race/gender/science fiction - response 5

Xenophobia on an interstellar scale

Captain.ver.Kerk — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 07:49:40 +0000

Of all the works we have read so far, the series Lilith's Brood reminds me most of other science fiction books I've read. It has several things I feel to be typical staples of the SciFi genre, parts that are most often shared with other novels in the category. These include the presence of an intrusive alien species, some great war that leaves our current perception of Earth in ruin, and advancement of human life and health through some means. The most noticeable and most pertinent theme, though, is that of Xenophobia, one I feel plays out most often in science fiction books.

Butler makes no attempts to hide the xenophobic tendencies of humankind in Lilith's Brood. As we see with Lilith, the protagonist of the first book DAWN, after centuries of suspended animation interspersed with brief periods of isolated wakefulness is very quick to welcome the presence of a human being into her chamber. She soon discovers that her companion is not, in fact human, and recoils away from him, noting that "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," (13). Lilith is African, a race most typically victim of xenophobic tendencies. Yet even she finds the though of an alien being with humanoid but not completely human features to be utterly repulsive.

The conflict is partly a superficial one, based upon the appearances of the Oankali. They have humanoid, bipedal forms, but instead of eyes, ears, or noses, they have sensory tentacles covering much of their body, giving them the appearance of medusae. Lilith even comments to Tate, the first person she awakens, that "Oankali are ugly. Grotesque. But we can get used to them, and they won't hurt us. Remember that," (131). In other words, the Oankali's appearance is definitely a startling and scary point that drives humans away from them, but this is not all that is wrong, as it is possible for humans to adapt to their looks.

Another human, Gilbert Roybal, reveals the true sentiment concerning the humans distaste for the looks of the Oankali Constructs and their sensory tentacles: "It's not just the way the tentacles lookâ€¦. Yes, they are ugly, but it's what they represent that's important. They're alien. Un-Human. How can little girls grow up to be Human women when their own sense organs betray them?" (391). The whole conflict is really about the fact that the constructs and Oankali are a whole different species apart from Homo sapiens, xenophobia on an intergalactic scale. After all, there are tentacled beings on earth, but these are not as capable of intelligent thought as we are. Yet the Oankali defy this norm, and other customs and mannerisms they have incorporate into one giant amalgam of foreignness that defies human categorization, making them something truly different and therefore frightening to us.

Xenophobia is a major theme in Lilith's Brood and other great works of science fiction like Ender's Game and later novels in the Foundation series. This idea of being confronted by something so drastically different in appearance, behavior, and biology, yet with mental faculties and ideas similar to our own truly frightens us and necessitates exploration, and Butler does this well in Lilith's Brood.

Anti-heroes

dreamfall17 — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:37:58 +0000

This book made me think entirely too hard about things I am not comfortable thinking about - what is human, what is free will, do humans really suck this much, etc etc etc. Now that I've finished, I'm still stuck thinking about it, but I am having a difficult time grounding what I have to say in the text, or even articulating it in something approaching a coherent fashion. I'll give it a shot, though.

One thing before I start: Regardless of whether the Contradiction would lead inevitably to human destruction, refusing to help humans continue as humans because they will eventually destroy themselves â€“ because helping them would be like "causing the conception of a child who is so defective that it must die in infancy" â€“ is a little like demanding all fetuses be aborted because men are mortal and will die at some point, anyway (532).

I'm really more of a fantasy than SF girl - I've read more fantasy books, good and bad, than I care to admit. Especially with high fantasy, the stakes tend to be pretty high â€“ set out on this quest to drop this ring in a fiery volcano or the world will end, journey into the mountains to awaken the dragons to save the kingdom, and similar. (Side note: I know that there are exceptions â€“ I'm running with standard structures here) The main character is often plucked out of obscurity, but because of one thing or another, they are in some way "destined" to carry out this task set to them. The protagonist sets out on this journey knowing it will be long and hard, and the plot concludes with a great release of the built-up tension â€“ a crashing together of great armies, an epic battle with the evil lord, etc.) The main character may start out as an everyman, but through his or her actions and words, it becomes clear that the protagonist is suited to the heroic lifestyle, so to speak. I find it difficult to describe exactly what I mean, but hopefully this makes sense

Most of the science fiction books I've read fit into this style, as well. Some, like The Handmaid's Tale, do not follow this structure, but Offred is never set up to be a hero, never does anything particularly significant on a grand scale; that's the point of the book. Lilith's Brood, on the other hand, repeatedly sets up a scenario perfect for the heroic structure â€“ the woman chosen to lead humans into a new world, the first human-born male construct, the first ooloi construct. However, none of them are particularly heroic. Though they never behave as proper, traditional heroes do, through smaller actions they manage to accomplish the same things.

Every one of Butler's protagonists really is an everyman. Lilith, Akin, and Jodahs actions are dictated by their own and their companions' everyday needs. It is through these smaller actions that they manage to accomplish such extraordinary things. They seem less unusual, untouchable, and heroic, and more like regular people who were put in extraordinary situations and managed pretty well. It is easier for the reader to put themselves in their situation, to relate, and therefore erases much of the the Oankali alien-ness. It brings out the humanity in the Oankali â€“ or perhaps the Oankali in humanity.

For example: Lilith never accepts the role the Oankali give to her as the shepherd of humanity, but neither does she radically reject it. She just rolls with it, because either radical action is too extreme for her, and it's easiest to take the middle road. Even in the last paragraphs of Dawn, she still says, "â€¦perhaps the Oankali were not perfect. A few fertile people might slip through and find one another. Perhaps. Learn and run! If she were lost, others did not have to be. Humanity did not have to be" (248). She does not initiative to become un-lost â€“ that is the job for someone in the future.

In a further rejection of the traditional plot structure, there is no real climax to the trilogy. The final scene of resistance in the mountain village is pretty anticlimactic â€“ the people have been subdued by Jodah and Aaor's healing abilities, and when the Oankali ship comes, "there was no panic on the part of the humansâ€¦it was a measure of the Human's trust that they let Aaor and me and our mates go down to meet the newcomers" (737). Even the last Human holdouts are defeated gently, by the kindness (and chemicals) of the ooloi, and it is questionable whether they are defeated at all. They are moving on to a better life on Mars, but they are still behaving as the Oankali want them to.

The end is ultimately ambiguous; the last sentence of the book, "Seconds after I had expelled it, I felt it begin the tiny positioning movements of independent life," has no real feeling of conclusion to it (746). Rather, it hints that life will continue on pretty much as it has through the entire trilogy, and it is through little actions and normal people that change will come.

The Oankali race metaphor

roseblack — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 11:35:58 +0000

The Oankali are a lot like Europeans/Americans.

There, I said it. Certainly, it's not the only metaphor that can be drawn from the relationship between Human and Oankali in Lilith's Brood, but it's an interesting one to look at. In light of the colonialist implications discussed in class, it's also one of the more obvious ones. There is, however, a defined parallel understanding of Human-Oankali relations with regard to race.

The biological understanding of value and character bears a striking resemblance to the sorts of arguments leveraged by White scientists for the last few centuries in an attempt to explain, and by explanation prove, the inferiority of Black intellect and emotional life. So convinced are they of their own developmental superiority that they cannot accept the input of humans into their own fate. They wait, instead, for the maturation of a child with Oankali genes, because even acknowledging their own inability to understand human culture, they're unwilling to build from the desires and opinions of the lesser species. Even an immature, partial Oankali is given a stronger voice than fully acculturated humans, such as Lilith. The humans play into this sense of superiority by fixating on the surface aspects of their life with the Oankali, such as their children's tentacles, and ignoring the more profound loss of humanity they've experienced in a lack of meaningful freedom

The motion of the narrative voice toward a more Oankali perspective also maps the acclimation of humanity (and Lilith in particular) to the Oankali world that they seem immovably stuck in. By the end of Imago, Lilith seems to have given up any form of deep resistance, mired as she is in mothering the children she'd originally resisted. Her silent betrayal of Jesusa bespeaks a profound accommodation to the Oankali life that is now the vast majority of her existence. Jodahs itself believes itself to be in touch with its human side, and to understand humanity through itself, but displays a lack of empathy with the humans it encounters. It seems confused, and even perhaps disdainful of Lilith's attempts to keep bits of human culture alive; "She does that sometimes â€“ insists on keeping human customs." (p. 528)

What can we take from this narrative of cultural subsumption? Butler describes a universe in which humanity, in all of its cultural diversity, disappears into barbarism or alien existence. As evidenced by reactions in class, readers find this prospect disturbing, and of questionable morality, if applicable. In this removed form, we can question the medium-term effects of colonization without the cultural baggage of clichÃ©s so often implied in discourse on the topic. In examining our own reactions to the Oankali paradigm, we see more profoundly what it is about humanity we do value.

taking pass this week

Kamin — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 09:56:06 +0000

After getting back at 2am from winning a Bay Area ultimate tournament that puts Claremont into the top 16 teams in the country... I'll take this one off.

First person alien

blacklace — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 09:21:46 +0000

In the Lilith's Brood trilogy, "Imago" is the first time we get a first person narration. It's the voice of an ooloi, and therefore one of the most foreign to us in the world of the book. This functions on several different levels. It serves the utilitarian function of decreasing the number of "it"s in the text, making syntax more understandable overall. But it also sets up a very interesting self-and-other construct, removing it from the societal and making it far more individual.

On a certain level, Jodahs is both the most alien and the most comforting character presented to us who has Oankali blood in it. It is both Human and Oankali, and of a gender we have no concept of or parallel to within the human race. There's this tiny part of it that is like us, but it is wrapped in so alien a package, thinks with so alien a mind, that it is hard to understand it. The first-person narrative brings us closer to it, making it easier for us to sympathize with it on a level based in linguistics. It is the only character we get to understand through its self, its own concept of self, as an individual, something that is very integral to our (the reading audience) concept of self. There is an immediacy that is absent in the previous two books.

You also have Jodahs as the first...mistake? Throughout all three books, we hear all about how the ooloi perfectly craft magic little embryos that turn into the projected, desired offspring. Yet for a society that seems so hell-bent on privileging nature over nurture to the point of exclusivity, it's interesting that the child gets to, in some respects, choose its own gender. There is an implication in "Adulthood Rites" that the Oankali constructs have far more freedom/ability to choose their own gender, and that, if they do not like their Human construct paired-sibling, they can choose to be of the same gender as the human construct, thus avoiding having to mate with it.

This is echoed to a certain extent in "Imago." But in "Imago," the human-born construct is the first one to turn ooloi. Nikanj is torn between its own desires to have this same-sex child to help ease its loneliness, and the consensus of the Oankali, who fear this child. At the end of the book, though, we find out that this is not an independent occurrence--there is another pair of siblings in a Jah village who are becoming ooloi. "This produced confusion among the people. One mistake simply focused attention on the ooloi responsible. Two mistakes unconnected, but happening so close together in time after a century of perfection, might indicate something other than ooloi incompetence" (743). This brings to mind several threads of thought. One, when society is ready for something, it will happen. Take Newton and Leibniz and calculus. The nine different evolutions of the eye I learned about in high school also seems to fit in here (though poking on the internet seems to indicate that this is being refuted, and that the eye only happened once, and just branched like crazy). It also brings to mind "Jurassic Park," when Dr Malcolm says "Life will find a way" and *poof* the dinosaurs start morphing genders so they can reproduce.

What I find most striking about this dual evolution of ooloi constructs, though, is that it shows a certain level of fallibility within the Oankali, who have previously been presented as infallible on the genetic level of understanding and manipulation. They do not have the complete control over evolution that they like to seem to have to their "trade partners."

So, we've got these biological mistakes, specifically Jodahs, and it's the first person to speak to us in the first person, to have a true narrative sense of identity and individuality, and to offer us what seems like an unfiltered view into its mind. With the human and the human construct, there was a narrator who could observe and speak for them. With Jodahs, this is not possible. Why?

When the Oankali are in their second consensus meeting, Jodahs tells the reader "We represented the premature adulthood of a new species. We represented true independence--reproductive independence--for that species" (742). In Jodahs, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It has become a human-oankali-ooloi hybrid that in many respects overwhelms everyone who comes into contact with it. It has a way with humans that wins over century-long resisters. It succeeds where the Oankali fail. And it can reproduce. Until this point, even when the Oankali were reproducing with the humans, even when constructs formed second and third and fourth generations, there was still a purely Oankali ooloi involved in the process, controlling the process. The humans weren't partners in a trade, they were subjects in an experiment, because the oankali still maintained ultimate control over the future of the humans, refusing to let a human influence penetrate the level of the final decision-making process in creating offspring.

Looking at the three books, each begins with a birth of sorts. Lilith is born into a new world. Akin is born from the womb into the world. Jodahs has a birth into a gender and adulthood. The first time we hear from Jodahs, he is becoming ooloi. Both it and Akin speak of the sensory perceptions, changes in taste and smell. Lilith's birth is a gasping, a dimness, a struggle to see. With each birth, there's an increased level of comfort with being born, a better understanding of what is happening, what is being experienced. As understanding increases, the characters are better able to speak for themselves. Lilith speaks to the Oankali, but they do not listen to her until things have gone terribly wrong, and she has proved her fears and wishes were valid. Akin can convince the others of the necessity of an Akjai human colony without testing it first. Jodahs speaks with its own voice from the first moment we meet it.

By making that which should seem so alien to us the only person who gets to use its own voice, the separation between that which is alien and that which is human is decreased, blurred. Arguably, Jodahs is the most manipulative of all the people we meet, because it is human, oankali, and ooloi, able to understand both species, and to wield powerful narcotics, its mere presence winning its enemies to its side. It should be the most repulsive character to us as humans, because it effectively destroys the resister urge, the desire to go to Mars and preserve humanity with its very presence. Yet, narratively, we are put closest to it, made to understand it best.

I don't have a solid conclusion for this. In some ways, this drawing in through the first person seems like it's meant to simulate being in contact with an ooloi, drawn in against one's will, desire, conscious choice, through subtle things like the use of "I." Like it's the closest we can come to understanding something that is truly alien. Like we're meant to see ourselves as the alien.

Glad to be done with the tentacle porn...

LeoniaTavira — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 08:15:19 +0000

Octavia Butler uses dialogue throughout the book to say a great deal more than one would initially interpret. She uses the Oankali and their projected image of omniscience to convey criticism of humanity and our civilization, even in situations where the Human culture is not specifically under scrutiny. Less helpful to the story is her tendency to constantly ram the "Human Conflict/Contradiction" down the throats of her readers, yet never properly investigating just what is so flawed in it. Because so much of the trilogy deals with the indoctrination of Humans or the raising and educating of children, there is a lot of room for explanation to the reader and we often hear the same situation explained from multiple perspectives. This method of getting information to the reader is interesting because it points out the contradictions the Oankali are responsible for and the subtle manipulation and destructive lies through omission. Much of the Oankali deception is only a suspicion until the third book, where the reader gets a very in depth view into Jodahs' reality and how he twists people to match his will. The concept of love in these inter-species relationships is completely dismissed, Lilith herself even says at one point that it's only a matter of pheromones, and that becomes absolute fact when we experience Jodahs' perspective. As far as Jodahs and Aaor were concerned it seemed not to matter at all which pair of Humans were chosen as mates, just that they found two warm bodies of roughly the right age. Love is occasionally mentioned, but quite frankly it seems to exist more to point out just how ridiculous that concept is with the degree of control the Oankali and constructs have over the Human perception of reality, than as any kind of serious statement.
One passage of Adulthood Rites that really stood out as saying more than it seems was when Akin and Tiikuchahk were on the shuttle to Chkahichdahk with Dichaan. Dichaan allowed Akin to "taste the ship's perceptions" and then offered to do the same with Tiikuchahk (444). Tiikuchahk asks its sibling whether or not it should also have this experience, as it had clearly been painful to Akin and it is Akin's response that is interesting.
"Yes," he said. "Do it. It hurts, and you won't like it, but there's something more in it than pain, something you won't feel until afterward. I think maybeâ€¦maybe it's a shadow of the way it will be for us when we're adult and able to perceive directly. It's worth what it costs, worth reaching for." (444)
This passage not only answers Tiikuchahk, but also answers how the Oankali, and constructs who are sufficiently swayed by the Oankali way, feel about hybridizing humanity. From their perspective Humans should breed with them, sign over their free will and reproductive abilities. It will hurt. They will go against their better judgment and resent their own weakness â€“ not realizing just how little choice they had in the first place. But the Oankali and constructs are convinced that the trade is the correct choice and in the end the Humans will understand that the preservation of even the remotest slice of humanity is worth losing all trace of what Humans had once been. Even though Oankali explain throughout the book their reasons for the trade, their efforts to make Humans happy and save them from extinction, this passage seems to offer clarity of opinion that seems different from the more outright declarations in the book. For some reason this statement, that is not even about directly about Humans, explains the essence of the Oankali reason for continuing to force themselves on humankind against their wishes because of a belief that the pain is "worth what it costs."

by the way

dragongrrl — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 07:53:12 +0000

Despite the fact that I really enjoyed Lilith's Brood, I'm skipping this reading response. I've just had a lot of writing to do recently...

Aliens Like Shakespeare, Too

coffeeandcherrypie — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 05:01:51 +0000

As a humanist leech, I sometimes feel left out of certain SF authors' visions of the future. In Starship Troopers, disciplines like philosophy are entirely ceded to the sciences--viz. the constant references to "mathematically verifiable moral truths." And this is to say nothing of the uses of mimetic representation--a curious absence, given that such visions of the future are made via a sort of mimetic representation. We talked in class about whether there was art on Gethen in The Left Hand of Darkness. In Lilith's Brood, Butler explicitly states that there isn't art among the Resisters. This comes up when it gets revealed that, prior to the war, Gabe used to be an actor by profession. What's particularly interesting, though, is the way aesthetic experience gets linked with the tactile communication that takes place between constructs and Oankali.

At first, Akin clearly has no idea what it means to be an actor. He describes the phenomenon of performance art in descriptive terms that turn out to be sort of alarming: "Gabe had been an actor. People gave him money and goods so that he would pretend to be someone else" (408). Aside from basic cultural miscommunication, Akin's objections to Gabe's acting look, at first, pretty Platonic. "'Didn't your mother ever tell you any stories?' [Gabe] asked Akin. 'Yes,' Akin said. 'But they were true'" (408). Here, Akin's idea is that fiction--or, probably, any other form of mimetic representation--is not a useful endeavor because its empirical falseness renders it a less good way to communicate between persons information about human-/Oankali-nature, the given world, etc. Plato, of course, makes this objection in Book X of the Republic.

This dovetails unsettlingly with the state of utter destruction that has been wrought on Earth by this time in the novel. "'She never told you about the three bears?' 'What's a bear?'" (408). This perspective shift renders impotent Akin's attack on acting as well as Gabe's defense of same. At a certain point, the biological mandate to survive trumps any sort of demands that aesthetic objects impose on us. Art pales in the face of death--or, in this case, extinction. I take this to be a really useful observation that perhaps SF authors, in general, are in a better position to make than other fiction writers.

Gabe's performance of Lear for Akin is described simply as a transformation: "Gabe became an old man" (408). Despite his initial reservations, Akin has a powerful experience of empathic substitution: "Somehowâ€¦he felt what Gabe seemed to want him to feel. Surprise, anger, betrayal, utter bewilderment, despair, madnessâ€¦." (408). A wide range of the human experience suddenly becomes available to Akin, and he experiences it immanently. It's an incredible fact about art that it can make subjective experience communicable between persons; that it should also do this between species says something about the real (potential) power of representation in the universe of Lilith's Brood.

Afterward, when Akin attempts to describe to Gabe his experience as an audience, he describes it as being similar to a form of communication unique to the Oankali: "It's like what we do--constructs and Oankali. It's like when we touch each other and talk with feelings and pressures. Sometimes you have to remember a feeling you haven't had for a long time and bring it back so you can transmit it to someone else or use a feeling you have about one thing to help someone understand something else" (409). There might not be a better way to paraphrase the purpose of art than to say it's "talking with feelings and pressures." The humanist tradition, it turns out, survives, albeit in a semi-recognizable form. But that seems to be a theme in the novel.

Liliths - Response 5

Scott_of_the_Sahara — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:14:55 +0000

My reaction to Lilith's Brood after just reading the title was to think, "Lilith! What a terrible name for parents to give their child!" I didn't know too much about Lilith, other than that she was supposed to be the first wife of Adam, according to apocryphal texts, and that she supposedly killed children. From where I was coming from, that didn't seem like the best name for parents to give their daughter, although I was intrigued as to how the choice of name would play out in the three books. For instance Tino, upon hearing her name, remarks that it is an "unusual name loaded with bad connotations" (285). I have to agree, although it could very well be that he is just referring to the stories he as heard about Lilith Iyapo. Nonetheless, many of the stories of Lilith Iyapo have interesting parallels with various stories of Lilith. So, I it would be a good idea to read up a little more on the background of Lilith and the various stories surrounding her.

It turns out that she was much more than just the child killer and first wife of Adam that I had originally thought and that many of the earlier traits ascribed to her are clearly reflected in the character in the text. In early Sumerian texts she was a demon who would visit men in the night and have children by them. This notion of her as a child bearing demon continues into the Talmudic period where, according to Raphael Patai, she was unhappy as Adam's first wife so she fled and went to the Red Sea where she "engaged in unbridled promiscuity, and bore a demonic brood of more than one hundred a day" (Patai 296). Woah! A brood! Lilith's bearing of a demonic brood relates very well to the perception of Butler's Lilith by the resisters. Lilith herself raises the objection early in Dawn, terrified after learning how her children will no longer be human, she fears that the Oankali will "make mules of our children sterile monsters" (55). The resisters see the children as just that, monsters, the demon brood, and they perceive her children as the end of the human race. They are not human and they are the ones who are going to repopulate the planet, not the human race which the Oankali claim to have been saving. Having been previously unaware of this aspect of the story of Lilith, I thought it was very interesting that the title seems to suggest there is possibly something demonic, or at least unhuman, about her children.

Lilith is also concerned with childbirth. According to sources cited by Patai, women would recite certain incantations to protect themselves from the complications that she could cause in child birthing. In fact, it was possible for her to cause sterility. In a way resistors blamer her for much of what has happened. She is there Judas goat (245) and it is because of her, or at least can be seen to because of her, that the human race will no longer survive. The human race is now sterile without the Oankali.

There are also texts which tell of Lilith as being the wife of Samael (Patai 308). Where Adam was, at least, human, Lilith is now the wife of a demon. The Oankali in the minds of the resistors? And here again there is the fear that they might fill with world with "their demonic brood" so God takes it upon himself to castrate Samael.

The parallels with the different religious and mythological Liliths and the role of Lilith Iyapo as seen from the resistors point of view was an aspect of Dawn and Adulthood Rites that I thought was very interesting, especially not knowing much about the history of Lilith. The demonic aspect of her through history and her demonic children who threaten to fill the world, fit well with the fears of the resistors who believe that the construct children are not human and yet they will be the ones to inherit the restored Earth.

Here's the link to the article I read which does a great job tracing the changes of Lilith:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8715%28196410%2F12%2977%3A306%3C29...

Art, Culture, and Oankali

DeusExMachina — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 10:56:07 +0000

The Oankali in Lilith's Brood are distinctly alien, in many ways â€“ but the difference which persists longest and is most troublesome is their culture â€“ or apparent lack thereof. The Oankali apparently take the view that biology is everything â€“ that, given the scale of a group of humans throughout a lifetime, the genes they have within them ultimately decide the fate of the entires species. They believe that they can predict the lifestyle of the children their ooloi mix before the children are even born. But this sort of dramatically confident view is also one-sided: it ignores the existence of culture, the influence of society, and what Hobbes calls "the Social Contract". The Oankali perceive a predictability in humans' genetic makeup that persists whether the humans exist in a "state of nature" or not. Granted, the behavior of the humans we see in the book seems "nasty, brutish, and short" except on account of the intervention by Oankali.

But there are also suggestions that the Oankali view is not all-encompassing. The Oankali claim that the "Trade" with humans is in part an exchange of cultural practices â€“ but it doesn't seem like the Oankali have a culture outside of their biology. They have no written records â€“ in fact, they do not wish for Lilith to have writing implements intially, either â€“ but instead rely only on their infallible memories. They have no tradition of fiction, myth, or lying. The closest they come to art is in the shaping of new creatures to serve their needs â€“ and even that seems painfully utilitarian. And even though they claim to be interested in human culture, they really seem to fear it. Take this episode, for example:

"The music would soon either drive the storytellers into one of the houses or, more likely, bring them into the singing and dancing. Oankali did not like music. They began to withdraw into the houses â€“ to save their hearing, they said. Most constructs enjoyed music as much as Humans did. Several Oankali-born construct males had become wandering musicians, more than welcome at any trade village." (Butler 439)

The Oankali willingly walk away from human culture, ignore it as best they can. They have no use for it. The reasons for this aren't clear: but my best guess is that it's not biological enough for them. It is as if the Oankali's ability to perceive biology so completely blinds them to the worth of non-biological practices. Their ability to communicate directly to one another through sense-tentacles could be related: Akin admits that acting at least is "like when [the Oankali and Constructs] touch each other and talk with feelings and pressures. Sometimes you have to remember a feeling you haven't had for a long time and bring it back so you can transmit it to someone else or use a feeling you have about one thing to help someone understand something else" (Butler 409). Actually, this description of acting resembles Ursula Le Guin's explanation of fiction as a method of "describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist's way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies" (The Left Hand of Darkness, Introduction). So if fiction is a method for abstractly conveying difficult information, then Constructs should have no need for it, and in fact this is true. But at the same time, the Constructs enjoy music as much as humans. And even though natural Oankali are not musical, what the Ooloi do is "almost like making music â€“ balancing endorphins, silencing pain, maintaining sobriety... Ooloi made great harmonies, interweaving people and sharing pleasure" (512).

To the Oankali, then, biology does not simply replace art; biology is art, and other forms of art are unnecessary. They do not partake in the trade of books and paintings, and they seem to scarcely acknowledge their value, even though they also claim that human culture is greatly significant. In the end, it may be significant because it is the one aspect of humans they least understand.

yay Akin

greenhedge — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 04:56:49 +0000

Octavia Butler's "Lilith's Brood", among other things, is an extremely thorough exploration of morality. Firstly, it challenges the emotional connection to morality by creating a situation where standard sympathy for characters doesn't necessarily reflect who has the moral high-ground. A lot of books use sympathy for the characters to give an impression of the moral situation. However, in this book, it's nearly impossible to determine whether events are ethical, because the characters that those events affect are both human and alien. For the humans, my sympathy center works fine, but the Oankali are presented as such a truly alien species that it seems nearly impossible to understand the reasons behind their actions. Though the book attempts to give some insight into the machinations of the Oankali mind, especially in "DAWN", it's very hard to pin down exactly how they think. For that reason, the same reason I don't judge a crocodile for attacking a person, I find it difficult to judge the Oankali, and find it difficult to sympathize for them. Any sympathy analysis of the situation yields a bias towards the humans that may not necessarily be fair. The notion of a people who are motivated by the incorporation of new genetic material into their society is so completely foreign that my ethical sense becomes irrelevant, and I can only analyze the inter-species conflict intellectually. This presents a problem.
How does one analyze intellectually an emotionally based subject like ethics? This question has strange relevance to the world that has been presented in "Lilith's Brood", because it derives ideas from both human and Oankali thought. For the humans in the story, moral right is a very subjective and emotional issue. It's clear that the decisions and moral convictions that humans make are based on their emotional state, which frequently includes fear and resentment. These lead to convictions, which demonize the Oankali, and lead the more radical elements of Phoenix to believe that cosmetic surgery on construct children is a moral imperative. On the other hand, the Oankali see morality very scientifically. They have incredible insight into the genetic foundations of life, and for that reason they are able to analyze the core of different organisms' actions on their most basic level. When analyzing the human genome, the Oankali see a conflict between the hierarchical nature and intelligent nature of human beings, which they believe to be a fatal flaw. Because the Oankali perceive organisms to be merely the sum of their parts, this flaw seems inescapable to them. Since their society is morally motivated by genetic diversity, they see modifying the human race, and effectively eliminating the flawed genes, as the obvious ethical solution. Letting the human race continue to propagate in its current state seems would be a crime. When Akin is asked why the Oankali wouldn't help humans settle on Mars, he explains that, "The only thing that would be more terrible would be to murder you all with my own hands." (502) He goes further to explain the Oankali position, saying that "You can't see and read genetic structure the way they do. It isn't like reading words on a page. They feel it and know it." (502) The Oankali moral positions are driven by analysis of a perception which is near scientific. The fact Oankali, which are all provided with similar information, come to a consensus on this moral issue shows that their moral reasoning is deterministic, and not subjective. This divergence in ethical reasoning between humans and Oankali turns the earlier question to something different: how does use Oankali reasoning to analyze human ethics?
I believe the character Akin was made for the purpose of making the aforementioned question answerable. He gives the most exposure to the Oankali type of thought, but at the same time, he is the most human of the constructs. This gives him a perspective, which allows him to use his Oankali reasoning, but also address the emotions which are important to human moral reasoning. Ultimately, he comes to the conclusion that there is a lack of symmetry between the two species, and that humans deserve an independent equivalent to the Oankali Akjai. He realizes that the nature of Oankali necessitates symbiosis with other species, but he also is very aware of the injustice of forcing the human race into extinction in the process. Ultimately, he shows that moral justice between two societies necessitates balance.