Tag Archives: Dawn

Octavia Butler — Best and Worst

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OEB

So we’re in the middle of an Octavia Butler roundtable, I thought it’d be fun (maybe) for people to talk about which of her works are their favorites and which are their least favorites.

My favorite book of hers is Dawn, from her Xenogenesis series (which I’ve written about here among other places.) I just love the way it presents a standard aliens-as-colonizers narrative in such a way that the colonizers are both repulsive and sympathetic. The flatness of her prose here feels like it both conceals and accentuates the complexity of what she’s doing with empathy. It’s an interesting comparison with Gwyneth Jones, who touches on many of the same themes and ideas in a more knowing, ironized, and deliberately academic way. I love Jones, but there’s a lot to be said for Butler’s approach too, which presents everything almost transparently; it feels almost like a YA novel about growing up to be a tentacled sex monstrosity.

As for my least favorite….I read “Wild Seed” a long while back, but I found its presentation of gender difference (male, bad! female good!) to be pretty irritating. I just read Butler’s short story collection “Bloodchild”; the last story, “Martha”, in which a black female sci-fi writer is asked by God to save the world through vivid dreaming seemed both overly cute and nakedly self-aggrandizing.

For the rest of her books I’ve read, I quite like Kindred, didn’t like Fledgling much, and I think that’s all I’ve read.

So what about you all? What’s your favorite and least favorite Butler?

Ugliness, Empathy, and Octavia Butler

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This is part of a roundtable on the work of Octavia Butler. The index to the roundtable is here.
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How do critiques of identification complicate Western models of empathy? What might empathy look like, and produce, when it doesn’t require identification? What about more difficult cases in which the reader is required to empathize with the oppressor, or with more complicated protagonists? – Megan Boler, “The Risks of Empathy”

She was not afraid. She had gotten over being frightened by “ugly” faces long before her capture. The unknown frightened her. The cage she was in frightened her. She preferred becoming accustomed to any number of ugly faces to remaining in her cage. – Octavia Butler, Dawn

I didn’t agree to participate in this roundtable on Octavia Butler because I enjoy her writing, but rather because I don’t. My admiration for her storytelling is nothing short of begrudging; I have to work at it. And I’ve always been careful to attribute my resistance to matters of personal taste. Butler is, after all, a beloved award-winning writer in science fiction, a pioneer who helped open a space for communities of black speculative fiction writers that I adore, including Nnedi Okorafor, N.K. Jemison, Tannarive Due, and Zetta Elliot. So if I find the slug-like aliens in Dawn nauseating or if the pedophilic undertones in Fledgling nearly keep me from finishing the novel, then I assume that’s my problem.

My displeasure doesn’t prevent me from recognizing Butler’s importance in my African American literature courses and I teach her fiction whenever I can, with her 1979 novel Kindred being the most popular. Students are eager to embrace the story’s invitation to see the interconnected perils of slave resistance and survival through Dana’s modern eyes, grateful that the narrative’s historical corrective comes at the comfortable distance of science fiction tropes. The book raises provocative questions for debate, although I admit to being troubled by how often readers come away from Kindred convinced that they now know what it was like to be enslaved. Too often, their experience with the text is cushioned by what Megan Boler characterizes as “passive empathy”: “an untroubled identification that [does] not create estrangement or unfamiliarity. Rather, passive empathy [allows] them familiarity, ‘insight’ and ‘clear imagination’ of historical occurrences – and finally, a cathartic, innocent, and I would argue voyeuristic sense of closure (266).

Much of Butler’s fiction doesn’t work this way, however. Estrangement and unfamiliarity, particularly in relation to ugliness and the repulsiveness of the alien body, are central to her work. And this is what gets me. The non-human creatures she imagines make me cringe and their relationships with humans in her fiction are even harder to stomach. My first reaction to the Tlic race in Butler’s 1984 short story, “Bloodchild,” was disgust, made all the more unnerving because of the great care Butler seemed to take in the description of the strange species; the serpentine movements of their long, segmented bodies resemble giant worms with rows of limbs and insect-like stingers.
 

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It doesn’t matter to me that the Tlic can speak English and feel pleasure and build governing institutions, not when they look like that. In the story, they use humans of both sexes to procreate in what initially appears to be a mutually beneficial, parasitic relationship, at least until the main character, a young human male named Gan, begins to question the status quo. Butler’s description of Gan curled up alongside T’Gatoi, the Tlic who has adopted him and his family, is not really an image I want to grapple with for long:

T’Gatoi and my mother had been friends all my mother’s life, and T’Gatoi was not interested in being honored in the house she considered her second home. She simply came in, climbed onto one of her special couches, and called me over to keep her warm. It was impossible to be formal with her while lying against her and hearing her complain as usual that I was too skinny.

“You’re better,” she said this time, probing me with six or seven of her limbs. “You’re gaining weight finally. Thinness is dangerous.” The probing changed subtly, became a series of caresses. (4)

T’Gatoi uses her authority as a government official to protect humans (called Terrans) in exchange for the use of their bodies as reproductive hosts. The balance of power between the two species tips back and forth in the interest of self-preservation and free will. Gan isn’t sure he wants to be impregnated – is he a partner or a pet? – but he ultimately submits under the terms of a negotiated relationship that takes into account both his discomfort with the T’Gatoi’s rules and his reluctant longing for her affection. T’Gatoi, too, has desires and cares for Gan. She also wants her Tlic children nurtured in a loving home if they are to survive. And while I admit that I can relate to these feelings and conflicted needs, this is a kind of intimacy that I’m willing to share with a pregnant man, not with a bug.*

Boler asserts that Western models of empathy are based on acts of “consuming” or universalizing differences so that the Other can be judged worthy of our compassion. Despite our best efforts, we end up using the Other “as a catalyst or a substitute” for ourselves in order to ease our own fears and vulnerabilities, rather than actively working to change the assumptions that shape our perspective (268). I’m in awe, then, of the way Butler’s science fiction heightens readers’ physical discomfort with characters like the Tlic in order to rebuff passive empathy and other modes of identification that absolve us of the need for critical self-reflection. T’Gatoi is the Other that I can never fully know. I can’t easily reduce her experience to my own, but I also can’t deny the prickle of recognition that comes from the emotional struggle between the Tlic and the Terrans. When Gan’s mother jokes, “I should have stepped on you when you were small enough,” I recognize her bitterness as a survival strategy, an attempt to upset a social hierarchy and dissociate from the Not Me.

So when I recoil at every reminder of T’Gatoi’s “ugliness,” I wonder what this emotion says about my approach to difference in society and in myself. How does my reaction to the unfamiliar outside the story, my unwillingness to engage the socially embodied strangeness of 2014, compare to the blustery panic of creepy crawly things I want to step on because they are small enough? (And what about those times when the bug is me?)

“Bloodchild” turns my personal readerly aversion into an ideological dilemma and advances the more challenging work of what Boler describes as “testimonial reading”:

Recognizing my position as ‘judge’ granted through the reading privilege, I must learn to question the genealogy of any particular emotional response: my scorn, my evaluation of others’ behaviour as good or bad, my irritation – each provides a site for interrogation of how the text challenges my investments in familiar cultural values. As I examine the history of a particular emotion, I can identify the taken-for-granted social values and structures of my own historical moment which mirror those encountered by the protagonist. Testimonial reading pushes us to recognize that a novel or biography reflects not merely a distant other, but analogous social relations in our own environment, in which our economic and social positions are implicated. (266-7)

Boler’s work on emotion and reading practices draws on her experience teaching Art Spiegelman’s Maus and other fictional works about historical events to make her case. But Butler’s science fiction thought-experiments also provide a framework for a mode of bearing witness that is just as complicated .
 

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In the 1987 novel, Dawn, the first book of Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy (retitled Lilith’s Brood), the main character models the task of testimonial reading against the “affective obstacles” that hinder awareness of “the power relations guiding her response and judgments” (265). These obstacles initially come in the form of extraterrestrials called the Oankali whose bodies are entirely covered with writhing, grayish-white sensory tentacles. They have rescued groups of human survivors, including a black woman named Lilith, in the wake of nuclear destruction on Earth. Awakened on their ship years later, Lilith is required to remaining in her room with one of the ugly creatures until she can look at them without panic. The aliens know that before Lilith can interact with their society without harming herself or others, she must grapple with her revulsion at their physical appearance:

[The Oankali] walked across the room to the table platform, put one many-fingered hand on it, and boosted himself up. Legs drawn against his body, he walked easily on his hands to the center of the platform. The whole series of movements was so fluid and natural, yet so alien that it fascinated her.

Abruptly she realized he was several feet closer to her. She leaped away. Then, feeling utterly foolish, she tried to come back. …

“I don’t understand why I’m so… afraid of you,” she whispered. “Of the way you look, I mean. You’re not that different. There are – or were – life forms on Earth that looked a little like you.”

He said nothing.

She looked at him sharply, fearing he had fallen into one of his long silences. “Is it something you’re doing?” she demanded, “something I don’t know about?”

“I’m here to teach you to be comfortable with us,” he said. “You’re doing very well.”

She did not feel she was doing well at all. “What have others done?”

“Several have tried to kill me.”

She swallowed. It amazed her that they had been able to bring themselves to touch him. “What did you do to them?

“For trying to kill me?”

“No, before – to incite them.”

“No more than I’m doing to you now.” (16-17)

Entire chapters are spent detailing the process through which Lilith learns to view the Oankali named Jdahya without fear. Their exchange invites comparisons with the xenophobia and prejudice of our own world, of course; Lilith’s dark skin could easily elicit similar reactions. Untangling the “genealogy” of her emotional responses becomes even more daunting once she learns that the aliens have three sexes and the ability to manipulate the genetic material of other beings. She is repulsed one moment, curious the next. Unable to look away, she demands answers from Jdahya until her body’s refusal to accept what he is becomes physically and emotionally exhausting. It is then that she begins to ask questions of herself. “God, I’m so tired of this… Why can’t I stop it?” (26).

Butler turns Lilith’s reactionary apprehension into a more productive space for her and for us as readers so that we may all think more critically about the larger forces at work in our judgments of others. To me this is what makes Butler an exceptional storyteller, whether I like her writing or not. Equally important is the fact that Lilith’s encounter with this single Oankali is only a first step. She’ll have to leave the room, meet others, apply what she has learned. For my own part, I’m now half way through Adulthood Rites, the second book in Lilith’s Brood and it is slow going, but I want to finish. The story has been difficult and deeply rewarding for me in a way that I’ve come to expect from Octavia Butler, a reading experience not unlike the probing of limbs that turns to a series of caresses.

 

*Nnedi Okorafor also explores dynamics of power through human companionship with an insect-like robot in her terrific short story, “Spider the Artist.”

Works Cited

Boler, Megan. “The Risks of Empathy: Interrogating Multiculturalism’s Gaze.” Cultural Studies. 11 (2) 1997: 253-73.

Butler, Octavia. Bloodchild and Other Stories. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1996.

—–. Lilith’s Brood: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago. New York: Warner Books, 2000.

White: Not the New Black

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Whether in the American Revolution, Schindler’s List, or Star Wars, Americans have always had a deep and abiding love for tales of oppressed white people. In her new YA novel, Revealing Eden, Victoria Foyt takes that insight and runs with it as fast and as far as impressively insipid prose can take her. In the far future, solar radiation has become exponentially more dangerous, and those without the melanin to withstand it are second-class citizens. Our heroine, Eden, is white and, therefore, doomed to eugenic culling unless she can convince a black man to mate with her and give her dark-skinned babies. Soon she is embroiled with the fascinating Bramford, a black scientist who has had his DNA spliced with panther, eagle, and anaconda genes, turning him into an earthy, atavistic archetype. Luckily, in Foyt’s world, black people are in charge, so Bramford’s evolutionary descent has nothing, nothing, nothing to do with sexualized animalistic fantasies about black men. Shame on you for even thinking so.

Revealing Eden is unusually crass in its take on race, but its general methodology has a longstanding pedigree in sci-fi and fantasy. You need only think of that ham-fisted Star Trek episode in which the aliens with faces that are white on the right side are oppressed by aliens with faces that are white on the left side, or the ham-fisted Next Generation episode in which the crew finds a planet where women rule over men.

Or, for a more recent example, try the film In Time, a parable in which fungible time has replaced money as the currency of choice. Thus, the rich live forever on horded time and the poor have to beg, borrow, steal and run for every second. The movie is clearly intended to be a comment on our crappy economy and growing inequality — but it’s a comment shorn of any mention of the ways in which that inequality continues to be bound up with race. There is, as far as I can remember, only one black character in the film; a long-suffering wife whose (white) husband is an alcoholic. The unfair distribution of time serves as a metaphor for real-world injustice — but does the metaphor highlight those real-world injustices, or does it deny them? Is it possible that the sci-fi setting is just a way to do a story about economic oppression without the inconvenience of having to feature black leads?

Similar questions arise in the three most successful YA series of recent memory: Harry Potter, the Hunger Games and Twilight. All make extensive use of metaphor to discuss racial prejudice — or to avoid discussing racial prejudice, as the case may be. In Harry Potter, (bad) wizards are prejudiced against muggles; in the Hunger Games, the people of the Capitol are prejudiced against the people of the Districts; in Twilight, vampires and werewolves are prejudiced against each other.

All these series come down squarely against discrimination, which is nice as far as it goes. That isn’t very far, however. For example, wizards in Harry Potter really are superior to muggles; no one really denies that. The only point at issue is whether muggles should be killed outright (as Voldemart believes) or whether they should be kept in perpetual ignorance for their own benefit (as the “good guys” believe.) Rudyard Kipling might approve, I suppose, but, to put it kindly, it’s hard to see this as a particularly insightful take on contemporary race relations. And I will avoid discussing the lovable house elf servants, who adore their own enslavement — a fantasy underclass entirely composed of Gunga Dins.

Hunger Games and Twilight are arguably less clumsy, but not by much. Suzanne Collins avoids discussing race by the simple expedient of not discussing it. Her main character, Katniss is possibly biracial, but it’s so downplayed in the book that Hollywood had no problem casting a white actress in the part for the film. In Twilight, there are many Native American characters, and the books deal forthrightly with prejudice directed against those characters. But all that prejudice is because the Native Americans are werewolves; there’s barely a hint that Native Americans who are not werewolves might occasionally be discriminated against. And, of course, Meyer, like Foyt, cheerfully deploys the stereotype of the animalistic, emotional, virile lesser races. Just because discrimination is bad doesn’t mean you can’t have some fun with it, right?

In all of these cases, the problem is that oppression is seen as a (simplistic) structure, rather than as a history. For Foyt, Rowling, et. al, you condemn racism by saying, “Hey! Racism is bad!” For none of them is there a sense of historical inequalities as a living and inescapable presence. Victoria Foyt’s main character, Eden, reads Emily Dickinson, but not Langston Hughes; nobody in Harry Potter compares Voldemort to Hitler; nobody in the Hunger Games has heard of Che. Oppression in all of these series has a now, but no yesterday. Sci-fi and fantasy, apparently, means a world without a past.

It doesn’t have to be that way. As just one counterexample, consider Octavia Butler’s Dawn, the first book of her Xenogenesis trilogy. The novel is set after a nuclear apocalypse. Most of the world has been destroyed, and earth’s few survivors have been rescued by a tentacled alien race known as the Oankali. The rescue is not entirely philanthropic, though. The Oankali are genetic manipulators; they want human beings for their genetic material. Or, to put it another way, they want to mate with our women — and also our men.

The main character in Dawn is an African-American woman named Lilith. You might think that in a future where most of humanity is dead and aliens have inherited the earth, race wouldn’t matter. But, as Butler shows, that would be naïve. Race matters a lot. It inflects other humans’ reactions to Lilith when they are asked to follow her leadership. It inflects the aliens themselves, who assume that Lilith will want to mate with one man because he is black. And it inflects Lilith’s reactions as well, both in her loyalty to her species against an imperial invader, and in her eventual acceptance of difference and, ultimately, of interspecies integration.

Butler doesn’t forswear analogy. The Oankali are in some ways very much like human imperialists — the European invaders conquering the New World. Similarly, mating with the Oankali is comparable to interracial relationships. But the metaphors don’t erase the past; instead they complicate it The imperialists are also saviors. Interracial marriage is both a betrayal of the race and the promise of a new and beautiful future. A future in which, not incidentally, the children of a black woman save humanity.

Dawn demonstrates that metaphor is not, or at least should not be, amnesia. Foyt wants to say that white is black without making any effort to think about either white or black. As a result, her world — and to a lesser extent, the worlds of Rowling, and Collins and Meyer — have an air of rather nervous blandness. Butler, alone in this company seems to realize that even in a different world, we can’t escape what has already happened in this one.

Alien Submission

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This is part of a series of posts on empowerment
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Lilith, the heroine of Octavia Butler’s novel Dawn, is about as thoroughly disempowered as a woman can plausibly be. When we meet her, she has just awoken after a nuclear holocaust to find herself a prisoner on (as we eventually learn) an alien spaceship. Her captives do not even initially provide her with clothes; when she refuses to speak to them, they simply ignore her until she goes insane (they fix her, luckily, so the book can go on). When she does finally meet a tentacled alien, she has a phobic reaction so severe that she can barely stand to be in the same room with it. The alien, though, refuses to leave, demanding that she accommodate herself to it with a blank insistence that smacks of both condescension and sadism.

Eventually, Lilith learns that the aliens (the Oankali) are capable of advanced genetic manipulation, and have rescued the few remaining earthlings in order to mate with them. Despite her protests, Lilith is trained to prepare other human beings to meet the Oankali. She does, and eventually, as a reward, the Oankali impregnate her without her consent. Nikanj, the creature who impregnated her, tells her that her words said she didn’t want a child, but her heart said something else; in short, it gave her a baby for her own good. Lillith is angry at first, but eventually she accepts that Nikanj was right; she really did want a child, just as it said. Over the course of the three book series, Lilith bears something like a dozen or more alien babies. Thus one of the names of the trilogy, Lilith’s Brood.

And if you thought that tale of being changed into a baby factory against your will was bad, just wait till the second book. In”Adulthood Rites,” the entire plot hinges on the evil of birth control. Furthermore, we learn that the so-called Human Contradiction is most fully embodied in males. Thus, effectively, men are more human than women. Dave Sim couldn’t have summarized misogyny any more clearly than that.

Butler isn’t a misogynist though. She’s a feminist. So what on earth (as it were) does she think she’s doing?

Things may become a little clearer if we go back and define the “human contradiction” that males appear to embody more fully than woman. This “human contradiction” is hierarchy and intelligence. According to Butler-via-the-Oankali, humans are an exceedingly intelligent species, but because they are hierarchical, their intelligence leads them inevitably to murder each other. Thus, the nuclear apocalypse is not an accident; it’s the inevitable effect of humanity’s genetic structure. Men are more human than women in that they are more hierarchical, and therefore more fully in tune with the inevitable human destiny of self-destruction. As Nikanj says to Lilith, “A male who’s Human enough to be born to a Human female could be a danger to us all.” Men, being men, are too human and too deadly.

In this context, Lilith’s disempowerment takes on a different inflection. After all, in this narrative, humans tried empowerment. They built powerful bombs and more powerful bombs, and finally they all killed each other. Clearly, it’s time to try something else.

The thing Lilith tries is adaptation — or, less charitably, submission. The Oankali choose to wake Lilith and work with her specifically because she is so adaptable. Butler never says this in so many words, but the implication is that because Lilith is a woman and an African-American — because she was marginal in terms of her culture on earth — she is more able to accept radical changes to that culture. She was also an anthropologist, accustomed to accepting and processing difference. Even given her background, though, Lilith has a remarkable talent for changing and adapting to those she meets. She is unique, in some sense, not because she stays true to herself, but because, like Bella in Twilight — or, indeed, like any mother — she is willing to be transformed by those she loves.

On the other hand, those who insist on staying true to themselves have a terrible time of it in Butler’s world. The Oankali, as I said, are genetic engineers. They are also the ultimate traders — and what they trade is their being. The Oankali travel from star to star, seeking other living creatures with whom to combine their genetic material. The perfect capitalists, they remain Oankali through constant change, losing their very genetic identity in the pleasurable rush of barter.

The pleasure is literal. The Oankali have three genders; male, female, and ooloi. The third, neuter sex combines genetic material from the other two, and from their trading partners, to produce a new life form. The male and female do not have intercourse; instead, the ooloi plugs directly into their nervous systems, and manipulates their genetic material….as well as their pleasure centers.

Nikanj focused on the intensity of their attraction, their union. It left Lilith no other sensation. It seemed, itself, to vanish. She sensed only Joseph, felt that he was aware only of her.

Now their delight in one another ignited and burned. They moved together, sustaining an impossible intensity, both of them timeless, perfectly matched, ablaze in sensation, lost in one another. They seemed to rush upward. A long time later, they seemed to drift down slowly, gradually, savoring a few more moments wholly together.

Afterwards, Joseph, Lilith and Nikanj’s male lover, interrogates Lilith.

“Why do you let them…touch you?”

“To have changes made. The strength, the fast healing — ”

He stopped in front of her, faced her. “Is that all?” he demanded.

She stared at him, seeing the accusation in his eyes, refusing to defend herself. “I liked it,” she said softly. “Didn’t you?”

As this quote mentions in passing, the Oankali actually did empower Lilith; by manipulating her genes, they gave her great strength, the ability to heal quickly, and very long life. She’s a superhero basically, like Buffy or Wonder Woman. But her main power is something she had originally — the ability to accept and submit, to difference and to pleasure.

It’s a power she has not least because she’s a woman. In her book Powers and Submissions, Christian feminist Sarah Coakley argues that Biblically it was women like Mary Magdalene who first saw the risen Christ, and that they had to convince men that what they had seen was true — a dynamic which Thomas Aquinas linked to women’s greater ability to love. Along those lines, male humans, as Joseph demonstrates, are as a group substantially more freaked out by sex with the Oankali than women are. Men who sleep with the Oankali feel that they’re being feminized. They need to be strong and autonomous — so much so that the ooloi who mate with men provide them with the mental illusion that they are able to move during interspecies sex, because they would be disturbed by the reality that the ooloi immobilize them to give them pleasure.

For Butler, then, the human (and especially male) desire for autonomy, dominance, and power is at best a whimsy to be indulged and at worst a deadly disease to be eradicated. There are echoes here of the philosophy of William Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman.

It seemed to me, from a psychological angle, that the comics’ worst offense was their blood-curdling masculinity. A male hero, at best, lacks the qualities of maternal love and tenderness which are as essential to a normal child as the breath of life. Suppose your child’s ideal becomes a superman who uses his extraordinary powers to help the weak. The most important ingredient in the human happiness recipe still is missing — love. It’s smart to be strong. It’s big to be generous. But it’s sissified, according to exclusively masculine rules, to be tender, loving, affectionate, and alluring. “Aw, that’s girl stuff!” snorts our young comics reader. “Who wants to be a girl? And that’s the point; not even girls want to girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, power. Not wanting to be girls they don’t want to be tender, submissive, peaceloving, as good women are. Women’s strong qualities have become despised because of their weak ones. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of a Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.

The Oankali’s solution is a little different, but the diagnosis is similar. Men (and women too) must learn that violence and empowerment are less powerful than love, peace,and tenderness. The Oankali need to teach men (and women) to submit to love and the loss of self. If men (and women) do not learn the strength of selflessness and submission, they will be destroyed.

This is, in fact, precisely the choice that the aliens give human beings. If they are willing to adapt and submit, they can breed with the Oankali, and their children will be born with tentacles and travel through space. If they are not willing to adapt and submit, then they will have no children at all. The Oankali sterilize all those who refuse to take Oankali mates. The humans will live out exceedingly extended, sterile lifespans, and finally die off. At that point, the Oankali’s living ships will consume everything living on the earth as fuel and sustenance for the long space voyage, and the Oankali/human children will leave earth forever.

This seems excessively cruel; a brutal eugenic blackmail. But Butler explains repeatedly that the Oankali are not in fact trying to force humans to breed with them against their will. Rather, the Oankali sterilize humans because they know that if they don’t sterilize humans, humans will kill themselves off. The genetic contradiction, hierarchy and intelligence, is an inevitable death sentence. Allowing humans to breed means creating a messy, extended genocide rather than a quick, relatively painless one. The Oankali’s logic is, undoubtedly deliberately, the logic of abortion — babies who would be unhappy shouldn’t be born.

The Oankali eventually reverse their decision; Akin, Lilith’s first male Oankali/human son, convinces his people to let the humans breed true on Mars. The Oankali still believe that humans will destroy themselves, but Akin insists that they should be allowed to go on; to make their own choice about how they and their children will die if they cannot choose to live. Even if the imperial conquerors bring love, long life, and peace, the conquered should have the right to cling to their benighted folkways…on a reservation, since their home has been stripped for parts.

Butler’s perfectly aware of the bitter irony there, just as Lilith is aware of the bitterness of her own submission. Though she loves her alien family — her ooloi, her male husband, her female Oankali mate, her male Oankali mate, and her ever-increasing brood — she never fully reconciles to having (as she sees it, with some justification) betrayed humankind. Despite her adaptability, her submission still leaves her feeling co-opted, manipulated, and disempowered.

Though that’s not all she’s left feeling, obviously. Butler doesn’t denigrate empowerment; she clearly believes that women (and men too) should be able to make their own choices, even if those choices include embracing traditional family structures as the Mars colonists do. Lilith herself, for all her adaptability, is hardly weak. On the contrary, she’s intelligent, determined, courageous, and resourceful. Given the task of training other humans to return to a wild and primitive earth, she works hard to give her charges the skills they need without letting them revert to savagery. Similarly, she tries to balance the humans’ need for the Oankali in the short term with the ultimate imperative to escape. Lilith isn’t always, or even often, successful, but she’s always thinking, and in the face of an impossible situation she keeps her goals clearly before her, and works towards them to the best of her ability. It’s hard to know what more one could ask of a hero than that.

But though she acknowledges the importance of empowerment, Butler clearly also hopes for something beyond the hierarchical ideals of strength and autonomy and victory. Indeed, for Butler and for Lilith, one could argue that the courage comes out of the adaptability; that the power comes from the submission. Feminist theologian Sarah Coakley (mentioned above) seems to argue for this point as well, when she argues that from passive spiritual contemplation should come not just “Love, joy, peace” but also “personal empowerment, prophetic resistance, courage in the face of oppression, and the destruction of false idolatry.”

This is worked through by Butler perhaps most clearly in the final book in the series, Imago. The central character and narrator of this volume is Jodahs, Lilith’s first ooloi child. Jodahs has superstrength, superhearing, superhealing, and can shapeshift at will — but without love, it literally de-evolves and begins to disintegrate.

This is not, however, a weakness — love isn’t kryptonite. On the contrary, lovelessness causes death not because there’s something wrong with Jodahs, but because that’s how the world works. Without love, as Butler’s nuclear catastrophe suggests, you get a holocaust.

If lack of love is death, Jodahs’ beauty, its specialness, is precisely love and empathy; all its powers and abilities are linked to the fact that it is a creature made to minister to humans. Butler emphasizes repeatedly that Jodahs needs — indeed hungers after — the experience of healing others of their wounds and genetic defects. This healing is accomplished through sex; by giving pleasure. Thus, Jodahs must seduce, love, mate, and heal or else die.

Jodahs’ superpowers, then, are dependent on its being dependent. This is especially so since those powers come not from the aliens, but from humans — and particularly from human weakness. The Oankali wanted to mate with humans because humans get cancer; they were especially interested in Lilith because she had a strong genetic predisposition to the disease. It’s the rapid cell growth of cancer that taught the Oankali to heal and shape-change; it’s Lilith’s genetic weakness that gives her ooloi child its fantastic abilities. In both its life-threatening need for others and in the genetic basis of its abilities, Jodahs can be seen as an answer to the question posed by Coakley:

what…if true divine ’empowerment’ occurs most unimpededly in the context of a special form of human ‘vulnerability?’

Coakley asks this question specifically in the light of the Christ of Philippians 2.5-11,

who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every other name, that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow…

In this duality of power and weakness, humility and exaltation, there’s a pretty clear parallel with Butler’s miracle-working human/alien, superhero/dependent, not-man/not-woman, healthy/sick, biracial ooloi. Queerness and kenosis come together in an identity outside identity, a self-effacement through jouissance, the fruits of which are empowerment.

Towards the end of Imago. Jodahs, the narrator, overhears a conversation between its lover, Jesusa, and its mother, Lilith. Jesusa is trying to decide whether to become Jodahs’ life partner. So she asks Lilith how she ever reconciled herself to alien sex.

“I’m afraid. This is all so different… How did you ever…? I mean…with Nikanj…. How did you decide?

My mother said nothing at all.

“You didn’t have a choice, did you?”

“I did, oh, yes. I chose to live.”

“That’s no choice. That’s just going on, letting yourself be carried along by whatever happens.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” my mother said.”

Choice, life, sex, and motherhood — it’s hard to believe that Butler isn’t deliberately glancing at the abortion debate here. I don’t think the message is “pro-life”, precisely — especially since the whole debate is in the context of genetically creating tentacled human hybrids through complicated five-way intercourse with aliens, which is not exactly a stance that the Pope would endorse. Still, Butler does seem to be taking a dig at the way that pro-choice can sometimes assume (as with various critiques of Bella) that a choice can only be a choice when it is an assertion of power, or individuality, or death. Lilith didn’t choose love, but she chose to submit to it. Because of that, Jesusa, almost despite herself, turns to Lilith for wisdom and strength. So, too, do the Oankali depend upon her to bear us towards the future.