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language: English
country: USA
year: 1987
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
series: Xenogenesis, #1
dates read: 26.2.14-1.3.14, 18.6.24
(cw: rape, homophobic slurs, transmisogyny)
I remember being very impressed with Octavia Butler’s Dawn when I first read it. in a future-past where most of humanity was destroyed by a global nuclear war, Lilith Iyapo Awakens to find herself in a captive-cum-guest of the Oankali, an alien race who manipulate genetics and organic matter as easily as breathing, more or less. they offer a choice, an ultimatum, or a gift, depending on your perspective: they will teach humans to survive on Earth again, and in exchange they will exchange their genetic material with humanity, creating a new, joint-hybrid species. this is how the Oankali propagate themselves.
Lilith is by turns repulsed, intrigued, and terrified — both disillusioned with a humanity that destroyed itself and horrified by the casualness with which the Oankali both psychologically and biologically manipulate her and the other humans she is assigned to lead.
it is very much a sequel to Kindred, with the horror of slavery projected into space: what if everything about you, down to your genes, was subject to someone else’s control, and the only “agency” you had was to choose to comply or to choose to die? what if your captors controlled not only the fate of your children but whether it is biologically possible for you to reproduce at all? what if you could only experience pleasure from sex when mediated through your captor, one of the Oankali ooloi, a third gender who join male and female during sex? (apart from Lilith’s human lover being called a “faggot” at one point there is no acknowledgment of the possibility that anyone might not be heterosexual; in fact, when Lilith Awakens the first of her followers-to-be, a woman, she explicitly says she’s doing this because, of course, there could never be any sexual tension between women. if there is anything that might be called queerness among the Oankali, it is invisible to us.)
it is deeply disturbing, as it should be. also, while I often find Butler’s prose to be fairly plain, there are some tasty phrases here — it’s not Delany or Samatar, but it’s very well-written.
and yet. I can’t stop thinking: when Nikanj, the ooloi Lilith has been partnered with, first meets the human man Lilith has been sleeping with, it drugs him and coerces him into sex, which Lilith apparently enthusiastically joins. the next time they meet, it does this again, again with Lilith, explicitly invoking Joseph’s physiological reaction as “proof” that he really “wants it” even though he is unambiguously verbally rejecting Nikanj. Lilith appears unbothered by what is clearly and unambiguously rape, and I can’t shake the feeling that the narrative, too, sees nothing wrong here. it is, after all, Lilith’s story: when Lilith is disturbed, we are disturbed; when Lilith is unperturbed, we are…?
obviously Kindred, too, is about complicity, but even at the end of Dawn, when Lilith seems to grasp the horror of what’s been done to her and the other humans, she can never — unlike Dana — finally refuse her complicity. she returns, always, to Nikanj. we’re back to classic Butler: what if everything were just fucked up and that fucked-up-ness were objective biological reality rather than a constructed social system?
I suppose I’ll see out how Adulthood Rites handles this, but I fear it may simply gloss over it on its way to the next generation.
EDIT: also forgot to mention the one other time queerness rears its head, namely when Lilith reveals her Oankali-enhanced strength and some people speculate that she may not “really” be a woman (i.e., that she might be trans).
moods: dark, horny, reflective