Refusing Despair-Collapse, Survival and Radical Hope
What can you hold on to when things fall apart? What must you let go? Is it possible to lose everything and still reinvent yourself, connect with others, make meaning and build faith, community and hope? What do I owe my family? myself? my community?How much is empathy a source of strength or a weakness? How can I, how can we, possibly endure?
Parable of the Sower asks questions I urgently need answers to, answers I cannot find on my own. Redwoods burning, authoritarian Presidential candidates promising to return America to a mythical Christian past, big box stores guarded by men carrying automatic rifles, the erosion of democracy and supply chains - the world in the novel is horrific, plausible and just a half-step away from our own. Despite how much prescience, pain and loss fill the narrative, it consistently refuses despair. It is a stubbornly utopian novel in an extremely convincing dystopian disguise.
The novel begins with Lauren Olamina, 15 years old, strong-willed, curious, imaginative and brave, dreaming of fire and flight. Lauren is black, daughter of a preacher, born with a hyper-empathy condition she must keep secret from others. Lauren is a student, and later a teacher, of survival. She is compelled to find her own truths, write her own religious texts and discover/create/will her God into being. She becomes a prophet, with all the strange, uncomfortable truth-telling and stubbornness prophets must possess.
Lauren knows that building walls, hiring guards and turning inwards will not avert catastrophe. To survive catastrophe, you must be canny, clever, lucky and willing to use whatever tools you can find. Keep your escape bag handy, never let your guard down and always have someone who can keep watch with you. Build smaller communities of trust and care, be careful about what systems you will participate in, and find yourself some land. Lauren does not stop dreaming about flying, about building a community that can collectively escape earth.
Lauren is filled with what philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear calls “radical hope”, the capacity to believe in and build towards a new world, one you cannot fully imagine, even as the only one you know collapses around you. If you can face the world as it actually is, not just as you need it to be, and if you can embrace the inevitability of change, including the fear and loss that change brings, you can turn towards survival, both physically and psychically. If you can take your empathy, channel and temper it, so that it fuels but does not overwhelm you, you can survive. If you can care for others, despite the vulnerability and loss of control that care brings, you can build trust and connection. Parable of the Sower recognizes that, as much as we can hurt each other, we can also heal, restore and love each other. Communities are built on ashes, and acorns can grow into oak trees.
The novel terrifies me and gives me hope. It teaches me.