Multiethnic Literatures in the U.S.

Aloft is the story of Jerry Battle’s escape from life’s mundane problems. Retired from his landscaping business at 59, he prefers to spend his time flying his airplane alone above his native Long Island. He longs to live above the fray, to escape the messy entanglements of love and family. Once when Battle is flying, he experiences an odd rush watching his Long Island home fade beneath him. “I’m disappearing,” he thinks. Then, he whispers an aside to the reader: “Let me reveal a secret,” Battle confesses, “I have been disappearing for years.” He is now aloft, emotionally and spiritually untethered, severing the ties that ought to bind.

    Just what has caused Jerry to, as he puts it, “disappear” from his own life, is not apparent for the first third of the novel. Lee has a habit of withholding information, of waiting before dropping a backstory like a bomb to alter the emotional terrain. In Aloft the backstory concerns Daisy, Jerry’s long-dead wife and the mother of his two children. Lee mentions her in passing throughout the opening chapters, but not until we are fully absorbed in the stream of Jerry’s present circumstances do we get something approaching a full account.

Except for an occasional line of postmodern critique from Theresa, the issue of race is not raised. Rather, it is part of the fabric of life, expressed through Jerry’s relationships with his father, children and Daisy. None of Jerry’s memories of his marriage reveal much about who Daisy really was, she remains more or less an image of sex and hysteria in broken English. The flashback, though, does show us Jerry in a different light, and we suspect that his inability to connect with or even perceive his wife’s humanity contributed to her alienation. Lee offers no counterpoint to Jerry’s version of Daisy, but allows us to feel its suffocating limitations, Jerry’s terrible and ordinary failure.

Implicit in Lee’s portrait of Battle is a critique of contemporary American life. We may not live in Battle’s world of mini-mansions, subzero freezers and private tennis courts, but we probably recognize at least some of Jerry’s problem in ourselves. In an age characterized by the pursuit of more, more possessions, more stability, many of us feel disconnected, aloft. Lee’s novel helps us to see that an unexpected feature of achieving our American dream is a vague dissatisfaction, a listless distraction from the things that matter most.  We see the depth of Battle’s problem that also may help us to recognize the ways we are lost when we withdraw from the ones we love.

In the first chapter of Parable of the Talents, by Ocatvia E. Butler, Lauren has a conversation with one the surviving members of the Dovetree family, Aubrey. They talk about the attack on the Dovetree’s house, killings, and the destruction. Aubrey started talking about the description of the attackers and the way they acted.

“…attackers were men, but they wore belted black tunics – black dresses, she called them – which hung to their thighs.”
“They all wore big white crosses on their chests – crosses like in church.”

These two phrases sound all too familiar. They sound like a description of cloths that Ku Klux Klan wear, however, it is not. The current Ku Klux Klan is white robes with a variation of red or black cross on the chest or back area. The people who Aubrey talks about were black tunics with red crosses. This illustrates to me that the whole country, nation, is back to where we were when the Ku Klux Klan could walk the streets and literally kill people who they thought were not fit in their society. However, this might be not be the case since these people wear black tunics, which might show that it is similar to what has happened in our history, it is not the same, but very closely related. I once heard someone say something similar to, “For every country to move forward, it needs a revolution once in a while.” Revolutions happen when something drastic happens where people do no like what is being done (in a simple way). “Desperate times call for drastic measures.” When there is a revolution the nation is pretty much is set to the beginning. New rulers need to be put in place, new laws have to created, and new ways of living have to be established. In Parable of the Talents, this isn’t the case. Even thou they don’t call the people who attacked Dovetrees Ku Klux Klan, they are. We are back at the begging and things are going to go bad again. This is another circle of life which repeats itself, different time same concept.

“Jarret insists on being a throwback to some earlier, ‘simpler’ time. Now does not suit him. Religious tolerance does not suit him. The current state of the country does not suit him. He wants to take us all back to some magical time when everyone believed in the same god, worshipped him in the same way, and understood that their safety in the universe depended on completing the same religious rituals and stomping anyone who was different. There was never such a time in this country.”

There was a time when all this was considered the right thing to do, however, it was never established as a law in a society we live in today. Taking this phrase and looking at the present state of the United States religion, there is no way US will ever be “taken back to that magic time of one religion.” US is one the religiously diverse nations and that cannot be taken away from a nation like the United States of America.

After reading “Parable of the Sower”, I was heartbroken. I became disgusted with the world around me as Octavia Butler exposed me to the ugly truths that I was all too familiar with: racism still exists and it is worse than ever, the middle class are becoming poor, the environment is going to hell, drug addiction is out of control, and the worst part is that society will just ignore all these problems until they blow up in our faces with chaos and anarchy taking over, just like they did in Butler’s novel.
Butler gives us various hopeful situations to solving these problems. Unfortunately, every single one she slowly crushes and kills. Butler introduces us to Lauren, a character with hyperempathy. Such a unique disease of feeling others’ pain that one quickly wonders what the world would be like if everyone had such a disorder. Would there be peace on earth? Hell no. Butler destroys this dream of any good coming from this disorder by showing that we’d be helpless in helping each other or better yet, we’d kill all those in pain just so we wouldn’t have to suffer. People with broken bones would quickly be executed to save the suffering we’d have to endure. Maybe this is Butler’s way of saying that society can’t just understand or feel the pain of those who are suffering. That would do no good. By helping others people would have to face their agony. So instead people just try to hide from others’ misery.
Through Lauren, the reader also gets the hope of a girl determined not ignore society’s problems but instead face them head on with the idea of changing the world into a better place. Our wish that Lauren can change the world is also killed by Butler. She makes our hope in Lauren change into disgust as Butler changes Lauren into a cross-dressing religious extremist that slowly begins to justify killing and stealing in her philosophy of change. Her obsession with her father and sleeping with someone who reminds her of her father and is her father’s age is not to pleasant either.
Even the hope of educating others to these problems is shattered by Butler. In the book people don’t even want to know about societies’ problems but instead want to live inside their walled communities. When Lauren tries to educate her community of the terrors of the outside and being prepared, she is just ignored and even punished for scaring people. It’s as if Butler is telling us that there are all these horrible things in our society and there is nothing we can do about it because people don’t want to do anything about it. We can’t make a philosophy for everyone to follow, we can’t just try to feel others’ pain that their in, we can’t fight racism because it’s unidentifiable, and we can’t really educate those who just want to live inside their little “bubbles”, so what can we do? Butler succeeds in ripping out our little hearts and leaving us to bleed to death. Hopefully our hearts are mended a little in Butler’s sequel by giving us a little hope in mankind.

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.

I just finished reading Parable of the Sower and I must say WOW! This book is amazing! At it’s crudest moments are when we see the true elements of human nature. As humans, we feel, we try to be compassionate, we try to help our fellow man. But that is today, not in the 2020’s when our book takes place. People have come to embody their worst forms. People are drug addicts, theifs and killers. Cops & politicians are in it for thier own gain, not the people they are supposed to serve, and there is no one strong enough to challenge them. People have only been left with thier animal instincts. We see these things when comeone notices a human skull lying on the ground & doesn’t flinch. They can only be thankful that “It’s not me.” Or when Lauren’s group comes across a corpse on the side of the road & nobody has a problem with Emery taking the woman’s clothes…”I need to survive”…

What has the world come to when a man will to try snatch a child from her mother’s grasp? It seems the only time purity & innocence come up in the novel is when the chidren are the focus. Doe makes her father take half the pomegranate because they should each have thier fair share. Allie takes in Justin like he is her own child. Natividad & Travis join the group because their child needs strong defenses around him. It is perhaps the children that are able to keep this group sane & together. Everytime Grayson wants to leave, he takes on look at his daughter & knows he must stay, at least for her sake. He needs to survive. Survival is the key to the future Parable of the Sower holds for the people of the United States.

Throughout Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Lauren (the main character) talks about the aspects of her newly discovered religion of Earthseed. The religion states that God is change and that you can shape that change. This means that you control your destiny and the destiny of others with your everyday actions.

In this particular section of the book (p. 167-268), Lauren demonstrates one of the important concepts of the religion. “Embrace diversity, Unite—Or be divided, robbed, ruled, killed By those who see you as prey. Embrace diversity Or be destroyed” (p.197). After pyro addicts and thieves take over and burn down Lauren’s community, her family is killed, and she is forced to live on her own. Lauren has to find a way to survive without a home and without the help of friends or family. She is left with nothing. But Lauren, being the strong girl that she is, does not believe that she is left with nothing. She knows that she has Earthseed. She knows that if she keeps it her mind and actions she will survive. In order to survive, Lauren knows that she has to find allies and head north. She meets two survivors named Harry and Zahra when she looks for a place to sleep. They all sleep in the same garage for a night, and become allies from there.

Their journey north becomes a struggle with savages trying to rob or kill them for their supplies, clothing, and money. As they travel through expressways they meet new and different people. They meet a mixed family of three (Travis, Natividad, and their baby Dominic), a former rich man named Bankole, two prostitute sisters named Allie and Jill and a small child named Justin. Before the family joined Lauren’s group, they were attacked by robbers and wild dogs because they were a small group, and therefore, seen as prey. Before Bankole joined the group, he was seen pushing his cart along the road by himself, and would most likely be robbed or killed like every other individual that was seen alone. Before Allie and Jill came along, they were found trapped in a house after an earthquake and would also be dead if they were not saved by Lauren’s group. After his mother was killed, Justin had no chance of surviving if they did not take him in. The way that Lauren takes these people in and allows them to travel with her as a group demonstrates her belief in Earthseed. She embraces diversity by inviting people no matter what race they are. (there are three white people, three black people, and two Hispanics) She also encourages unity because she knows that that is what it takes to survive.

As each of the individuals join the group, they gradually become a community. They take turns watching for scavengers while the others sleep, they advise each other on what supplies to buy, and they kill anyone who attacks anyone in the group. With her belief in Earthseed, Lauren was able to build this community. She starts to prove that she did not just make it up like some people believe. Surviving as a unite shows that the religion is true, and that others should believe in it as well.

This concept of embracing diversity and uniting seems to be Butler’s way of sending a message to readers. She is trying to show today’s society that the only way to survive and prevent the formation of Robledo’s 2027 society is to unite and accept others no matter what race they are.