I always wonder why Margaret Atwood’s dystopian portrayal of a future when women are reduced to breeding stock is used as a metaphor for the plight of women when so many women in the world actually live in a much worse real dystopia.
I’ve witnessed and intervened in many injustices toward women over the years. I threatened two police officers in Haiti who were beating a woman with their rubber truncheons. I’ve had to intervene to get permission for women staff to travel for training or who were bullied by government officials or religious police. I’ve revised pay scales to pay for positions regardless of the person’s sex.
With so much abuse against women around the world, why must we use metaphors? To me the face of female oppression is a lace eye covering on a black burqa or the young women in Iran who are arrested and in some cases murdered because they refuse to wear hijab.
If I was younger, I would have figured out a way to help women in northern Iraq fight against those who sold them into sexual slavery or worse. They are my mothers, sisters, and daughters.
Your witness is powerful and wrenching. Thank you for all you've done on behalf of women. You make a compelling point - these dystopias are only possible to create and consume from a place of privilege. And don't get me started on the obsession with apocalypse as a potential or even likely future, when so many have experienced it already, and are currently.
Unfortunately, in too many countries and cultures, women probably must kill their oppressors, as harsh as that may seem, to take their rightful place in their societies.
Some say that nothing was ever solved by violence, but that is not true. It took violence by the British Navy to end the Atlantic slave trade. It took a savage civil war to end slavery in the United States. Decolonization required armed struggle for people to win their independence.
Oppressed women of the world arise and lose your chains. Your true brothers will stand with you.
I think about this every time I walk through the old women's prison at the territorial penitentiary that's now a museum in my end of town. I read the women's stories and wonder, in some cases, Well what else were they supposed to do?? Behind the brief case notes seem to me many cases of garden-variety, age-old, intergenerational abuse of women. And one day, the woman said, No more.
I had a second cousin in northern Idaho whose husband was a notorious abuser, both physical and verbal. One day she decided she had endured enough, so she grabbed a chair and a hunting rifle, situated herself in front of the entry door, and pulled the trigger as soon as he walked in from work. It was lights out for the bastard.
There was almost no investigation because everyone agreed the husband “needed killed,” as they said. There was never an indictment or a trial, but some of the men who knew her situation, and they did, needed to intervene a few times earlier on her behalf. They owed it to her.
I would prefer to be a pacifist, because I loathe violence, but until those who would harm the innocent live in fear of justice, certain tasks must taken care of by society.
So very much is rendered taboo in fiction by the publishing and advertising industry, and general culture, because the artform is so threatening to vested interests. This de facto censorship is far more pronounced in fiction than in nonfiction, surely because fiction can do everything nonfiction can do and much more, making it more powerful, compelling, and popular. Nonfiction is very threatening to injustice too, but fiction has so many more powerful tools at its disposal that it is subject to constraints and attacks, ideological and otherwise, that nonfiction is far more protected from. The entirely disparate number of topically explicit and specific antiwar books, fiction to nonfiction, to take one example, shows this difference in treatment profoundly. Such novels are almost entirely - or entirely - gatekept from being published in fiction, often by being called wrong form, un-aesthetic, inartful, etc - flimsy rationales and baseless complaints and accusations that nonfiction books on the matter, no matter how roughly cobbled together, are far more typically spared. Of course fiction is an art, non-fiction far less so, which can cause people to believe or not see or rationalize away this wholesale censorship in the first place. That's how to get away with the suppression - by defining it away - so that you can deny it, if conscious, or fail to see it for what it is at all.
If you haven't read Kathryn Davis's _Duplex_, I highly recommend it. Believe it or not, a robot narrator. I read it in two sittings. Brilliant. Even wrote Davis a fan letter and she replied. I may do a series of brief review of a variety of books soon ... xo ~ Mary
I've not read "The Parable of the Sower," but I've had a visceral reaction to the kinds of summaries I've seen posted on FB and elsewhere. Your caution about how dystopia often overreaches might be part of what I'm feeling. But it's also a certain confirmation bias that tilts discussion toward all the ways that a certain prophecy seems to line up with our moment, when I think the exceptions to the rule deserve equal time. This caution comes from years of teaching nature writing and often feeling like the genre boxed my students into a corner: either climate change was the great moral fight of their lives -- the kind of thing that didn't really have another side, like abolition -- or it was overblown. I gravitated more toward memoirs like Masumoto's "Epitaph for a Peach," because I felt that food writing held more hope than the broader cli-fi scope. There's some truth to Oryx and Crake, but also a lot that fires wide of the mark. And I think overstating the case often renders it moot, at least as a potentially transformative or persuasive story.
I'm mulling a question on the topic, because the rehearsed consensus that often galvanizes around these conversations is precisely what bedevils the humanities. It becomes less a conversation than an affinity group.
But I respect your sensibility, and so this is a useful nudge toward reading the book for myself. Thank you :)
I agree, wholeheartedly. Oryx and Crake wore on me, but I stuck it out for the full trilogy. I agree, it's far too outlandish (though I do cringe when I hear they use pig hearts or kidneys in humans - which is it?). Not familiar with Masumoto's book, will look into it. Thanks for the recommendation. Of the books I listed, "Station Eleven" comes close to that balance. The TV series based on it went much further, in a good way. Creativity and connection will endure, even in a changed world. (How do we know? Because it always has.) "How Beautiful We Were" gets at that in a gorgeous, wrenching way.
I'm okay w/ divestment from fossil fuels being like abolition. I'm *definitely* not down for all the outlandish techno-solutions out there. Carbon sequestration will never approach the necessary relational repair needed.
I look forward to your question on the topic. More and more, I find myself aligned with the humanities' tools for wrestling with this. But the conference I went to last month reminded me, oboy, the humanities also harbor a whole lotta navel-gazing.
Keep your vision of the humanities, regardless of what happens at conferences. Meanwhile, everything about your post rings true for me, from the sensational overreach of some dystopias (entertainment??) to Butler's self-awareness in Parable about the unwillingness of people to hear "truth" on its own.
Julie, thank you for this well researched, interesting essay about Butler's work. My favorite part of your piece was your perspective that our global problems are also (possibly primarily?) spiritual and metaphysical. It's refreshing to me that a person with your esteemed background shares that opinion freely.
It's always scarily fascinating when reality follows art and you present an excellent example. I haven't read Butler's book and I hope it reaches a satisfying conclusion, just as I firmly hold on to hope for our world.
Donna, thanks for your thoughtful response. I assure you, it's been quite a journey to get the point of sharing such thoughts "freely." Like most modern Americans, I was indoctrinated into the whole materialist fever dream. Thanks for your work and teaching in this space; it's so needed.
there are so many parts of this i am sitting with today. Octavia is my favorite; her work changed my whole way of looking at life, my writing. thank you for the careful dissection and mention of the verbs... resonated with me. just thank you so much. and wow. July 2024.
I know this wasn't the main point of your essay, but I'm fascinated by the climate-fiction genre you mentioned, and I added your list of suggested titles to by book list. Thank you!
As the parent of a 15-year-old, I am chilled by Butler's timetable. Lauren would have been born within months of Obama's election or inauguration, depending on whether she had a 2008 or 2009 birthday. She would have come to a child's first awareness of the larger world during the Trump years. Thank goodness we still have elections and running water. May it long be so.
Great stuff. If anything, I think of Parable of the Sower as a kind of newtopian fiction, more than dystopian, as the regenerative philosophy, thought, feelings, and actions are present from the start and throughout, and would be present in Lauren Olamina even if the existing civilization were not collapsing catastrophically around her. The character and the novel are a progressive partisan force not merely in the face of new calamity but also in face of the would-be stable status quo (which itself is a vicious form of dystopia, if less obviously). Her very practical, humble, and inspirational Book of the Living with its Earthseed philosophy steadily grows and leads her and her growing community to their new place they call Acorn, which happens to be the acronym for the longtime also very practical, humble, and inspirational Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now - founded in Little Rock, Arkansas to help empower and improve the living conditions of primarily African Americans in impoverished and otherwise troubled neighborhoods. Despite its eye-catching dystopian, utopian, and speculative elements, Parable of the Sower could hardly have stronger, more committed, and partisan roots in the real, throughout.
Ernest Callenbach's Ectopia is a valuable if limited form of so-called utopia, I think, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow is an especially impressive and valuable example of what I think of as revolutionary fiction. With Parable of the Sower - and there are of course other examples - these several novels push variously forward through grim times to create both heightened and practical social consciousness for better more livable futures and days. I try to do something similar in Most Revolutionary with very strong focus on social consciousness, which is indivisible from our personal consciousness, as the personal is made up of the private and the public both.
Since your normative and technical dissection of Parable of the Sower shows your keen interest interest in the art and craft of fiction, you might be interested in the brief notes on the subject that I put together based on my MFA lit training, Hollywood script training, general research, and sheer experience - "The Energy of Story" - https://fictiongutted.substack.com/p/the-energy-of-story
I think that Lauren Olamina's and Octavia Butler's Earthseed philosophy and consciousness are expressed as not only practical and inspirational but also as revolutionary, necessarily so in this unprecedented age of climate collapse and worsening nuclear and other terminal threats. Truly a book for our time and future time, if there is to be any.
Thanks for this thought-provoking comment, Tony. “Newtopian” is a great term. I’ve thought about “protopias,” ie, what we could build *now,* rather than wait for more collapse. Which of course lots of folks are on about - regenerative and intentional communities of all flavors. I’m glad to know about ACORN in Arkansas. Will look that up. I tried Callenbach’s novel but found it to be so agenda-forward and preachy, it bored me. (And I’m easy to please! 😂) Didn’t know about Wizard of the Crow. Sounds interesting.
Thanks for the link to your essay. Will check it out.
At the time Butler was writing, ACORN was a socially and politically powerful national organization, which was fraudulently targeted by the right, and is now an international organization with domestic spinoffs. I worked closely with ACORN very briefly in 1997, in its Little Rock chapter, coincidentally. I happened to begin my 3 year MFA program in 1994 a year after Parable of the Sower was published but can't exactly recall where I first encountered the novel, likely an MFA class, or Austin Texas bookstore. I think a class that I can't entirely recall. I do remember however being immediately unusually impressed by the novel, and by no novel moreso, until my colleague Andre Vltchek's Point of No Return in 2005 and Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow in 2006 came out to rival it.
Octavia E. Butler is one of my favorite writers, and this pair of books is a great, if tough, read. Lauren is a great character and leader. I found her obsession with leaving Earth to be the puzzling part of her character, but many charismatic leaders have these. Have you read The Parable of the Talents?
I admit, haven't read the others in the series. There's a musical based on it - and a podcast about the musical. Pretty fascinating. I just missed seeing it in D.C.; came a bit late to knowing about it.
There's only one more book, she didn't begin the third. But Talents ties things up a little, and is worth reading. I'll look into the musical and podcast, thanks.
I’m just starting the Talents. Written in 1998, it imagines a 2032 presidential campaign for a charismatic populist with the slogan “make America great again.”
Butler was extremely prescient, but that slogan was what Reagan used to get elected. Her dystopian vision was not without precedent. Hopefully we get an Olamina in our future.
I always wonder why Margaret Atwood’s dystopian portrayal of a future when women are reduced to breeding stock is used as a metaphor for the plight of women when so many women in the world actually live in a much worse real dystopia.
I’ve witnessed and intervened in many injustices toward women over the years. I threatened two police officers in Haiti who were beating a woman with their rubber truncheons. I’ve had to intervene to get permission for women staff to travel for training or who were bullied by government officials or religious police. I’ve revised pay scales to pay for positions regardless of the person’s sex.
With so much abuse against women around the world, why must we use metaphors? To me the face of female oppression is a lace eye covering on a black burqa or the young women in Iran who are arrested and in some cases murdered because they refuse to wear hijab.
If I was younger, I would have figured out a way to help women in northern Iraq fight against those who sold them into sexual slavery or worse. They are my mothers, sisters, and daughters.
Your witness is powerful and wrenching. Thank you for all you've done on behalf of women. You make a compelling point - these dystopias are only possible to create and consume from a place of privilege. And don't get me started on the obsession with apocalypse as a potential or even likely future, when so many have experienced it already, and are currently.
Unfortunately, in too many countries and cultures, women probably must kill their oppressors, as harsh as that may seem, to take their rightful place in their societies.
Some say that nothing was ever solved by violence, but that is not true. It took violence by the British Navy to end the Atlantic slave trade. It took a savage civil war to end slavery in the United States. Decolonization required armed struggle for people to win their independence.
Oppressed women of the world arise and lose your chains. Your true brothers will stand with you.
I think about this every time I walk through the old women's prison at the territorial penitentiary that's now a museum in my end of town. I read the women's stories and wonder, in some cases, Well what else were they supposed to do?? Behind the brief case notes seem to me many cases of garden-variety, age-old, intergenerational abuse of women. And one day, the woman said, No more.
I had a second cousin in northern Idaho whose husband was a notorious abuser, both physical and verbal. One day she decided she had endured enough, so she grabbed a chair and a hunting rifle, situated herself in front of the entry door, and pulled the trigger as soon as he walked in from work. It was lights out for the bastard.
There was almost no investigation because everyone agreed the husband “needed killed,” as they said. There was never an indictment or a trial, but some of the men who knew her situation, and they did, needed to intervene a few times earlier on her behalf. They owed it to her.
I would prefer to be a pacifist, because I loathe violence, but until those who would harm the innocent live in fear of justice, certain tasks must taken care of by society.
This is such a sobering perspective. Proof positive that I have led a truly sheltered life. For which I am profoundly grateful.
Not sheltered, but normal. No woman should live in fear from men. That’s basic civilization.
So very much is rendered taboo in fiction by the publishing and advertising industry, and general culture, because the artform is so threatening to vested interests. This de facto censorship is far more pronounced in fiction than in nonfiction, surely because fiction can do everything nonfiction can do and much more, making it more powerful, compelling, and popular. Nonfiction is very threatening to injustice too, but fiction has so many more powerful tools at its disposal that it is subject to constraints and attacks, ideological and otherwise, that nonfiction is far more protected from. The entirely disparate number of topically explicit and specific antiwar books, fiction to nonfiction, to take one example, shows this difference in treatment profoundly. Such novels are almost entirely - or entirely - gatekept from being published in fiction, often by being called wrong form, un-aesthetic, inartful, etc - flimsy rationales and baseless complaints and accusations that nonfiction books on the matter, no matter how roughly cobbled together, are far more typically spared. Of course fiction is an art, non-fiction far less so, which can cause people to believe or not see or rationalize away this wholesale censorship in the first place. That's how to get away with the suppression - by defining it away - so that you can deny it, if conscious, or fail to see it for what it is at all.
If you haven't read Kathryn Davis's _Duplex_, I highly recommend it. Believe it or not, a robot narrator. I read it in two sittings. Brilliant. Even wrote Davis a fan letter and she replied. I may do a series of brief review of a variety of books soon ... xo ~ Mary
Mary, You've been reading such interesting books! 😅
Wow, what a recommendation! Thanks. Will check it out.
I've not read "The Parable of the Sower," but I've had a visceral reaction to the kinds of summaries I've seen posted on FB and elsewhere. Your caution about how dystopia often overreaches might be part of what I'm feeling. But it's also a certain confirmation bias that tilts discussion toward all the ways that a certain prophecy seems to line up with our moment, when I think the exceptions to the rule deserve equal time. This caution comes from years of teaching nature writing and often feeling like the genre boxed my students into a corner: either climate change was the great moral fight of their lives -- the kind of thing that didn't really have another side, like abolition -- or it was overblown. I gravitated more toward memoirs like Masumoto's "Epitaph for a Peach," because I felt that food writing held more hope than the broader cli-fi scope. There's some truth to Oryx and Crake, but also a lot that fires wide of the mark. And I think overstating the case often renders it moot, at least as a potentially transformative or persuasive story.
I'm mulling a question on the topic, because the rehearsed consensus that often galvanizes around these conversations is precisely what bedevils the humanities. It becomes less a conversation than an affinity group.
But I respect your sensibility, and so this is a useful nudge toward reading the book for myself. Thank you :)
I agree, wholeheartedly. Oryx and Crake wore on me, but I stuck it out for the full trilogy. I agree, it's far too outlandish (though I do cringe when I hear they use pig hearts or kidneys in humans - which is it?). Not familiar with Masumoto's book, will look into it. Thanks for the recommendation. Of the books I listed, "Station Eleven" comes close to that balance. The TV series based on it went much further, in a good way. Creativity and connection will endure, even in a changed world. (How do we know? Because it always has.) "How Beautiful We Were" gets at that in a gorgeous, wrenching way.
I'm okay w/ divestment from fossil fuels being like abolition. I'm *definitely* not down for all the outlandish techno-solutions out there. Carbon sequestration will never approach the necessary relational repair needed.
I look forward to your question on the topic. More and more, I find myself aligned with the humanities' tools for wrestling with this. But the conference I went to last month reminded me, oboy, the humanities also harbor a whole lotta navel-gazing.
Keep your vision of the humanities, regardless of what happens at conferences. Meanwhile, everything about your post rings true for me, from the sensational overreach of some dystopias (entertainment??) to Butler's self-awareness in Parable about the unwillingness of people to hear "truth" on its own.
Yes, that one passage is almost shocking in its transparency.
Julie, thank you for this well researched, interesting essay about Butler's work. My favorite part of your piece was your perspective that our global problems are also (possibly primarily?) spiritual and metaphysical. It's refreshing to me that a person with your esteemed background shares that opinion freely.
It's always scarily fascinating when reality follows art and you present an excellent example. I haven't read Butler's book and I hope it reaches a satisfying conclusion, just as I firmly hold on to hope for our world.
Donna, thanks for your thoughtful response. I assure you, it's been quite a journey to get the point of sharing such thoughts "freely." Like most modern Americans, I was indoctrinated into the whole materialist fever dream. Thanks for your work and teaching in this space; it's so needed.
there are so many parts of this i am sitting with today. Octavia is my favorite; her work changed my whole way of looking at life, my writing. thank you for the careful dissection and mention of the verbs... resonated with me. just thank you so much. and wow. July 2024.
So glad this resonated. I think maybe it’s so jarring because the world she created in that story felt so real. Cinematic and sensory.
I know this wasn't the main point of your essay, but I'm fascinated by the climate-fiction genre you mentioned, and I added your list of suggested titles to by book list. Thank you!
Awesome, Sarah. They're terrific books, all. You may also be interested in this Substack: https://climatefictionwritersleague.substack.com/
As the parent of a 15-year-old, I am chilled by Butler's timetable. Lauren would have been born within months of Obama's election or inauguration, depending on whether she had a 2008 or 2009 birthday. She would have come to a child's first awareness of the larger world during the Trump years. Thank goodness we still have elections and running water. May it long be so.
Yes, it is chilling.
Great stuff. If anything, I think of Parable of the Sower as a kind of newtopian fiction, more than dystopian, as the regenerative philosophy, thought, feelings, and actions are present from the start and throughout, and would be present in Lauren Olamina even if the existing civilization were not collapsing catastrophically around her. The character and the novel are a progressive partisan force not merely in the face of new calamity but also in face of the would-be stable status quo (which itself is a vicious form of dystopia, if less obviously). Her very practical, humble, and inspirational Book of the Living with its Earthseed philosophy steadily grows and leads her and her growing community to their new place they call Acorn, which happens to be the acronym for the longtime also very practical, humble, and inspirational Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now - founded in Little Rock, Arkansas to help empower and improve the living conditions of primarily African Americans in impoverished and otherwise troubled neighborhoods. Despite its eye-catching dystopian, utopian, and speculative elements, Parable of the Sower could hardly have stronger, more committed, and partisan roots in the real, throughout.
Ernest Callenbach's Ectopia is a valuable if limited form of so-called utopia, I think, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow is an especially impressive and valuable example of what I think of as revolutionary fiction. With Parable of the Sower - and there are of course other examples - these several novels push variously forward through grim times to create both heightened and practical social consciousness for better more livable futures and days. I try to do something similar in Most Revolutionary with very strong focus on social consciousness, which is indivisible from our personal consciousness, as the personal is made up of the private and the public both.
Since your normative and technical dissection of Parable of the Sower shows your keen interest interest in the art and craft of fiction, you might be interested in the brief notes on the subject that I put together based on my MFA lit training, Hollywood script training, general research, and sheer experience - "The Energy of Story" - https://fictiongutted.substack.com/p/the-energy-of-story
I think that Lauren Olamina's and Octavia Butler's Earthseed philosophy and consciousness are expressed as not only practical and inspirational but also as revolutionary, necessarily so in this unprecedented age of climate collapse and worsening nuclear and other terminal threats. Truly a book for our time and future time, if there is to be any.
Thanks for this thought-provoking comment, Tony. “Newtopian” is a great term. I’ve thought about “protopias,” ie, what we could build *now,* rather than wait for more collapse. Which of course lots of folks are on about - regenerative and intentional communities of all flavors. I’m glad to know about ACORN in Arkansas. Will look that up. I tried Callenbach’s novel but found it to be so agenda-forward and preachy, it bored me. (And I’m easy to please! 😂) Didn’t know about Wizard of the Crow. Sounds interesting.
Thanks for the link to your essay. Will check it out.
At the time Butler was writing, ACORN was a socially and politically powerful national organization, which was fraudulently targeted by the right, and is now an international organization with domestic spinoffs. I worked closely with ACORN very briefly in 1997, in its Little Rock chapter, coincidentally. I happened to begin my 3 year MFA program in 1994 a year after Parable of the Sower was published but can't exactly recall where I first encountered the novel, likely an MFA class, or Austin Texas bookstore. I think a class that I can't entirely recall. I do remember however being immediately unusually impressed by the novel, and by no novel moreso, until my colleague Andre Vltchek's Point of No Return in 2005 and Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow in 2006 came out to rival it.
Octavia E. Butler is one of my favorite writers, and this pair of books is a great, if tough, read. Lauren is a great character and leader. I found her obsession with leaving Earth to be the puzzling part of her character, but many charismatic leaders have these. Have you read The Parable of the Talents?
I admit, haven't read the others in the series. There's a musical based on it - and a podcast about the musical. Pretty fascinating. I just missed seeing it in D.C.; came a bit late to knowing about it.
There's only one more book, she didn't begin the third. But Talents ties things up a little, and is worth reading. I'll look into the musical and podcast, thanks.
I’m just starting the Talents. Written in 1998, it imagines a 2032 presidential campaign for a charismatic populist with the slogan “make America great again.”
Butler was extremely prescient, but that slogan was what Reagan used to get elected. Her dystopian vision was not without precedent. Hopefully we get an Olamina in our future.
i second that
Thanks Julie. Another book to add to my TBR pile.
Sorry about that! Rebecca had just mentioned the book in a comment!
haha! no worries