Tag Archives: Lilith’s Brood

Is Survival Always the Best Option? Pessimism, Anti-Natalism and Bloodchildren

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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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If we count not only the unusually severe harms that anybody could endure, but also the quite routine ones of ordinary human life, then we find that matters are still worse for cheery procreators. It shows that they play Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun — aimed, of course, not at their own heads, but at those of their future offspring. – David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been, p. 92

Benatar’s anti-natalism is not likely to capture the popular imagination any time, soon; probably never, I’d wager. What kind of person accepts that it would be for the best should humanity stop reproducing? But a few metaphysical defeatists do indeed take some solace in it, at least by discovering a comrade in bleakness who attempts rational arguments for our shared existential plight – justifications that aren’t reducible to some mere psychological fracture. The psychologistic dismissals of pessimism are widespread, most recently and disappointingly exemplified by writer Nic Pizzolatto in his TV series, True Detective. Disappointing, because Pizzolatto clearly shares my love for the most ontologically downtrodden horror author working today, Thomas Ligotti. Nevertheless, after 7 hours of episodes that dismantle straight guy Marty Hart’s ideas of family, hard work and law as delusional distractions which keep him from confronting the abysmal punchlines consistently delivered by pessimistic funny man Rust Cohle, and despite having the latter nearly quote Ligotti verbatim at times, Pizzolatto betrays all of this with a denouement that makes the show into little more than religious propaganda hidden in a blighted form. Rust has a metaphysical conversion in the finale after a near death visitation by his dead daughter and father: he begins to see little rays of hope peeking out of the darkness of the nighttime sky. Turns out it was the trauma of losing a child and of not having reconciled with his father – genetically, a future deadend and an unresolved past – that lead to those previously expressed dark thoughts, and not, say, facing the objective ramifications of the eternal perspective, or sub specie aeternitatis, which can only reveal an end to humanity, its concerns and all its artifacts. Rust and the audience need no longer worry about such ramifications with the hope of continuing as an immortal soul. Ligotti refers to such pessimistic flimflam as a “façade of ruins, a trompe l’oeil of bleakness.” (Ligotti, p. 147)

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Another shell game with hope is played out in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men where an inexplicable apocalyptic plague has resulted in universal infertility. Regarding anti-natalism, Peter Singer naïvely wonders, “If we would all agree to have ourselves sterilized then no sacrifices would be required — we could party our way into extinction!” Instead, the film offers a more psychologically plausible scenario: With humanity facing its true endgame, the last generation behaves like a coyote chewing through its ensnared limb, only to realize that each of its limbs is equally trapped. There’s no shared hedonistic spirit, where the world turns into one big Burning Man festival, rather the state (England) erects more barriers, whereby the more privileged, based on the same old fears of class and race, try desperately to reduce the possibilities of the less fortunate ruining whatever pleasures are left in the one thing everyone is forced to share, a moribund genetic fate. Shit never stops running down hill. What the film suggests is that thanatopobia is part of our psychological foundation. “To subdue our death anxiety, we have trumped up a world to deceive ourselves into believing that we will persist – if only symbolically – beyond the breakdown of our bodies.” (Ligotti, p. 159) When we can no longer postpone reflecting on the nothingness of the final true death to some future progeny, we can no longer rely on the comforts of a symbolic immortality. The film suggests we would behave like caged animals. But, then, one of those rays of hope shows up in the form of a pregnant woman, suggesting the human race isn’t finished yet. After which, the story becomes one of a formerly defeatist protagonist making sacrifices for the benefit of some future society that he hopes (with his re-discovered faith) will be better than the current one. The ending is ambivalent enough that the materially inclined need not feel betrayed like we were with True Detective, but it still gives the viewer an emotional escape hatch (unsurprising, I suppose, if you already knew that the book on which the movie was based is by a devout Anglican).

Likewise, thanatophobia – the maternal instinct being the relevant strain here – is the structuring motivation running through Octavia Butler’s tale of survival at any cost, Xenogenesis (aka Lilith’s Brood). After a nutwing contingent of ideologues wipes out most of the life on Earth with nuclear bombs, the few remaining humans are “rescued” by the Oankali, a parasitical species of date-raping colonialists with grotesque worm-like sensors all over their bodies who solve most of their problems with the evolved ability of genetic manipulation, a biologically inherited eugenics. Their means of survival is, like capitalism or the culture industry, to consume qua incorporation all the different beings and materials they find across the universe into their own genetic history, making the new more of the same.

What’s particularly interesting about Butler’s take on the alien invasion trope is that she focuses on a human collaborator, Lilith, and not the heroic figure of the resistance fighter. Not that there’s much possibility for resistance once Lilith is awakened from her stasis, hundreds of years after the nuclear winter. The aliens have rebuilt much of the Earth’s topography and restructured the humans to suit their expansionist goals, which amount to serving the Earth as food to their massive living spaceships and propagating a new strain of the Oankali species using the human gene pool as a reproduction machine. Use it all up and move on. The only two forms of rebellion left to the humans are bitching a lot among themselves and a noncompliance that will result in an eventual death that’s not much more than long-form suicide. Lilith chooses the symbolic immortality of humanity by helping her fellow Terrans accept the idea of humanity becoming one more admixture to the collective genetic memory of the Oankali.

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But I doubt Butler would agree with my negative description of the Oankali, since she rationalizes most of their oppressive behavior as the story progresses.  However objectionable they may at first seem, they look much more like a perfectly harmonic anarchy of superheroes by the end of the series. Thus, what begins as the subjugation of humanity turns out to be its salvation. The Oankali understand each other, other living beings and the world around them on precognitive levels, genetically and materially. They don’t need the muddying mediation of language, since they can objectively tell if no means yes. Humans might be cognitively confused, but the Oankali can see the essential truth underneath. Butler is clearly sympathetic to their collectivism, setting it up as a utopian vantage point, her sub specie aeternitatis, from which to critique what she considers humanity’s defining problem, the human contradiction. That is, humans have a biological characteristic for being hierarchical, which is seen in many other animals, too, but it results in stuff like nuclear warfare when reinforced – rather than, as Jdahya explains, “guided” – by the other major human feature, intelligence. (p. 41, Xenogenesis)

There’s a good bit of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s early pessimism in how the Oankali (and Butler, evidently) perceive humans. His version of our fall from grace: When humans were closest to our animalistic predecessors, as natural man, lacking reflection, we simply existed in the present, moment to moment, like all animals. Even though there was a natural hierarchy, some serving as food for others, all animals, including early man, remained in a satisfied state of blissful ignorance. Worms don’t think about how awful their lives under the domination of birds; both simply do what they do. But once self-consciousness set in with the development of language, humans were capable of considering whether we’re better off now than previously and of making plans. This is time consciousness, which meant that we began to think about what things were like and what they may be like in the future, providing us with the faculty of perfectibility. Perfectibility relies on a perpetual dissatisfaction with our present situation based on comparisons to our past and imagined future selves and to other humans. This alienation from the present is what led, on the one hand, to the development of, say, moral thought or imagining a better polity, and, on the other, to the fear of death, or “our subjugation to the opinion of others [that] paves the way for direct political subjugation.” (p. 69, Dienstag, whose interpretation of Rousseau I follow here)

Rousseau mused about utopian arrangements that would help shelter modern man from time consciousness, where we might rediscover the authenticity of natural man, no longer feeling enslaved to the opinions of others. But, because we can’t forget all the knowledge that’s been acquired over our history, nor can we rid ourselves of temporality, he was highly doubtful that that we could ever return to primeval happiness. But aren’t the Oankali just such a fantasy of an advanced civilization that lives in an animalistic present? Their genetic telepathy makes language otiose while giving them a complete awareness of everything around them. Because of that link, they exist in a natural collective state that is inherently cooperative and anti-competitive. They don’t use tools, but they’ve plenty of organic technology, which is capable of the most advanced scientific feats, such as space travel. And because of their genetic memory across generations as well as a control of aging, they have no anxiety about death. Perfectibility is a matter of adapting to and merging with the surrounding organic forms – of tuning into their present environment, not being alienated from it.

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Using the Oankali as an impossible fantasy for perfecting humanity seems to me at odds with the story’s other major theme, moral responsibility for the subjugated. This is why the trilogy begins to lose ideological steam as Butler becomes increasingly interested in the alien culture itself (focusing on Lilith’s brood and Oankali politics) in lieu of how the humans behave under its dominion. Making substantive points about collaboration becomes difficult when human survivors ultimately should be thanking Lilith for being their Moses to an eternal Oankali paradise. Consequently, I prefer the short story, “Bloodchild,” which Butler wrote while doing research for the trilogy. It explores many of the same themes without the wish fulfilling distractions: The Tlic, an intelligent insect-reptile hybrid with scorpion tails bond with human boys early in their life as a way of preparing them to be symbiotic incubators for the alien species’ vein-munching larvae. (Males are used as hosts, because females are needed to birth enough males to meet Tlic demand.) Humans have once again fucked up everything sometime in the past – this time, by making Earth into some slave-based dystopia. So some refugees found their way to the Tlic’s planet, where the master-slave relation proved more agreeable than back home. As in Xenogenesis, the humans survived only through a diminishment of their humanity. However, there is no potential for perfectibility by becoming part of the Tlic’s reproductive process. They have pretty much the same contradiction that we do.

It’s a coming of age story in which the adolescent Gan is getting ready to have T’Gatoi, an important Tlic bureaucrat and longterm family friend, implant her larval eggs into his bloodstream. His mother, Lien, agreed to this long ago, his father was a host before him (he carried T’Gatoi), and Gan has been raised to accept it as his purpose. The family gets plenty of food and privileges through their relation with T’Gatoi. Gan only begins to question his fate after witnessing the way the little Tlic grubs, ready to be delivered, begin to feed on their host until they can be moved to the corpse of an indigenous beast. This bloody act of physically substituting one body for another helps him realize that his existence is reduced to being a host animal. He seriously considers suicide to prevent himself from being either a mere means for T’Gatoi or the living dead existence of his brother, Qui, who’s resigned to wandering about the preserve on which they live, high on the narcotic egg juice that the Tlic supply to keep the humans living long and pacified lives. But if he doesn’t serve as host, his sister Hoa will; in fact, she even wants to. To save his sister from such a fate, he recommits himself to the task. However, he doesn’t explain it (in first person) as a mere sacrifice on his part, but as a personal desire: “[T’Gatoi:] ‘But you came to me … to save Hoa.’ [Gan:] ‘Yes.’ I leaned my forehead against her. She was cool velvet, deceptively soft. ‘And to keep you for myself.’” (Loc 340) Despite Butler’s insistence in the afterword (Loc 364) that this is a story about love, not slavery, the differential power involved makes her interpretation about as reasonable as a non-ideological romance between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson.

Similarly, when Lien shows signs of depression at having provided her children for Tlic reproduction, T’Gatoi responds by drugging her, using a sting of the Tlic’s tail and insisting that she drink more egg juice. No matter that T’Gatoi and Lien grew up together, the friendship, just like all forms of love between the two species, is corrupt and not to be completely trusted, regardless of how either side might interpret the relation. The dominating to dominated class hierarchy won’t allow anything more. Hardly limited to a slave economy, Butler makes a much better case against hierarchical discrepancies in this short story than she manages in the entire trilogy that followed. That’s because without a utopian interpretation of the alien superiors here, subjugated choice (qua love) is potently problematized, and the effects of domination are critiqued.

Although “Bloodchild” is a perfectly miserable gem that encourages a properly depressive reaction, it still focuses, just like every other example discussed so far, on the will to survive through a high sacrificial cost of some sort (in the case of Gan’s family, basic human dignity). When it comes to sowing the seeds for the future of humanity, our moral options, in fiction and for most people, are limited by a perverse optimism, which Ligotti (p. 154) summarizes as Frankenstein’s Oath: “We, as licensed protectors of the species and members in good standing of the master-class of the race, by the power invested in us by those who wish to survive and reproduce, vow to enforce the fiction that life is worth having and worth living come hell or irreparable brain damage.” As the aforementioned Benatar suggests, this Pollyannaism is justified by the low expectations of humans, sub specie humanitatis. We’re quite good at adapting to suffering and, like Gan, accommodating oppressive beliefs as our own when we have so little real choice. As he puts it, “we would not take slaves’ endorsement of their enslavement as a justification for their enslavement, particularly if we could point to some rationally questionable psychological phenomenon that explained the slaves’ contentment.” (p. 100, Benatar) He argues for another moral possibility, which should come as no surprise if you read the epigraph.

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Regarding future-life cases 1 – i.e., the potential lives of people yet to be born and who are presently non-existent – Benatar makes the case for a fundamental asymmetry in how we evaluate whether it’s good or bad to bring them into existence such that the moral view is that we never should. In one scenario, Lilith brings X into existence, in which case we would say that X experiencing pain is bad and X’s experiencing pleasure is good. That’s agreeable enough, I think, but the problem comes in when we consider what happens should Lilith choose to not bring X into existence. The absence of pain is good even without X to enjoy it. That is, independently of any pleasure, it’s better to not have X than to have X in pain. However, pleasure doesn’t work out in an equally symmetrical fashion. The absence of pleasure isn’t bad unless X exists to be deprived of it. And since X doesn’t exist in this scenario, there’s nothing bad (but nothing good, either) about non-X not experiencing pleasure (since no one’s missing anything). It would be neither better nor worse to not have X who will experience no pleasure than to have X will experience some pleasure. Because it’s good to avoid bringing into the world whatever inevitable amount of suffering that will befall X by not having X, and nothing bad (nor good) would occur should Lilith not have X, she shouldn’t have X, nor should she ever have an X or Y or Z. The same goes for all of us humans, as well as the Tlic, but probably not for the Oankali, since pain isn’t really such a bad thing for them. Therefore, the collaborators in Xenogenesis and “Bloodchild” are not doing humanity any favors by doing whatever’s necessary to survive. They’re actually bringing unnecessary harm into the world, particularly since humanity continues only under the “thumb”/tentacle/tarsus of alien oppressors.

Benatar’s argument isn’t likely to convince the optimistic majority as it leads to some really uncomfortable positions, such as a pro-death view of abortion (women shouldn’t just have a legal right to choose, but should always use that right to abort) and that we should let the species die out even in the absence of extraterrestrial domination. And it has received some stiff philosophical challenges. However, he does offer intuitive support for his asymmetry by showing how it provides a basis for other more commonly accepted asymmetries. For example, most people probably share the view that we have a duty to not bring babies into the world that we know will greatly suffer (such as a fetus that tests positive with an incurable degenerative disease), but not the inverse duty to bring happy people into the world (there’s certainly nothing immoral about a kind and caring couple deciding to not have children). Benatar’s asymmetry provides a possible reason: It’s good not to have children with incurably painful diseases, but neither bad, nor good for children who don’t exist to not experience happiness – i.e., the couple who decides to not have a child isn’t depriving a non-entity of happiness. But, even if that doesn’t sound plausible, the argument is refreshing just because it runs counter to the popular temptation to justify whatever moral position one has with a just-so story from evolutionary psychology. Could there be an ethical view less biologically adaptive than anti-natalism? If for no other reason, I appreciate the effort.

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Showing sympathy for Benatar’s conclusion is Joanna Russ’ heroine, Elaine, in the relentlessly anti-utopian We Who Are About To …. With no hope of being rescued, she lets her fellow castaways know what she thinks about their plan to rebuild civilization on the planet where they’ve crashed:

All right, so you think you have the chance of a snowball in hell. Maybe you do. But I think that some kinds of survival are damned idiotic. Do you want your children to live in the Old Stone Age? Do you want them to forget how to read? Do you want to lose your teeth? Do you want your great-grandchildren to die at thirty? That’s obscene. (p. 14)

Taking a poke at stories like “Bloodchild” where humans fleeing from Earth always manage to discover advanced alien civilizations on other planets, this new planet is a barely hospitable environment with no signs of mental life, civilized or otherwise. There are so few women and men that all the others are not going to allow Elaine (or anyone else) to opt out of reproduction. The central struggle in the book is, as Samuel Delany discusses in his introduction, whether quality of life or reproduction provides purpose to our existence. Insisting on a right to die, she’s forced to kill all but two of the group, because they chose suicide. Elaine isn’t just skeptical like Rousseau that we could revert back to the state of natural man, she has no desire to do such a thing, fearing what a return to a natural hierarchy would likely mean:

You must understand that the patriarchy is coming back, has returned (in fact) in two days. By no design. You must understand that I have no music, no books, no friends, no love. No civilization without industrialization! I’m very much afraid of death. But I must. I must. I must. Deliver me from the body of this. This body. This damned life. (p. 21)

Once alone, Elaine records her final thoughts into a recorder (the narrative conceit of the book) as she starves in a cave, waiting for the proper moment to use a poison capsule. In place of the thanatophobic maternal instinct or Stockholm syndrome as love or a utopian dream that justifies a suffering existence, this is a violent stand for human and, more specifically, female dignity.

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Footnotes:

1. Present-life cases involve the continuance of a life, the cessation of which involves a different threshold for suffering from the one regarding whether a life should never be started.

References:

Benatar, David (2008), Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. Oxford University Press.

Butler, Octavia (1996), Bloodchild and Other Stories. Open Road Integrated Media.

Butler, Octavia (1987, 1988, 1989), Xenogenesis. Guild America Books.

Dienstag, Joshua Foa (2006), Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit , Chapter 2. Princeton University Press.

Ligotti, Thomas (2010), “Sick to Death” in The Conspiracy against the Human Race, p. 147-167. Hippocampus Press.

Russ, Joanna (1976), We Who Are About To …. Wesleyan University Press.

Other Notes:

Children of Men poster is by Noah Hornstein.

Benatar diagram was borrowed from here, which also has a summary of the argument should mine not be sufficiently clear.

Finally, ‘Loc’ refers to the location in a an ebook edition I have of Bloodchild. This is different from the page numbers.

Deus Ex Machina By Alien

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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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adulthood-ritesIn order to keep relevant, the contemporary film adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy would update its nuclear holocaust to apocalyptic climate change. With a few exceptions, most of the end-of-times imagery can remain unchanged. Mass rioting and civil wars erupt over deadened landscapes and disintegrating cities. All seems lost. Then: an alien race, the Oankali, swoops in from space, scooping up the last surviving species, humankind in particular.

The Oankali also restore Earth to pristine, pre-Industrial health, yet Butler treats this like a neutral fact, important to the world building, (literally,) and not singled out for the miracle that it is. This would change in the modern movie remake. In the book, the humans seem barely appreciative, and quickly move onto other concerns. They take the healed planet for granted, but as victims of an atomic war, they were never responsible for its loss. Everyone blames the few military plutocrats who pushed the button. The Oankali try to prevent the redevelopment of technology, which irks a great many survivors. How could innocent people not wish to restore everything that was stolen from them—houses and streets and mines and guns and all?

In the hypothetical film update, the world is destroyed by the narrowness of the human race, albeit orchestrated by these same military plutocrats. No one prized the environment above all, and everyone lived unsustainably. The blame becomes collective. The equators flood, and food and water run out. The humans are widely aware of their hopelessness as they approach the end of the world. Then: almost divine intervention. Redemption. The audience watches the human survivors emotionally leveled, toppled by grace and humility, rapture and grief. Cue swelling strings, a long pan over waterfalls, or intact glaciers. Hands sifting the soil. They could easily reapply the John H Williams score from Jurassic park—the part when the jeeps pull up into a field of Brachiosauri.

In this version, it’s also easier to imagine humanity consenting to what the Oankali require in return—to interbreed with them completely, leaving no further generation of purely human beings.

Would humanity still value Earth, if humankind had to take the fall, and extinguish itself instead? The reverse narrative is far more dominant—humans racing out in spaceships for a replacement planet. Interestingly, the Oankali believe that letting the human species continue as is constitutes mass-suicide. ‘The Human Contradiction,’ the mixture of intelligence and hierarchical behavior, will always guide humankind to utter destruction of themselves and the Earth. The Oankali believe they are offering a way out—humans may not survive, but their genes can.

It is eventually revealed that the Oankali plan a parallel fate for Earth. They had to save the environment to have something to feed their animalesque spaceships. Once these ships reduce Earth to a desolate core, the half-Human, half-Oankali people will take off in search of more intelligent life to augment. Sadly, this development comes too soon in the books, nullifying what had been a beautiful, difficult paradox. Why not resist, if they’re destroying the Earth as well? So what if the solar system will be eaten by the sun, or a passing black hole, in the matter of aeons? Perhaps humans will outrun it. That’s what the Oankali are doing. The movie version breaks down in development hell.

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.