Posthuman Practice through Religion in Parable of the Sower and The Year of the Flood
In the first part of Parable of the Sower, Lauren Olamina formulates the tenets of Earthseed. Earthseed is a posthuman practice that stimulates earthy survival through the lenses of Thacker’s Cosmic Pessimism (See Chapter 2 for an explanation). After her community is destroyed, she practices Earthseed to adapt to the changes in an ongoing apocalypse. When her gated community is destroyed and her family killed, she gets the opportunity to practice her religion. Before the Robledo community’s downfall, Lauren too precautions by teaching herself and others of plants for survival, much in the same way God’s Gardener’s do on Saint Eaull’s day. She learns that she can make acorn bread and prepares survival-packs. Yet when she tries to disclose her thoughts on the end of the community to her friend Joanne, she is scowled by her father because “it’s better to teach humans then to scare them” (Butler 65). However, Lauren Olamina is tired of “a dumb little game of ‘If we don’t talk about bad things, maybe they won’t happen’” (61). Yet clearly, Lauren is counting a radical change for her survival; the end of a stable home. In her article, Outterson argues:
“Olamina was right – Change is necessary – but change is also violence, and so in a sense the violence that destroys her communities is inevitable. Only when she finally lets the seed spread when she finally sends her companions out to travel without a safe and unchanging home, can they survive.” (444)
God/Change in Earthseed is thus something violent yet necessary to stimulate earthly survival of Olamina and her community. In her book, Lauren writes: “In order to rise from its own ashes. A phoenix/First/Must/Burn” (Butler 153). The violence in Earthseed is impersonal, “an pessimism of the-word-without-us” (Thacker 68), that generates ideas of the self’s death and the inability to witness life after the-world-for-us (the end humanity).
Furthermore, posthuman-practice for survival in Parable is about embracing cosmic pessimism as a state of becoming with each other. In a Radiolab podcast, Eugene Thacker is interviewed on why his book became a mainstream phenomenon via Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s video promotion. Even Jay-Z’s costume designer, Jean Ambrose, found the idea of In the Dust of this Planet’s “menacing” yet attractive phrase to put on a jacket or shirt Ambrose described it as the end of an era and the beginning of something new and she notes that it was almost like Jay-Z did not know that it was on his back; he was not afraid of the end of the world (“Radiolab – In the Dust of this Planet – [Horror, Fashion, and the end of the world . . .]” 20.00 – 25.00). The same parallel can be drawn with Earthseed; it is a religion that helps humans become posthumans that are brave in the face of death, violence and climatological influences. In her article, Lauren J. Lacey observes that Butler’s texts “demonstrate that coping with power requires adaptability, strength, and the willingness to take power for oneself” (381). The practice that Earthseed is for the subject to have a sense of empowerment the same way Ambrose’s analysis did: it encourages is human survival by way of overcoming or accepting cosmic pessimism or change in communalities.
The communalities involved are based on difference. Earthseed functions as an open religion that allows the posthuman to break boundaries between gender and race as an integral part of humanity. Rebecca J. Holden notes, “Butler’s black female characters must navigate their survival their survival in societies riddled with complex hierarchies of power, hierarchies based on differences in gender, race, species, and mental strength” (Holden in Lacey 382). The way Lauren and her group navigate through these complex hierarchies is with Earthseed. Lauren presents herself as a man for practical reasons that contribute to her survival. In contrast, her fellow survivor Zahra “grabbed male attention” (Butler 183) and that was dangerous in Parable’s apocalyptic world, where predators “prey on old people, lone women, or women with kids, handicapped people” (202). Lauren’s change of gender is thus another posthuman practice that helps with survival.
However, it is notable that Parable’s focus on human and human differences overshadows non-humans or the world-in-itself. There are some short mentions of how the climate is affecting the earth, but it remains a lurking shadow in the narrative, not emphasized as much as humans dealing with the idea of a world-without-us. Butler’s posthuman practice in Parable thus remains limited to coping mechanisms in a world becoming a world-without-us, yet with more detail to a utopian focus of communalities between humans.
God’s Gardeners
For her second novel in the MaddAdam trilogy, Margaret Atwood writes fourteen hymns that celebrate activists as saints to appreciate the non-human world or as some may call simply nature. The hymns in The Year of the Flood were even converted into real songs released on an album called Hymns of God’s Gardeners available on Youtube via bootleg videos (“Margaret Atwood sings the Mole Day hymn”). The God’s Gardener’s sect attempt to fuse “science and Judaeo-Christianity” (Coyne 1). However, it can be argued that Atwood does more than simply mix two ideologies; they mix the two with environmentalist and animal activist ideologies, creating what seems the perfect religion to teach others old stories of activists that made headlines in the past or became martyrs such as zoologist Dian Fossey who fought hard for the gorilla species in Rwanda (A hymn is dedicated to her: “Today we Praise our Saint Dian”). Margaret describes The Year of the Flood as a “simultaneouel” (Coyne 1) of the first novel Orynx and Crake, in which the perspectives of other characters that bring about the “Waterless Flood” are brought into picture (Atwood ). The second novel involves a storyline of three protagonists Toby, Ren and Adam One. After a disease has spread on the planet, killing most of humanity, Toby and Ren’s stories offer perspectives of how they survive and what happened before the disastrous pandemic. Both Toby and Ren were God’s Gardeners at one point, and Adam One is the cult leader. Everyone who joins this sect are either defectors of the gated communities or victims of their circumstances. The God’s Gardeners are pragmatic believers who gather trash in the “peeblands” () or streets for recycling, tend gardens of vegetables and fruits on a roof, rarely take baths in order to save water and wear sacks of simple clothing to distance themselves of the “Exfernal World” and their creations that are made by exploiting resources of the planet, animals and other humans. The novel is multi-faceted for it addresses issues of gender, class, modern slavery and race as well (though not as diverse as Butler). The God’s Gardeners mostly address environmental problems and try to create a symbiotic relationship with nature and other humans they manage to convert into a Gardener.
The horror in Atwood’s novel lies in the idea of human extinction by way of pandemic plague, while the planet thrives in its own ways. What makes Atwood’s novel even more horrific, is its temporality that lies in the near future for its