In Octavia’s works community is often an antidote to the alienation mischaracterized as rugged individualism in the West. Octavia noted: “My character Anyanwu at one point actually says that she makes communities around herself. All of my characters are in a community like Lauren in Parable of the Sower, or they create one; she does that, too. My own feeling is that human beings need to live that way and we too often don’t.”
