Feb 06 2008
Access is the Problem
In the novel, Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, the characters and other inhabitants of the future United States face an all too familiar world of little access to essential resources. This world in which it is difficult to obtain an income, food, and adequate medical care is not all that foreign if compared to today’s society. Today, those who are not on the top of the social class hierarchy deal with limited access almost daily. They fight to obtain a job in which will pay enough for them to get out of debt, they struggle to obtain healthy foods (without having to travel long distances), and they attempt to gain adequate and affordable healthcare and justice. This is exactly the picture that Butler paints in her novel, except that instead of only affecting the poor, it sweeps the country on a large scale, making a full life even more difficult to obtain.
One of the first and most obvious things that the characters in Butler’s world do not have is access to money. The only money they are able to obtain is by either stealing or by taking money from the dead. If any characters are able to hold a job, it usually does not pay enough for them to support a family or to buy necessities to live on. Butler writes, “Wages – surprise! Were never enough to pay the bills” (288). Even when people were able to earn some type of wages, they couldn’t afford water and food. These kinds of occurrences are strikingly familiar to today’s world. Jobs that pay a low salary never quite get people out of debt. They also leave people with a low amount of money to buy food. Another similarity between this fantasy world and our current one is the distance people are made to travel to obtain food. Butler’s characters cannot find adequate stores that sell food and clothing at affordable prices. This is not a far off idea if the poorer areas of cities today are closely examined. People must travel further distances in order to buy the things they need, much like the people in Butler’s world. This problem of access to resources is what sets classes apart from each other in today’s society, and unfortunately, in Butler’s world, this lack of access is what keeps Lauren and her followers on the streets.
In addition to not having access to money and proper food, the characters in Butler’s world do not have access to medical care or to the criminal justice system. Doctors and hospitals are long gone and the people are left to either not receive medical care, or to simply make due with that they have. Along with no medical care, these people cannot depend on the police for assistance. Often the police charge outrageous prices for routine investigations or worse, they don’t respond to a call for days. Again, while these situations might seem shocking to think about, they are going on in the world today. In poor areas of the city, police many times are slow to respond; if they respond at all. With Bankole’s situation, Butler writes, “The deputies all but ignored Bankole’s story and his questions. They wrote nothing down, claimed to know nothing.” (316). In this instance, the police didn’t even give Bankole a chance – they had their minds made up that he was a criminal. In the end, the lack of available resources is the community’s downfall. Because of the unavailability of water, food, money, and medical needs, they are left fending for themselves. They steal and share, make their own food, and try the best they can to survive under the less than perfect conditions that now make up their lives, just like some people do in today’s world.
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In the post, alafau2 (just in case you want your name to remain anonymous online) writes a lot about the problem of space and access to certain goods, services, etc., which, as she correctly points out, often becomes the marker of class status. What, thus, if we think about Butler’s novel as a way to urge us to consider a different way to think about global differences between people. Maybe, her “sci-fi” novel really does not primarily examine a different time, but a different space-in other words, a problem of time seems to be more a problem of space. In other words, is the difference between the historical stages from, say, the early 1900s until 2030 not also to be found simply by looking at different geographical developments on our globe? How does such an understanding change the ways in which we think about differences between classes, nations, etc. and the ways in which they developed differently (and how does power factor into this development–colonialism, imperialism, global capitalist trade, etc.)?