Parable of the Migrant
There are a number of reasons why you should make Octavia Butler's "Parable of the Sower" your beach read this summer, not least of which is that its story begins on July 20th, 2024.
This summer, if the conversation ever gets past the topic of Joe Biden’s age, we are destined to hear more and more about the crisis at the “southern border,” about the waves of “asylum seekers” that have been crashing over northern and southern cities alike, and about the “breaking”of services, everything from hospitals to schools, under the onslaught of people coming here seeking refuge and opportunity.
If you’re like me, you can read these stories and feel for these people, but nevertheless remain alienated from them and their plight. Yes, I have seen the young mothers on New York City’s subways and on Chicago’s streets hawking boxes of candy while carrying their children on their backs. I have seen the men in the parking lots of Lowes and Home Depot hoping for a day wage. But in US cities that have become inured to a mix of the mentally ill and drug addicted who make their homes on the street, it can be difficult to distinguish between those who are fleeing the collapse of their home countries and others who are escaping the collapse of themselves.
None of this was particularly top of mind for me when I decided to read, for the first time, Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel The Parable of the Sower. George Orwell’s 1984 was published in 1949, and it established the convention that whatever the “future” might hold, it would have to happen more than thirty years from the storyteller’s present. We are now thirty years on from the publication of Butler’s story, and as convention holds, her “future” is in fact this year: the first chapter of the novel is headed by a diary entry dated “Saturday, July 20, 2024.” And if the future Butler’s story foretells is one that isn’t readily recognizable to those of us living comfortably in cities such as New York, or Chicago, or Los Angeles (where Sower is initially set), it’s ultimately a story of migration away from such places, which means its future is very much the present for many of those people who we are seeing and hearing and reading so much about, but who nevertheless feel very far away.
Sower is for sure “dystopian,” and mostly pessimistic. (Butler apparently broke off turning the work into a full trilogy because she felt it was too dark.) Set in Los Angeles, and then on the highways heading to northern California, Sower is a survivalist set piece whose lesson is nothing so much as: “be prepared for the worst, by expecting it of the world, and others.” That lesson is taught by Lauren Oly Olamina, who is a teenager throughout the story, 15 at the start and 18 by its end. Critics have called it a “coming-of-age” tale, but in truth Lauren’s sense and sensibility are fully formed by the first chapters. Shaped as diary entries headed by bits of verse that make up Lauren’s budding idea of “Earthseed,” a quasi belief system that enshrines “change” as God and with a destiny to “take root in the stars” (the only optimistic note ever struck in the book), those chapters don’t reveal Lauren to us so much as they reveal what it takes for her, for anyone, to survive the future.
As Butler imagined it, that future -- today -- would be one of social decay fueled by extremes of inequality. Los Angeles has devolved to a lawless wasteland spotted with walled compounds where the rich, or merely lucky, role-play a civilized existence. Civic services, such as police and fire departments, are privatized, if not corporatized. Company towns offer security in exchange for debt peonage. Poverty and drugs fuel desperation at scale. Other people, in this Hobbesian declension, are hell. Welcome to California.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Butler’s Los Angeles was a city actually -- or actually perceived to be -- on the brink. The gangland war between the Crips and Bloods in “South Central'' reached such prominence that it was enshrined as entertainment for the rest of America by Dennis Hopper’s Colors (1988). That same year Mike Davis began writing City of Quartz (1990), his searing history of how LA had reached what he believed to be its nadir -- a harbinger for the rest of the country. Reflecting on that effort in 2006, the same year Butler died, Davis wrote, “every eleven-year-old in the city knew that an explosion of some kind was coming. In a city tragically full of armed and angry teenagers, LAPD Chief Daryl Gates’s ‘Operation Hammer’ – with its Vietnam-like neighborhood sweeps and indiscriminate nightly harassment – was universally viewed as a deliberate provocation to riot.” Those LAPD officers revealed themselves to be members of a gang that was first among equals when they were caught on video beating a defenseless Rodney King in 1991. When those same officers were acquitted at trial the following year, the hammer sparked and the city burned. All of which is to say Butler was far from alone in her dim view of LA.
So if the speculative setting of Sower wasn’t that speculative after all, what gives the book its SF bonafides? Two plot devices: Lauren is beset with “hyperempathy,” meaning she feels other people’s feelings when she sees them feeling them. She calls this “sharing.” What proves to be the one true curiosity of Sower is that this condition’s full implications are never explored beyond the idea that hyperempathy renders Lauren supremely vulnerable to acts of violence, especially those that don’t end, quickly, in death. There’s a moral sharpness to this conceit. How does or must one act when others feelings can be felt, not just sensed? But that edge gets dulled against the grinding survivalism that is the main driver of the plot. In any potentially violent confrontation Lauren must kill. To be merciful, to merely injure or incapacitate, say, would do the same to Lauren, and the other “sharers” who join her, placing her and her fellow travelers at risk. In this hyperempathy is a mirror of the brutal outside world, the desolated landscape of desperate acts: it demands that one be a killer, a curious and little-remarked upon status for the founder, and foundation, of a new religion.
The other device is “Pyro,” an addictive drug that makes people want to start fires and watch them, the experience being an ecstatic one – “better than sex,” Lauren explains to a friend. For a near future when water has become even more exceedingly scarce, what better plot accelerant could there be. From the beginning, when Lauren is 15, she knows, and thus so do we, that the walled community in which she was raised will come to an end. The outside will get in, and it will be fire that opens the door.
Lauren, unlike most in her community who live in a state of grim denial, is prepared when it does. She has a go bag. She knows where the money is buried. She knows how to use a gun. The inevitable arrives, and then, for second half of her story, Lauren is on the move, first alone, and then gradually with a group that grows, both out of circumstance and necessity. (I have to admit that reading Sower, even in the relative calm of LA in 2024, made me want to sign up for advanced firearms training, a wilderness first-responder course, and survivalist camp.)
It is here that Butler gives us a glimpse of what it might be like to be a migrant. Lauren and her companions walk from Los Angeles to the coast of Humboldt County, upwards of 700 miles, in search of safety and some semblance of security. On the road, everything and everyone is a threat. Keeping watch at night, lest one be robbed or killed, is a constant plot point, and a tense one at that. Solo travelers are easy prey, as are pairs, who can only cover their camps from one direction. Groups of three and four are better, but the dynamics of trust -- probably the one word that could describe what Sower in the end is “about” -- become infinitely trickier. And larger groups attract too much attention. Bigger may seem safer, but it’s also a more obvious target. There’s more to steal, more confusion to sow.
Butler’s honesty about human nature and human behavior is what gives the novel the realism that is a hallmark of the best fiction, be it speculative or not. Women and children are not just or only victims, they are also liars, thieves, and killers. As migrants, the characters have no illusions about what it takes to survive. A pair of travelers met on the road, far from the city, will have had to steal or hurt or kill. No one is innocent, but everyone can be understood, and some may be forgiven.
Nearly everyone. It’s worth pointing out here that race in Sower is only merely and minimally descriptive. We know who is black (Lauren) and who is white, Hispanic, mixed, etc. But these ascriptive traits are irrelevant to the characters’ histories or to the plot. To push this point home, the closest thing to true evil, those people who are beyond understanding but perhaps not beyond forgiveness, are the “pyro addicts,” described as “bald people with painted heads, faces, and hands. Red faces; blue faces; green faces; screaming mouths; avid, crazy eyes, glittering in the firelight.” In other words, they are deracinated and artificially colored beings that are something other than, or less than, human – a natural force (fire) that has been artificially unleashed (arson).
Critics who want to read Butler’s works as allegories of race relations or enlist them as propaganda tools for (almost always Left) political programs will always miss what’s there on the page. As some critics have written, Sower could be newly relevant as a parable of the first, or even a second, Trump administration, with all its intimations of racist and xenophobic fascism. There is a presidential election, yes, and a populist figure by the name of Christopher Donner wins. But talk of Donner and his policies occupies at most five or six pages of the book, and the damage to society is so obviously done long before Donner comes to office, and the effects of his administration’s policies are so tenuously and even then ambivalently linked to the conditions Lauren and her companions experience on the road, that it’s only the most wishful and blinkered reading of Butler’s work that could possibly enlist it as partisan political allegory.
What these and similar readings cannot but miss is that Sower’s politics, even its moral landscape, are ambivalent, complicated, and so very very human. Butler notably gets to most of the places that Cormac McCarthy would revisit in his masterwork The Road (2006), another novel about desperate migrants traversing even more desperate landscapes. McCarthy’s achievement was to have distilled that experience down to a fundamental but often fleeting moral obligation that an adult has to protect and preserve the life of a child. Depressingly, discomfitingly, not every adult will feel this obligation, particularly when pushed to the edge of their animal selves. What is good and what is bad in McCarthy’s universe breaks across this line. There is an us and a them. It is only at the close of the book when the composition of who is “us” is given to change, and then only after a sacrifice. “Them” remain the same.
The Butler of Sower wasn’t interested in such distillations, in such binaries, nor in the same poetic pretensions. Sower is nothing if not vision of how migration requires one to, at turns, cashier and keep those moral obligations. Who is good and who is bad is subject to continual revision. The only God held up for worship is “change.” Destiny is migration – to the north, to the border, to the stars. It’s the closest I think one can come to gaining even a glancing understanding of what it must be like to trek hundreds of miles in search of some little sense of security, but with no promise of it, and always with the flames never far behind.