While browsing Instagram the other day, I came across a post from Sonya Renee Taylor, author of The Body Is Not An Apology: The Power of Radical Self Love, that called out the collective longing to return to our normal state for what it is: a longing to return to a world that “normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack.” She goes on to say that we “are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.” Whether the full extent of how is apparent yet, there’s no denying that we are in the midst of great societal change and upheaval. And with change comes the opportunity to shape not just the outcome, but also the change itself. As one of our greatest writers commands in her novel Parable of the Talents, “Seize change. Use it. Adapt and grow.”
There are many other lessons to be taken from the Earthseed books by Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower and The Parable of the Talents. Set in an apocalyptic United States that’s all too real, one woman seeks a different way to not just survive, but also to live. She is guided by the radical belief that “All that you touch, you Change. All that you Change, Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change.” I’ve come back to these novels over the years, astonished at their prescience for the world to come (they were first published in the 1990s, recently reissued by Grand Central Publishing, with a forward by N.K. Jemisin). I also come back to them for their sense of hope that a different future is possible.
Inspired directly by the Earthseed novels, Adrienne Marie Brown wrote Emergent Strategies: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds to put into practice Earthseed philosophy. She also edited Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good and Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. Brown recently came to the Seattle Public Library for an evening of conversation.
This moment in history is not just about survival; it is about our future too. Find stories of hope and grassroots, community-based creative strategies to repair, heal, and transform our societies in Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories From the Transformative Justice Movement. As we take a moment to collectively look at ourselves and our world in this strange, unsettling, and terrifying time, we must remember that we are powerful together and that we can create and shape change, individually as well as collectively. Whether it’s for better or worse is entirely up to us.
To learn more about Octavia Butler, here are two SPL podcasts to listen to: One celebrating her legacy from 2015, and the other, from 2007, is a tribute to her by the extraordinary science fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson.
~posted by Veronica H.
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