Parable of the Sower - Octavia Butler

I do not like Lauren Olamina. There. I've finally said it.

Or, it's not that I don't like her but I have so many problems with her ideology and presentation of ideas that it was the number one thing I kept thinking about while reading Parable of the Sower.

I have never really read any sci-fi, but Butler and Le Guin have been people who I've been wanting to give a chance to break that cycle. I love watching it, that's for sure, but when I go to a text it's often a literary metafiction or nonfiction essay that I'll turn to if not obvious from the constant onslaught of post-colonials and coming of age.

In a lot of ways, Parable of the Sower is a tie-in to what I do love about the genres I do read - a dystopian near-future, where renegade individualism during a water crisis has made a desperate and violent divided people out of the entirety of the United States. Lauren grows up in this new America first in a walled neighborhood of forced self-preservationists and then (spoiler) following its demise due to ransacking murderous junkie arsonist vagrants, grows to live on the road as she journeys to an unknown future.

My own self-appointed ideology can find times where I match what she says. Take the probably most well-known Earthseed statement:

All that you touch you Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God Is Change.

I think this is, for the most part, both a unique and rad observation. We are beings not of our own self but one interconnected to the history of what comes before us and what will come after. We both are changed and change by our very existing. I like that. What I don't like, the latter half's demand that both change is truth and by that we can define this as an all powerful identification of our one reality. I've known many a change to be a lie or to not come from an all-knowing omniscience; or a reality that is not mine to have just as much God as mine. Not to be nihilistic or exhaustingly anti-spiritual, but edifying these as not examinations but declarations of being feel both self-interested and disengaged to the possibility of change itself. I dislike items that ascertain our world through definitions of finality.

Often in the book, Lauren is confronted on her ideology - one that comes within yet she at one point determines as "stumbling across the truth" instead of, what is challenged at her, making it up. I make up a ton of stuff, but I also, and like Butler and the characters who challenge Earthseed through the book, know that my ideas are not just of my own. She sounds clunky when she defends her ideas as her own only, and is put forth as originator instead of within a lineage of people trying to remark on existence and community. To me that's a big part of the being changed. It's why I read at all. To be changed. To learn from another's world.

I'm left not necessarily understanding if Butler had that intention of having her character be complicated - a little stubborn and conceited - or that Lauren is to be unchallenged for her ideas. Nothing seems to humor her through the book or show her greater introspection, particularly when her ideas' lofty-disconnect from the realities of everyone she meets do not mesh. They simply become a disciple. Ultimately it feels as though she incorporates them through her worldview rather than allowing them to change and learn from them.

Relatedly, I couldn't find solace in is the hyperempathy of her character. Pain yes is a thing that we experience on an individual level, but not only of the physical. At first, I turned to the books more reactionary or, honestly, conservative/junk science ideas as having been misappropriated in my world but I think she honestly has too much faith in these thoughts. Lauren is to me, continually judgmental of the world around her - the street poor scavengers, starving children turned cannibals, hyperviolent addicts, etc. I don't think she empathizes much with them, instead assigning them often these identities of lesser-than for their acts of desperation and chaos.

A large part of my ideology is that I do not need to import myself into someone else's situation. That I do not need to experience someone's struggle to know that I do not want them to struggle, to hurt, to fear. Liberal circles do this a lot, wherein instead of listening to the situation of someone and allowing them to serve the major voice, they attempt to place themselves in someone's shoes as the only way of truly understanding. That seems not just performative but invasive, colonizing. I do not believe that I must assume someone's identity to find solidarity with them and that expectation is to me ultimately dangerous; dehumanizing.

This has been a pretty critical writeup but for what it's worth I did enjoy a lot of Parable of the Sower, and did finish it for a reason. I maybe am thinking to a person who identified with Lauren without seeing these clear cracks in a non-altruistic teenager who grows in a accelerated dystopia akin to our world and has a lot of life yet to live before she may settle truly into having finalized her identifications of the world around her. That is an important part of her character as much as any of her more self-created insight. Interconnectedness is a large facet of understanding each other and the world we live in and I was left with these thoughts on it more than anything else after finishing the novel.