blog — January 16

Excerpt: Introduction to “Parable of the Talents” by Octavia Butler

ALL THAT YOU TOUCH YOU CHANGE
BY TOSHI REAGON

Octavia E. Butler’s Parable novels—Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents—have become bibles for grassroots revolutionaries. They’ve become temples and gathering stones. Many folks have Earthseed or God Is Change as their religion on social media sites. The post-Parable generations of Black Sci-fi, Afrofuturistic Comic Book Nerd Kids, students, professors, and artists have taken pos- session of the mainstream idea of who gets to imagine and create a future on Earth and in the stars. Octavia Butler’s never-ending yet full of endings universe laid a foundation and held up that soulful spot upon which revolutionaries can stand.

It was very hard for me to read Parable of the Sower. My mother, Bernice Johnson Reagon, introduced Octavia Butler’s work to me in the late ’80s. I read Dawn first. Then Kindred. Then Wild Seed. And on and on until, one year around Christmas, I saw a new book on the shelves at the bookstore—Parable of the Sower. I bought two. One for me, and one for Mom. I wrapped Mom’s book and put it under the tree. When we opened our gifts, we had each given the other Parable of the Sower and purchased another copy for ourselves. Mom read hers right away. I read two pages and closed mine, thinking, Nope. Not now. I was not yet ready to face it.

In 1997 Mom and I taught a semester at Princeton University for Toni Morrison’s Atelier. We taught songs from the African American song tradition. Because we had to teach a text alongside the music, Mom suggested Parable of the Sower.

This was when I first read the book. This was when we learned we could sing this book, leading us on our journey to create Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower: The Opera.

Octavia Butler gets us back home again in Parable of the Sower.

After reading it I couldn’t imagine the need for anything else. A book that was so hard for me to read past the first page. It was a story that swallowed me up and told me it was true even though it was placed in the fiction section of the bookstore. True even though it took place in the future, a future thirty years away from the time I first read it. It moved my feet across a highway where feet are not supposed to travel. It took me along. It landed me home.

But I did need the something else that is Parable of the Talents.

Parable of the Talents is the part we don’t want to face. That denial trigger hits and hits and we act like we don’t know what to do, or how to do. All of sudden our skill and mastery duck deep inside us and we whisper, No. Not again. We are unable to count on or stand on our strength and knowledge.

Parable of the Talents says, “Stay here and watch the future look back at you.”

In looking at what narrative to tell for the opera, my mind kept traveling to this Parable. Here in the teen years of the twenty-first century, not so far away from the year 2024, when Parable of the Sower starts, we are, right now, at the beginning of Parable of the Talents. We are at the opening of that unimaginable, horrible era of human destruction—of each other, of the world—stated so clearly on the pages of both of these books that long after her death Octavia Butler is being praised as a predictor of our current events.

Octavia Butler the time traveler, the wall bender, the space explorer and community maker, the race builder. Sometimes she can be too literal for me, like the town oracle you go to sit in front of when you’re extra desperate. The town oracle who never lies, whose eyes won’t twinkle and let you see something else or let you think that maybe you heard wrong.

No, you heard right.

Parable of the Talents is delicious plain human speak. It is what you are actually working with. It is another map for anyone looking for where they are. It is unfolded in your lap and you can see yourself on it. You see the roads you have traveled and the ones you have yet to travel. You see the space where there was no road and you climbed over, under, and through wilderness. You see your good company and your alone places. You see your deserts and your too-much-rain places. You see the years roll on no matter what. You see your won- dering how far have you gone.

As you look, you trace scars on your own body where someone cut you, or you tripped running, or the earth burned or shuddered open and things fell on top of you while you covered others. You learn the geography on the map, practice memorizing routes. You forget where you buried things in the past and that’s okay—if you have an imagination.

If you believe in something beyond yourself.

If you know that you are a part of a changing universal narrative and that there is home on the journey, and rest for the weary.

If you are available to stand inside the ever-turning possibilities of breathing.

But if you are not, you might find yourself in a oneness of fear and hatred, only wanting and serving one thing. You might think you own the elements themselves and all other living creatures must bend to serve your narrow-minded vision of domination. You might look at the map and, as slave masters did centuries ago, think it is a plaything for your pleasure only. You will never learn.

Embrace diversity
Unite—
Or be robbed, ruled,
killed
By those who see you as prey. Embrace diversity
Or be destroyed.
—EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING