PROLOGUE
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From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
By Lauren Oya Olamina
Here we are—
Energy,
Mass,
Life,
Shaping life,
Mind,
Shaping Mind,
God,
Shaping God.
Consider—
We are born
Not with purpose,
But with potential.
THEY’LL MAKE A GOD of her.
I think that would please her, if she could know about it. In spite of all her protests and denials, she’s always needed devoted, obedient followers—disciples—who would listen to her and believe everything she told them. And she needed large events to manipulate. All gods seem to need these things.
Her legal name was Lauren Oya Olamina Bankole. To those who loved her or hated her, she was simply “Olamina.”
She was my biological mother.
She is dead.
I have wanted to love her and to believe that what happened between her and me wasn’t her fault. I’ve wanted that. But instead, I’ve hated her, feared her, needed her. I’ve never trusted her, though, never understood how she could be the way she was—so focused, and yet so misguided, there for all the world, but never there for me. I still don’t understand. And now that she’s dead, I’m not even sure I ever will. But I must try because I need to understand myself, and she is part of me. I wish that she weren’t, but she is. In order for me to understand who I am, I must begin to understand who she was. That is my reason for writing and assembling this book.
It has always been my way to sort through my feelings by writing. She and I had that in common. And along with the need to write, she also developed a need to draw. If she had been born in a saner time, she might have become a writer as I have or an artist.
I’ve gathered a few of her drawings, although she gave most of these away during her lifetime. And I have copies of all that was saved of her writings. Even some of her early, paper notebooks have been copied to disk or crystal and saved. She had a habit, during her youth, of hiding caches of food, money, and weaponry in out-of-the-way places or with trusted people, and being able to go straight back to these years later. These saved her life several times, and also they saved her words, her journals and notes and my father’s writings. She managed to badger him into writing a little. He wrote well, although he didn’t like doing it. I’m glad she badgered him. I’m glad to have known him at least through his writing. I wonder why I’m not glad to have known her through hers.
“God is Change,” my mother believed. That was what she said in the first of her verses in Earthseed: The First Book of the Living.
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.
The words are harmless, I suppose, and metaphorically true. At least she began with some species of truth. And now she’s touched me one last time with her memories, her life, and her damned Earthseed.
2032
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From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
We give our dead
To the orchards
And the groves.
We give our dead
To life.
ONE
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From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
Darkness
Gives shape to the light
As light
Shapes the darkness.
Death
Gives shape to life
As life
Shapes death.
The universe
And God
Share this wholeness,
Each
Defining the other.
God
Gives shape to the universe
As the universe
Shapes God.
FROM Memories of Other Worlds
BY TAYLOR FRANKLIN BANKOLE
I HAVE READ THAT the period of upheaval that journalists have begun to refer to as “the Apocalypse” or more commonly, more bitterly, “the Pox” lasted from 2015 through 2030—a decade and a half of chaos. This is untrue. The Pox has been a much longer torment. It began well before 2015, perhaps even before the turn of the millennium. It has not ended.
I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises. I have heard people deny this, but I was born in 1970. I have seen enough to know that it is true. I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people.
Overall, the Pox