I was first introduced to Octavia Butler in a writing class at San Francisco State University. We read a selection from one of her books, just enough to make me wonder, who is this black woman, one of the first to get recognition in science- fiction? The next time I met her was during the height of the pandemic in March 2021 when I drove to Gualala, California just to get away from the news and hear the Pacific Ocean.
I gave myself five days, and on the fourth, drove to Point Arena where the fences were decorated with abalone shells. I drove through the downtown area, no more than three city blocks with the requisite coffee and pizza shops and bookstore, where I found her. To my disappointment, the bookstore like most everything else was closed, but in the window was posted a quote from Butler’s book, Parable of the Sower:
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.
I stood before that door and cried, overcome with my fears of a virus sweeping the world, causing ICUs and morgues to overflow, forcing the world to come to a standstill. I returned to the Bay Area with the sound of the waves and Octavia Butler’s writing, and went on to read one of her books with my young students.
But the next time I came face-to-face with Butler was at the Oakland Museum’s exhibit on Afro-Futurism where black artists, photographers, musicians and writers envision a different more humane world. Rather than expressing change in negative terms, what it could not look like or be, it was an expression and a manifestation of what change could look like and be.
I’m now reading Parable of the Sower. As a Jewish person who has struggled with not knowing my ancestors, many of whom died in the smolder of World War II, and struck the living dumb, too traumatized to speak about the past, I hear echoes of Anne Frank in Butler’s young narrator, Lauren Oya Olamina.
Parable of the Sower is written as a diary by young Lauren who lives in a crowded cul de sac surrounded by a wall. People are killing each other, stealing, and going crazy is this post-apocalyptic world. Lauren suffers from hyperempathy, a debilitating sensitivity to the emotion of others. She has feelings for a boy, but turns away, thinking it will only lead to babies and poverty and a worsening situation. Lauren wants to survive, but despite the horror of her world, she has a belief in people and herself.