Walking the path of Oya and Octavia: Envisioning sacred epistemological ecologies from Butler’s Parable of the Sower

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Description for Program

In Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler infuses Africana indigenous spirituality and ecocriticism within her presentation of the protagonist Lauren Oya Olamina-Bankole, who functions as a liberator, guide, oracle, and warrior for herself, her community, and the earth. Lauren acts as her namesake, the orisha, Oya, embodying the “winds of change” amid societal collapse and ecological disaster. Lauren’s empathic abilities allow her to serve as a conduit for other people’s emotions, managing this ebb and flow of collective experience. Additionally, Lauren serves as a steward of the land, growing and tending to what is left of the natural world and reconnecting humanity with that which continues to grow even after multiple violences on the earth. We see these aspects of Lauren as examples for today, reminding us that “every child is cast from paradise into growth and destruction, into solitude and new community, into vast, ongoing, Change.”

Through discussions of Lauren’s spiritual, psychological, and environmental ideologies, we will demonstrate how Butler’s text offers wisdom on how we form radical spiritual relationships in a “post-apocalyptic” environment—relationships with the earth and with the people who inhabit it. This prophetic narrative pushes us to reimagine the interrelationships between spiritual, epistemological and environmental change, offering a unique lens Africana people can use to interpret and envision solutions for displacement, deprivation, and division.

Sub Unit

• ASWAD

Chair

• Doñela C. Wright, San Francisco State University

Discussants

• Raven Moses, Thomas Jefferson University

• Jennifer Williams, Loyola Marymount University