory\u201d, Callaloo,<\/em> Vol. 32, No. 4, 2009, pp. 1353-1365.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Butler,\nOctavia E. Parable of the Sower<\/em>. Open Road Integrated Media. 1993.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Parable of the Talents<\/em>. Open Road Integrated Media. 1998. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Haraway,\nDonna J. Staying with the Trouble, Making Kin in the Chthulucene.<\/em> Duke\nUniversity Press. 2016<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stillman, Peter G. \u201cDystopian\nCritiques, Utopian Possibilities, and Human Purposes in Octavia Butler’s\nParables\u201d, Utopian Studies, <\/em>Vol. 14, No. 1, 2003, pp. 15-35.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hyeisoo Kim studies in the Research Master Programme in Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam.<\/em> This piece was written for a Masterclass on Speculative and Utopian Writing and the Transcultural offered at Utrecht University by Barnita Bagchi in the Research Master Programme in Comparative Literary Studies. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Reading Octavia Butler\u2019s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents in Pandemic Times 3 April 2020 Hyeisoo Kim Apparently what is happening now and will happen after this time are utopian \/ dystopian stories that have already been drawn by our imagination. Every day we see the news of this tragedy playing out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/utrechtutopianetwork.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/utrechtutopianetwork.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/utrechtutopianetwork.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utrechtutopianetwork.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utrechtutopianetwork.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=244"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/utrechtutopianetwork.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":252,"href":"https:\/\/utrechtutopianetwork.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244\/revisions\/252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/utrechtutopianetwork.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utrechtutopianetwork.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/utrechtutopianetwork.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}