called “Surviving President Tr*mp:
Lessons From the 1960’s and
Octavia E. Butler.” I included a pho-
to of an autograph Butler inscribed
in Parable of the Sower to my late
mother, civil rights activist Patricia
Stephens Due: “To Patricia Stephens
Due and A Better Future.” To me,
that photo encapsulates the power-
ful spirit of two women who fought
the same battle on two fronts—my
mother with her multiple arrests
and trauma from state violence
against her in the sixties, and Butler
with the searing power of her art in
the seventies and beyond.
The irony, of course, is that Parable
of the Sower is about anything but a
better future—it’s a dystopia with the
urgency of now that feels more like a
documentary chronicling the crum-
bling of our society before our eyes.
Teenage protagonist Lauren
Olamina, who has more wisdom
than the combined adults in denial
around her, is forced to grow up too
soon. Lauren faces a world teeming
with violence, poverty, unemploy-
ment and death. And she must do all
of this with a disability/gift called
Hyperempathy Syndrome, which
means she literally feels the pain and
dying of others around her—even if she’s
the one who must injure or kill them.
Parable of the Sower encom-
passes so many themes that recur
in Butler’s work—the reluctant hero-
ine who must take charge because
of her gifts and integrity, the brutal
impact of hierarchy and the seeds of
hope embedded in her character’s
Earthseed religion, which teaches
that God is Change and that plan-
ning and action are the antidote to
terror and tragedy. In Parable of the
Sower, one Earthseed verse reads:
“Belief initiates and guides action—
Or it does nothing.”
That sense of urgency is what
scholar Ayana Jamieson, Ph.D., says
compelled her to devour everything
Butler had written after a White
colleague told her to read Butler
because he thought she had Hyper-
empathy Syndrome. Jamieson had
never read a Butler novel, but she was
hooked after Parable of the Sower. “Itcalls us to action so we can realize
alternatives are possible,” says Jamie-
son, founder and director of the
Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network.
“The tightrope between optimism
and pessimism is really pragma-
tism—what are the concrete things
you would need if aliens were here?
What would you need if there’s no
clean water or access to gasoline
or the fire department doesn’t
come? What if we didn’t have all the
middle-class services we take forgranted—if there’s no public edu-
cation?” Jamieson says. “That hor-
ror is already a factor in the lives of
marginalized folks and women—it’s
not like you have to wait for the
Apocalypse.”
During our 2000 interview with
her, Butler recalled hearing criticism
from Black readers that her science
fiction wasn’t focused enough on
race. Her first novels, Patternmaster
(1976) and Mind of My Mind (1977),
were about telepaths and shape-
shifters who can inhabit the bodies
of different races and genders. She
used metaphor to examine racial and
gender power dynamics.
“I got it from other people during
the sixties, when you were supposed
to be so terribly relevant: ‘ Why do you
write that stuff? It’s not relevant. You
should write something that’s more
politically relevant to The Struggle,’”
she told Steve and me.
Her answer to that criticism was
1979’s Kindred, about a contempo-
rary Black woman who gets caught
in a time loop that keeps returningThe grand dame of science fiction, Butler received numerous awards for her short
stories and novels.I was very lucky to come
to something I cared
about more than I cared
about anything else.”
—OCTAVIA BUTLER(^) C
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ESSENCE.COM I 74 I SEPTEMBER 2019