Written by: Artemis Westover, Staff Writer
A Note on this Piece:
I wrote this paper for Monsters in Popular Culture taught by Dr. Paul Booth. The assignment was simple: write about a piece of monster literature. I had just read Octavia Butler’s Lillith’s Brood trilogy and found it to be one of the most unique takes on alien/human relationships in Science Fiction that I had ever read.
I was immediately drawn to this story because it depicted a kind of alien that I had never seen before. The Oankali weren't the enemy, they weren't the hero, they were just there. They were the trees, the ships, and the memories of their people. Butler establishes that as a species they possess massive aggressive, militaristic power, but in the books, all we see is the Oankali subtly influencing humanity by showing the humans, showing us, a better way of doing things.
I have always been fascinated by the way that aliens in books, movies, TV, are often used as a way of exploring something about humanity. Our human-ness stands out when it is presented in contrast with an alternative form of life. Science Fiction is the practice of building an alternative reality to our own. The dramaturgy of Science Fiction is ultimately the dramaturgy of reality.
Lillith lived in a world like ours, and she and the rest of the humans recall and even cling to the violence and selfishness of past generations of humanity. And yet Butler's books represent a glimmer of hope because the Oankali doesn't actually exist.T hey did not truly create their progress: Octavia Butler did. Every alien utopia in literature and film was dreamed up by a human. Science Fiction is the practice of radical imagination that things can change for the better.
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The opening moments of Dawn by Octavia E Butler, come to us in a series of awakenings. Lilith is woken up in what seems to be a prison cell. A seemingly disembodied voice asks her repeated questions about her past. We learn that there was a massive war that killed most of humanity, we learn she had a family and a child. When Lilith finally meets the people who are holding her in the cell, she is not shocked by the knowledge that they are aliens but as soon as she sees one up close, she becomes afraid and deeply unsettled: “She did not want to be any closer to him. She had not known what held her back before. Now she was certain it was his alienness, his difference, his literal unearthliness.” These aliens, known as the Oankali, are bipedal and humanoid, they are grey and covered in what Lilith originally perceives as hair but soon realizes are thousands of minuscule tentacle-like sensory organs. She is even more disgusted by the way they move in response to her actions. The Oankali, a male named Jdahya, begins to tell her about his people, the place they are in, and what she is doing there, but Lilith can barely bring herself to look at him. Lilith’s fear and shock are discordantly contrasted by Jdahya’s strange calm when he describes the actions of humanity that led to the Oankali’s intervention:
"By your way of measuring time, it has been several million years since we dared to interfere in another people's act of self-destruction. Many of us disputed the wisdom of doing it this time. We thought...that there had been a consensus among you, that you had agreed to die."
Butler’s Oankali represents a kind of fear of aliens that goes beyond being scared of little green men. We are afraid of little green men whose power as a society and as an organism far surpasses the temperamental blip that is humanity.
This is especially true for American audiences. Since its inception, the thesis of the American colonizer institution is that it is the best country in the world. The explanation for this shifts with the political and social waves that this country and the world move through. One notable shift began in the 50s with the Cold War and the rise of the alien creature feature. The American institution had a clear enemy in the foreign communists. Unofficial and official American propaganda painted the military and the scientific community as capable and strong in the face of Soviet atomic threats, threats from the sky, from another world. In the book Monsters In America, Scott Poole details the way these early films reinforced the public’s trust in its government and military: “These narratives ended, not with world apocalypse, but with a full restoration of a secure, consumer-oriented status quo.” This format is incredibly important to American audiences. America must come out on top, even as we have progressed beyond the heavy-handed cold war metaphors, any alien threat that appears in a story must be taken down by some sort of terrestrial system. We will not even entertain the idea that the aliens might be better than us.
Butler does. In Dawn, the Oankali reveal a plan to have the surviving humans find mates within the Oankali in order to repopulate the earth without the thing that the Oankali believe to be the fatal flaw of humanity: hierarchy. The Oankali have several advantages over humans both biologically and socially. They can observe the biology of other life forms in order to improve their own biology as a species. The combination of the Oankali’s superior societal structure, free of hierarchy, and superior biology, able to observe life forms on a genetic level, paired with the human’s superior intelligence and creativity, and their capacity for generation and regeneration of cells (cancer) would result in a species and a society that could rebuild the earth and continue the legacy of humanity. But this plan is met with much resistance. Lilith is assigned to help the surviving humans acclimate to their new reality, but they resist, and by doing so confirm the Oankali’s hypothesis. In a test environment, the experimental group Lilith is assigned to is put off by her. They see her as a traitor for adjusting to their alien captor’s way of life, for taking an alien mate. I see two opposing perspectives in this conflict that pervades all three of the novels in Lilith’s Brood.
The first is that the Oankali have a point. Butler is using her storytelling to explore a theoretical restructuring of human society and using the Oankali as a narrative device to do so. In her graduate thesis, Cristina Cordova Paz explores how Butler exposes human bias and proposes “a strategy for adaptation and evolution beyond the contradiction, describing the benefits of a significant mental shift in order to help humans to unearth their underlying beliefs related to differences for the welfare of the world” (Cordova Paz, iv). They argue that Lilith’s experiences serve to deconstruct “a hierarchical power structure and a binary thought pattern for the new future of humans and hybrids, for whom diversity will be necessary for their evolution” (Cordova Paz, 43). The aliens in Dawn are an example of one way aliens can be representational in media. They could represent a new way of doing things, a new way of thinking about and structuring the systems we have become used to that may no longer serve us or could even be actively harming us. This perspective on the Oankali actively disrupts the “full restoration of a secure, consumer-oriented status quo,” (as discussed by Poole) that Butler’s audience had become comfortable with. Through Cordova Paz’s perspective, Dawn is a piece of alien media that uses its audience’s learned fear of aliens to carefully teach, through a surrogate protagonist, its audience how to deconstruct their fear of the disruption of their system.
A contrasting perspective is presented in the book Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought by Patricia Melzer. Melzer frames the Oankali as a colonizer state and Lillith and the other humans as explorations of a colonized identity:
"Constructed, not by geographical displacement, but by colonial intrusion and resistance to the process, such as through nationalism. With her complex representations of black subjectivity, Butler thus places black experience into the wider context of anticolonial debates, engaging with the question, 'What if the intruder stays?'"
This perspective positions the Oankali as colonizers who see themselves as benevolent saviors here to reform a dying humanity who without them would self-destruct into oblivion. Through a wider cultural consideration, an audience can see the Oankali as stand-ins for colonial superpowers, particularly the United States, who saw themselves as saviors of indigenous people. Melzer’s perspective also interprets the reactions of the surviving humans as natural nationalist reactions to colonization, and this is seen in the subsequent novels, particularly Adulthood Rites which takes place on a restored Earth populated by Oankali/human hybrid societies, and groups of humans whose cultural identity is based on their resistance to assimilation within the Oankali. Dawn and all of the Lillith’s Brood series are forms of alien media that upset the current colonizer/colonized perspective by using an unknown to stand in as a known entity in order to force its whole audience to reconsider their position within the power structures they live in.
The Oankali are a complex alien civilization both within the story and as narrative devices from a larger cultural perspective. Regardless of one’s interpretation of their meaning, they encourage us to reconsider the ways “outsider” systems could or do impact our lives and identities as individuals and parts of a whole. I believe that the genius of Octavia Butler’s work is that both of the perspectives I have presented can and do coexist. The point of telling alien stories like Dawn is to generate discussion and potential reframing of the systems in our society that we may take for granted.
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