Dramaturgies of Water and Inter-Species Peace in Parable of the Sower
In Parable of the Sower, fire is a destroyer of worlds.
Water, in contrast, is a creator.
One of my many roles, as a theater scholar and artist, is that of the dramaturg. The dramaturg asks questions. She follows “forking paths” in order to collaboratively hone (shape) meaning, in service to the story the playwright and/or director needs to tell (even as the story shapes us).[i] Practicing a form of dramaturgy here, I constellate worlds of water in Parable. I hope you might be moved to engage these questions, authors, and ideas further, and to experiment with constellations of your own.
If we think of the humans in Parable as bodies of water (and, remember, our bodies are mostly water), it makes sense that fire -- able to burn from the inside, to desiccate organs and lungs—would be acutely dangerous. Astrida Neimanis writes that “as bodies of water [. . .] our borders [are] always vulnerable to rupture and renegotiation.”[ii] Human bodies are vulnerable to fire, but also available (vulnerable in a more positive sense) to other bodies of water, to a kind of linking of bodies of water.
In Parable, water is a gathering place and a breaking open place. At the ocean, Lauren, Zahra, and Harry submerge themselves. Through this cleansing, a baptism of sorts, where water meets water, the trio gives way to others. Lauren invites Travis, Natividad, and Domingo to join them. Lauren’s small group grows.
Neimanis reminds us that “the flow and flush of waters sustain our own bodies, but also connect them to other bodies, to other worlds beyond our human selves.”[iii] As Lauren’s group continues to grow, they become saturated with watery fluids: the liquids of sex, birth, crying, nursing. . . the very stuff of human –and more than human—life.
Trees, plants and gardens –also acutely vulnerable to fire--- provide solace, safety, and sustenance throughout Parable (and indeed, plant life is a key metaphor for Earthseed). Amidst the stark images of burning, poverty, and violence, lush, verdant gardens recur, litanies of vegetables and fruit like prayers, riots of juice, color, and texture.
Water, thus, also links species. Informed by adrienne marie brown, I suggest that water offers an “emergent strategy” not only for human survival, but for an interspecies thriving.[iv] In Parable, the species (as I read) are human and plant. How might this emergent, interspecies vision spin yet further out?
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, for example, apprentices herself to marine mammals, writing: “Breathing in unbreathable circumstances is what we do every day in the chokehold of racial, gendered, ableist capitalism. We are all still undrowning. And by we, I don’t only mean people like myself whose ancestors specifically survived the middle passage, because the scale of our breathing is planetary at the very least.”[v] How might we rethink our bodies (of water) in relation to other bodies of water, both human and non-human? What kinds of breathing in unbreathable circumstances does our “now,” our 2022, demand of us?