COLLECTIVE IMAGINATION IN DEEP TIME: Conjuring with Octavia E. Butler
The state of our future world has become increasingly difficult to imagine.
Enter the year 2020.
In November 2019, a virus began to snake its way around the world, branching from East to West, in a matter of three short months. At present, across the globe, almost 10 million people have been reported to be infected and close to 500,000 people have died as a result of what some say is an “apocalyptic” virus that has been termed simply as COVID-19.
By February, it officially became recognized as a pandemic. By March, the sober realization of the rapid deadliness of its reach forced millions of city-dwellers and townies off dense, urban streets and suburban strips to be sequestered in their homes. By April, it was the virus that had emerged to become the most catastrophic event to occur during our lifetime. By May, we witnessed more killings of unarmed black men and women by both the police and armed white citizens in America. The month was concluded by the barbaric police killing of George Floyd and the world graphically bearing witness to the systemic knee on the necks of Black Americans.
June has brought a groundswell of protests and civil unrest, internationally, and, yet again, the call for everyone to finally acknowledge that Black Lives do, in fact, Matter.
The year is 2020, and the months and decades that will follow have only begun.
Revisiting the near-past: On a Saturday morning in early February, a gathering of futurist world builders, facilitators, advisors and one creative observer (me), hunkered down around a large conference table in a room generously offered within the home of NY Live Arts to begin the first of a 3-step process that would soon bring a collective future imagining into our present frame.
“Octavia E. Butler will be our spiritual Godmother throughout this process,” declared Kamal Sinclair, Guild of Future Architects executive director and den mother of said “process.” And so, it began. As quickly as dust could be disturbed, like any good artist’s latent sensibilities threatening to erupt, four futurist storytellers settled in to be firmly grounded in the process of creating the future. The Four — Stephanie Dinkins, Sophia Nahli Allison, Yance Ford and Idris Brewster — were at the dawn of a complex jaunt to construct a world of their collective imagining. Little did we know then how quickly fate would align with the bellowing uncertainty of that future, combined with the continual sacrifice of brown and black bodies, the reignition of more painful yet transcendent pasts-to-futures all to be slammed into an unstable present.
In the past, imagining events of our current magnitude had generally been left to the fantastical doomsday authorship of writers such as Butler or Margaret Atwood. In the present, comprehending how existing and looming disasters can coincide compels us to look critically at the world we have created and are continuing to build.
This critical assessment is necessary work for the Guild of Future Architects. It is work that dissenting minds have deemed a futile effort, since our progression has oft been viewed as a steady victory toward human dominion over the malleable elements of nature, which surely humankind will always be able to control and direct. Thus, in February 2020, it became the work of four futurist creators to show that an ostensibly impossible world is not only possible, but it is also inevitable. It became their work to reveal how past and present have coalesced to create a future world that is occurring NOW.
What Butler gave us
The narrative, scientific and technological fusion of speculative fiction, deep time perspective and collective imagination soon began to fill the space with a consanguineous knowledge and kinship with Butler, with whom the artists had been directed to begin a dialogue as inspiration for the work. Conjuring with Butler, an undeniable observationist prophet and scientific lyricist, the artists began to cut a path to follow the breadcrumbs she left us as an ancestral way-shower.
The genesis of multiple theories of creation is quickly dispensed by members of the group as we review generative bodies of Butler’s most seminal works, (Wild Seed and Kindred, to begin; the Parable series to end). These texts inarguably sought to provoke divergent and intersecting ways of envisioning a past behind and world ahead — as well as our potential to shape and reshape both.
What emerged was a deep consideration of Butler’s scientific observations and narrative trajectories. For Butler, the present is a space where we can hypothesize about current trends and create linkages to potential catastrophes in the future. In turn, the past is a place for reflexive transcendence, wherein the marginalized, either by choice or design, can transmute the circumstances of their oppression. But, what of a place that exists in between past, present and future? What exists in the mycelial fibers that connect these generational occurrences? Where do we harbor our ancestral pain, regenerate and transform? It would appear somewhere in that link; somewhere within the in-between.
We began by assessing the link between past and present before migrating into the future. Exploring the distant past, Butler threads 16th century Africa and the antebellum South to her present worlds of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. In her 5-part Patternist series (1977–84) and acclaimed novel, Kindred (1979), Butler examines the themes of power, institutionalized racism, gender roles and medical epidemics, tying them to the theories of survival, reproduction and evolution.
Kindred tells the story of Dana, a black woman living in 1970s Los Angeles who is inexplicably transported to a Maryland plantation before the Civil War. Butler’s utilization of time travel allows her to intimately explore the lives of enslaved Africans in the American South while also weaving their stories and legacy to the survival of modern-day American Blacks. Wild Seed, although the fourth book to be released in the Patternist series, is chronologically the first. It tells the story of two Africans, Doro and Anyanwu, who are immortal. Doro is a spirit who ensures his survival by inhabiting the bodies of those he kills, while Anyanwu is a shapeshifter who possesses the power to heal and can transform herself into any living being, animal or human. The books that follow in the series weave a congenital thread into the tapestry of a severely flawed and ominous future.
In Butler’s prophesied future-that-is-now, Lauren Olamina declares, “Change is God.” During the first pages of Parable of the Sower (1993), future religious leader Olamina speaks of the inevitability of change and the destruction of false prophets. To her, God is creation and transformation. God is not an ideal, but an evolving process of understanding and self-actualization. When we meet Olamina, she is young in body, but mature in mind. A newly-turned 15 years old during the summer of 2024, Olamina’s American world is bleak. Wealthy and upper middle-class neighborhoods are surrounded by protective walls topped with wire. Adults and children carry guns when they venture outside their homes to protect themselves from those who are eager to get whatever they can for survival. Water has become a luxury item, since only a few can obtain and afford it. People subsist on homegrown produce and limited community resources.
Speaking of the newly elected American president who many believe will bring a positive turnabout to their dire circumstance, Olamina says:
“I mean he’s like… like a symbol of the past for us to hold on to as we are pushed into the future. He’s nothing. No substance. But having him there, the latest in a two-and-a-half-century-long line of American Presidents make people feel that the country, the culture they grow up with is still there — that we’ll get through the bad times and back to normal… but it took a plague to make some people realize that things could change. Things are changing now, too. Our adults haven’t been wiped out by a plague so they’re still anchored in the past, waiting for the good old days. But things have changed a lot, and they’ll change more.”
When her home is set ablaze and her family lost, Olamina sets out on foot, moving from Los Angeles to northern California. Along the way, her philosophies and prescriptions for life, now called Earthseed, gains followers. Eventually, they gather to form a religious community. Earthseed is predicated on the necessity for change and the need for humans to evolve beyond Earth, since it is believed the gutting of its natural resources will eventually lead humans to extinction.
Building a world ahead of us
This pluralistic, collective imagination of past and future worlds continues to be the harvesting of contemporary progressive artists. They have been in a constant state of producing metaphysical, spiritual/ancestral and creative/meditative realms beyond traditional narrative renderings. These are the various utterances made during that first session:
“There is no time and space.”
“We are our own ancestors.”
“We are all collaborators.”
Immediately the trajectories Butler built become our path forward, and from which the artists begin to weave an elongated braid into the future.
SEEDS → TIME → NETWORK →
Time is continuous, and so is the space in between. These are the seeds Butler left for us to harvest. She gave us the perception to see deeply so that we may forge our past-present-future with progressive technologies and an analysis of our current world to consider a divergent evolutionary environment. She reminded us of our ability to shape-shift through time and space and various constructs and possibilities to ensure our survival. She reminded us of the power that systematically oppressed individuals and communities possess to evolve in the face of ongoing structural and interpersonal change so that we might make new human natures and attributes, new social constitutions and patterns that release us from the traps in which we have become ensnared. It is then necessary work to invent something that creates more, rather than fewer, possibilities for our world.
That’s the revolutionary presumption of a world these four artists began to lay brick upon brick on that chilly February day in 2020. It is the presumption that we can bend time. Plant seeds. Expand our reach. Collaborate with our ancestors. Gather in sacred spaces. And heal.
I, for one, was excited to start on this journey of discovery, to find out how the months and decades would unfold…
