La forma organizacional que adopta el control en Colombia

When the group arrives on Bankole’s land, they expect to find a few houses and the man’s family. They discover that the land was burned and that Bankole’s sister, her husband, and their children were all killed in the arson. This detail underlines the fact that the land is not a utopia, but a place that the community needs to transform and protect. This community, further

developed in the sequel Parable of the Talents, is introduced in the last pages of the book. Lauren describes the land location in her diary:

Somehow, we’ve reached our new home—Bankole’s land in the coastal hills of Humboldt County. The highway—U.S. 101—is to the east and north of us, and Cape Mendocino and the sea are to the west. A few miles south are state parks filled with huge redwood trees and hoards of squatters. (313)

Even if secluded, external invasion is still a possibility for the community. On the other hand, Lauren states in her journal: “the land surrounding us … is as empty and wild as I’ve seen it. It’s covered with dry brush, trees, and tree stumps, all far removed from any city, and a long, hilly walk from the little towns that line the highway” (313). The location, “far removed from any city,” guarantees a little protection. The potential new prosperity the community is seeking opposes the urban dimension. The locus in which Lauren and her group frame their aspirations for change and transformation is rural in nature. The community, however, will shape the territory. When Lauren asks her companion whether they want to stay or proceed north toward Canada, Ally, one of the latest additions to the group of travelers, responds: “I’ll stay. I want to build something, too. I never had a chance to build anything before.”(322) The community, therefore, shows a need to affect the environment through building and structuring the landscape. Yet, their vision is not that of recreating the capitalistic model that failed in the 1990s, but to establish a form of social-environmental coexistence to create an alternative to urban

perspectives. Lured north by the vague promise of finding housing and work, the community soon discovers that the seclusion of Bankole’s land does not provide a secure income. “But there’s no work here!” Harry protests. “There’s nothing but work here, boy. Work, and a lot of cheap land” (322) Bankole rebukes. If the group is to reimagine a future that offers an alternative

dimension to the failed capitalistic model, they have to begin by opposing the system of oppression, creating a personal method of sustenance.

In order for the community to put their plan into action, they need to decide how to make use of the land, how to spatially organize the territory and take advantage of the natural resources available. As implied in the narrative, the land of Acorn is not an idyllic location but the

community works to make it sustainable and habitable. In addition to the risks of invasion, manifested in the killing of Bankole’s family and the destruction of local resources (the solar powered well, for example), the community has to face the consequences and continual challenges of climate change. Not discouraged by the scenario, the group decides to bury the dead and start working on the land. Lauren, who saved some seeds from her home community in Los Angeles, begins envisioning how to maximize the profit from the land, what seeds to plant and how to save the plants that are left from the previous inhabitants: “Bankole owns the land, free and clear. There’s a huge, half ruined garden plus citrus trees full of unripe fruit. We’ve already been pulling carrots and digging potatoes here. There are plenty of other fruit and nut trees plus wild pines, redwoods, and Douglas firs” (318). Despite the promise of sustainability represented by Acorn, the book closes with some looming remarks regarding the overall condition outside of the community. Bankole states:

Some…countries will survive. Maybe they’ll absorb what’s left of us. Or maybe we’ll just break up into a lot of little states quarreling and fighting with each other over whatever crumbs are left. That’s almost happened now with states shutting themselves off from one another, treating state lines as national borders. (327)

The notion of borders mentioned by Bankole reflects the concern of the overall narrative. On the one hand, the characters of the story take advantage of barriers and borders to protect themselves

from the dangers of the outside; on the other, borders seclude and segregate. The notion that is explored at the local level through the description of gated communities (in Talents Acorn will also become a gated community) and defended campsites, is here elaborated in a nation-wise perspective. Bankole continues:

You know, as bad as things are, we haven’t even hit bottom yet. Starvation, disease, drug damage, and mob rule have only begun. Federal, state, and local governments still

exist—in name at least—and sometimes they manage to do something more than collect taxes and send in the military… However much more you need of it to buy anything these days, it is still accepted. That may be a hopeful sign—or perhaps it’s only more evidence of what I said: We haven’t hit bottom yet. (328)

These types of considerations placed at the end of the narrative suggest that recovery from the corrupted federal situation and failed environmental system are not resolvable with the creation of small state-communities. In her diary, Lauren insists on the need to create local infrastructure to build the means to eventually abandon Planet Earth and move to the stars. Her spatial imagination is thus expanded, projected toward the universe. What she envisions is a form of cognitive mapping that sets the grounds for future developments in Parable of the Talents.

In the sequel, the growing community successfully establishes itself in Acorn and creates an effective even though short-lived method of subsistence. Instead of by walls, the property is marked by rows of prickly cacti. The necessity for delimitation points at the necessity to recur to traditional forms of protection, the very forms that Lauren rejects in the pages of her diary. This controversy is reinforced with the assault of the community by religious fanatics belonging to a

Christian crusade. Their arrival marks the defeat of Acorn, and thus the collapse of a structural alternative to the failure of the American government.

5.4 Conclusion

Parable addresses what Madhu Dubey defines as a “crisis of urban literary

representation,” (105) in his 1999 article “Folk and Urban Communities in African-American Women's Fiction,” depicting a dystopian reality that reflects the concerns related to a failed urban model. The interpretation of the novel should be contextualized not only within the science fiction realm, but also taking into account its historical references, especially in relation to the African American perspective. Butler connects the past, the present, and the future of the United States and California through parallels between slavery and contemporary labor exploitation. Cities are represented as the center of corruption and decay. The urban environment is

envisioned as the “dark mirror” (Williams 229) of the capitalistic system. Raymond Williams’ words are particularly fitting as in his book, The Country and the City, the critic elaborates the distinction between the two environments, explaining how literary works define the relationship between the urban and the rural. Despite the clear distinctions that historically consolidated popular assumptions (the country is peaceful, the city is fast-paced; the people in the country are uneducated, while the ones in the city have access to good schools; etc.), the author reinforces the idea that the two spaces are interdependent. Williams specifically argues that field labor is attached to a capitalistic model. The system is not estranged from the one employed in urban factories. Toward the end of the novel here analyzed, Emery, one of the Earthseed travel companions established in Acorn, introduces the concept of “slave driver” (323) as a possible employment for the white people of the community. The comment implies that even in the apparent peace of Acorn, the risk of falling into the very system the community is escaping from

is high. The contradictory predicament that the narration establishes is elaborated in the complex relation of private and public, inside spaces and the outside.

Butler begins her narration reflecting on the role of gated communities, which protect from the outside, but gates also enclose and segregate communities and divide people based on differences such as wealth and race. Her insistence on the problem of suburban enclosure is related to the history of Los Angeles and the time in which she was writing. Looking at a Los Angeles burdened by social and racial injustice, devastated by urban riots, and threatened by ecological catastrophes, Parable grapples with notions of resistance and survival, while also questioning possible alternatives to the status quo. In his book, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, Edward Soja elaborates a vision that is in line with the one displayed by Butler in Parable:

The reactionary postmodern politics…must be directly confronted with an informed postmodern politics of resistance and demystification, one that can pull away the deceptive ideological veils that are today reifying and obscuring, in new and different ways, the restructured instrumentalities of class exploitation, gender and racial

domination, cultural and personal disempowerment, and environmental degradation. (5) Written in Los Angeles and published in 1989, Postmodern Geographies offers valuable resources to interpret the way the environment is elaborated by Butler. Soja and Butler use two different types of narration to account for the complication of their city. Their local perspectives, however, are not confined to Los Angeles, but provide questions and models that are easily applicable to other urban regions both inside and outside the United States. Reflecting on the “spatiality of social life,” Soja describes “how human geographies become filled with politics and ideology”(6). The narrative spaces of Parable are as much ideological and political as the

physical spaces described by the geographer. Every structured and improvised community described in the text reflect a specific social order that both tries to contrast the ideology of a failed system and submit to social logics of hierarchical placement. Reflecting on the

geographies of different communities within the context of California. Butler inscribes “the ways we make practical and political sense of the present, the past, and the potential future (a

postmodern geography of critical social consciousness)”(Soja 12). The protagonist challenges the functional and structural stability represented by enclosure both ideologically and physically to define her “critical social consciousness”. Crossing borders and constantly redefining the space of her community are the means through which the character displays her awareness and combats social and environmental injustice. The notion of change and spatial redefinition in the novel creates a sense of diasporic displacement that is further elaborated in the pages of Talents, through the narrative’s projection into the universe. In conclusion, the literary representation of the environment offered in Parable provides a key to grappling with the urban and suburban realities of Southern California, the urge to establish alternatives for marginal communities, and the existence of viable forms of social and environmental resistance.