Parable of the Talents

This post contains spoilers about Octavia Butler’s Parable novels.

I have been distracted by politics for the last couple of weeks, given the change in the Democratic ticket. I had largely checked out on news of the race before mid-July, because I simply could not bear the thought of Trump winning, and I had to insulate myself against the increasing possibility of that. When Harris became the nominee, everything zoomed into focus again. In particular, I could once again think about Trump and his place in history and what he represents. This is probably why I felt I could pick up Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler. A few years ago I read both Kindred and Parable of the Sower, and although I gobbled them up, I couldn’t quite bring myself to go full dystopia.

All three books deal with slavery. Kindred is a fantasy novel about a Black woman who travels back in time to the Antebellum South, with predictably scary results. The Parable books are set in an apocalyptic future—caused by climate change—where at first the characters have to deal with the chaos of a crumbling government, and then, in the later book, with an organized faction of Christian militias that restore order by enslaving anyone they view as political opposition. The action of the Parable books starts in July 2024, and is in some ways eerily prophetic, which may be why I had them on the brain. As Michiko Kakutani described them:

I read Parable of the Sower in June of 2021, at a time when I was still limited in my activities because my children were not vaccinated yet. I remember being very spooked by some of the dystopian or prophetic elements of the story, having recently experienced major disruptive events in the form of both the pandemic and some of the more chaotic periods of Trump’s presidency. Now, as I read Parable of the Talents, I am not having that reaction, which I assume has to do with the greater political calm of the last few years and the more recent sprinkling of hope. I keep noticing the differences in the events of the book, rather than the similarities. The big one being that the fictional fascists take over after years of evident decline and disorder, whereas the real life fascists would be inheriting a more or less functioning country and would, if they win, be the clear cause of its demise.

Nonetheless, it is notable that I’m reading a book about an alternate version of the U.S. where Christian nationalists have implemented their agenda—at a time when such political actors are a real threat. The Parable novels are an exercise in imagining the conditions necessary for slavery to return, and again and again in the narrative Butler points to the gap between the constitution as written and its faulty, politically motivated interpretation, particularly of the Civil War amendments:

In the world of Talents, no child on their own is safe, even the police will sell them into slavery, because the law as written is not enforced. The constitution as written is not enforced. As I was saying a few weeks ago, we are now at the point that the Supreme Court is ignoring the bedrock principal of our founding, according to which no one is above the law. The Roberts court has been busily ignoring the Civil War amendments for a couple decades now. So are we really so far from the kind of world Butler imagined?

Our real life Christian nationalists have been pushing the idea of ending birthright citizenship for some time. JD Vance is out there trying to end no-fault divorce, insisting that women stay with their abusers “for the good of the children.” His supporters openly wonder if women really deserve the vote. What Butler is suggesting is that reactionaries don’t need to change the law—they don’t need to go to the trouble of repealing the pesky amendments they don’t like—they just need the power to insist on their own interpretation of it. It doesn’t matter that their interpretation is that black is white, or that slavery is fine even though we outlawed it in 1865. If they seize enough power, long-held customs and rights can fall away.

This dovetails for me with the importance of definitions, and how much of current American life is a struggle to define basic terms. I kept noticing this during the Trump administration, how Trump or the GOP use words differently than most people I know. For instance, they might define freedom as the right to bring an assault weapon into a grocery store, which is unrecognizable to me as having anything to do with liberty. I was struck by a recent example where a poll judging the characteristics associated with each candidate found Trump was viewed as more “patriotic” than Harris. What definition are people using when they call the act of trying to overthrow the government patriotic?

The sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom talks about how gaslighting occurs across a power differential. In some sense, what power is is the ability to mess with other people’s definitions: of themselves, or of the world around them. McMillan Cottom points out that the concept of race is itself a form of gaslighting, since it is not describing any underlying biological reality. Isabel Wilkerson, in her book Caste, points out that having pale people lord it over others based on the color of their skin is just as arbitrary as tall people deciding that they rule the world and attributing all sorts of negative characteristics to the short.

One interesting facet of Talents is that in imagining the necessary conditions for the return of slavery, Butler creates a world where the institution is not based on race. It involves a more religious and gender-based system. The world of Talents discriminates against the poor, and a lot of the poor in this dystopian version of California are Black or Latino, but white people are not immune from the ongoing depredations of Jarret’s followers. The main character’s community, Acorn, is targeted by the Christian slavers because it is seen as a cult, and community members of all races suffer more or less equally after it is taken over by the Christian militia. In the world of Talents, all women and children face the near constant threat of sexual slavery—as mentioned in the excerpt about the constitutional amendments. Race remains present as a theme, but mostly through the narrative’s preoccupation with what it feels like to become someone else’s property, and the historical precedents for that. Not to be reductive about it, but it feels like a lot of the book is trying to convey slavery from the inside, in a way that anyone could relate to. If Kindred is about a contemporary Black woman embodying one of her ancestors, the Parable books are about anyone finding themselves in those circumstances.

The book does predict certain characteristics of Trump and his acolytes, echoing Sinclair Lewis’ observation about fascism in America coming wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross. I was particularly interested in Butler’s attempt at universality, because it captured something I have been thinking about since 2016. I have been struck by Trump’s ability to unite European-style fascism with our more homegrown breed of white supremacy. What that means in practice is that under Trump, certain white people oblivious to the markers of the Herrenvolk democracy that has long characterized the U.S. became very aware of its contours. They suddenly understood something that Black people have always recognized, which is that we have only been a true democracy for a brief time, and reactionary forces have been trying to roll back those crucial democratic gains since their passage.

As McMillan Cottom put it, you don’t need to read Hannah Arendt to understand what’s been happening in America for the last decade, you just need to go back to good old W.E.B. DuBois. Butler tells that story in a visceral and gripping way.