The Novel That Tells You How To Survive America

Some thoughts on Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower.

I rejoined X, formerly known as Twitter, with a new account after several attempts to reclaim my old account and log back in. I was away for about 9 months—I was logged out back in mid-October and unable to log back in due to problems with the two-factor log-in system that I have since discovered are widespread thanks to changes to the site internally. I am aware of the argument for not being on there and even made it. The problem is, I had networks there, a community built over 15 years, and I often had no idea what was happening. And I felt out of touch with friends at a distance from all over the world.

Today I found a thread by Michiko Kakutani, who was posting about Octavia Butler’s legendary novel, Parable of the Sower, in part because this coming July 20th, 2024, is the date on the first entry in the journal that forms the novel’s central text.

As the news cycle filled these last few weeks with the astonishing chaos that is the world right now, I kept seeing people posting about how this day from the novel was coming. And as I read down the comments on the Kakutani thread, I saw again something I’ve noticed pretty regularly with the novel ever since I became aware of it. How people will say they are afraid of it when urged to read it. And I do understand. And so I posted about my experience of the novel, how to my surprise it made me feel grounded and even sane. And then I had a few more thoughts about it all and here we are.

Those of us who love the novel can also have an evangelical air to us, of the kind that alienates as many or more as we might recruit. And it is true that nothing triggers me more from my time on social media than someone saying A must-read/If you read one thing today/Let this sink in. My eyes go cold.

Even scholars of her work have described fearing the novel. Professor Tiya Miles, writing about the novel for The Atlantic, describes her own fear of the novel quite movingly:

I am an academic historian, and for years I taught Butler’s historical fiction in my classes (particularly 1979’s Kindred, which follows a Black woman wrenched back in time to live with her enslaved ancestors). But I avoided her futuristic novels, which I found too harrowing to read.

When Parable came out, I was a graduate student working part-time in a collectively owned feminist bookshop in Minneapolis called Amazon Bookstore. (Even this detail smacks of the strangeness of past-future collisions—a few years later, that cozy shop would reluctantly relinquish its name to Amazon Books, which was not yet the behemoth we know as Amazon.com.) Our book club selected Parable, but I could not bear the violence and desolation of Butler’s fallen world. So I put the novel down and did not pick it up again for more than two decades. When I finally did, it was because of its resonance with a historical artifact I was studying—a cotton sack packed by an enslaved mother for her daughter right before they were separated by sale. The daughter used this sack as a lifeline. In Parable, the teenage protagonist packs a similar survival sack, which she uses to flee a deadly attack on her neighborhood. I was hooked. And I saw that it was this overlap between Butler’s two modes—past and future—that makes her canon so special.

Written in the tradition of the folio novel—say, in the tradition of Dracula—the novel poses as a journal that has since become a scripture to a religion called Earthseed. Olamina tells us she has begun taking notes as an attempt to put down what she was learning in books that would help her to survive a collapse that she was sure was coming, a collapse that does then come. So we see her create a notebook for these lessons, and then put them to the test, even as the entries are framed by the elements that tell us it is now a religious text in the religion she eventually organizes. The notebook becomes a scripture. And in the novel, this framing creates a powerful dramatic irony. We forget at times the character of this frame until we reach a new chapter and we remember we are reading from the vantage point of someone many years in the future, looking back on these times.

And Parable of the Sower will teach you many things. It is not just a set of lessons about food and the raising of crops, the ways to find your way from this place to that. It is also about how Olamina learns to judge other people and possibly trust them—or not. How to teach people when they're afraid. How to organize a night watch, look for food, and lead a group. How to organize for trouble.

I have often said cynicism gets you nothing you want. It doesn’t protect you, it doesn’t win you allies, it doesn’t create communities, and it is a gift to your enemies. Cynics are the last ones usually who want to be at the community meeting. And if they show up, the organizer feels a kind of victory. And so I was moved by how much Olamina, as a narrator, was so full of the desire to live, the desire to overcome and not just survive but to thrive, even to travel to space. A wild optimism you could say, even a radical one. At the time I found it, it was what I needed.

We take it for granted now that Butler predicted our current times. Her essay, A Few Rules For Predicting The Future, is what I think of as a common sense guide to writing speculative fiction as well as preparing for the disasters made deliberately by a fatal status quo that insists what it is doing is correct and causes no problems despite the ample evidence of those problems. Her role as visionary was more or less confirmed for good by the election of Trump, something out of her sequel to Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents, which predicts an American political collapse into fascism hastened by environmental collapse and economic collapse with a presidential candidate who wins on the slogan “Let’s Make America Great Again.” But there’s other things in the novel that startled me, like a device that I would argue is Oculus Rift, and a kind of news in short clips that easily resembles what Twitter was, or what TikTok and Instagram are now. Or how Olamina has a strange kind of empathy she calls hyperempathy, where she feels so much of what someone else feels it overwhelms her and she has to learn to find herself again.

So much of the American status quo asks you to be afraid of the wrong things. And to consider the wrong things safe. Surviving life here is about knowing how to be afraid of the right things and the novel is arguably about that most of all.

Some further readings for you, if you like, besides the Miles essay:

• Abby Aguirre’s essay on Butler and the novel at The New Yorker.

• This 1997 Randall Kenan interview with Octavia Butler, looking back on her career, is special to me.

• E. Alex Jung profiled Butler posthumously at Vulture.

• There’s a beautiful interactive feature on her by Lynell George at The New York Times.

• Toshi Reagon, who wrote an opera based on the novel with her mother, Bernice Johnson Reagon, has a podcast, Octavia’s Parables, created with adrienne maree brown, that takes you through the different chapters, one by one, a remarkable experience and an enormous education in what went into the novel and what might come out of it.

• The Public Books tribute to Octavia Butler on what would have been her 75th birthday.

If you have thoughts about the novel, or other Butler scholarship you’d like to add, I would love to see it all, please post it in the comments. And thanks for reading.