In my English 1 class we’re reading The Fall, a piece of documentary theater about a student-led protest at The University of Cape Town. The play gets its name from the students’ call to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes from the campus (#rhodesmustfall), but morphed into a larger unfinished conversation about what a decolonized world would look like.
After the statue was successfully removed the students had to figure out what to do now, literally what do they put in the statue’s place. One student says,
“I remember thinking, ‘We have to fill that space with us.’ Things, shapes, people we can recognise. Now the real work of decolonizing starts.”
But the students quickly realize that their desire to create a decolonized world founders because they can’t agree on what a mutually-empowering intersectional revolution should achieve. They struggle to imagine a different world. Can they avoid toxic gender hierarchies? Acknowledge the historical pain of racism? The burden of income inequity?
In class we talked about the need in all social justice movements for destruction as well as creation. You have to imagine what you will put in the place of the thing you burn down or, in the case of the statue, load onto a flatbed truck.
Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, published in 1993, is an exercise in that kind of creation. In Parable the destruction is not brought by revolution but infrastructure collapse, extreme economic inequality that shreds the social fabric, and environmental disaster. 1993, y’all! This book makes Nostradamus read like a generic fortune cookie. She was writing about climate change deniers and anti-vaxers before anyone could believe people could be so craven and/or ignorant.
In response to this totally anarchic and feral world, the narrator, a young black woman named Lauren, imagines a new way of life called Earthseed. My friend Summer calls Lauren her favorite cult leader. Technically Earthseed can be considered a cult because its a prescriptive belief system promulgated by a charismatic leader with the ability to feel other people’s pain—but that word has such a bad reputation.
Let’s think of it like this: there’s nowhere to go that’s safe, everyone you know is probably dead, and this woman has a gun and seems to know how to survive. Of course you follow her.
And then she gives you Earthseed, which promotes community reliance, sustainability, and civility toward the end of “a unifying, purposeful life here on earth.” Lauren’s writing serves as the book’s epigraph:
“Prodigy is, at its essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all. ”
Positive obsession.
Is it really a cult if what she’s saying is true?
Don’t answer that.
But there are a few important differences between this and other imagined ideals. Where Plato’s utopia is a thought experiment, Butler’s is situated in the vividly material. As in Lilith’s Brood, Butler is unflinching about rape and its normalization during times of perceived lawlessness. Every women in the novel is either raped or witnesses a rape or both. The threat of anarchy, but also the hopes of revolution, are embodied and gendered.
The wickedness of her world is not only explicitly gendered but also raced. Lauren’s urgency recalls Lucille Clifton’s "won’t you celebrate with me" and Audre Lorde’s "A Litany for Survival" (at times in the book Butler treats poetry and scripture as nearly interchangeable.) In the poems and the book, black women’s survival is a feat that demands commemoration and celebration.
Lauren “intends to survive,” but she cannot do that without a community, so she has to create one. And she wants it to be nice for everyone. Is that really a cult or just the bible you write from a particularly raced and gendered experience?
Does Earthseed have the potential for authoritarianism and dogma? Yes. Butler acknowledges this in glimpses of Lauren’s response to potential heterodoxy and the suggestive symbolism of numbers. But Butler also knew that creative world-making is a necessary skill. It has to be taught.
Step one. Write your own bible.
*In some ways this is going well, but I have some reservations about using it in the future. All of the untranslated Swahili makes it difficult for English Language Learners. Some of the ideas have been unfamiliar.**
**Update. I’m going to teach it again next year, but I’m going to do Notes from the Field first because it sets up the what of documentary theater and deals with more familiar issues. The shift to The Fall will exemplify a much more local instance of documentary theater practice.