{"id":119995,"date":"2018-01-08T11:18:17","date_gmt":"2018-01-08T16:18:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=119995"},"modified":"2018-01-10T12:46:01","modified_gmt":"2018-01-10T17:46:01","slug":"staging-octavia-butler-abu-dhabi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/01\/08\/staging-octavia-butler-abu-dhabi\/","title":{"rendered":"Staging Octavia Butler in Abu Dhabi"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

The Louvre Abu Dhabi<\/p><\/div>\n

The Louvre Abu Dhabi, designed by Jean Nouvel, opened in November after years of delay and a cost rumored to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The same weekend as LAD\u2019s grand opening, the NYU Abu Dhabi Arts Center hosted the world premiere of Parable of the Sower<\/em>, an opera composed by the singer\/songwriter Toshi Reagon, a queer Brooklyn-based activist, and based on the prophetic novel by Octavia Butler. At first glance, it seems unlikely that a \u201cstarchitect\u201d museum in Abu Dhabi, where gas is cheap and water is expensive, would stage an opera about a fiery, drought-ridden apocalypse. And yet, taken together, the museum and the opera initiate a set of conversations\u2014about art and culture and change\u2014that upend stereotypes about the Gulf.<\/p>\n

The book Parable of the Sower<\/em> (1993) was intended as the first of a trilogy. It\u2019s set in a world where California is burning, rivers have dried up, and the president sells entire towns to the highest corporate bidder. Violence is everywhere, and not even houses of worship are safe. In the second book, Parable of the Talents<\/em> (1998), a president is elected who promises to \u201cmake America great again.\u201d The third book was never published. Given Butler\u2019s prescience about America\u2019s worst impulses, perhaps it\u2019s best that the third book never came out: Do any of us really want to know how bad things might become?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The teenage heroine of the story, Lauren Olamina, flees her town on the outskirts of Los Angeles after the neighborhood is burned and looted by \u201cpyros,\u201d people addicted to a drug that makes fires better than sex. Along with two other survivors from the neighborhood massacre, Lauren decides to walk north, perhaps to Canada or to anywhere where \u201cwater doesn\u2019t cost more than food.\u201d<\/p>\n

The subject matter of Parable<\/em> doesn\u2019t immediately suggest \u201copera.\u201d But, as Reagon told me, \u201ctheater is a great way to talk about hard things.\u201d Working in collaboration with her mother, Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of the musical ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, Toshi Reagon used the novel as the basis for a song cycle. The song cycle debuted in 2015, and the opera version two years later, although Toshi describes it still as a \u201cwork in progress.\u201d She wanted it to be seen. \u201cAfter Trump was elected,\u201d she said, \u201cthe conversation [started by the novel] needed to happen now. We can\u2019t wait.\u201d Given that the devastation of climate change is one of the \u201chard things\u201d addressed in the opera, staging this work in Abu Dhabi takes on a dramatic resonance: Abu Dhabi faces the very real possibility of running out of its water reserves within the next thirty-five years (and relies on desalination for more than 90\u00a0percent of its domestic water consumption).<\/p>\n

The West doesn\u2019t generally think of the Gulf as a place where conversations about climate change are taking place. Instead, the West seems to view the Gulf as a bling-bling country that stops counting its petrol dollars only long enough to oppress its migrant labor force. \u201cThe Middle East\u201d is just a swirl of veiled ladies, oil rigs, and the occasional jihadi. But were these stereotypes the full picture, the so-called repressive government of the Emirates would have long ago swooped in to shut down the opera\u00a0Parable<\/em>. They have not, and yet the opera follows in the long tradition of protest music (Toshi is named for the wife of her godfather, Pete Seeger), and issues a clarion call for social and political change.<\/p>\n

As Lauren walks north, she spreads a religious message. She calls her religion Earthseed, and one of its fundamental principles is that \u201call you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.\u201d What begins as an escape from the wreckage of her town becomes a quest to start an Earthseed community. Her urgency to change the world propels her onward.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Toshi Reagon<\/p><\/div>\n

The opera stays true to the bleakness of the novel, with one significant alteration, which Reagon\u00a0explains to the audience about midway through the performance. \u201cOctavia Butler included all kinds of people in her novel, but she didn\u2019t call up a folk singer,\u201d she says, and shakes her head in disbelief. \u201cYou gotta<\/em> have a folk singer, who will sing a very long song with lots of details, and a singable chorus\u2014every movement needs a folk singer.\u201d<\/p>\n

And then, at every performance, she paused here and smiled. \u201cSo I put myself in it, and there\u2019s a part in here for you, too.\u201d The folk song, \u201cOlivar Blues\u201d is about a town that gets sold to a corporation called KSF. Lauren\u00a0is surprised that the town allows itself to be sold, because it\u2019s \u201cupper middle class, white, [and] literate.\u201d But the town is crumbling into the sea on the one side and under siege from the migrating poor on the other, and KSF promises to keep the town safe. In exchange, KSF gets a ready supply of cheap labor and access to the town\u2019s water.<\/p>\n

\u201cOlivar Blues\u201d lives up to Toshi\u2019s description: it\u2019s a long song about how gentrification, corporate greed, and the seductive ease of online life erode our communities, without our even noticing. The song tells us that we should have \u201cgiven two fucks,\u201d we should have \u201cdone more to make some changes.\u201d The chorus\u2014the audience part\u2014is simple: \u201cdon\u2019t let your baby go to Ol-i-var.\u201d At every performance I attended, the audience sang, and loudly, right through to the song\u2019s final lines: \u201cfight, fight, strat-e-gize, stay together, equal rights.\u201d As we sang, I looked around. A few rows in front of me, I saw a mild-mannered Emirati student of mine punching her fists in the air, while her friend, a girl from Korea, stamped her feet and swayed to the beat.<\/p>\n

When I talked with those students after the show, they said it was \u201camazing,\u201d and \u201cawesome.\u201d They loved the singing. \u201cIt\u2019s like we were in it together,\u201d they said. What we were \u201cin\u201d was a moment of communal power, a space devoted to\u00a0the possibility of change.<\/p>\n

The chaos in the world of Parable<\/em>\u00a0mirrors our own moment, in which it is impossible not to imagine that an apocalypse is imminent. And yet, because we get to sing along, the opera creates a sense of optimism lacking in the novel: It\u2019s hard to sing along with a book. The opera encourages\u2014even demands\u2014that we sing and clap, that we whoop and stamp our feet.<\/p>\n

As I sang along to \u201cOlivar Blues,\u201d I thought about the migrant workers in Abu Dhabi living in labor camps outside of town\u2014and then wondered about migrant workers living in similar conditions in the U.S. When the ensemble sang \u201cit don\u2019t rain no more,\u201d I thought about the irrigation hoses that coil around every tree in Abu Dhabi, and those in turn reminded me of the images from California and Western Canada over the past few months, in flames from drought-fueled wildfires. The opera created a kind of double mirror, reflecting on the world in multiple directions.<\/p>\n

That reflection process also happens in the galleries of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which create a conversation between East and West without the West being automatically situated as dominant. The thematic arrangement of the galleries means that you might see a Quran displayed next to a carved Madonna next to a statue of Shiva\u2014and while you might disagree with this method, you can\u2019t help but think about the global circulation (and appropriation) of ideas, images, and artifacts.<\/p>\n

The museum and the opera remind us that change doesn\u2019t happen in a steady trajectory or a tidy timeline. Earthseed stipulates that \u201cthe only lasting truth is change,\u201d but as Lauren\u2019s journey makes clear, planting the seeds of change requires engagement and persistence. At the end of the opera, Toshi sings the Biblical version of the parable of the sower, which in the King James translation refers to the \u201cgood ground\u201d that is needed for seeds to grow. Parable<\/em>\u00a0and the Louvre Abu Dhabi suggest that fertile ground\u00a0can be found even in the desert.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Deborah Lindsay Williams is the program head for Literature and Creative Writing at NYU Abu Dhabi, and a columnist for <\/em>The National, the English language newspaper of the United Arab Emirates. Recent work of hers has appeared in the<\/em>\u00a0New York Times, Inside Higher Ed, and <\/em>Vogue.com. She is writing a book about Abu Dhabi and New York. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Louvre Abu Dhabi, designed by Jean Nouvel, opened in November after years of delay and a cost rumored to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The same weekend as LAD\u2019s grand opening, the NYU Abu Dhabi Arts Center hosted the world premiere of Parable of the Sower, an opera composed by the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1352,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[32431,32433,32430,29494,32432,32434],"class_list":["post-119995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-arable-of-the-sower","tag-lauren-olamina","tag-louvre-abu-dhabi","tag-octavia-butler","tag-parable-of-the-talents","tag-toshi-reagon"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaging Octavia Butler in Abu Dhabi<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Abu Dhabi, where gas is cheap and water is expensive, seems an unlikely place for a political opera about a fiery, drought-ridden apocalypse.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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