Parable of the Sower

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

The best shorthand for how I felt about Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower is that I recommended it to everyone I knew who hadn’t already read it the moment I finished the book. The novel is set in a future that was some thirty years distant at the time Butler was writing but which is now only a couple of years away. Skillfully written in the form of journal entries, Parable has surely felt immediate and gripping for readers ever since its publication, but reading this book under Trump, under Covid-19 in the USA, under the suppression of an uprising against racism and racialized violence, made the reading experience all the more chilling, gripping, mind-blowing.

The author of the aforementioned journal entries is Lauren Olamina, a Black teenage girl who lives in a walled community with her father, a minister, who she reveres; her stepmother Cory; and her three brothers. Lauren’s birth mother died giving birth to her and, because she was addicted to the fictional drug Paracetco while pregnant, Lauren was born with hyperempathy, the often-debilitating ability to feel pain that she witnesses others experiencing. Rounding out the community are eleven other families, who all work together—despite their differences of opinion, behavior, morality, and race—to grow and save food, stand guard around the community and defend it from attackers, and undertake other functions so often found in community: raising and educating children, worshiping together, and enjoying one another’s company through play, love, and family connection. Once a space that seemed a bastion of safety, Lauren is increasingly aware that her walled-off neighborhood is both threatened by the outside world and not even that separate from it: when Lauren leaves the neighborhood for shooting practice with her father, when her younger brother leaves to make his own way outside the walls, it becomes increasingly clear to her that the walls are only a superficial promise of security and stability, and she begins to prepare for surviving outside of them.

Just as critical to Lauren’s survival as her preparedness, her determination, and her ingenuity is her spirituality. Having discovered a vein of spiritual truth which she calls Earthseed, Lauren collects the wisdom she distills in her journal along with her reflections on the travails of day to day life. These verses, simply written but profound, communicate an ethos of connection to the earth, awareness that all that is perceived is merely temporary, that “God is change,” and that God, purpose, and the self can all be shaped by one’s own preparedness, determination, and will. Accompanying these spiritual truths is also Lauren’s sense of Earthseed’s “Destiny”—that people, Earthseed, are destined to take root among the stars. A literal message that humanity—or, at least, some of humanity—is destined to survive the ravaged earth and depart to a “new world” in the stars, this colonial message is largely unquestioned and uncomplicated in Parable of the Sower, and I look forward to seeing how this aspect of Earthseed is further addressed and hopefully problematized in the series’ second book, Parable of the Talents.

An utterly absorbing, challenging, mind-expanding novel, Parable of the Sower touched me right where I’m currently sitting, asking me, in concert with so much else that is happening around me, to stop taking for granted that the world as I know it will remain so. It challenged me to start preparing not only for the reality that the world will, profoundly, change, but for the reality that I can have a hand in shaping that change—that we all can.