In the time that we have left, pt. 3

Octavia Butler is on the list

Sometimes, it takes an extraordinarily long preamble to get myself writing. That's why I bolded Octavia Butler's name above. To remind me, no matter how long it takes me to actually get to the point, when I do get there, I want to be focussing, however briefly, on Octavia Butler.

I've decided that I want to try and write everyday. And, as much as possible, I want to be writing the story of the Devolution Movement, real and/or imagined. But I'm going to have to be flexible about that everyday thing. I've never been a person who could pull that off. Nevertheless, in the broadest possible meaning of the term, I am a writer. I am a writer and I want to be a writer who writes. So, I've got to create a structure that helps me do that and I have to forgive myself when I don't.

But to facilitate both writing and forgiveness, I'm going to add interludes to the structure into which I'm trying to fit myself. That means that I am going to allow myself some days on which I write, but never, ever get to the point. I will call those writing fragments Interlude, as in "Interlude 1, " "Interlude 2," ad nauseam. Hopefully, there won't be too many such posts and quite a few more entries headed, "In the time that we have left..."

Anyway, Octavia Butler...

She saw so much coming in our shared future. She saw dystopia and she saw struggle. She called out white supremacy and she encouraged us to see that we are all hurtling into the same future and warned us not to deceive ourselves about the forces that would mobilize to maintain privilege and inequality.

Butler's book, The Parable of the Sower, was published in 1993. The book centers on the story of Lauren Olamina, a teenager who foresees a troubling future for herself and her tribe, and who conceives of a resilient and sacred community that seeks to bend the moral arc of the universe.

In an afterword to the book, Butler outlined the social, political, cultural and environmental conditions that shape the world we live in:

"...look where we are now, and...consider where some of our current behaviors and unattended problems might take us. I considered drugs and the effects of drugs on the children of drug addicts. I looked at the growing rich/poor gap, at throwaway labor, at our willingness to build and fill prisons, our reluctance to build and repair schools, and at our assault on the environment. In particular, I looked at global warming and the ways in which it is likely to change things for us...I considered spreading hunger as a reason for increased vulnerability to disease.  And there would be less money for inoculation or treatment. Also, thanks to rising temperatures, tropical diseases like malaria and dengue would move north. I considered the loss of coastline as the level of the sea rises. I imagined the United States becoming, slowly, through the combined effects of lack of foresight and short-term unenlightened self-interest, a third world country."

So, there we are. Olivia Butler's account of what she was thinking about when she wrote Parable of the Sower. That was 30 years ago. Butler was thinking about challenges that we are facing now years before they became even remotely visible to most of the rest of us. And though she wasn't quite saying that the change we need to undergo, if we are to survive the wrenching social and environmental dislocations ahead, must be a species-level change, she very nearly said something like that.

So, is Octavia Butler one of the prophets of the Devolution Movement?

Hell, yes.

In the time that we have left, pt. 2

 What work marks the early stages of a developing movement? Who does it? Are we already in the early stages? Whose work will history acknowledge?

How much or how little time should I spend figuring where exactly would I locate myself in the early history of this movement? Nowhere, probably. I've been in the peanut gallery for most of my adult life, doing whatever seemed most urgent at any given time. I certainly haven't been a thought leader in the nascent movement I wish to see gathering momentum. I haven't been an organizer or an activist. There were quite a few years when I mostly contented myself with emptying, then recycling beer bottles.

In any case, to calculate anyone's exact location in the multi-dimensional map of global movements begins, I suspect, with admitting that there has never before been a truly global movement. Unless, maybe, one supposes that the agricultural revolution was just such a movement. You know, the Agricultural Revolution, some 60-70,000 years ago? The one that made most of us farmers and pushed hunter-gatherers to the margins? Not a true movement, really. No hive brain at work there, either. But certainly an almost simultaneous global transformation. And, we would have to note that it's impossible to assess anyone's role in a transformation that began in prehistory, before there existed a single historian, or, even, a footprint thereof. Absent any model for assessing where anything actually starts or who started it, we probably need to begin developing some arbitrary criteria so that we can begin making a list of whoever might have made an early, and critical, contribution.

It's easy to imagine a reader arriving at this point in this post saying to themselves, or out loud to the universe, "what the hell are we talking about?" So, let's backtrack. This post is part two of an inquiry that began with yesterday's post. It is headed "in the time that we have left" because the earth is in jeopardy and almost all of the responsibility for that belongs to humans. We have so much to account for and no time for an accounting. The earth, the biosphere, the mass of all that lives and breathes and swims and flies and crawls is shrinking. The walls are closing in on us. If we and all the bio organisms around us are to survive what's coming in any remotely familiar form, we must become virtually unrecognizable to ourselves. We need to devolve.

And only a nearly universal consensus about the urgent need for human devolution will get the job done. So, again, what's the best next question? There must be nearly an infinity of possible answers to that question and I simply do not have the skill and ability to get to anything like a comprehensive answer to that question. Who does?

But I do keeping asking myself this question? Who are the pioneers who have/are/will catalyzing the movement in question? If there is already a list, who or what is on it? Again, a comprehensive answer would be one hell of a long list. But I say that no matter who qualifies for that list, one person who beyond any doubt belongs on that list is Octavia Butler. 

A Lesson from Everfair

Decisions of when to fight, and where to fight, and how to fight, are never automatic; however decisive and clear an unjust incident may be, why does the responsibility to respond always fall on the shoulders of those we think are the most aggrieved?

Nisi Shawl's Everfair, proposes an alternative outcome to the late-19th, early-20th century genocide in the Congo perpetrated by Belgian King Leopold on the way to thoroughly expropriating the valuable resources of that African land. Mark Twain, who wrote several polemics denouncing the genocidal Belgian attack on the Congo (including King Leopold's Soliloquy), believed that Leopold ranked as one of the most villainous figures in all of world history.

"In fourteen years Leopold has deliberately destroyed more lives than have suffered death on all the battlefields of this planet for the past thousand years. In this vast statement I am well within the mark, several millions of lives within the mark. It is curious that the most advanced and most enlightened century of all the centuries the sun has looked upon should have the ghastly distinction of having produced this moldy and peity-mouthing hypocrite, this bloody monster whose mate is not findable in human history anywhere, and whose personality will surely shame hell itself when he arrives there--which will be soon, let us hope and trust," Twain wrote in the post-humous Mark Twain in Eruption.

In Shawl's alternative history novel, a diverse collection of demographically distinct groups, including faith-based, back-to-Africa, American blacks, European socialists, and native Africans, unite and eventually establish their own free state on parts of the Congo wrested by force from Leopold. The book is full of singular characters, important resurrected history, and subtle moral lessons. I haven't yet reached the end of the book, but before I do, I'd like to highlight one of those lessons.

One of Shawl's major characters, Lisette Toutournier, is a bi-racial Frenchwoman. She is smart, passionate and apparently fearless, a set of characteristics that makes her appearance in the Congo as a dedicated opponent of Belgian colonialism unsurprising. As the resistance to Leopold grows and the utopian Everfair begins to take shape, Toutournier finds enough free time to pursue a number of love affairs.

At a critical point in their affair, one of her lovers, a white European woman who has come to occupy a revered position in Everfair's pantheon of heroes, cluelessly insults Lisette's racial heritage; an incident that leaves Lisette both speechless and unwilling to continue their affair. But though the affair has ended, Lisette's lover cannot begin to guess the reason why.

Perhaps, by the end of the story, Lisette will have shared the pain and anger that she felt at the moment her lover so casually and ignorantly derided one of the central aspects of her identity. Regardless, the reader knows that Lisette's lover, a respected leader of Everfair, is nevertheless a product of the racism of her time and place. The reader also knows that it is not possible for Lisette, however gifted and disciplined she may be, to address and remediate all insults and the racism that underlies them.

This brings us (or me, anyhow) to #blacklivesmatter and the growing refusal of African Americans and their allies to stand aside in the face of police brutality and police killings in black communities nationwide. Huge numbers of white Americans seem surprised by the growing militance, though both that surprise and the number of white people who pretend or allow themselves to be surprised seems to be diminishing in the face of the persistence of #blacklivesmatter, North Carolina's Moral Monday Movement, and similar local and national groups.

The surprise white folks seem to feel is a fundamental manifestation of white privilege, which is ultimately the privilege to ignore the realities of one's surrounding community, or country, or world. It is more than a little ironic that white folks, who have for generations reaped the benefits of exploiting the black community, seem to need those same people to do one more thing for them; to clarify with endless patience what racism is, how it permeates our society, and how it is manifested and sustained in feigned shock at acts of black resistance and rage.

That white folks need such remedial instruction from black folks is outrageous. Fundamentally outrageous. After all, African Americans live every day with insults and assaults simply because of their skin color, and must decide to ignore so many of those insults and assaults so that they might instead both live their lives and maintain their sanity. Who has time in the face of the daily demands of life and the tactical demands of resistance to racism to also scrub clean the souls of white folks? 

That Sisyphean tasks reminds me of a truth I stumbled upon some years ago when I first wondered how many times a gay friend of mine needed to come out in order to best take care of himself and to move forward in solidarity with comrades organizing to resist homophobia in all its manifestations. Eventually it became clear that the question of coming out to new people in new places was an endlessly repeating requirement that he was forced to reconsider under constantly changing conditions.

It struck me then and seems equally clear to me now that addressing homophobia and racism are not primarily the responsibility of gay men and lesbians and bisexuals and transgender people or of African Americans. Indeed, if we are to rid the world of racism and homophobia, the main responsibility for rooting out such scourges belongs to those who carry those diseases in their most virulent forms. Straight people and white folks.

Postscript: I cannot resist adding that Shawl dedicates her book to Octavia Butler, whose books offer many lessons that complement Everfair. I reviewed one of those books, Parable of the Sower, a few years ago. To fight back in Parable's dystopian world, which shares many characteristics with our own, Butler develops a tool, a new religious "faith that that has no supreme being, only a profound and Buddhalike understanding of the world that humans must embrace, sharp points and sharp edges, notwithstanding. 'All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change,' she writes. In other words, there is nothing for it but to live in the world, and to see oneself as both responsible for what the world becomes and subject to its conditions at any given time. People are most present in the world when they are growing and changing.

I have to say that with Everfair, Nisi Shawl establishes herself as Octavia Butler's spiritual heir.

Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower

I'm returning Parable of the Sower to the library today (DC Public)

but I don't want to do so without acknowledging just how effectively Butler is able to tell an optimistic story, while framing it within a dystopian future that seems only a degree or two off from the world we live in now. In a postscript to Parable of the Sower, Butler said she based her dystopic view of the future on what the United States seemed to be at the time (Sower was first published in 1993):

"It is to look at where we are now, and to consider where some of our current behaviors and unattended problems might take us. I considered drugs and the effects of drugs on the children of drug addicts. I looked at the growing rich/poor gap, at throwaway labor, at our willingness to build and fill prisons, our reluctance to build and repair schools and libraries, and at our assault on the environment. In particular, I looked at global warming and the ways in which it's likely to change things for us...I considered spreading hunger as a reason for increased vulnerability to disease. And there would be less money for inoculations or treatment. Also, thanks to rising temperatures, tropical diseases like malaria and dengue would move north. I considered loss of coastline as the level of the sea rises. I imagined the United States becoming, slowly, through the combined effects of lack of foresight and short-term unenlightened self-interest, a third world country."

But Butler's world, however crushing and grinding, is only background to her story of Lauren Olamina, a precocious, empathic, visionary teenager who leads a small group of fellow travelers out of harm's way and to a shared vision of the future that is motivating and optimistic. Just prior to a calamitous incident that will destroy the community in which she lives and scatter its survivors, Lauren begins a journal that will become the foundation document for Earthseed: The Books of the Living.

Essentially, Earthseed is a new holy book for a faith that has no supreme being, only a profound and Buddhalike understanding of the world that humans must embrace, sharp points and sharp edges, notwithstanding. "All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change." In other words, there is nothing for it but to live in the world, and to see oneself as both responsible for what the world becomes and subject to its conditions at any given time. People are most present in the world when they are growing and changing.

I assume that Butler was partly motivated to tell this particular story by a perception that the religious faiths and traditions people use to interpret the world and hold it at bay are part of the problem, one of the reasons why we do not effectively address problems like climate change, poverty and the gap between rich and poor. There are, after all, a great number of ways in which prevailing cultural beliefs and attitudes seem to hamper our ability to solve critical problems. The monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), in particular, seem to have created a mania in the West, and certain other parts of the world, for interpreting the modern world based on the experience of others, mostly men, mostly white and long dead, who would be even more baffled by modernity than we are; a riot of such folks, ranging from Moses, the prophets, Jesus and Mohammed, all the way to the Founding Fathers, whose inability to address and resolve the question of slavery would lead to a fratricidal war that would nearly destroy the United States less than 100 years after the country's founding.

In an ironic end to her story, Butler quotes a verse from the bible: "A sower went out to sow his seed; and as he sowed, some fell by the wayside;and it was trodden down and the fowls of the air devoured it. And some fell upon a rock; and as soon as it sprang up, it withered away because it lacked moisture. And some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprang up with it, and choked it. And others fell on the good ground, and sprang up, and bore fruit an hundredfold. (The Bible, Authorized King James Version, St. Luke 8:5-8)"

I've wanted to write a book something like Sower, myself, and have even outlined one (but not pursued it to completion); so when I read Butler's very effective go at the same problem, I feel a little bit awed and very aware of my weaknesses. All the more surprising then to discover that Butler's diagnosis of her own character bears some resemblance to my self-diagnosis: [I'm] an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty and drive."

Well, so what? Butler's combination seems to include a little bit more drive than mine, which turns out to reward me well.