Parable of the Sower (1)
the future is worth it
y’all, I am so excited to share this book with you.
What we’re reading
- Jemisin, “Three reads”
- Butler, Parable of the Sower, chapters 1–12
Discussion prompts
- what does Jemisin suggest about the interconnectedness of imagination, survival, resistance, and futurity?
- What does Lauren Olamina’s discovery of Earthseed tell us about how religions are created or found? Where does Earthseed come from, what is influencing her thinking about God, and what does she want Earthseed to do?
Now that you have a little bit of background on how race works in what’s now the United States, and hopefully a better sense of the relationship between race and religion, we can really get started.
If you don’t already know about Octavia Butler, you are in for a TREAT. Check out this quick animated introduction to her work:
The narrator, Prof. Ayana Jamieson, says that Butler saw “imagination [as] a strategy for surviving an unjust world on one’s own terms.” (By the way, Northeastern’s own Prof. Moya Bailey created this video with Dr. Jamieson!)
I hope you’ll be able to see Earthseed (and new/ “found” religions in general) as exactly this: creative responses to an unjust world, and attempts not only to survive, but create conditions for flourishing in impossible times.
We’ll be reading the sequel to Sower, Butler’s Parable of the Talents, to close the semester. If Sower shows us how new religions begin, Talents gives us a sense of how they survive. Stay tuned for that.
Jemisin, “Three reads”
Like Jemisin, I was really struck by how different it feels to read this book now. I’ve read it at least three times, most recently in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. Sower has absolutely taken on a new urgency (it just hit the NYT best-sellers list TWO WEEKS AGO, 15 years after Butler’s death and 27 years after it was first published), which I wouldn’t have thought possible four years ago.
Things to think about:
Jemisin sees in Butler and in Lauren “the radicalism of ‘merely’ envisioning a future — while American, while black, while female.” What do you think Jemisin means by this? What is radical about a Black disabled American woman envisioning a future?
“Parable of the Sower works beautifully as an examination of how smart resistance functions,” Jemisin says. How do you see resistance functioning throughout Sower?
There is also an explicit critique of Christianity in both Jemisin and Butler. (You maybe caught that the title of this novel is a biblical allusion?) As Jemisin says,
For every attempt made by marginalized people to express anguish and seek change for historical (and ongoing) harm, there’s always pushback from those who demand that we suffer only in the expected ways, express that suffering with an acceptable tone, and end both our suffering and our complaints on demand.
What does this mean? How do Jemisin and Butler describe the ways traditional Christianity has demanded “suffer[ing] only in the expected ways,” and what alternatives does Earthseed offer? And do you see any resonances with Baldwin’s critique of American Christianity?
Spoilers: we’re going to talk a LOT more about the radicality of (re)imagining a future this semester. It’s also important to note the space between “envisioning a future” and hope — Lauren Olamina is NOT a hopeful character, but her understanding of God as Change means a future is inevitable AND that it can be shaped to facilitate her survival and potentially even her flourishing. As Jemisin puts it: “Claiming the future will be an ugly, brutal struggle, but I’m prepared to go the distance in that fight. The future is worth it,” (emphasis mine).
Butler, Parable of the Sower (ch. 1–12)
This selection, a little less than half the novel, brings us from Lauren Olamina’s middle adolescent attempts to understand God as Change to the disappearance and likely death of her father, a Black college professor and Baptist minister.
“Nothing is going to save us. If we don’t save ourselves, we’re dead. Now use your imagination.”
Butler, Parable of the Sower (2000, 59)
The big questions for this story so far:
- what’s Earthseed? how is Lauren Olamina describing her understanding of God, of why things are the way they are, and of how she’d like them to be?
- how does Lauren Olamina come to her understanding of Earthseed? the language she’s using to describe this is really important, so pay close attention to it.
- what does Olamina’s Earthseed tell us about how new religions come into being? how is she building on existing traditions? how is she responding to current crises? what new perspectives and possibilities does Earthseed offer?
“I’ll use these verses to pry them loose from the rotting past, and maybe push them into saving themselves and building a future that makes sense.”
Butler, Parable of the Sower (2000, 79)
This is such a rich story, and there’s so much to talk about here. I’m looking forward to hearing what you all thought of this story! Be sure that your responses include consideration of what Earthseed can tell us about radical religious innovation.
I talked about the space between hope and futurity on twitter, too, if you just can’t get enough Butler (who could?):
or as Lucille Clifton puts it:
come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
