The novel “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia Butler begins in the year 2024 — in a world where democracy is at stake, a climate crisis rages, and extremist politicians are on the rise. Octavia Butler published her book in 1993. So … how did she predict the future? And what can her writing teach us about the world we live in today? Octavia Butler scholar Dr. Ayana Jamieson joins the show to help Errin answer these questions – and more.
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On today’s episode
Our host
Errin Haines is The 19th’s editor-at-large and writer of The Amendment newsletter. An award-winning journalist with nearly two decades of experience, Errin was previously a national writer on race for the Associated Press. She’s also worked at the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.
Follow Errin on Instagram @emarvelous and X @errinhaines.
Today’s guest
Ayana Jamieson is an educator, mythologist, and depth psychologist. She is the founder of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network, a global community founded in 2011, committed to highlighting Octavia Butler’s life and work while creating new works inspired by Butler’s legacy. Ayana’s essay, “Far Beyond the Stars” contains methods for curating your own archive and appears in the Black Futures anthology edited by Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham (One World).
Follow Ayana on Instagram @ayanajamieson.
Episode transcript
The Amendment podcast transcripts are automatically generated by a third-party website and may contain typos or other errors. Please consider the official record for The Amendment podcast to be the audio publicly available wherever you listen to podcasts.
Dr. Ayana Jamieson:
We’ve identified Afrofuturism as like Black folks — past, present, and future — sort of cyclically interconnected. And I think Butler’s conception was even more clean, right?
She’s like, “What is the history of the future? How do we wanna map that out? And how will we be agents in mapping the future that does the least amount of harm? And what will happen if we don’t take on that stewardship seriously?”
Errin:
Like this may be some people’s future, but it’s also other people’s present.
Hey y’all, and welcome to The Amendment, a weekly conversation about gender, politics, and power from the 19th News and Wonder Media Network. I’m your host, Errin Haines. Okay, cue the mind blown emoji: 31 years ago, Octavia Butler published a “Parable of the Sower.” It was a dystopian, futuristic book that I first read years ago, and I really hadn’t picked it up again since. But the universe led me to recently reread it, and imagine my complete shock when I remember that the book starts on July 20, 2024. Yes, 2024. The year that we are in right now. Mind blown emoji, like I said. So let me tell you, I was on a journey all over again, and I was just so struck by how much Octavia Butler got right. And I just immediately thought, “Okay, we have to talk about this on the podcast.”
Errin:
So Amendment book club, loading. Now, for those of you who are not familiar, “Parable of the Sower” is set in an America where democracy is crumbling, extremist politicians are taking over the country, low-income people are being conscripted into what is essentially modern day slavery, climate crisis causing food and water shortages. Is any of this sounding familiar yet? The main character of the book is a young queen — a Black girl named Lauren Olamina, who lives in a small gated community with her family. And, at first, she’s protected from the outside world. But eventually — spoiler alert — she has to set out on her own, defending herself, starting a new community based on a religion that she started called Earthseed. “Parable of the Sower” has been a deeply influential book for so many people, and there are so many things about this book that really feel pretty relevant today. For me, also, just kind of seeing this 15-year-old girl with so much agency, who was so smart and who was such a badass. I mean, look, I’m not saying I was Lauren Olamina at that age, but I’m not saying I wasn’t. Anyway, I digress. I wanted to talk to Dr. Ayana Jamieson, a professor at Cal Poly Pomona and founder of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network. She’s been reading and thinking about Octavia Butler for a long time, so I am really, really excited to get into “Parable of the Sower” with her. Welcome, Ayana.
Dr. Jamieson:
Hey, Errin.
Errin:
I wanna start with a little level-setting for people who are not familiar with “Parable” and Octavia Butler’s work and legacy more generally. Tell us a little bit about who Octavia Butler was, what she was interested in about writing and exploring.
Dr. Jamieson:
Sure. So, Octavia Butler was a person who grew up in Jim Crow, California. She was born in 1947 in Pasadena, California, and while it was a diverse environment in many ways, it was a quintessential, sort-of mixed-use space, meaning some of the areas were sundown towns, like some streets you could not, you know, drive north of this area. You had to have, you know, papers to be there. So she remembers what California was like when we first started having, you know, racism without racist.
Errin:
Huh
Dr. Jamison:
So that’s one thing, right? So she was alive through the governorship of Ronald Reagan, for example. Um, and she was a child who had a mother who was a maid. So she grew up witnessing her mother cleaning houses and going into back doors. And she had a very unique perspective as a child who was big for her age, was very shy and introverted, but also very, very creative and telling herself stories and then eventually writing them down because she didn’t wanna forget them. And then even as a young child, starting to type them up and send them out to publishers to get published as a child, even though she herself said she had never read another person — another word written by a Black person — she still had the audacity, like Lauren Oya Olamina to envision something larger than having a job where you sit down or where you work inside, right?
Errin:
I mean, the world of science-fiction, even, was not a world that she knew Black people to be operating in. Like, just seems to me the real epitome of Black girl — Black woman — imagination, you know? It ended up serving her. She realized fairly early that she wanted to be a writer, and that she wanted to write about, uh, to tell these kinds of stories, in particular, that that really were an escape from a lot of the circumstances that you were describing.
Dr. Jamieson:
Yes and no. I think she realized that those material conditions were ones that a lot of other people experienced. And so, I love to think about her as writing from a working class perspective.
Errin:
Yes.
Dr. Jamieson:
As a person who regards, like, nature and animals as not being subservient to us, you know, recognizing, like when they took her to the zoo in elementary school, she’s like, “Why are these sentient beings caged up?”
Errin:
Mm-Hmm.
Dr. Jamieson:
And how do we create, you know, cages and categories around race and gender and class? So I think she was writing those things into her stories. She said science fiction was a field that was wide open, that there were no closed doors. So, you know, she’s really what she called, like, writing herself in — like writing herself in to a genre that ignored her and ignored people with her gender. and ignored people with her race, or painted women and, marginalized people as docile or without intelligence.
Errin:
Yes.
Dr. Jamieson:
So she is not only writing for her own self-development and her own psychology and wholeness, I think, but also she’s giving these folks a read at the same time and putting the genre on notice so that she couldn’t be ignored.
Errin:
I mean, there were so many parts that were getting different for me in 2024 rereading this book. I’m wondering what parts of “Parable” really felt most strikingly similar to the political landscape that we find ourselves in?
Dr. Jamieson:
That we found ourselves into. I know that was an LOL sob emoji, if that exists.
Errin:
It does.
Dr. Jamieson:
Because, yes, because I feel like we got too many of the problems that she was speculating about 30 years ago. We reached them like maybe 20 years ago, right? There are many things, like when I think about Lauren and the text, I think about how she lived in a, like, regular neighborhood, and you were saying she was in a gated community, but I wanna describe for our readers some details about the book.
Dr. Jamieson:
So she’s basically…she lives on a cul-de-sac. So it’s not really a gated community. Like, in California, we have places that give themselves their own names because they don’t wanna be associated with the rest of us. Like it’ll be somewhere in Orange County, but they give their like gated housing development, the name like “Coto de Caza” or “Rancho Santa Margarita” or some other foolishness, right? Or “Phillips Ranch” instead of Pomona, et cetera, et cetera. Um, and so for her, it’s not this fancy thing with, like, a guard. It’s literally, like, a gate that they’ve erected in the neighborhood that they—
Errin:
For protection.
Dr. Jamieson:
—Yes! On the cul-de-sac. Because in the novel, there are no more public schools, and there are, uh.. this novel comes out of a particular piece of California legislation where it would have barred undocumented people from accessing public education, healthcare and other services.
Dr. Jamieson:
So Butler thought, like, “Oh, we’re really trying to pass this law to disenfranchise and exclude people? Okay. You want a whole bunch of sick, uneducated people roaming the streets? We’ll see about that.”
Errin:
Yeah.
Dr. Jamieson:
And that’s exactly what happens because the people living outside the cul-de-sac — outside the wall — are, like, you know, the walking poor. And they don’t have a shelter. They don’t have access to clean water, they don’t have garden space to grow things that you can no longer get in the grocery store and the Walmart. It’s not Walmart, it’s called something else. But when, eventually, the walls in Lauren’s community are broken down by drug addicts, and when this happens, Lauren Olamina is one of the only people who’s like, “You know what? We’re not going back to the good old days.”
Errin:
No.
Dr. Jamieson:
When we were just messing everything up. We need to prepare for if we are on the outside of the wall. And when she told her friend Joanne this…
Errin:
…Joanne wasn’t ready to hear it, and she rejected it, and she felt threatened by the truth that Lauren was trying to, I mean, she was trying to help her, you know? She was trying to free her, right? Liberate her.
Dr. Jamieson:
Well, she was trying to prepare her for a time…
Errin:
Yeah.
Dr. Jamieson:
…Different from what they were experiencing. So she shares some books about, like, survivalism and saving seeds and filtering water and other useful survival things to her friend Joanne. And Joanne, like, goes to tell her parents, I think. And then Joanne’s parents tell her father, and of course we haven’t said yet, but, Lauren Olamina, she has this recurring nightmare where she knows that her soul is basically on fire and that she cannot continue to be the preacher’s kid. Her father is Reverend Olamina, and they hold church services in their living room as well as school services. Her father and her father’s wife, they’re both professors, and they, like, teach remotely online, which did not exist in 1993. And then they bicycle into the university
Errin:
But it existed already in Octavia Butler’s fantasy 2024, right? I mean, like, look, okay, Octavia Butler did not have a crystal ball. Let me just, you know, put that out there for people. I mean. She still was basically predicting the future. Like, what was she studying, what was she researching? And why it feels like studying the past and paying attention to the present can allow us to see into the future, right?
Dr. Jamieson:
Well, it can better prepare us for the changes that will inevitably arise in the future. Because change, it’s not like a thing that happens. It’s an archetype that exists as a constant, right?
Errin:
Yes.
Dr. Jamieson:
It’s an archetype, a way, a state of being, a pattern.
Errin:
Yes.
Dr. Jamieson:
An organizing pattern in the universe that is the highest amount of order in the Earthseed belief system, right? So in the Earthseed belief system, God is changed. God has a capital G, but we’re not talking about the God of Abraham. That was Lauren’s Reverend Olamina’s God. It’s the God of change. And it’s like you cannot pray for change or against it, but you can basically, sort of, meditate on the fact that change is gonna come and how are you going to be shaped by change? And how are you, in turn, going to shape change? And you can make choices. And it’s not, I wanna say, it’s not only about the future, and it’s not about the past, it’s also about what people are doing in the present.
Errin:
Mm-Hmm.
Dr. Jamieson:
This is what we need to be asking ourselves: Who’s already experiencing apocalypse right now? Because somebody is, right? Even for us to use the technology, like, how much oppression went into the building of the technology in order for us to have mobile phones and internet, et cetera? So we have to always be asking those questions.
Errin:
Like this may be some people’s future, but it’s also other people’s present.
Dr. Jamieson:
Yes. And also there’s this food in the book, and it’s, um, acorn bread.
Errin:
Yes.
Dr. Jamieson:
And, um, anyone who is indigenous to any place knows that basically whatever falls off of the tree outside of where you are, that’s a thing that’s often gonna be a stable food for what you use in your environment, even though maybe American people are not necessarily thinking about native plants as much, right? We have lots of acorns that are just outside on the ground. So instead of being like, “Oh, here are all these acorns to sweep up,” in Lauren’s view, her mother — whose name is, Corazón, right? Cory, for short — she makes acorn bread out of these acorns that are just on the ground outside. So it’s use what you have that’s around you. How do you shape change? They cannot go to the store and buy King Arthur’s flour. There’s no store, there’s no flour, there are no large-scale agribusiness farms. Those things are not accessible to a regular…
Errin:
Very far away from that neighborhood, from that world that she’s in. And it’s not safe to leave and to go beyond the gates, right?
Dr. Jamieson:
Right.
Errin:
They can’t go very far, yeah.
Dr. Jamieson:
They can’t go very far. And they’re going on a bicycle. And also, one controversial thing that really hearkens back to the civil rights movement is that, you said, what was Butler studying? One of the things Butler was studying was firearms. We see a very early scene in the book where they’re leaving on bike to go get baptized, even though Lauren is like, “I know that this is not what my spirit wants, but I’m gonna go along to get along.” And they had been trained to use firearms, and they saw a lot of suffering along the way…
Errin:
Yes.
Dr. Jamieson:
…When they were on route. Like, the stakes are super high, but this is the reality that people are actually living today.
Errin:
I mean, we talked about this a little bit already, but I mean, Octavia Butler was this Black woman in science fiction.You talked about her lived experience that she brings to this work. It’s a space dominated by White men authors. What else would you say is really just unique about how she specifically imagined the future and the power of a Black woman who is putting that lens on the future?
Dr. Jamieson:
Well, I just think it’s definitely from a womanist perspective, right? And that she claimed to be a feminist, and she was outspoken about it, right? She thought about all of us having autonomy and being in community with one another and being reliant and interdependent rather than this thing which she called in one of her novels, Like, the human contradiction, which is like humanity’s conflict between being highly intelligent beings, but also being competitive and basically getting into the position to one-up ourselves to death many times over. So she was like saying humanity was in its adolescence, and that we still had a chance to grow out of that self-centered, underdeveloped sort of state of being in which human beings are the center of everything. She really decentralized that in ways that I think people are uncomfortable with. And so I think, like, what she called herself — before even the term Afrofuturist was coined — was a histo futurist.
Dr. Jamieson:
And she said something to the effect of, “A histo futurist is a person who imagines the historical past and present with the technological past and present,” like the human element of those things. And I guess we’ve identified Afrofuturism as like Black folks — past, present, and future — sort of cyclically, interconnected. And I think Butler’s conception was even more clean, right?
Errin:
Mm-Hmm.
Dr. Jamieson:
She’s like, “What is the history of the future? How do we wanna map that out? And how will we be agents in mapping the future that does the least amount of harm? And what will happen if we don’t take on that stewardship seriously?” I think it’s a really great question to continue to ask ourselves all the time.
Errin:
It’s so rare that Black girls are cast as heroines, right? Especially in sci-fi stories. What do you think are like the most interesting parts of Lauren’s perspective? Like how her vantage point influences how she sees the world that she lives in?
Dr. Jamieson:
Well, I think she understands that there’s a hierarchy.
Errin:
Even at 15. She sees it, she understands.
Dr. Jamieson:
Right? I mean, Lauren was born in 2009, right? So think about the kids that were born in 2009, 2010, and what they’ve experienced knowing about…
Errin:
Oh my God.
Dr. Jamieson:
The death toll and fires
Errin:
You’re unlocking a new level for me. What would a child that grew up in those years…they would be wiser than your normal 15-year-old, right?
Dr. Jamieson:
Right.
Errin:
They’ve seen a lot.
Dr. Jamieson:
Well, think about the children that are coming up now. Think about the Parkland survivors.
Errin:
Yes.
Dr. Jamieson:
And people’s responses to, like, Uvalde, right? Or even the Tennessee Three getting rejected. Like, these are things that can happen now because of the children that exist, because they hold us accountable for continuing to go and be consumers. Like, “Let’s just go buy something else. Let’s order something from Amazon to get delivered.” And these kids are like, “No, uh, I’m not going to eat meat because I know how much beef uses and trashes the environment, so therefore I decide that I’m not gonna do it.” I think these kids are built different because they have experienced things that we could not even conceive of.
Dr. Jamieson:
And I think that’s also what’s different about so-called kids now, right? Is they know it’s not just them, but…
Errin:
And they have to trust each other, and they understand that they all need each other. I mean, her central philosophy, the Earthseed philosophy, you know: God is changed. I’m listening to you talk and I’m wondering a couple of things: What you think activists and our politics today can learn from that philosophy, but also Lauren’s kind of evolution and learning. And as she’s gathering this community to her on this journey, what that teaches us about finding hope in the midst of society breaking down.
Dr. Jamieson:
I think Butler felt maybe the same way about people and the environment as Lauren does, in that you can’t just cancel people and throw them away. It’s like, throw it away where? The world is round. So, even when someone is not perfect or doing the perfect thing, there has to be a process of reintegrating them back into the community. So I think that’s kind of a restorative justice model in a way.
Errin:
Mm-Hmm.
Dr. Jamieson:
And “hero” is an archetype that we have in this culture. And people think it’s like Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, you know, cutting people down and indiscriminately killing people, and everyone else is an accessory to their desires and imaginations. That’s like most of Western film, right? And I think what Butler sees as a way forward – the other part of that verse — it’s “All that you touch, you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.” And so anyone who wants to maintain the status quo, even when it’s not working for everyone, they’re going to suffer the consequences of their inaction and inability to accept change. And I think that’s what we are experiencing in this political moment.
Errin:
Yes, yes, yes. Exactly. And even the heroine in this case is a sower, right? Somebody who is committed to this new growth. So yeah, I mean, continuing with your point, how do we identify sowers in our politics today?
Dr. Jamieson:
Oh, that’s an excellent question, man. I think, I mean, it’s complicated when we have some people that are sort of doing, like, activism cosplay. So that’s one problem. But I do think what we need to do is amplify the voices of people that are consistently speaking out and don’t really, like, profit or benefit from it. And in effect, like, even though we have Martin Luther King holiday, right…
Errin:
Mm-Hmm.
Dr. Jamieson:
…They did not love MLK when he was here.
Errin:
We know that, absolutely.
Dr. Jamieson:
So the voices that are silenced and marginalized, I think we need to uplift them. I think that everyday intellectual activists are people to watch. Committing those acts of solidarity and community and activism without being asked. It’s a person who has been shaped by change, but also shapes change by being in community with people. And I think those are the folks that we have to continue: the artists, people writing fiction, people reading fiction. There are people reading fiction who have more power in their own individual house to be differently with their own families and environments than any deacon or pastor behind a pulpit, any university president, any elected official. I think those folks accessing information for themselves, asking questions, I find those people the most exciting to be with, right? Not necessarily people just in my echo chamber.
Errin:
So I know that you are working on multiple exhibits about Octavia Butler. Can you talk a little bit about those? What it’s like, kind of, seeing people walk through that space? And some of the most interesting learnings that you’ve heard people take after walking through the space?
Dr. Jamieson:
Oh, thank you so much for asking, yes. For those that don’t know, I’m the Advising Curator for the San Diego New Children’s Museum’s Octavia E Butler Seeding Futures exhibit. And we finally began, I guess about a year and a half ago, working toward bringing a community of scholars, activists and artists together to build this room-size exhibit — the first one of its kind based on Butler’s young life and inspirations, when we opened it on March 9th. And it was really beautifully done by the artists and teaching artists and practitioners that are at the museum, but also it was sort of, like, a love letter to my childhood self in a way of like Black girl awkwardness and creativity and imagination. And so you’ll see in the exhibit, like, some things about her early life, quotes that she had, things that she was inspired by, and it’s really beautifully done and all hands-on. And the whole museum is basically inspired by Butler’s being in community and what she left us. So it’s very exciting.
Errin:
I’m wondering, um, if you could make the case for why we should continue to read and study Octavia Butler.
Dr. Jamieson:
Oh, awesome. Yes. That’s a great question, too. I think we should continue to read and uncover what Octavia Butler had to say because we have still not learned the lesson yet. We can still do better. We could still be better. And because, like, what she published was really only the tip of the iceberg — she had so many notes and so much about culture — I think we can not only read Octavia Butler, but use her methods for reading the world in order to orient ourselves to shaping change and being shaped by change in the future. That means reading newspapers, finding honest journalism, supporting the causes that you believe in and not giving up. I think she really has us making the best choices, no matter, or making the best choice that we can, given whatever circumstances. It doesn’t have to be perfect. We just have to do our best. So I think that’s the most fundamentally important thing that we can continue to look to her for. And also those inspiring future generations or, like, really truly not projecting onto her legacy, but really observing what is there and trying to articulate how those things might be useful for us, you know, growing up as a culture.
Errin:
I will just say, as somebody who revisited this book, I am definitely encouraged to go back and revisit other Octavia Butler texts and even to go down the rabbit hole into her other writings that I haven’t yet read. But, strongly encourage, if you’ve already read “Parable,” if you’ve already read any of her other novels, it’s worth revisiting. So for folks who are interested in learning more, Ayana, what would you recommend? Like some of your other favorite Octavia Butler books?
Dr. Jamieson:
Oh, I would say to read the “Patternist” series that starts with “Wild Seed” about these two African immortals during the importation that begins. It’s the only novel of hers that takes place completely in the past. And it really has this question about what would you do if you were immortal? Or what if you could change your shape from the inside out on a cellular level? What if you could heal yourself and transform yourself from the inside? So that’s where I would go. And I would also say, please read “Bloodchild and Other Stories,” which is a collection of short stories and essays can engage in and look for her interviews on YouTube and things like that.
Errin:
Yes.
Dr. Jamieson:
And actually hear her voice and see how she was a person who was, like, six feet tall by the age of 12 and had this very deep contralto voice and really just sort of sit on the margins of her existence to, sort of, make friends with all the marginal parts of ourselves. I think that’s part of what gets evoked in her writing. The writing might not make you feel good, but it’s definitely gonna make you feel something and to figure out.. .
Errin:
Yeah.
Dr. Jamieson:
…how you lean into that discomfort and what that means about your own individual existence on this planet.
Errin:
Well, Ayana, I’m excited to head into the Octavia-verse — i.e. going down the rabbit hole on YouTube, and I’m so glad that I got to spend this time with you. I’m so glad that we got to revisit “Parable of the Sower” together. So thank you, thank you, thank you for this, you know, inaugural meeting of The Amendment book club. No, I’m just kidding you guys. That’s not a thing yet. But thank you for helping me to think about what this book has meant, continues to mean, will continue to mean for our society and in such a consequential year, 2024, which she describes not too far off, as it turns out. .
Dr. Jamieson:
Yeah, And it turns out that we started this whole debacle a little early in 2016. So let’s just all keep our loved ones close, and keep an eye on the election and, you know, be gentle with ourselves and one another as we live through this timeline. And I mean, I’m all about any type of book club, so if The Amendment book club goes forward, please keep me in the loop. I do not wanna be left out.
Errin:
Stay tuned. Look, there may need to be an Amendment-seed club. Okay? Start getting some seeds together and swap seeds. Seed swap!
Errin:
As y’all know, The Amendment aims to examine the unfinished business of our democracy and center, those who are historically unheard, underrepresented and underserved. It’s built into our mission at The 19th, and it’s at the heart of everything we do. And now, with less than six months to go until the 2024 general election, I’m asking you to join us in this work right now. The 19th is in the final days of our Spring Member Drive, and every donation to our nonprofit newsroom goes towards funding our journalism. Right now, your gift will be matched dollar for dollar by the Boone Family Foundation. The 19th is doing the work to equip women and LGBTQ+ people with the information they need to participate in our politics. And we’d love for you to be our partner in that pursuit. We’ve made, empowering those communities our business, and by donating $5 or more to our nonprofit newsroom, you can make it yours. Head to 19thnews.org/springmemberdrive. And thanks so much for listening this week.
The Amendment is a co-production of the 19th News and Wonder Media Network. It is executive produced by Jenny Kaplan, Terri Rupar and Faith Smith. Wonder Media Network’s Head of Development is Emily Rudder. Julia B. Chan is The 19th editor-in-chief. The amendment is edited by Jenny Kaplan, Grace Lynch and Emily Rudder, and it is produced by Adesuwa Agbonile, Grace Lynch, Brittany Martinez and Taylor Williamson with production assistance from Luci Jones and post-production support from Julie Bogen, Victoria Clark, Lance Dixon, and Wynton Wong. Artwork by Aria Goodman. And our theme music was composed by Jlin.
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