Within economically deprived areas, Marxist geographers like David Harvey work to build what they call “spaces of hope.” Against the drive toward “exclusionary communitarianism, narrow vested interests […], corporate profit hunger, financial myopia, and developer greed” (Harvey 154), Harvey imagines communal spaces where “narrow vested interests” give way to “mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defence” (Kropotkin 5). Like Harvey, Octavia Butler, in Parable of the Sower, and Ana Castillo, in So Far From God, anticipate—and even provide rudimentary models for—communal spaces that replace “bourgeois utopias,” premised on privatization. “Utopias,” Russell Jacoby writes, “seek to emancipate by envisioning a world based on new, neglected, or spurned ideas” (12). By exposing the unjustness and dehumanizing affect of capitalism and the profit motive, and by modeling communities based on co-operation, Butler and Castillo envision what Ernst Bloch calls a “wishful landscape,” a “concrete utopia”—put simply, a better, more equitable world.
Butler’s Parable of the Sower presents a post-apocalyptic world where social Darwinism is the order of the day. As Lauren Olamina, the young African American heroine of the novel, writes, in Earthseed: The Books of the Living, people “divide. They struggle, / One against one, / Group against group” (103). States, for example, are “shutting themselves off from one another, treating state lines as national borders” (327). In Parable, the kind of “exclusionary communitarianism” that Harvey discusses has resulted not only in gated communities—or rich “ghettoes of affluence”—but the privatization of water and all formerly public services, including the fire department. Water is delivered by water-peddlers, though “water now costs several times as much as gasoline” and the peddlers are often brutally murdered for their precious cargo (18). In this socio-economic environment, as Lauren’s dad suggests, “all anybody can do right now [is] [l]ive. Hold out. Survive” (76). And survival isn’t easy. “Everything,” Lauren asserts, is “getting worse: the climate, the economy, crime, drugs” (187). Murder and theft are common occurrences. The streets are littered with dead bodies, some of which are headless. Children, raped and bloodied, roam the streets alone or in packs like feral dogs. “Squatters, winos, junkies, homeless people in general […] carry untreated diseases and festering wounds. They have no money to spend on water to wash with so even the unwounded have sores […] There was naked little boy whose skin was a mass of big red sores; a man with a huge scab over the stump where his right hand used to be; a little girl, naked, maybe seven years old with blood running down her bare thighs. A woman with a swollen, bloody, beaten face […]” (10-1, 13).
Lauren Olamina suffers from hyper-empathy, a syndrome that causes her to share the pain of others. If she sees someone bleeding, she bleeds; if she sees someone hit, she feels the blow “as though [she’d] hit [her]self” (11). This syndrome is particularly debilitating because the world she lives in is so violent. “But if everyone could feel everyone else’s pain,” she asks, “who would torture? Who would cause anyone unnecessary pain” (115)? Lauren wishes she “could find other people who have” hyperempathy, “and live among them. A biological conscience,” she admits, “is better than no conscience at all” (115). For safety reasons, she and her family live in a neighborhood surrounded by a large wall, sentries posted at the gate. Lauren tells us that “a couple of neighborhoods [were] so poor that their walls were made up of unmortared rocks, chunks of concrete, and trash. Then there were the pitiful, unwalled residential areas. A lot of houses were trashed—burned, vandalized, infested with drunks or druggies or squatted-in by homeless families with their filthy, gaunt, half-naked children” (10). And “up toward the hills there were walled estates—one big house and a lot of shacky little dependencies where the servants lived” (9).
But after the wall surrounding her neighborhood is breached and her community overrun by “the hungry, thirsty, homeless, jobless, filthy people outside” (187), and her family is killed, Lauren takes to the road. She eventually meets and bands together with Travis, Natividad, their son Dominic, Zahra, Harry, Bankole, among others. Because Lauren believes “no one should travel alone in this world” (317), she, along with her new friends and companions, sets out to build a community based on her philosophy of Earthseed. In this community, “people look out for each other and don’t have to take being pushed around” (223). People will “defend their community” together. As Lauren’s brother says, “there’s nobody to help us but God and ourselves. I protect Moss’s place in spite of what I think of him, and he protects mine, no matter what he thinks of me. We all look out for one another” (75-6). Lauren and her group will go in search of “arable land, a dependable water supply, and enough freedom from attack to let [them] establish [themselves] and grow” (224). Lauren imagines building a community that can “provide education plus reading and writing services to adult illiterates […] So many people, children and adults, are illiterate these days,” she laments (224). “We might be able to do it—grow our own food, grow ourselves and our neighbors into something brand new. Into Earthseed” (224). Earthseed, as Lauren imagines it, has much in common with 19th century anarchist and utopian socialist communities like New Harmony, Brook Farm, and Oneida. An old Oneida song might well be sung at Earthseed: “We have built us a dome / On our beautiful plantation, / And we all have one home, / And one family relation.”
When the group finds their “beautiful plantation,” the land Bankole owns “free and clear” (318), they christen it Acorn. “Nothing we find farther north will be any better or any safer than this,” Lauren asserts. “It will be hard to live here, but if we work together, and if we’re careful, it should be possible. We can build a community here” (319). Lauren’s community is a “space of hope.” And making the “possible” a reality necessitates “hope.”
Hope, Ernst Bloch, reminds us in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, is essential for building an alternative politics. “Possibility,” he writes, “has had a bad press” (7); and “there is a very clear interest that has prevented the world from being changed into the possible” (7). For Bloch, Harvey reminds us, the “demise, denigration, and disparagement of all forms of utopian thought,” have “meant a loss of hope and without hope alternative politics becomes impossible” (Harvey 156). What Lauren Olamina offers in Parable of the Sower is a vision of possibility, a vision of hope. The Earthseed community, based on mutual aid and mutual support, provides a “space of hope” in the ruinous landscape born of competitive capitalism.
Sofi, in Ana Castillo’s So Far From God, has much in common with Lauren Olamina. She utilizes the power of mutual aid to give hope to the women and children of her community and to protect the environment that is being ravaged by industrial pollutants. With the help and support of the women of her Latina/o community, Sofi founds a “sheep-raising wool-weaving co-op,” as well as an environmentally friendly “Food Co-op” (214).The women of Tome set out together to save their community from destitution and to become economically self-sufficient. Sofi, after becoming the Mayor of Tome, uses her power not to become a self-serving political leader, but to help support the economically self-sufficient community so it doesn’t have to rely on “the system.” Sofi’s daughter, Esperanza, acquired a militant social conscience in college, though Sofi never understood her daughter’s interest in or concern with politics. Sofi tells her husband, Domingo, that Esperanza “always tried to tell her about how we needed to go out and fight for our rights. She always talked about things like working to change the ‘system.’ I never paid no attention to her then […] But now I see her point for the first time […] I see that the only way things are going to get better around here, is if we, all of us together, try to do something about it” (142). Things do get better: The wool-weaving cooperative “created and sustained the livelihoods of more than two dozen women. As cooperative owners of their wool-weaving business they had paying jobs they could count on and were proud of and the mothers among them didn’t worry so much about their babies and childcare because they could bring their ‘jitos to work” (147).
The co-operative, community-based enterprise replaces the competitive, hierarchical system based on capitalism—the logic of which, as Noam Chomsky might say, is profit over people. This community, by contrast, provides a supportive space for women by giving them paying jobs, allowing them to bring their babies to work, and providing low interest loans to people in need. As community interests are emphasized, concern for the environment grows along with demands for hormone-free meat and organic vegetables. “Some neighbors began planting organic vegetables. In this way, most people had inexpensive access to pesticide-free food, not to mention just having vegetables to can for their familias” (148). As the food co-op develops and provides the town with healthy, ecologically friendly foods, the community bond is strengthened. Community members, “inspired by the diligence, ingenuity, and communal spirit of Sofi’s vecinos, began to work on the drug problem that had found its way into the local schools and into their immediate vicinities, by forming a kind of hard-nosed drug SWAT team. And while the problem was not completely obliterated it would not be a lie to say that some lives had been saved because of the SWAT team’s own diligence, ingenuity, and communal spirit” (148).
In stark contrast to the communal spirit exhibited by the women of Tome, Acme International, the “big new company” that’s moved into town, illustrates the corrosive and callous nature of corporate greed. Sofi’s daughter, Fe, wants the American Dream. She marries, settles “into a three-bedroom, two-car-garage tract home in Rio Rancho with option to buy,” furnishes “it all new,” sells her old car and buys a “brand-new sedan model, right out of the showroom, for the occasions when she and her husband, Casey, want to go “out together to nice places like the Four Seasons Hotel to dance on Saturday nights” (177). Fe considers herself the “steady and dedicated worker type, always giving her one hundred percent to the job, even when she was passed up twice for promotion at the bank and remained in New Accounts without so much as a prospect to get a real raise” (177). She is let go from the bank under dubious circumstances and takes a job at Acme International, a company that does subcontracting work for the Pentagon. A woman who used to work with Fe at the bank and who now works at Acme, told Fe Acme was hiring assemblers; she said that “though the work was, let’s face it, shit, […] the pay was real good” (177); and since Fe wants all the accoutrements that signal “success” in America, she takes the job with little hesitation.
Eager to be promoted at Acme International, “from the start [Fe] took on every gritty job available, just to prove to the company what a good worker she was” (178). What Fe’s former co-worker didn’t tell her was that “she was getting nausea and headaches that increased in severity by the day,” and “that many of the women she worked with at Acme International were also having similar symptoms” (178). When the women complained to the company nurse, they were given ibuprofen tablets and advice about “pre-menopause and the dropping of estrogen levels in women over thirty, and pretty much [told that their symptoms were] just about being a woman and had nothing to do with working with chemicals” (178). Fe would later become pregnant, though she didn’t know it until she miscarried. When talking with female co-workers at lunch one day, she learns that at least three of them had had hysterectomies last summer.
“Every morning,” at Acme International, “each worker was given a pan about the size of a square foot which was filled with some nasty smelling chemical or other that would clean what Fe was told were parts for high-tech weapons” (180). The chemical glows in the dark, and “therefore,” we’re told, “you could work with it in the dark, with special gloves and cap” (181). Because of the chemicals, Fe develops a “red ring around her nose and breath that smelled suspiciously of glue” (181). But despite this, Fe agrees to take on “an especially tough job,” cleaning “ten twenty-pound pieces” of metal with a special chemical. Because of the nature of this new chemical, Fe is told she will have to work alone in the basement. Though the foreman told Fe the chemical was ether and that “it’ll make you sleepy, but that’s all,” the cleaning product eats through her orange gloves, “dissolve[s] her manicure” and her finger nails (183). “Meanwhile the red ring around the nose, glue breath, big dried spots on her legs, and one constant fire drill going on in her head were doing nothing for her once-a-fairy-tale life with Casey” (185).
It wasn’t long before Fe was diagnosed with cancer. “She had cancer on the outside and all over the inside and there was no stopping it” (186). The cancer “was eating her insides like acid” (186). Fe, of course, soon dies and is cremated, “because by the time of her death there was so little left of Fe to be buried anyway” (186). Not surprisingly, we find out that the chemical Fe was using was illegal and “had already been banned in New Mexico and some other states but not in the state” from which Acme had acquired it (187). The chemical “must always be sealed,” and “it should not be left to evaporate […] because it [is] heavier than air” (188). This is the chemical that Fe “more than once dumped down the drain at the end of her day, which went into the sewage system and worked its way to people’s septic tanks, vegetable gardens, kitchen taps, and sun-made tea” (188).
That the women of Tome band together to counter the kind of logic that allows employers to endanger knowingly and willfully the lives of their employees, and poison the land, demonstrates not only solidarity along gender and racial lines, but solidarity along class lines. And “class consciousness,” Jameson argues, in the final chapter of The Political Unconscious, “is Utopian insofar as it expresses the unity of a collectivity” (290-91). Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Castillo’s So Far From God affirm “collective solidarity” (29). They function as models—what Gómez-Pena would call “utopian cartographies” (New World 6)—for better living. Lauren’s Earthseed Community, and Sofi’s “Sheep-raising wool-weaving” enterprise and “Food Co-op,” offer spaces of hope; they offer the possibility of living together in a socially and economically viable space where cooperation is the rule, not the exception. In the worlds Butler and Castillo map out, mutual support, mutual aid and mutual defense are not simply gestures of kindness. They are vital for the survival of each and all.
Notes