Saturday, October 24, 2020 - “Fictional Seeds Will Bear Fruit / Octavia E. Butler” by Rebecca Nison
“Pay close attention to what you choose to water,” writes Jaiya John. “It will grow.”
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
I’m wandering the wide streets cordoned off for pedestrians. The quiet is startling. Mask on, I’m all eyes, taking in what remains and what’s changed. At the corner, what was once a shop filled with tapestries and candles is all dark windows, empty space. I mourn this, recognizing there are losses behind this loss that I can barely imagine. I notice, too, the balconies, once vacant, that now bloom with tall plants. I notice windows packed with living green, leaves pressed to windows, seeking the taste and power of the sun. And I think of Octavia E. Butler.
In January of this year, I read Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Set between 2024 and 2027, Butler’s prophetic vision struck me in January as a terrifying possibility of the world to come. By now, I agree with Toshi Reagon, who recently co-wrote and co-produced the opera Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, the first adaptation of this book for the stage: “This isn’t what our future has to be. What Butler gave us with her work was a blueprint on how to change our course.”
Lauren Oya Olamina, the young Black hyperempathic protagonist of Parable of the Sower, is rewriting the future of the world through the creation of a new belief system while she survives a devastating dystopia. This belief system, Earthseed, centers around inclusion, humanity, community, the inevitability of change, and our responsibility and power to shape that change. In my mind, it’s a modern-day wisdom text.
When the virus struck in March, I knew I’d need to prepare. I flipped through the pages of Butler’s book to remind myself of what Lauren Oya Olamina packs when she flees her walled community after the loss of her family. Among other things, she packs notebooks and seeds, both tools for possibility and sustenance.
On March Thirty-first, I planted cucumber, tomato, bibb lettuce, arugula, carrot, and zucchini seeds. Herbs too. I tended them daily. As they sprouted, I noticed their response to the sunlight, adapted their positions, found the best window spots for each tiny cup of soil and the roots I couldn’t see but trusted were growing. Some, though not all, survived the initial seeding and sprouted. As I learned from the first batch of seeds, I planted more, with greater skill this time. I sit now surrounded by a bed of bibb lettuce; basil growing high; a dying melon plant from which one teardrop-shaped fruit still grows; mint overflowing from its container; zucchini leaves which, with the help of my daily nursing, are healing from disease and trying to flower again; two cucumber plants nearly twice my height; and tomatoes ranging from marble to baseball-sized, soft green to bright red, sharing an ever-growing vine in all their different stages of fruiting and ripening.
I planted these seeds not only for myself, but in the hopes that I might learn enough to someday feed others who might need them. (I’ve been fortunate to give a number of zucchini and cucumbers away--even a jar or two of pickles.) I grew these to begin my elementary education in the land, to recognize the true work and time it takes for a seed to become sustenance, and to realign my perception of scarcity, possibility, and consumerism. From Octavia E. Butler’s fictional world, actual edible nourishment has grown. From the physical tending of the seeds and plants, I’ve learned many things. From the gift of Butler’s writing came the seeds and this food; from the gift of the experience sowing and tending these plants, I reflect on the responsibilities of writers and creators now. The questions expand: What tools are required to nourish growth so seeds may sprout with enough health to bear fruit? What environments and communities and creations will help us tend right growth? How much sunlight? How much water? What structures of support do we and our collective need? How to perceive the signs of dis-ease? How to help life heal? In which season and climate will we flourish? What seeds must be sown in this season, and how may I better learn to tend them?
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