IAS Turbulence: Dreaming of Utopia — Reading Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia E. Butler

Katie Stone

Zanele Muholi, Sindile II, Room 206 Fjord Hotel, Berlin, 2017, silver gelatin print, image and paper size: 66.6 x 100 cm © Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yancey Richardson, New York

 

It’s the day before the revolution. An elderly woman named Odo is dreaming. In her dream, she is trying to make her way through a crowd of protestors, but she is struggling.

She was too short. A broad black-vested belly and chest loomed up, blocking her way.^[i]

Short or not, she is determined to get through.

Sweating, she jabbed fiercely with her fist. It was like hitting stone. (344)

Her victim’s huge lungs let out a bellow, but she realises that this is not in response to her attack; rather it is a response to what is happening on the stage.

 The speaker had said something, something fine about taxes or shadows. (344)

Odo greets this fine speech, where social policy rolls into aesthetics, or physics, or wherever else shadows touch, with a bellow of her own.

Thrilled, she joined the shouting – “Yes! Yes!” (344)

She is not sure what the speaker has said, and her main goal is still to get through the crowd, but still she joins them in their thrilling cries. Odo is a vital element of this crowd – of this Movement. For her, the crowd, their politics, this protest, are not separable from her individual struggles, or indeed from the ground beneath her feet, the shadow she casts, ‘the tall weeds with dry, white, close-floreted heads’, which nod all around her (344).

And so, Ursula K. Le Guin’s story ‘The Day Before the Revolution’ begins. It is a quiet story following a woman’s routine, how her plait comes untied, how she struggles to eat a peach, how she admires the beauty of a young man. For the elderly Odo, crowds and protests exist now only in dreams.

The speaking tours and the meetings and the streets were out of reach for her now, but she could still write. (352)

This story acts as a prologue to The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974), which is set several hundred years after what, in The Dispossessed, is termed the Odonian revolution. Or perhaps it is more productive to think of The Dispossessed as an epilogue to this story, as, in ‘The Day Before the Revolution’, Le Guin continually stresses the significance of the marginal, the small, of that which is easy to overlook. It is there that Odo – the woman who will give her name to the coming revolution, born of her writings and her dreams – roots her radical politics. Not in the fine things the speaker on the platform says, but in the ferocity of the woman who is too short to navigate the crowd. It is a quiet story but not one which welcomes a quiet response. It shows its readers the necessity of marching, of fighting, of attacking that which stands in their way, but it also shows us that this kind of revolution was not designed with everyone’s body in mind.

Le Guin prepares us for the turbulent times in which we now struggle by showing us that times have always been turbulent for those who are too small for the crowd; for whom the built environment of the contemporary capitalist city is disabling; whose bodies are racialized, deemed ‘illegal’, othered at the hands of the white supremacist, transphobic police state. And yet, it is those who are most at risk of being swept away who have always fought against the tide, in ways large, small, and strange. Unlike the charming mathematical genius Shevek, who dominates The Dispossessed and for whom the historical Odo serves as an inspirational forebear, the living Odo of ‘The Day Before the Revolution’ refuses to be straightforwardly charismatic, powerful, or strong. Nor does she abuse her position in the revolution, as Shevek does, to harass or assault those with whom she comes into contact. And this is why it is so significant that it is her words, her thoughts and ideas, and the ways she chooses to pass them on, share them, help them to grow among her community, that guide the Movement that Shevek inherits in decidedly less turbulent times. This is a story which shows us that one does not need to be physically able to cut through or charismatically dominate the crowd in order to start a revolution.

At the day’s end Odo makes her way up the stairs of the disused bank which the Movement have transformed into their home. She does not stride. She cannot take the steps two at a time. And yet, inexorably, she makes her way up:

 One by one, one leg at a time, like a small child. (357)

This is a mode of utopianism which refuses to settle on a static image of perfection. It is, as Le Guin has put it, an ambiguous utopianism in which the path walked by those who would imagine a better future is shown to be a treacherous one. And nowhere are the dangers of such a path more apparent than in the writing of Octavia E. Butler. If Le Guin is wary of embracing utopianism, Butler is actively suspicious of it. She writes:

I don’t like most utopia stories because I don’t believe them for a moment. It seems inevitable that my utopia would be someone else’s hell.^[ii]

In ‘The Book of Martha’ (2003), Butler grapples with this problem. She sends Martha a dream, or perhaps a vision, in which God demands that Martha imagine a utopia: a utopia that would work. Martha is tasked with the work of a utopian novelist, of a revolutionary, of someone in the business of crafting feminist futures. And the work is hard, unwanted, thankless. But, for Martha, as for Odo, this is the day before the revolution, and to refuse to shape the future is to surrender it to the forces of domination – misogyny, racism, queerphobia, capital – which have so horribly shaped the present.

If Martha doesn’t agree to transform the world then God will pick someone from all those who would, happily, do so.

And, instantly, [Martha] thought of some of these – people who would be happy to wipe out whole segments of the population whom they hated and feared, or people who would set up vast tyrannies that forced everyone into a single mold […] There were people like that. Martha knew people like that. (200-201)

Dreaming up new futures for the world is, as Martha sees, so often an exercise in purging, cleansing, removing not the causes of suffering but rather those who suffer. Against these sweeping, fear-driven, white supremacist modes of dreaming, Martha offers a utopia which is partial, gradual, small.

I don’t believe it’s possible to arrange a society so that everyone is content, everyone has what he or she wants. (202)

Again, there are echoes of Odo here.

There would not be slums like this if the Revolution prevailed. But there would be misery. There would always be misery, waste, cruelty. (354)

Martha formulates this partial vision, not by taking on a God’s-eye view but instead by bringing God into her home, literally, and sharing with them ‘the best tuna-salad sandwiches she could’ make (209). At the story’s opening her task seems to be to see through the eyes of a God who looks like ’a twice-live-sized, bearded white man’ (190) and yet, by the end of this transformative dream, she sees God as a Black woman like herself – someone with whom she can comfortably share a sandwich and collaborate with in transforming the world. Martha doesn’t have to see more and know more – be bigger, or more important – to change the world, rather her challenge is to shift her perception of who is capable of shaping the future. Her dream allows her to break what she refers to as her ‘mental cage’ (209) and what God calls her ‘old habit’ (210) of locating power in maleness and whiteness. For this reason, it is in the practice of dreaming that Martha places her hopes for the future. Rather than a grand shift in society, Martha’s utopia is one which exists in dreams: ‘Powerful, unavoidable, realistic dreams’.

Each person will have a private, perfect utopia every night – or an imperfect one. (204)

This, Martha hopes, will combat the alienation, despair, and apathy she sees around her. It will ‘take the edge off their willingness to spend their waking hours trying to dominate or destroy one another’. (204)

There are many ways in which these dreams could be used to escape from, rather than transform, the structures of power in which we struggle.

 Some people will be taken over by it as though it were an addictive drug. Some will try and fight it in themselves or others. Some will give up on their lives and decide to die because nothing they do matters as much as their dreams. (204)

These are the risks of daring to craft utopias and they are not trivial. But the risk of inaction – of being destroyed by the turbulence which currently has us in its grip rather than trying to create currents of our own – is greater still.

At the end of the story, Martha asks God to make her forget what she has done. It is not she who matters, but the change she has created. Just as Odo dies just as the revolution which she instigated begins, so Martha’s involvement in the utopian future she has dreamed into being ends before it has begun.

And here we are, without Le Guin and without Butler, our own world’s revolutionary dreamers, but with so many people across the world who have taken up their legacies. These thinkers, writers, activists, view the stories told by these now departed women, not as the final word on revolution, but as invitations to join them in the unenviable, exciting work of crafting feminist futures. People like adrienne maree brown[iii] and Walidah Imarisha, Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey, like Sophie Lewis and the Sons of Kemet, Patricia Piccinnini and Janelle Monáe, Nnedi Okrafor and N. K. Jemisin, Camae Ayewa, and Rasheeda Phillips. These people have joined Martha in ‘that sweet frenzy of creation that she lived for’ (190). They show us that queer, Black, feminist futures begin with a few words, a short burst of music, with the sleeping form of Zanele Muholi, pictured here, who seems to dream even as we look at them. These are the people who were listening when Butler said:

 Tell stories Filled with Facts. Make People Touch and Taste and KNOW. Make People FEEL! FEELl! FEEL!^[iv]

As Le Guin once wrote: ‘Story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time, but in the great rapids and the winding shallows, no boat is safe’.^[v] What the writing of these women and their utopian descendants shows us is that despite the treachery of these waters, they are filled with people who are battling against the currents which threaten to drown them. They shine a light on even the smallest of struggles and show how each body moving against the tide, each dream in which we can find pleasure and meaning, creates ripples, opens new pathways and invites us to dream in still more daring, more strange, more utopian ways.