Neoliberal capitalism is obsessed with choice: the illusion of it, anyway. Same with patriarchy, white supremacy, imperialism, settler colonialism—they all sustain themselves in part by making our oppression our job. We internalize the rules so we can flog ourselves for breaking them, over and over again. We proclaim, loudly, that we deserve what we get, that we are oppressed because we choose it, and we must only wish away or ignore structural burdens in order to experience freedom. We fight other oppressed folks who dare to name our oppressors as entities outside ourselves. The ways our oppressions internalize themselves are often so insidious that the ideas our brains produce in their thrall can appear revolutionary, at least to us, at our current level of awareness. (See Kanye thinking a white supremacist chestnut is the key to black liberation.)

I’ve been thinking about why I’m fat, lately.

In the past, I declared that I was fat by choice. It was important to me, then, to grasp at what few shreds of individual agency I could. I needed to feel like my existence as a fat person was a rebellion in the sense that I could quit any time, and not doing so was a middle finger to society. At any point, if I just paid a little more attention to my body, if I was just a little less frivolous with my food groups, I could leave the abundance of fatness behind. I just choose not to, right?

(I see them, now. Ghostly relics of internalized fatmisia: my insistent proclamations that I had a choice in the matter of being fat. Relics adorned in the garb of an illusory agency, a complicity in my own destruction that was difficult to resist when I was deep in my feelings about having had little say over the trajectory of my life.)

For some oppressions I live with, the origin lines are relatively linear to me. Ask me why I’m Black and I will tell you a story of chattel slavery, a colonial project undertaken as the greatest wealth redistribution project in human history, and a category created to distinguish humanity from property; ask me why I’m femme and I will tell you of babies carelessly assigned a gender based on a glance at external sex organs, a patriarchal society’s desperate efforts to contain femininity, and my own journey reconciling my internal experience of womanhood with my apparent gender.

My fatness, though, reaches from all directions. Ask me why I’m fat and I will tell you about patriarchy, his tyrant son, rape culture, and the wrath their mortal instruments inflicted on my young psyche. Ask me why I’m fat and I will tell you about ableism and the forced drugging of psychodivergent adolescents. Ask me why I’m fat and I will tell you about capitalism, its capricious devastation of our food environments, and its sorting of humanity into useful and useless. Ask me why I’m fat and I will tell you, again, about the razing of a continent through enslavement and colonialism. There are so many reasons, and I realize, now, that all of them are outside my control.

###

I had a 23andMe health and ancestry test gifted to me a while back by a friend. Last week, I got the results, and part of my health analysis stated that I was likely to be average weight. After I stopped grumbling about Whose average?, I started thinking about the course of events that tipped the scales of probability in favor of fatness. Not in a wistful, if-only-this-hadn’t-happened way, honestly. Just musing on the fact that my body, as reviled as it is, is basically a monument to the success of capitalism (and white supremacy, and settler colonialism). Like, look what having food accessible abundantly (to a few) and insisting we prioritize productivity over well-being to increase wealth (for a few) can do for a body. Or, look what tormenting brown folks whose bodies crave taking up just a little more space than your narrow white selves are comfortable with into yo-yo dieting in order to fit a white supremacist ideal can do for a body.

(Basically, y’all should be worshipping fat folks as gods of the fucking free market, patron saints of capitalism. Something other than pretending we don’t exist, or actively working to ensure we can’t.)

I know that genes aren’t destiny. I also know that I am what society made me. It is vital, then, to me, to find and name origin lines, because I do not believe in a fat liberation that does not also seek the dismantling of the structures that created my fatness.

But. But.

I’m not looking for reasons why I’m fat so that I can make it so less fat people exist. Despite my belief that our current food environments are designed to maximize profit rather than human happiness, and despite my belief that our ever-diminishing access to guaranteed shelter, abundant leisure time, and safe outdoor space is making our bodies and minds sick, I also believe that humanity contains a diverse array of naturally-occurring, joyfully normal body types, sizes, and shapes. I also believe that good health looks different for everyone, and is not a moral obligation.

(Especially when we’re in no danger of extinction from any “obesity epidemic”, but we are damn sure in danger of extinction from capitalism and white supremacist imperialism.)

###

I read a HuffPost article that really resonated with this desire I’ve been cultivating, to have the origin lines of my fatness identified (“Everything you know about obesity is wrong”, September 19, 2018). In it, the author, Michael Hobbes, prints the words of actual fat people, their stories of medical discrimination, inaccessibility, and wage theft. He also touches on the impossibility of losing weight and the paradox of individual choice in a society that works against you. I felt seen, affirmed: we know it’s not your fault, in article form. And I felt angry, because in that article are so many injustices. So many of my fellow fat folk pouring out their experiences, maybe hoping for understanding from their oppressors, maybe hoping to inspire their kin.

(I channeled that anger into wearing a crop top to pick up my parking permit at school, hoping my belly fat would disgust someone so much they’d say something and I might bring the full force of my rage to bear upon them.)

Of course Hobbes is saying things that fat acceptance activists have been saying for ages; diets don’t work, fat stigma kills. He’s just acting as a thin interpreter. And as Margitte points out in her incisive rebuttal (Everything you know about ‘obesity’ is still wrong, September 24, 2018), he’s still approaching fatness as a problem that needs to be eliminated. He is still linking fatness with health. Margitte, in response, implores us to stop searching for the cause of fatness and instead work towards liberation via building a society designed for all body sizes and shapes.

But when I read her words, I felt myself chafing against the idea. Why? I had to think about it, sit with it, make sure it wasn’t another relic of internalized fatmisia. And then I discerned my problem. It wasn’t the idea of working towards liberation, but the idea that I had to stop being concerned with the cause of my fatness. Because, like I said, I can’t see a true fat liberation existing in a framework where fatness is not a choice, and as long as patriarchy, white supremacy, imperialism and capitalism are still standing, my fatness will never, can never, truly be my choice.

Even my current level of health is not my choice. I think one reason Hobbes’ article resonated with me is that I have a deep longing to be healthier than I am, but I’m up against structural obstacles that make obtaining the health I want difficult. It sounds like liberation to my ears for society to remodel itself so that eating foods that don’t trigger my IBS or fibromyalgia flares is easier, so that I can get the free time and access to exercise I need to soothe my crazy mind and achy body.

But Margitte is right in the sense that a society remodeled in this way would be remodeling itself in a fatmisic image. It would be remodeling itself to achieve the erasure of fatness under the guise of improving health, because we have not accounted for the root of our hatred of fatness. And when the remodeling project did not succeed, society would again turn its wrath towards us and demand we account for why we’re still fat unhealthy, because in a fatmisic society fatness can never be healthy. And our subjugation is not dictated solely by our socially constructed health status.

(Fat folks are expansive, billowing. It takes many tethers to tie us down.)

###

Is it paradoxical that I still feel some sense of choice to my fatness now, having firmly outlined my lack of such? Let’s see: I choose to love myself even when I don’t. I choose to rage against my creators. I choose to exist in this body, every day, even if that choice is only made by inertia. But no, I don’t choose to be fat any more than I choose to be Black, queer, femme, or crazy. These are all categories created to divide humanity into those who hold power and those who do not. I find joy in the family I’ve discovered through the sharing and celebration of these identities, but I can’t deny their nature, their intended, oppressive purpose. And my fatness strikes at the core of all of them, connecting them, nourishing them with its decadence. I could not exist as any one of these things without my fat.

(Like so many beautiful things in life, fatness is multifaceted.)

I want us to create a fat liberation movement that strikes at the core of our intersecting identities and nourishes other liberation movements. I want us to acknowledge and honor where we came from, acknowledge that we share the same root system with others who are oppressed by white supremacist imperialist capitalist patriarchy. We all have different origin stories for our fatness. We have all been shaped round in part by the societies we live in. Our bountiful, glorious abundance deserves an acknowledgement of receipt, a tracing of origin points. Not so we can follow them back to their heart to destroy the adipose beast that birthed our kind, but so we can dismantle the structures that prevent our fatness from truly being a choice.

[CW: suicide, r*pe, internalized fatmisia]

I come to this page with absolutely no idea how to say what I want to say. But I’m here, and I’m gonna try.

First: let me stop assuming that everyone who comes across my work is familiar with my backstory. I’ve realized of late that I write as if the reader has been on this journey with me; I make vague allusions to events but never really flesh them out except in my own head. To describe the journey I’ve been on for the past 9 years will require a lot more context than I’ve been inclined to provide in the past. This will be long, but maybe, satisfying. And aren’t those the best?

Second: let me stop being flip like I was right there. This is silt churning, catharsis. It needs a delicate hand and mind.


I’ve been “political” since I was a young femme. I first got into environmentalism when I was about six. I was heavy into whales and other sea life, and I loved plants and nature and nonhuman animals in general. (I loved human animals too, but I’m trying to highlight that humans are also just animals!) The ozone layer crisis (this was the early-to-mid 1980s) worried the hell out of me and I made my mom buy non-CFC hair spray that she hated because it took so long to wind up. I also put a brick in our toilet tank that I’m pretty sure was still there when we left that apartment.

I ended up starting an environmental club at school, and we brainstormed on what we could do to save the planet with our elementary selves. There was a bad drought here in California at the time and my mom’s bank was giving away these envelopes filled with stuff like water-storing crystals for plant soil and pink food coloring tablets to drop in your toilet so you’d know if it was running and wasting water. I took a TON of them (because no one was taking them anyway) and we handed them out on the street.

My awakening to other issues that impacted my identity took place in popcorn fashion: staggered, bursting into view. At eleven I read about riot grrrl through the Prodigy message boards, and I became a feminist. At thirteen I began learning about Black liberation struggle and our African heritage; and at fifteen I admitted to myself (and my mother) that I was queer. I had been fat, to various degrees, since I was six or so, but didn’t connect the way I was treated because of it to any larger oppression until I was around fifteen as well, because it was around this time that I circled back around to riot grrrl and feminism. Riot grrrl led me to punk, which exposed me to anticapitalist ideas (but it wasn’t until this year that I actually read Marx).

(It should be noted here, that troubling these upper layers of ideology was a dark undercurrent of “pathology”. When I was eight I was raped by an older classmate, and became a survivor. When I was fourteen I attempted suicide for the first time, and became a survivor of a different type. I found feminism for the first time because of my experience with rape, and I found it again because of my experience with craziness.)

Riot grrrl and punk were kind of tarnished for me in the late 90s and early 2000s, around the time I was awakened to trans folks’ struggles. I made a really precious friendship during that period with a white trans woman who had some questions on race and who offered to answer my questions about gender in exchange. I’m still friends with her and I am so appreciative for that experiential skill-share. She and other queer and trans friends of mine were involved in the Camp Trans protests of the Michigan Womyns Music Festival because of their “womyn-born-womyn” policy. They would go around to different artists’ shows who played MWMF and draw attention to the issue. I was still recovering from my second suicide attempt and in some intensive therapy to process a second rape that was inflicted on me in 1999, so I was never able to participate in the protests (and I still feel shitty about it). But I stopped buying the music of all the bands that supported MichFest, which included one of my favorite bands at the time: Le Tigre. Hence my disillusionment with riot grrrl; Kathleen Hanna was a real idol of mine when I was a teenager and seeing her support a space that deemed my friends unwelcome hit me hard.

By the time I was twenty-five (2005) I had finished intensive trauma processing and was looking ready to enter the workforce (again, after a brief stint from nineteen to twenty). Once I entered the workforce again, my politics started to slowly bleed out the window. The more it looked like I was going to be able to be a productive member of society, maybe be able to have a career and an investment portfolio or whatever, the less I cared about radical shit. I never became a conservative or anything, but I definitely was trying to be normative. I was trying to fit in with the folks at my office, who were all obsessed with the milestones of life, with meeting societal expectations, but they didn’t know it. And neither did I, because my political awareness never actually ran that deep. I hadn’t made all the connections. I hadn’t rooted my understanding of these systems and their impact inside myself. I still thought that if I just tried hard enough, I could overcome. Because I was exceptional. Or at least, I could be, if I got my shit together.

I lived in this way for about four years, striving, considering myself middle class, considering myself on my way to something: acceptability, or respectability, or maybe even prosperity. But my body began to protest again, straining under the pressure of normality, a reminder. In 2008 I had a reproductive health scare and a lot of associated pain; in March of 2009 a doctor’s negligence in not treating my hypothyroidism led to my gallbladder needing to be removed. To top it off, I was laid off from my job a few months later.

And then, because disruption loves to cluster, my marriage unraveled. I was left alone with myself and what I had accepted as my life. That pain catalyzed me to really begin the work of decolonizing my mind. In response to years of repression, I spent a few summers on unemployment being queer and fat and Black and loving it. I also started to reconsider a lot of things about myself, starting with the origin story of my crazy. I still wasn’t making the deep connections yet, though. I acted as if I loved myself, as if I had begun to fully embrace all of my being, but that was just the confidence of others flaking off onto me. Once I was still and alone, I didn’t really know who I was.

(A year or so after my ex left is also when I started withdrawing from all the psych meds I had been on. Having been unemployed for a couple years, and coming into a full realization of how fucked the health insurance system in the U.S. is, I was really worried about being so dependent on it. Meds aren’t cheap, and the doctor visits to refill the meds are even more expensive. Plus, I disputed that I actually needed them, to be honest. Part of my newly reborn radical consciousness thought my craziness was a product of the meds, and that I didn’t have any debilitating problems before that. That’s not the case, but I’ve already talked about that elsewhere.)

The generosity of the government started to run out, so I folded myself back into acceptability and went back to work. I was eating well because I was trying to support my body through the withdrawal, and my mom had gotten breast cancer so we both went vegan together. As a result of these changes (and my increased activity level because I took a lot of walks to quell boredom at work), I lost a bunch of weight from 2012-2013. I also met my current partner. In spring of 2014, I went back to college for computer science. Again, I was sure I was on my way to something. It wasn’t as much about respectability this time, but it was definitely about prosperity. I really thought I was going to be financially stable, wealthy even.

Nah. I just got laid off again. And I got pregnant, and got awful all-day morning sickness that made me drop another twenty pounds. By the time I got an abortion, I weighed as much as last I did when I was ten years old. So that was wild.

(I think, though, that getting laid off that time was the last boot out of respectability I’m gonna take. I’m really not trying to go back.)

I ended up going back to school full time after that and that’s where I’ve been since. I now live with my partner in an apartment, because the big house my mom and I got went into foreclosure and we had to split. Having to actually manage a two person household, make sure rent and lights are paid, etc. has definitely radicalized me. There’s so much I probably knew was bullshit, but didn’t have to navigate until the last 3 years. Going back to school also helped me make more connections and understand how oppressions are related and perpetuated in a much more native way. And, honestly, this motherfucker who is currently President of the U.S. made me realize a few things about how useless civility and conflict avoidance are, and how norms are kind of bullshit. (I wanna write about that, but later.)

What brought all this up for me was that recently I started wearing sleeveless stuff again. Before this summer, I hadn’t worn anything sleeveless since 2011 or so. Back then I was writing about fat a lot, which led to me hanging out with a lot of amazing fat femmes. I felt bolstered by their beauty, and like I said before, their confidence was contagious. If you asked me in 2011 why I was wearing sleeveless shirts I’m sure I would have answered with something that was proudly body-positive, something quotable. It was a veneer, because I didn’t really know in my soul why. I’ve worked so long and hard to subjugate this body and contort it into proportions that society deems appropriate. I’ve done it as a punishment for my perceived fault in being raped, I’ve done it as a form of self-harm in order to soothe, and I’ve done it under the guise of health. Why would I not consent to hiding the evidence of my failure?

I told myself it was because my the skin on my arms is all wrinkly and crepey and hanging now since losing and regaining so much weight. I told myself I should have learned to love myself earlier so I wouldn’t have fucked up my skin with dieting. I told myself all the things that would convince me that this was my problem, that it was my fault, and I should take the L and wrap up my arms and probably my whole body and also just drop off the face of the planet because I was never meant to survive anyway.

But this summer is so fucking hot. And THAT is not totally my fault. In fact, I have spent my whole goddamned life ringing the alarm bell about environmental shit. That’s one thing I’ve never lost sight of. And the heat finally drove me to connect the dots and uncover my body again. I realized that if these capitalist motherfuckers are going to burn down the planet in their own quest for prosperity, I’m not going to consent to covering up my fat in this blistering heat, sweating it out in penance for not meeting a standard of beauty. That realization opened the literal floodgates. I’d already been spending the last year or so thinking about all the fuckshit I do to myself that makes my life worse in exchange for upholding the status quo. But my body hate and shame is deep rooted, entwined with shame about being a survivor of multiple rapes and assaults and as a result being sexually dysfunctional for the majority of my life, placing others’ pleasure and comfort ahead of my own. It took being off the meds for an extended time, I think, to catalyze this for me. Being able to think a bit more clearly, and also the benefit of age, has seared the connections between the way I treat myself and systems of oppression/social control into my mind. I can never go back.

Y’all, can I just say that I hope the rest of the world wakes up faster than I did? How I be around this stuff, writing about this stuff, but not actually knowing this stuff in the core of my being? I still, still don’t feel like I have this wholehearted embrace of every part of my body, but I am resolute in my intention to sit with my discomfort. I have a reason, now. I know why I’m doing this. I’m a child of god and I deserve to live my life without the fetters that humanity has laid on me. I am glorious, even if I can’t see it through the veil of socialization into white supremacist capitalist imperialist cisheteropatriarchy.


I invite you to join me as I work through this process of self-reflection & transformation. Next up: breaking down my attitudes about my disabilities & divesting from a cure/control/contain model.

primary conflict:

i know i’m insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but i need to believe i’m talented (aka special) in some way to motivate myself to try.
why (is this a problem)?

1.   the odds are stacked against me due to my:

i. non-traditional (read: non-straightcisrichwhitemale) life trajectory
ii. race/gender/class/sexual orientation/disability

and i’m not a normal* so i lack the capacity to easily delude myself into believing that i can bend the world to my will.

1a.    i was watching Neil Gaiman deliver a commencement address & i wanted to apply some of it but i kept being reminded that my positionality will make a lot of his advice moot.

1b.    reality is basically an illusion. human vision is all weird hacks. so technically i never see anything as it really is.

1c.    & maybe i could shift my reality so i’m living in a world where i can do anything. i can act as if all this shit is available to me.

but what happens when my reality collides with consensus reality? how do i overcome that? & what does that do to my reality?

 [it changes in some way; forces an identity reformulation.]

(then wouldn’t i be constantly having to confront the fragility of my own reality? what’s to prevent me from lashing out when my status is threatened? [see: whites in USA today])

1d.    so much of advice for artists/writers/entrepreneurs/etc is based on a normative white model.

2.    when i allow myself to feel even a teensy bit special, or to have any desire for success, i run up against individuality vs. collectivity.

2a.    i’m pretty convinced Western individualistic culture is fucking up the world & i identify a desire for individual achievement as rooted in this culture.

i feel like the idea that you have to: “make something” of yourself, or have a meaningful impact on the world (even if that impact is positive or centered on helping others), or leave a “mark”
is a facet of individualism

2b.    when i get excited about writing this novel because i might get it published, or when i dream about having conversations with people i admire on podcasts, i identify it as a function of being raised in an individualistic culture

& thus it’s a problem

& so i beat myself up for wanting those things

3.     then i decide my motivation for writing will be changing the world for the better, in collaboration with other artists writers activists etc. my contribution will be cultural, i tell myself. i’ll be working to shift the dialogue through my art, nothing more. no pressure. i’m one of many.

(it’s not about being famous or successful. it’s about making the world a better place, eliminating oppression, blah blah)

3a.    but to do that i still have to be a singular person out here trying to market my writing. i have to believe my shit is just a bit better than the average writer because i’m asking you to spend your few coins on it in this time of scarcity/uncertainty. i at least have to believe it’s as good as the average writer.

3b.    what if it isn’t good? (it definitely isn’t) then i’m just some shill out here duping unsuspecting people out of their hard-earned money, constantly looking over my shoulder.

3c.    what if it is good, but i can’t get anyone to read it because i don’t have the energy/confidence/money/followers/x to get anyone’s attention?

3d.    and even though i’m doing this to help better the world, and i’m not doing it alone, isn’t the belief that i can have an impact at all still individualistic at its core?

3e.    um, what if i get financially secure/rich/famous and i sell out?

(don’t worry fam, you’re never going to be financially secure)

3f.   …say you live the good life, you stay true to your principles, you make art, you publish it

choose your outcome:
maybe your words touch the hearts of billions and spark some kind of cultural shift
maybe your words touch the hearts of a few hundred, a few thousand, or a few hundred thousand. you lay a foundation, but nothing changes in your lifetime. so isn’t that still succumbing to individualism in the end?
maybe you sell a bunch of books but still struggle to make ends meet, and end up dying young from oppression and depression and stress

4.     anyway, in 3 billion years the universe will die & no one will ever remember any of this happened. so why bother with it? why not just end it now?

4a.   you have agency, you have choice.

you don’t think suicide is a sin
you know the world will not be losing some irreplaceable voice if yours is silenced
you know you are insignificant in context
you know death is only the companion to life, that it comes to us all, & is nothing to fear
you are in physical and mental pain
(so why not just die?)

4b.   your people love you. your people would be emotionally devastated if you die. maybe it’s not the world, but they’re your world. don’t destroy them

4c.    everything is suffering. maybe death is no more peaceful than life, just different. what if you are who you are even in death? what if you spend eternity ruminating over how pointless incorporeal existence is given the impending heat death of the universe?

4d.    inertia is always less effort than changing course.

you know where these rapids lead. you know once you go over the falls you’ll get to spend some time in tranquil waters. let yourself go over. cry.

4e.   maybe, eventually, it will get better.

4f.    and if it doesn’t, don’t worry, you’ll probably die young —

—to 1>

_____

* “Perhaps the clearest evidence for the benefits of illusions comes from the study of depressive cognitions. Independent work by several investigators has shown that relative to depressives, normals … are more prone to an illusion of control—that is, the perception that they can control objectively uncontrollable outcomes…” SE Taylor, Adjustment to threatening events: A theory of cognitive adaptation, American Psychologist (November 1983)

The clarity of hindsight often lures us to become mired in blame and guilt. As we wake up and become aware that the world is the way it is because certain humans have shaped it in their interest, people who are oppressed are tempted to demonize and cast out those responsible for their oppression, while people who are oppressors are tempted to silence and suffocate those naming them as a source of harm. The complex reality is that all of us contain both oppressed and oppressor; all of us inflict harm on others in some way simply as a consequence of being born into an oppressive framework. Our social environment is constructed to facilitate oppression, and it sows division and conflict among the oppressed.

Instead of standing still as our pasts consume us, we must commit to a philosophy of going from here: as oppressed people, we acknowledge and honor past harm but do not allow it to cloud the future; as oppressors, we embrace being accountable but do not allow accountability to stagnate into guilt; together, we allow our experience to inform and guide us as we work towards a world without oppressive structures.

In Walking Awake, the main character, Sadie, is complicit in a system that raises human hosts for parasitic beings we later learn were created by humanity in the distant past.  She is also a victim of that system, as the only reason she holds the position she does is because her bipolar diagnosis rendered her unfit for “service”—the Masters, as the parasitic beings are called, only want to occupy the best specimens humanity can produce. Her position entails raising children for the use of the Masters, and she becomes particularly fond of a child she names Enri, who is taken by a Master early on in the story. On the night Enri is taken, he comes to Sadie in her dreams. During their conversation, she discovers that all the humans that have ever been taken over by the Masters still exist and can communicate with each other in another plane. Their consciousness is just suppressed under the consciousness of the Masters.

When Enri first sees Sadie, he tells he that he felt anger towards her after he learned that she was complicit in a system that was raising him simply to be harvested. The children in this system are not aware of the true nature of their sacrifice until a moment before; they are raised to believe the Masters are benevolent aliens and being their vessel is the highest possible purpose a human can have, but they are never told what the Masters truly look like (scary crab things), and they are never told how violent the process is. The betrayal Enri must have felt upon learning that his caretaker, who lovingly called him Enri instead of Five-47, was actually an instrument of his demise, is a version of the betrayal we feel when a supposed “ally” or accomplice sides with white supremacy or patriarchy. Yet instead of discarding Sadie, instead of succumbing to his desire to demonize, he decides to view her through the lens of transformative justice: he tells her he realizes how the system worked to harm her as well by forcing her to turn over the children she had grown to love, and he offers her the opportunity to be accountable through dismantling the framework that facilitated her harming him. And Sadie, to her credit, does not attempt to argue with him about her complicity, she simply goes from here, accepts her role as both oppressed and oppressor, and allows Enri to educate her about the true history of the world: a world where the Masters are not aliens at all, but the genetically engineered creations of a class of humans interested in control and domination. This new knowledge compels Sadie to work with Enri and the others whose consciousness is subjugated by the Masters towards destroying the system.

Sadie does not turn away from the truth of the world, nor does she attempt to deny how she has benefited from the current system. Enri does not allow his anger towards Sadie and his knowledge of her complicity to cloud his vision of her as a complete human being worthy of an opportunity at redemption. Because they approach each other with open hearts and minds, they are able to work together to destroy the system that subjugates them both. Together, they free future generations of humanity, although it requires them to sacrifice themselves in the end. Like Sadie, we are called to sacrifice our delusions about the nature of our world in the hopes a clear view of reality will compel us to change it; we must sacrifice our placid acceptance of the status quo in favor of radical resistance against dehumanizing ideologies, and we must sacrifice our comfortable numbness in favor of revolutionary awareness. Oppressors can render psychic reparations for past harm via ongoing acceptance of complicity, and ongoing efforts to foment change: If we are oppressors, every day we act towards undoing the framework that perpetuates that oppression, and through these acts we embody our redemption.

As oppressed people, we hold our oppressors accountable in a space of love: we do not excuse harm, or ignore it, but we also do not allow it to prevent us from seeing the potential for transformation coiled up in each of us, cowering behind our socialization into white supremacist imperialist capitalist patriarchy. Like Enri, we have to move away from the comfort and surety of anger and blame and move into the discomfort and precarity of imagining and building new futures with the same people whose ancestors inflicted harm on us in the past, or who themselves have inflicted harm on us in the present. We forgive but never forget, because forgetting does not benefit us, but forgiveness can.

The future must be built on a foundation that allows each of us to fully realize our humanity; our revolution must contain a mechanism for providing reparations to those harmed and an opportunity for redemption to those who have done the harming. We will only find permanent relief from the trauma of being oppressed and the burden* of being an oppressor when we transform our world so that no one has to be either.

 


* “Absolute power for patriarchs is not freeing. The nature of fascism is such that it controls, limits, and restricts leaders as well as the people fascists oppress.” bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, 1981

"In Context" by Tasha Fierce
collage by me

When I interact with people in my day-to-day life, I try my best to consider them as whole human beings with a lifetime of distinctive experiences up to and including the moment before I began my interaction with them. I balance their mannerisms and reactions against the knowledge that they might be having a stressful day, or they might have had a stressful life. I’m not gonna lie and say I’ve perfected this practice—I have particular difficulty being graceful while driving—but I do practice.

I want the films I watch and the books I read to have this same consideration for their characters. I want characters that are whole beings, not flat caricatures and cutouts leveraged to further a plot. Homogenizing diverse experience is a tactic of oppressors, and I intensely dislike hearing echoes of the colonizer in the art I consume.

In District 9, the audience is locked into the colonizer’s mindset with no option of seeing reality any other way. Although we are presented with a number of interviews from social scientists and other talking heads speculating as to the structure of the aliens’ society and the nature of their distress, we only get brief dialogue from the perspective of the alien Christopher Johnson that references their home. We never learn what the aliens call themselves, instead being forced to either refer to them as the depersonalizing “aliens” or the derogatory “prawns”.

The movie’s treatment of the Nigerians is similarly dismissive. There are, again, interviews with white sociologists and talking heads who attempt to explain why the Nigerians are eating alien body parts and such. We never really see the lives of the Nigerians in this world from their perspective, so their actions seem completely irrational since we can only judge them from our context and that of the fictional documentarians.  Nearly everyone is treated as disposable by MNU, in particular the aliens, the Nigerians, and Wikus after his transformation. This speaks not just to capitalism’s prioritization of profit, but also to Whiteness’ perpetual concern with purity, its fundamental need to posit itself opposite an Other, and its need to punish those who transgress racial boundaries—although I’m unsure if that’s what the filmmaker was going for.

All I know is, once the initial novelty of an alien-invasion story that begins with us subjugating the aliens wore off, I just had this discomfiting feeling. I’m not a fan of the violence, both physical and psychic, and it just seems like the movie captures the worst of humanity. The cutout aliens were better people than most of the humans in the film, aside from the brother who got arrested for exposing MNU’s alien experimentation program. As Tananarive Due remarked, District 9 is less Afrofuturism than science fiction set in Africa; it is certainly lensed through the colonizer’s gaze.

After watching District 9, I began to appreciate Steven Barnes’ Lion’s Blood even more. It depicts an alternate history where Africans colonized Turtle Island using enslaved European labor—which, I admit, also makes me uncomfortable. But Barnes constructs his characters to be so multifaceted that I don’t feel like I’m forced into one viewpoint. He gives us both perspectives, the enslaved and the slaveowner, and in each perspective right and wrong are formulated slightly differently relative to the context the character is living in. I’m uncomfortable while reading because I hate to see my people doing wrong—I think colonialism and chattel slavery are wrong no matter who engages in them—and I’m uncomfortable because Barnes is forcing me to empathize with slaveholders: not just because they now look like me, but because they are portrayed as complete human beings. I’m not uncomfortable because I feel locked into a colonizing gaze.

Lion’s Blood illustrates how we can avoid reproducing the past of our oppressor in our futures. Even as it revisits our traumatic past and recasts its players, it portrays that past in a way that cherishes an essential and shared humanity. It stays true to what I know of the spirit of Afrofuturism: honoring the past and allowing it to inform the present and future, divesting from colonial and white supremacist rationalistic frameworks of understanding, and constructing narratives of our experience as Black people in fantastic realms that maintain our integrity as whole beings. Our history; our bodies; our beings are flawed yet magical. To reject the harmful dichotomies of white supremacist imperialist capitalist patriarchy, we must extend grace and the freedom to be self-actualized to all our constructions—whether they’re futures or characters.

When I was eight years old, I was raped by an older classmate. When I was eighteen, I was raped by the brother of my friend’s boyfriend while we were on a double date. Sprinkled in between those traumas are numerous microtraumas*: racism, bullying, sexual harassment, my first suicide attempt at age 14, my first hospitalization, forced medication, an ensuing period of psychological instability, more hospitalization, more drugs, both legal and recreational.

Much of my life I can only remember through a diaphanous veil of neuroleptics. Of course I have wondered what I would be—who I would be—if I had never had these experiences, if I had a childhood and adolescence unblemished by agony. I have even been preoccupied with recovering that lost girl, convinced that once I had excavated her from underneath the pile-on of medication, she might re-emerge as me. In some ways, she has. I see remnants of her in my creativity, my passion for learning, my relentless belief that humanity can create a world without oppression, and my enduring soft spot for whales. But I know now that I do not want to create a self absent my struggles, absent my traumas. I have shaped myself into a marvel.

In Like Daughter, the narrator’s friend Denise experienced a childhood filled with physical and sexual abuse. When cloning technology becomes widely available, she decides to create a clone of herself, intending to right the wrongs her parents inflicted on her. After she’s impregnated with the clone, she starts a search for a suitable father and ends up marrying a rich guy who has no idea what he’s getting himself into. By the time Neecy, her daughter, is six, the man she baited into being the dad has left them. Denise, unable to handle seeing herself broken again, calls up the narrator—who is also the child’s godmother—and asks her to take Neecy away. Instead of trying to soothe herself as she was, instead of healing her wounds in the present, Denise exhausts her minimal energy on a time travel project that ends in heartbreak.

It seems reality, or time, or whatever, does not allow do-overs. We are meant to be the people we are, and we will be shaped into that, one way or another. I have come to realize this over the past few years, and I no longer waste energy trying to resurrect my ancestral self. I remain in conversation with my past; I draw on it to provide context for my present, but I do not wish for a retake. So many things had to go right for me to be here that might not recur the second time around. Everything can always be worse.

I see so many of us walking around like Denise, longing for a chance to right the bygone wrongs of our life, unable to move forward, unable to imagine anything different. Some people are so entrenched in their nostalgia that it extends beyond the personal, into the political. I have made the decision to accept what was, and now I struggle daily towards embracing the present as a gift to the past. I return in triumph, not regret. Look at what I made from this.

 

 

* not in any way saying these are less traumatic generally, just saying that in the context of my life, they were slightly less so.

The Girl with All the Gifts
Adorably deadly.
putting the cut in cute
[attention: there will be spoilers]

What is liberation if it requires the enslavement of others? How can we prioritize our freedom while holding space for empathy? 

Imagining new futures means we do not have to accept the compromises made in the past. We can discard the colonizer mindset and adopt one that does not require the sacrifice of one for the sake of another; that negotiates paths wide enough for all. Under existential threat, we will defend ourselves—with whatever means necessary. When we have the advantage, we can be magnanimous—in fact, power demands magnanimity. Absolutes, either/or dichotomies, the idea that one group must sacrifice itself for another: these are all tools of the master.

In The Girl with All the Gifts, Sennia Nanua plays Melanie, an adorable Black girl who is infected with a symbiotic fungus. She’s incarcerated along with a bunch of other children—all white—who get up every day, get strapped into a chair, and get educated by a woman called Miss Justineau (also white). In the book, Miss Justineau is Black, and Melanie is white, and this makes more sense to me given the ending. But, I’ll get to that later.

Melanie is obviously bright, caring, and inquisitive. She cares about the well-being of all the adults around her, even though the soldiers whom she interacts with most frequently call her “it”, refer to all the children as “friggin’ abortions”, and berate Miss Justineau for showing empathy to what they consider fungus in human form. Other than Miss Justineau, whom Melanie adores, Dr. Caldwell, the head scientist, is the only other adult who is remotely warm towards her—and she is cold as ice. She is using all the children as test subjects for a potential vaccine, the production of which, we learn, requires Melanie’s brain and spinal cord.

We see Melanie get wheeled from the detention facility she lives in to a medical complex, and during this transition we glimpse humanity’s world as it is now: a sea of zombie-looking things trying to break down the fence that encloses Melanie’s world to this point—a military base on the outskirts of London. She has apparently been raised in the detention facility, because she seems to be heretofore unaware of the condition of the outside world. This is the apocalypse Dr. Caldwell is seeking to avert, and this scene impresses upon us the understanding that humanity is no longer dominant on this planet.

In the medical complex, Dr. Caldwell briefly tries to convince Melanie to sacrifice herself willingly by telling her she’ll be giving Miss Justineau a gift, but hedges her bets by drugging Melanie at the same time. While she has her strapped down, the base is overrun by “hungries”, the zombie-like things we saw chomping at the gates on Melanie’s trip to the complex. Dr. Caldwell’s assistant gets bitten and turns, giving Melanie an up-close glimpse of her people. Eventually she gets away, finds Miss Justineau and is picked up by a van containing Sergeant Parks, the man who took Melanie to the medical complex, along with some other military types. Also inside the van is Dr. Caldwell, who is still chomping at the bit to get to Melanie’s spinal cord.

They travel throughout the city trying to get to some mobile labs Dr. Caldwell knows about, so she can start making the vaccine. Throughout their journey, Melanie proves invaluable because she can negotiate the hungries without them coming for her. They’re guided by smell—as is Melanie—and sound. Dr. Caldwell invented some gel that blocks the smell, so the humans can move amongst them as long as they don’t make too much noise. Once someone gets loud, it’s over. But Melanie, being part fungus, isn’t food to them.

During this time we also find out more about the fungus and how it’s spread. It takes over the nervous system (its real-life analog is Cordyceps) and eventually directs the host to congregate with others so it can construct a tree-like structure and create seed pods. Melanie and the adults come across a giant forest Dr. Caldwell deems the potential “end of the world”, as if the seed pods ever burn or become saturated with water, they will open and the fungus will become airborne.

After they find the mobile labs, Melanie comes across some feral hybrid children and realizes that there is hope in this world even if humanity dies. However, those kids end up killing one of the humans she likes the most (and probably not coincidentally the only Black person left on the squad). She defends the rest of the adults against the feral children and kills their leader so they might escape.

Eventually, Dr. Caldwell, who is dying of sepsis, drugs everyone so she can kidnap Melanie and try to make the vaccine. She again attempts to convince Melanie that sacrificing herself for humanity is the altruistic and correct thing to do. Melanie at first agrees, then asks Dr. Caldwell if she’s changed her opinion of her sentience. Dr. Caldwell admits that she thinks Melanie is genuinely alive and self-aware, and at this point Melanie delivers one of the realest lines of the movie: “Then why should it be us who die for you?” She tells Dr. Caldwell to stay in the mobile lab, and she runs outside. 

Melanie has decided the best course of action is to ignite the giant seed pod forest and usher in her vision of a new world. After torching it, she comes across Sergeant Parks, who left the mobile lab looking for Melanie. Melanie ends up shooting him, at his request, because he doesn’t want to become a hungry. Dr. Caldwell gets eaten by the feral children, so Miss Justineau is the only human left. The movie ends with her in the mobile lab, unable to leave because of the airborne fungus, teaching the formerly incarcerated hybrid children along with the feral hybrid children Melanie has rounded up, through the glass.

Melanie needed Miss Justineau. The world she wanted to build required her in it to educate the children, lest they all end up feral. Miss Justineau’s life was going to be miserable in this new world, but Melanie forged ahead without giving her a choice, effectively enslaving her since she cannot leave that mobile lab without succumbing to the fungus. This is why I don’t like the reversal of the races from book to movie: Melanie executes a profoundly unloving act of creation/destruction and I prefer to see my people do better. I love the idea of a Black girl being the future, and I appreciate the power of lines like “It’s not over, it’s just not yours anymore” being spoken by a Black girl to a white man. But the movie’s hierarchies are not representative of reality.

At first Melanie seems to be the oppressed in the situation, because she is caged. But once the hungries invade the base, things change. And by the time she tells Dr. Caldwell “Then why should it be us who die for you?” we’ve seen a world turned over to the fungus, we’ve seen the feral hybrid children, and we’ve seen the seed pods that portend humanity’s eventual doom. Humanity is the oppressed in this world, the fungus is the oppressor. I don’t think Melanie was in a position where releasing those spores was an act of self-defense. She could have killed Dr. Caldwell and that would have pretty much ended the threat to her. She could have run away and lived in the wild and just waited for humanity to either die off on their own or actually pose a threat to her. Time, probability, and all the forces of nature were on her side. 

[We are currently living through the result of some white folks deciding the best response to a minority threat is to burn it all down, while protecting the “good” subalterns that serve their interests. I see these echoes of our reality in the movie.]

I believe we need to gain our freedom by any means necessary. But I question the ability of The Girl with All the Gifts to be a real metaphor for Black liberation without glossing over the power dynamics of the post-apocalyptic landscape Melanie exists in. There exist free hybrid children in Melanie’s world. Even if Dr. Caldwell found a vaccine, a vaccine can only save the uninfected. At best, humanity might continue on as a minority species—until some giant pod tree somewhere bursts open.  Melanie is certainly oppressed in her individual circumstance—like working-class white folks, for example—but overall, her people are running things out there. The actress playing Melanie is Black; the character is not. 

Yet there are still lessons to be learned from The Girl with All the Gifts, because the choice Melanie makes is a choice given to us all, and because Nanua’s casting now makes the character a cinematic representation of us. We are all challenged to reject the values we were inculcated with by society; to reject ways of living that require the subjugation of others. Melanie’s action illustrates how transformative love is not just ensuring the safety of the ones you love but allowing them to make choices about their own safety. Keeping someone “safe” against their will while you build a better world off their labor looks a lot like incarceration and slavery. Our future does not have to follow the same model as our past. We do not have to accept the zero-sum mentality of white supremacist imperialist capitalist patriarchy. No one has to die for anyone.

 

The white male founders of the United States lived in a world that was not at all one where all men were equal, or where all men had the same access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—and for the most part, they were perfectly happy with this reality. Their idealized vision of themselves as egalitarian, liberal, and enlightened is evident in the language of documents like the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The descendants of groups of people the founders never meant to be included in their definition of men have internalized their vision to such an extent that in a struggle to embody it, they again and again force the country further towards its ideal self. Liberalism and other Enlightenment ideologies were not meant to advocate for the equality of anyone other than rich white cisgender men, yet there are enough threads of inspiration and liberation within them that, to this day, oppressed people involved in all types of resistance struggles invoke the words of [a bunch of slaveholding, genocidal patriarchs] the founders to inspire their fellow citizens to do a little better. This is the impact of vision and ideology on the future. Vision provides the destination, and ideology is the road map. In the case of the U.S.’ founders, of course, the vision was more of a delusion, and the road map guided us into a laissez-faire hellscape. But delusion is important in creating a vision of the future. We must, in some sense, disregard the state of the world today and envision the best version of our selves and our societies.

Lauren Olamina, Parable of the Sower‘s protagonist, is creating an ideology—a religion, actually, but religions are like ritualized ideologies (or ideologies in their final form). She sees humanity’s lack of foresight and stubborn refusal to let go of the past, and understands the urgent need for a vision of the future that can force productive action in the present. In Earthseed, the religion Lauren founds, God is Change and Heaven is the Destiny, which is for humanity to take root amongst the stars. Earthseed: The Books of the Living contain her ideology, the road map she constructs to guide humanity to the Destiny. Rather than base her ideology on where an individual stands in a cosmic order, Lauren bases her ideology on an understanding of the cosmic order itself—change is the only constant. Once this nature is understood, action flows from the understanding. “Unenlightened self-interest” becomes a betrayal not only of one’s self and community, but of the laws of nature. Diligent work towards a goal like taking root amongst the stars becomes a form of worship. The ideology becomes internalized, the map memorized.

By setting Parable of the Sower at a point in time when the United States is on its last legs, and old ideologies are seeming inadequate to meet the challenges of the future, Octavia Butler asks us to consider what happens when we must throw out our maps and draw new ones. She also asks us to reconsider who can be a cartographer. Lauren is a teenaged black girl, in a suburb of Los Angeles, with no formal education or training. And yet she observes the world around her, and she has some knowledge of history. With these tools, she is able to divine an ideology that guides her and others through a chaotic moment in history, and ultimately to her vision of interstellar colonization.

Our world now is at a similar point as Lauren’s. The ideologies that propelled us to this moment—capitalism, individualism, materialism—are being rejected by future-minded folk desperate to see humanity do better. Like Lauren, we are called to chart a new path, and like Lauren, most of us have no idea what we’re doing. But Butler speaks to that place of quiet knowing in each of us, reassuring us that our observation and experience is valid. Despite our apparent insignificance, we can know the nature of reality, and we can harness it to shape the future. We can call into existence a better world: by creating art, literature and music that plants a vision of a just and equitable society in our collective minds, and by articulating principles that will help manifest in real life the worlds we fantasize about. We can create a new road map for our descendants to follow in striving for freedom.

There is a new-ish section on this site I wanted to point out. I added it late last year but never really announced it; the link just appeared in the navigation menu quietly. This was purposeful on my part, because it is a vulnerable act for me to create space on this site for pure creation and unfiltered emotion, and I suppose I felt more comfortable stealthily uploading such work to pages than I did publicizing it on the blog. It’s been a few months and I have a few less fucks to give, so now I think it’s time to give a proper introduction.

elsewhere, writing

I have poetry here, as well as some writing I imported from my old (secret) blog water in my cereal, which I used during the worst days of my withdrawal from psych meds. I’m also linking here to the category for blog posts I’m doing for Tananarive Due’s Afrofuturism course at UCLA—I think we will have 6 or 7 in all, and I’m not linking to these on the main blog other than in the featured slider.

The main thing is the poetry, since in the past few months I’ve been updating that instead of writing essays/blog posts sometimes. I don’t plan on updating the water in my cereal section. I hope that I’ve moved to a place in my life and my process where I can express some of that here, or if it’s too thorny to air publicly, just leave it in my journal.

I’ll continue to add more subsections to this part of the site as time goes on. I’m working on some fiction that I will likely end up sharing in a month or so. For now, what’s there is enough.

 

Peace,

Peace, Tasha

 

[SPOILER ALERT for the Xenogenesis trilogy and Earthseed series]
Human societies are constantly struggling between the past and the future, rarely fully inhabiting the present. We see evidence of this conflict today more plainly than ever, as climate change threatens humanity’s long-term survival while U.S. politics is preoccupied with the fallout of loss of white male status. The slogans of populist politicians of today are the same as those of yesterday: Make _______ great again, implying we must turn around to recapture our glory. In my own lifetime, I have observed that in the face of diverse threats to humanity’s survival, instead of confronting our destiny with clear eyes and purpose and shaping it into its best form, many would rather cling desperately to an idealized vision of what we once were. There is, of course, comfort in the familiar, and the past is infinitely more familiar than the future will ever be—although as Parable of the Sower‘s Lauren Olamina would point out, with an understanding of the past, the future becomes more knowable. I would imagine that during her own life Octavia Butler noticed a similar pattern of nostalgic avoidance as I have; there is much in her work to indicate that she did. She certainly identified a clear need for us let the past go in order to enable the future.

Much of Butler’s work features a tension between past and future playing out in the present. The main character in Kindred is supernaturally tied to the past, being violently jolted to slave times against her will. In Mind of My Mind, the past is embodied in Doro, the heroine’s father, whom she must battle to pave the way for a new form of society. But in the Lilith’s Brood trilogy, as well as in the Earthseed series, the main character is fighting regressive forces within humanity who cannot accept that change has occurred, is occurring, and that things will never be the same again. Both Lilith (the heroine of Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago), and Lauren Olamina (the heroine of Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents), are reluctant pioneers who, despite their reservations about the struggles ahead and what they will be required to do in order to survive, have determined that humanity’s collective survival lies in the future, not the past. Lilith, one of only a handful of survivors of humanity’s last nuclear war, must convince her fellow humans to accept an interbreeding program with a physically revolting species in exchange for the chance to perpetuate some of humanity’s genetic legacy and live on a restored Earth for a time. Lauren Olamina must build a multiethnic, collectivist movement that believes humanity’s destiny lies among the stars—in the midst of of a hypernationalist and religious fundamentalist revival in a United States reduced to developing country status by climate change.

Lilith is herself resistant to the idea of interbreeding with the Oankali, the alien species who have rescued her from the dying remains of Earth. The Oankali are masters of genetic manipulation, and have sustained their civilization for much longer than humanity. They survive through trading their genetic material with other species, changing both participants in the process and birthing a new species. The situation with the Oankali is admittedly coercive, in the sense that Lilith is basically captive for quite a while and denied reading and writing material. Eventually more information is provided to Lilith, and it becomes less of a captive situation. She comes to accept that humanity had pretty much destroyed the planet, and that without the remediation of the Oankali, it would not have supported life anymore. Reluctantly, she agrees to act as the mother to a new species, and to try to persuade as many humans as she can to engage in the gene trade with the Oankali. Having overcome her own resistance to letting go of the past, she must now surmount that of forty other humans. This is, predictably, where the majority of the conflict lies.

Once released on the remediated Earth, many humans form resister colonies and refuse to participate in the interbreeding program. The Oankali have sterilized humans to ensure that they can only breed the Oankali way (in a threesome with a human male, a human female, and an ooloi—genderless Oankali that are especially adept at genetic manipulation and can excrete substances that promote euphoric highs). The Oankali are also much stronger than humans, so the resisters had no hope of overpowering them. And in Adulthood Rites, we find out the Oankali’s living ships will eventually consume all of the renewed Earth’s resources, leaving a lifeless, uninhabitable husk behind—in response to this discovery, Lilith’s first half Oankali/half human son convinced the Oankali to offer the resisters a settlement on Mars, along with restored fertility. Yet by Imago some of them were still refusing, particularly a group of interbred humans with a genetic tendency to grow tumors and develop other ailments, descended from a human woman who discovered she was fertile. These humans built up an ideology around the Oankali as devils and Lilith as a supernatural La Malinche-type figure, preferring to breed family members with each other and suffer than accept that the past they were trying to preserve was destroying their future.

Lauren Olamina is a teenager forming ideas about the world that are contradictory to those she’s being taught. She rejects her Baptist father’s religion, instead developing her own philosophy based on Change as deity. As her world is in upheaval, she identifies change as the primary constant in the universe. The adults around her seem, in some respects, to be waiting for good times to come again; seem like they don’t actually believe that this is now and that was then, and although we can understand, honor, and draw power from the past, then will never be now again. Lamenting and preparing for the return of the past occupies space that belongs to the future, and Olamina understands this intrinsically. Instead of allowing adults’ nostalgia to make her complacent, she prepares for the future spiritually and materially: She develops her Earthseed philosophy that identifies God as Change and humanity’s Destiny as colonizing other planets, and she packs an emergency “go bag” she can grab at a moment’s notice in case she needs to abandon her home.

The United States in Parable of the Sower is presented with a similar choice as we had in 2016, a choice between a presidential candidate who at least paid lip service to being forward-looking and one who was proudly regressive. Reality mirrors fiction; faced with fiscal collapse due to climate change, Butler’s U.S. decides to turn back towards the past and assents to a rollback of their civil rights. Slavery is revived in pockets of the country. Company towns return, embraced by many people seeking refuge from increasing violence who do not know, or do not believe, their exploitative history. Olamina identifies a knowledge of the past, a consideration of consequences, as vital to survival—one of her Earthseed verses suggests considering the consequences of one’s behavior as a method of getting along with God. She identifies considering the future as similarly crucial in this verse:

A victim of God may,
Through forethought and planning,
Become a shaper of God.
Or a victim of God may,
Through shortsightedness and fear,
Remain God’s victim,
God’s plaything,
God’s prey.

(Parable of the Sower 31)

For societies, understanding the consequences of behavior entails understanding history. Shortsightedness and fear are embodied in regressive politics that emphasize denial over futurist problem-solving, precluding the ability to plan successfully. Occupying one’s mind with the past crowds out room for forethought.

The past and the future each have their place in our present. Blind nostalgia is useless, but an appreciation of the past is essential; likewise, paralyzing apprehension is not helpful, but envisioning ideal futures and potential paths towards them is key to ensuring best outcomes. Butler had a keen understanding of the mental balancing act required to successfully navigate pasts and futures while in the present, and she imbued her characters with this knowledge. Their experiences point to one conclusion: If we are to build better futures, humanity must let go of the past—before it is too late.