Skip to main content

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (Virtual Book Discussion)








The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued with Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, a science fiction novel written in 1993.

The setting for the novel begins in 2014 when the main character, Lauren Olemina is only 15 years old. She and her family live in a walled community surrounded by horrors going on right outside of her neighborhood that eventually spill in.

 Although Lauren’s dad is a Baptist minister, Lauren creates a religion called Earthseed that becomes her guiding principal. She wrote a Bible called Earthseed: The Books of the Living.

All that you touch
You Change
All that you Change
Changes you.
The Only Lasting Truth
is Change.
God
Is Change.

When forced to travel by foot from Southern California to Northern California, Lauren becomes a leader of a small group traveling with her. She also suffers a condition called “hyperempathy” which makes her feel the physical pain of others. All of us in our discussion agreed that we could benefit from a leader who had just a little empathy.

On June 27th, seven of us met on a Zoom meeting to discuss this great book. Octavia Butler wrote the book in 1993 and won the MacArthur Genius Prize in 1995.


We talked about prophecy and how the author tried to warn us to step back from the precipice we were (and still) standing on. Stacy said Butler’s book “warns us not to go there.”

When asked why we thought Lauren’s father talked her out of spreading talk of preparation to leave their neighborhood ahead of time, Shelara answered, “He didn’t discourage her so much as instructing her to share information in increments. 

Lauren’s dad taught her to put away seeds to grab for planting in a new place. He also taught her how to clean and use guns. These examples show that Lauren’s father, like her, knew that that their neighborhood peace wouldn’t last. There was, however, as Judy pointed out, tension between leaving or staying to fight.

Judy said the book was grim but still left so much open to hope. Laura said she “loved the term ‘God Shaping’”. I want to love the term as well, even though I believe in the absolute authority of God. Shelara pointed out that the fact that we’ve decided to break out into Methodists, Catholics, Buddhists, etc. shows that we’ve been shaping God in our own ways all along. That being said, it was somewhat uncomfortable for some of us who’ve been taught to revere, honor, worship and depend on God to read the following:

We do not worship God.
We perceive and attend God.
We learn from God.
With forethought and work,
We shape God.
In the end, we yield to God.
We adapt and endure.
For we are Earthseed
And God is Change.
  
 Barbara said, “I’ve been thinking about class issues in the book. When they met the doctor who owns property, it really underscored who has access to water, to food, to money. He’s 57 years old and by this time Lauren is 18. The saddlebag he’s carrying is of good quality.

Judy pointed out that in the world drawn in this book no one dies in a natural way. Shelara mentioned how calling the cops, who the citizens had to pay, made every situation worse. Stacy commented on the dogs that began to run in packs and became hunters of humans.

Once the group began to apply the lessons from Parable of the Sower to today’s pandemic, Judy told us that the culprit is capitalism. Shelara added to this, saying, “We’re seeing the callousness of capitalism. People couldn’t last two weeks once they lost their jobs. Poorer people never had a big enough part in this system to survive even for a short while.”

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Movement Made Us: A Father, A Son, and the Legacy of a Freedom Ride by David J. Dennis Jr. in collaboration with David J. Dennis Sr.

  Book Discussion of The Movement Made Us by David Dennis Jr. and David Dennis Sr.    Discussion date: December 30, 2023   Nine of us met for our last book discussion of 2023 on the last Saturday of December. The book, The Movement Made Us: A Father, A Son, and The Legacy of a Freedom Ride. This book chronicles Dave Dennis Sr. ’s Movement stories from 1961 to 1964. The stories are transcribed by his son Dave Dennis Jr.     Meghan : He (the son) was like translating a n oral history that he had broken down through interviews . I like the wordplay he used but I also questioned   how much of this is the son kind of creating literature and not necessarily the father’s voice? But at the same time, I appreciated it because it’s so inter-generational because the Movement is about family and passing down activism.   Janice: T he re is a YouTube video about this book recorded at MDAH. (Mississippi Department of Archives and History . ) The video features both David Dennis Sr. And
Post a Comment
Read more

New People by Danzy Senna

                                                                             The Urban Life Expe rience Book Discussion Series continued on June 3 rd , with a discussion of New People by Danzy Senna. This 2017 novel features a young woman, Maria, who is engaged to Khalil, but becomes increasingly obsessed by a poet i n their community who is unambiguously Black. Maria and Khalil are both mixed-raced people and are being featured in a doc umentary about multi-raced Black people who are exceptionally light complexioned and consider themselves upwardly mobile. Maria was adopted by a Black woman named Gloria who didn’t realize that her baby was never going to appear Black. Maria is writing her dissertation on the musicality of the Jim Jones cult and Khalil is starting a dot-com company with his best friend Ethan. The book discussion was quite contentious and brought up questions on who has the authority to write this kind of book. Janice: I’d go so far as to say I liked it. The
Post a Comment
Read more

Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision by Barbara Ransby, 2003

Nine of us met on Saturday March 16 th to discuss Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement by Barbara Ransby, published in 2003.    Although born 1903 in Norfolk, Virginia, Ella Baker was predominantly reared in Littleton, North Carolina. Her Civil Rights and Human Rights career spanned over five decades, some of her work took place in New York and some took place in the South.    Some of the groups she worked with are   YNC L Young Negroes’ Cooperative League    WEP Worker s’ Education Project    NAACP National Association for the Advancement of Colored People    SCLC Southern Christian Leadership Conference    M FDP Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party    SCEF Southern Christian Education Fund    SNCC Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee     She established her place in these movements as a behind the scenes organizer and never sought leadership positions. Her philosophy about movement work involved training regular people to lead from the bottom up, as opposed to  
Post a Comment
Read more