AKWAEKE

Dear Reader,

I must start with this—it is such an incredible honor to be invited to write the introduction for this edition of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents. There are very few authors who have the genius and impact that Butler has in this world, and quite frankly, I am not sure I have the words to adequately preface her work. Here, on this page, I am merely another reader who has been left reeling by the force that is Octavia Butler and by the shockwaves of the stories she tells.

This book terrifies me. I was in my early twenties when I read Parable Of The Talents for the first time. I didn’t know enough about history then to understand how the terrible things that have happened before could easily happen again. I was always busy trying not to die from the things inside my head. In the last decade, as people began to notice how the world was tilting toward the Parable books, I didn’t quite know what that meant.

Now, as I read it again in 2023, a hurricane is headed to Los Angeles. Wildfires are burning in Louisiana. The planet is boiling so a handful of people can make more money. A virus that has killed millions of us is in the air, mutating into multiple variants, but people don’t believe the virus is real and they won’t filter their air. The government is using the virus as a eugenic weapon, letting it kill untold numbers of people under the death cult of capitalism. The police of this police state keep murdering Black people. Earlier this summer, fires from Canada turned the sky in New York orange and I watched children laugh and run in the streets, in the ash, with no masks on. A few weeks ago, the headlines read that Texas is trying to close off highways to trap pregnant people so they’ll be forced to give birth, since abortion is now illegal in certain states. Everywhere we look, trans people are under attack and dying, while cisgender people gloat and kill us. I could keep this up for pages, these details of how the United States of America is seeping with fascism, how the worlds in Octavia Butler’s books seem to have risen from the page to lurch through this reality.

Parable of the Talents is set in 2032, which is less than a decade into the future. It feels too close to the skin, a nightmare exhaling panic against my neck, blood condensing from its breath into the hollow of my collarbone as it shows me how much worse all this can get. It is incredibly difficult to write about this book while the world is on fire, hurtling toward a nightmare that Butler writes about with an unflinching directness. My instinct is to run. In the world of Butler’s Parable books, I would never be Lauren Olamina, not with her desire to survive under such brutal conditions. As a person surviving under multiple marginalizations — Black, queer, trans, mad, disabled — I don’t want to be here for the apocalypse, even or especially as it’s happening around us right now. I want to have been born into something better.

I don’t want to look at the carnage that surrounds us. I don’t know how Lauren Olamina does it or how Octavia Butler imagined it. When I write future worlds, I turn away from this one and write the world I wish I lived in. This book demands that I look at this world without turning away, and that terror makes me shake. I know the things that happen in Parable of the Talents have happened before, are happening now, can happen again. It breaks my heart so completely. Since I understand neither Lauren Olamina nor the woman who created her, I call my friend Ann Daramola — a scholar, writer, and community organizer who understands both. We talk about Butler and this book, about how hard it is to read this story, about terrible loneliness and what it means to write deviant families into existence in your stories. Ann points out that as Butler writes Parable of the Talents, she’s not only looking at true things from her time, but she’s also following them along their path of least resistance and now the things she wrote about don’t only exist in story or imagination. They are alive and here with us. I think about how evil is walking well-worn roads, how it is – if you’re paying attention – predictable. I wonder about what it takes to put up resistance to this story so we don’t end up where the Parable of the Talents takes us. In the companionship of my friend, I am slowly able to see the other keys that this book holds—community, family, and the determination to adapt even as the world burns. As Lauren Olamina writes, God is Change.

I feel in awe of those of us who believe that we can change this world. Slowly, their belief bolsters me and the terror I feel is tempered. God is Change, so we adapt, but we adapt together. We may be suffering, but as Ann points out to me, we are not suffering alone. She quotes a section late in the book, where the character Len asks Lauren, “If God is Change, then…then who loves us? Who cares about us? Who cares for us?” and Lauren replies, “We care for one another. We care for ourselves and one another.” As my friend repeats those lines to me over the phone, they sound like a life raft in the burning ocean of this world. I begin to believe that this is how we might survive the unthinkable. If there was a map to surviving the fascist decline of this empire, it would be that we cannot do it alone.

Given that, it is no wonder that we’re encouraged toward individualism, where our power is hobbled. The despair that reaches for me with scraping fingers is deliberate, designed to break us down into an accepting futility. The horror is loud but when I look around, there are other things to look at. As I write this, a labor movement grows across the country as workers unite to fight for the right to live. People are still fighting for a better world, fighting to get abortion access to pregnant people, fighting to get funds and medication to the trans people in need, fighting to keep our stories alive, fighting the government to save our lives. People are still trying. Butler tells us how Parable of the Talents is named after a Biblical story with the lesson that you’re supposed to use the skills you have. Lauren Olamina says at one point in the book– “I do what I can. When I can do more, I will.” Survival is based on action, not faith, and the people themselves have the power to shape God.

My friends and I have talked about getting an apocalypse ranch by running water. In the year before the COVID-19 pandemic began, I was living in Louisiana, in a city destined to drown. I learned how to start seeds and I grew peanuts and corn, butternut squash, cucumbers and tomatoes, purple sweet potatoes and pink celery. I collected rain and put wriggling earthworms into the compost and soil. I learned which parts of the plants you can eat—the vining leaves of the sweet potato, the crushed yellow squash blossoms. If we ever did build a community like Lauren Olamina’s Acorn, I know what talents I’d use after the world ends again, what I’d offer to the people standing shoulder to shoulder with me amid the ash. It gives me some fortitude and I allow myself to imagine surviving the years that are to come, with a community around me. If we can imagine it, we can shape it and make it real.

Parable of the Talents is a difficult book to read; a gutting story to sit with. It rips veils off our eyes and it does so without mercy. It is also a brilliant, brilliant gift. It is a warning and a map and a key. It shows us the people who want us dead and how far they will go, then it asks us how far we in turn are willing to go in order to survive. It holds room for the people like me, who are almost frozen with fear, and for the people like Ann, who burn right back at the world, who are determined to not let things get this bad. 

It is, in the end, a true story. I breathe slowly through it, grateful for Butler and the work she offered to us in a world where we desperately need it, grateful for the brutality of the truth because it is true. I am deeply privileged to be alive and writing to you, dear reader, and I am glad that we are reading this book together. We have the power to shape this reality. The world will change.

We are not alone.

In solidarity,
Akwaeke Emezi