We the Laurens: In honor of Octavia Butler, on her birthday
I read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower over a winter break in 2017, at the suggestion of someone who has guided so much of my journey into racial equity and deepening awareness, Heidi Lopez. The text of Butler’s science fiction novel follows a young woman named Lauren Olamina living in a version of the United States that feels only a few years away from present day. The United States has accepted the rule of a far-right Christian figure head, not unlike Trump, who promises security in exchange for people’s basic freedom. The U.S. social system has collapsed due to climate change-induced disasters like droughts and super-tornados. Diseases that we thought eradicated from North America return and addicts to a drug that makes them desire fire start to burn communities across the country. Slavery has returned in the guise of company towns.
Lauren lives her life with awareness of the dangers of the outside world while her father, the community spiritual leader, fails to prepare for the breach of their neighborhood’s walls. When this does happen, Lauren is sent out into the dangerous outside world where she journeys to form her own community using the tenets of a religion she created and called Earthseed. One of the biggest lessons of Earthseed, perhaps adapted from the scientific complexity theory that was emerging during the writing go the novel, is that God is Change. In a world awash with violence and insecurity, Earthseed offers purpose and hope of a better future beyond planet earth.
Parable was the first science fiction text that I read where a young black woman took leadership to build her own world. I have read slave narratives of survival and resilience, but not those where protagonists are literally tasked with creating a world anew. Parable and Earthseed infiltrated into my consciousness, setting it ablaze with two questions: “What if?” And “How are you preparing?”
What if the United States further becomes the world of Parable?
What if you must defend yourself and your people against those who will murder you?
Who, besides your blood kin, are your people?
What if the life you lead now is the training grounds for the future that you must build?
How will you prepare to live without clean water, without reliable food sources and without the institutions that secure your life?
My year of study into Earthseed and into the worlds that Butler has created, has led me to conclude that the project of our lives, the project that we must cling to ferociously, is to be as abundantly creative as Lauren Olamina (and by extension, Octavia Butler).
Our work is to build our own worlds, rituals and traditions that support a vision and uphold values that allow the human race to be otherwise. At the moment for me this simply means a vision in which we reject capitalism and enter into a right relationship with other members of our species, with the planet and with our fellow companions, species that are not human, yet as sentient and important to our survival.
We, the Lauren Olaminas of the world, are young black and brown women who reject a vision of the world in which humans continue to lead existences that do not allow our thriving or fulfilling our potential as a species. We, the Laurens, refuse to let heterosexist patriarchy control the ways in which we are able to love, create families, reproduce or heal from the traumas of insufficiency that keep capitalism running. We, the Laurens, understand the value of each human being and see the earth, the sky, the rivers, the oceans, the animals of this planet not as resources, but as travel companions on an infinite journey. We are not alone, as something of Lauren Olamina lives within all of us.
We the Laurens respect the right to inclusivity of all forms of difference that make our species unique.
We the Laurens protect human and non/human life.
We the Laurens refuse to let life become commodified.
We the Laurens are survivors, farmers, seed-keepers, water protectors, healers and environmentalists.
We the Laurens are preparing for futures without the police, universities or borders.
We the Laurens are skilled world-makers who practiced first with re-making ourselves.
This last piece is crucial and brings to mind two key points: First, our labor on this road of becoming is to see the political and social battles of the contemporary moment as the space where we flex our muscles and put into practice the beliefs and values we carry forth into new worlds that are not marked or scared by structural violence.
There are countless examples of the ways in which every contemporary social justice battle, from the fight against white supremacy through Black Lives Matter, to the desire to protect indigenous lands all over the planet, may be understood as battles for both the health of our planet and the survival of the human race. As Laurens, it is our job to re-articulate these battles in ways that transcend the in-group boundaries that have historically defined our species’ ability for cooperation. Those dispersed, whether through the slave trade, forced migration, or refugee status, already have a head start in this and other forms of boundary-crossing thinking, theorizing and acting.
For example, a key aspect of Earthseed is that “God is Change.” Being an anthropologist in training, I understand the humans species as more than the sum of its parts: We are a collective that is more than different ethno-racial or cultural groups. My labor, intellectual and activist, is to understand the role that the philosophy that God is Change can play for humans as a species. This involves understanding the ways humans, in particular the most oppressed in our species, have historically mid-wifed change as an act of survival. The way we change and adapt in contemporary collectives and movements can be scaled up at a planetary level. At the same time, we are tasked with the labor of translating and world-building when we make tangible, possible and material ideas that appear too far fetched to ever work.
Case in point: In light of the crisis at the U.S. and European borders, how do we even begin to think the mechanics of a borderless world? How do we make that world attractive as a modality for our entire species? We must become, in the words of adrienne maree brown, adaptive. We must make delicious and available the possibility that we can be different, the hope that we can live otherwise in order to actually survive the clear ends that are coming.Whether those ends are the ends of lifeways, which colonialism and imperialism have facilitated, or eco-systems, which climate change is speeding up, or the belief in the possibility that we can survive outside of capitalism (which the demise of socialist experiments in China, Cuba and Venezuela are demonstrating), we are living in an era of ends.
If it all ended tomorrow, I want to believe that we would have done all that we could to prepare, that we would have lived life with the steadfast belief, the orientation towards action and the deep instinct to survive that Lauren Olamina, and Octavia Butler, teach us.
To learn more about the work and worlds of Octavia Butler, see the following:
The work of adrienne maree brown: http://adriennemareebrown.net
How to Survive the End of the World Podcast by the Brown sisters
Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements
The Annual Allied Media Conference in Detroit, MI.
On Afro-Futurism:
C.Michelle’s List of Afro-Futurism Texts
For complimentary academic writings on this subject, see the wonderful works of the humanist Sylvia Wynter.
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