the parable of the sower (octavia butler)

I read Butler’s book not realising, in my ignorance, its original publication date. Perhaps this is of less relevance that I am making it out to be, but the fact that the  novel was written in the mid-nineties marks Butler out as an uncannily prophetic voice. Had this been a novel published this year, one might have accused her of jumping on a bandwagon, but given the publication date it would be fair to say that in fact, Parable of the Sower is the bandwagon. It predates that other influential US dystopian novel, The Road, and subsequently apocalypse has become more and more fashionable. I came to the novel via Amitav Ghosh, who recommended it as one of the very few pioneering climate change texts. 

As an aside it would be fascinating to trace the history of apocalyptic literature. Apocalypse lends itself to cinema, and there have been plenty of Apocalyptic movies, from Stalker to The Omega Man via Will Smith’s I Am Legend. Images of devastation give good cinema. In literature, so rooted in the mores of its culture, it’s perhaps less common. Ghosh talks about the marginalisation of SF as a literary genre, which is the more natural home for an apocalyptic literature, a genre he argues is essential if we are to begin to address the dominant issue of the day, which is climate change.

Butler was there ahead of her time. The book’s heroine, Lauren Oya Olamina, lives on the edge of a Los Angeles which has been brought to the brink of societal collapse, in large part due to the scarcity of water. As her world becomes more and more feral, she is forced to flee, setting out on the road and gathering a bunch of followers to her slightly trippy vision of humanity’s future, encapsulated in her poetic writings. The novel is dynamic, fast-moving, and, in its way, terrifying. Survival is everything in the apocalyptic world and values such as empathy have to be carefully rationed, like water, if you want to live. 

The vision of Los Angeles being overrun by drug-crazed gangs made me question the writing at first. It made me thinking of the writings of Mariana Enriquez, whose stories broach the issue of an inner city which has been hollowed out by the use of crack derivatives (‘pasta base’ in Rioplatense terms). Where I live now, the Ciudad Vieja, there are most nights pasta base users squatting in the porch in front of my house. They are the shadowy figures of bourgeois nightmares, theoretically the emerging zombies who end up overrunning LA in Butler’s novel. Only, the social balance doesn’t quite work that way. In practice, they keep themselves to themselves, huddle in the corner of the barrio they have appropriated, and, as Enriquez describes, are not threatening. All of which made me question Butler’s Yankee perspective. However, the fact the novel is 25 years old gives it another dimension. Perhaps what is happening in our ‘third world’ barrios is just the start of something that terminates as Butler describes it. One hopes that her deeply pessimistic vision does not come to pass, but events seem ever more determined to prove this hope wrong.