The Black Urbanist Weekly for May 9-May 15, 2022
My personal parable from the Parable of the Sower Opera is faced with tough circumstances, our dreams and our songs will carry us through life and then will become a life force. This is an urbanist parable because I’m not the only one going forward in the future in song and dream asking for a better container in which to do life.
This is The Black Urbanist Weekly, an email newsletter that highlights the Black Queer Feminist Urbanist thoughts and commentary of me, Kristen Jeffers, internationally-known urban planner, designer, analyst, keynote speaker, media maven, and fiber artist. This week I’m going to begin what will be a summer series of highlighting why I’ve chosen certain books to be on my Bookshop bookshelves. This week, in honor of being able to see the Parable of the Sower Opera at Strathmore a couple of weeks ago, I’m going to talk about that work and how it differs from the books it’s inspired on and how its something we need to return to, if we are serious about having a society. LOTS OF SPOILERS, SO YOU MAY WANT TO SKIP DOWN TO THE BY THE WAY SECTION IF YOU WANT TO SEE THIS FOR YOURSELF — —
So before I get into this conversation on Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, the Octavia Butler speculative fiction novels rooted in the idea of how Black and other people of color would fare in a climate-troubled, politically-restrictive, economically-challenged future that at the time of her writing was 25–30 years away and is now just over two years away, I wanted to quote myself from a version of this newsletter from 2019, after I’d visited California for the second time and read Parable of the Sower for the first time:
I could totally see now having paid even deeper attention to the terrain, how people could totally take to the freeways and walk on one side and drive on the other, abandoning their cars due to the extremely high gas prices. How the abundance of fire could become more tantalizing and deadly.
How public services could become commodities and then out of reach of all but the wealthy.
How the middle-class neighborhoods could wall themselves off and still be vulnerable.
How areas like Skid Row could become more common and be depressed for years.
And California could change and restrict its borders at the expense of those who are most needy.
When I wrote that newsletter, which you can find here, in October of 2019, I was reassuring myself that reading these books would be enough for people to take it as a cautionary tale and not let climate change or class issues, or even religious bigotry get so intense.
Yes, I found my way to these books in the first place because of the 2016 election cycle and keeping up with how floods and hurricanes further heightened by fracking and drilling were doing equivalent, but still very different natural disaster damage to us on the East Coast.
But, in the late fall of 2019, it seemed like people were realizing we’d have to resist and things seemed to be favorable.
And then 2020 happened.
But two weeks ago, I managed to request and receive press tickets for the Parable of the Sower Opera. This is a musical adaptation of the novels by daughter and mother duo Toshi and Bernice Johnson Reagon, along with a phenomenal team of actors, producers, musicians, and other performers and public intellectuals. After two pandemic-related delays, it was finally being staged at the Music Center at Strathmore.
I was so nervous though that the Parable Opera would be as dark and discouraging as the books. I was proud that I’d thought to reach out for review tickets for this publication that serves as part of “what I can do”. I was even prouder that even though I’d finished enough of my special wool sweater dress (another “thing I can do”) that it could be worn as a shirt that evening. However, I barely made it to the theater because I had to clean up my puked-up dinner in my car just before we drove over to the Strathmore.
I felt reassured when we got there just after curtains were scheduled to go up that so many other folks were just getting to the theater — some by way of slow Metro service from the main part of DC and that the Strathmore was taking their own Covid screening very seriously, checking every single card and ensuring no one attempted to go maskless, at least in the lobby.
The long and thorough check-in line made some of us who had orchestra level seats be held in the lobby, depending on the TVs showing the stage to tell us what was going on once the opera did start.
Whether by coincidence or not, I feel like care was taken in the experience of those who couldn’t come in immediately for the first few songs for the story to be the way it is — filtered through a TV sharing dystopian news, by oracles that were deemed Talents, and Lauren, the main character, sitting on a bench, behind the walls of both her individual home and the walls of her neighborhood constructed to protect her and others from the dystopia, journaling all of her ideas on how to free herself from this contained world.
Then we were allowed to enter the theater as the scene had been turned into a church service, leading with a chorus — The Church Still Stands — and I felt as I was entering what church would feel like and does feel like, in these times when your church believes it has all the divine tools inside and no divinity could be found outside. A church behind walls, despite being called to minister beyond walls.
I grew up going to churches with wooden cushioned pews and no instruments but an upright piano and an electric organ. We had what we called “prayer service” on Sunday mornings between Sunday school and the main service, and on Wednesday nights before Bible Study. I even went to some rural congregations that still had the wooden floors that became their own instrument when a member of the congregation would randomly raise up (start singing unprompted) a song or a testimony — an act of expressing spoken gratitude for the blessings of God or a request for prayer for healing or resolution.
The first act felt like those prayer services, with all the different song raisings, and then after 30 minutes to an hour, the more polished church service would start, but even then the movements of the Spirit would have people doing different things, and then after another 1–2 hours (ok, I know some of you were at 3, 4, 5 hour, possibly all day services), we would all be pushed out into the “undivine” world to make sense of it and what we just heard.
This theater and opera’s “service” would allow us to explore its themes in a safe, controlled theater environment, that was supposed to serve as a “Balm in Gilead” and a wake-up call, while palatable to all audiences, specifically for the Black church, in its own language, to wake up out of its false sense of security in our current world and to lead people out to the Promised Land.
I’ll admit I was a little confused during the second act because I was still waiting for that abject violence that had emptied my stomach just an hour prior.
Now I see the second act used the framework of captives/refugees pushing through the natural terrain to ground their spiritual freedom — truly illustrating both that God is change, a song can be a positive obsession even in movement, and in my favorite touch, that spirits don’t die, they change form and sometimes that form continues to walk right along with you as you change.
I’ll let you all see for yourself how that last sentence becomes literal in the second act. And my stomach was settled.
Especially after the special post-show episode of the podcast Octavia’s Parables, hosted by Toshi Reagon and adrienne maree brown and they both mentioned how much they two felt this work was enhanced by our current circumstances. They also emphasized that the opera was supposed to mold to the room of its performance and much like church announcements, they encouraged the crowd to leave out and do something practical.
The podcast is a great listen to it as you go about making sense of what Covid has done, what isn’t being done for environmental and economic justice and continuing to move in a positive way, and in the words of Octavia Butler, So Be It and See To It!
And the opera can be returned to often, especially as a cast recording, for encouragement and affirmation. Keeping my eyes and ears peeled for its appearance.
By the Way
I wanted to start giving props to articles and other content that I really liked that I thought was relevant again, much like we have a section for shoutouts/classified ads. So, welcome to By the Way, and make sure you check out Before You Go too.
I saw this just before I hit send last week, but honestly, an exploration of Janelle Monae’s afrofuturist work — specifically her new book The Memory Librarian, especially since her live book tour just passed, is the perfect companion to all the work spoken about above.
And it was both an honor and a thrill to be named to someone’s collective of Black History Month heroes and heroines with Alexis Nikole Nelson, who reminds me so much of myself when I first started this platform, but instead of listening to naysayers who felt like the media was messing up our design practice, continues to educate people and take on national media and speaking opportunities on plants that are edible. Oh and now that I think about that, that’s also relevant to a discussion of any form of Parable of the Sower.
Why there never was a third Parable book as promised.
And finally, Toshi Reagon’s thoughts on the recent news that Roe vs. Wade and other abortion-related Supreme Court cases are set to be struck down.
Before You Go
Check out some special announcements from me and friends of the platform.
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If you just want to support me for any reason, but don’t need anything in return, you can donate to my capital campaign, or Venmo or Cash. App me.
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My bookshelf over at Bookshop.org is very much alive and well, purchase your copies of the books I talked about above, plus more that I’ve designated part of the Black Queer Feminist Urbanist canon, the general Black urbanism canon, and other lists because you can never have too many books.
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My very first official crochet pattern is for sale. It’s been tested and reviewed and you can join the club of folks making their own Kristfinity Scarves!
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I’ll be live on Patreon, LinkedIn and YouTube talking about everything I mentioned above and then some for my Open Studio/Office Hours at 4 eastern. Don’t worry if you can’t watch live, it will be archived publicly on all spaces. Also, all of my prior video chats under the Public Lecture/Open Studio label are now available on Patreon and will be making their way to YouTube little by little over the next few weeks.
Until next time,