Week 12: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago

I got out of hand for this week. I read Dawn in time for class, then took advantage of Thanksgiving break to finish off the trilogy with Adulthood Rites and Imago. Octavia E. Butler really crafted a clever set of books, here. It’s clear she’s deeply invested in the world she’s created, and there’s a certain kind of pleasure that comes from throwing away your preconceived notions of sexual dynamics to see out her trilogy to the end. The first book was certainly the most harrowing and tense, while the last was most experimental and un-human, with the second serving as an admirable bridge between the two. There’s a satisfying completeness in it being a trilogy, since the world of Xenogenesis is populated by three genders: Female, Male, and Ooloi. In Dawn, we explore Lilith’s horrible position, caught between humanity and Oankali. She ends up hated and wronged by the humans, just as she is misunderstood and wronged by the Oankali. Each seems to think they know what’s best for Lilith when all she wants is to be left alone. It makes Dawn a deeply uncomfortable novel to read, though you can’t tear your eyes away. Butler is careful to keep us from hating the Oankali. She’s also careful to keep us from deciding whether they’re right or wrong to take away Humanity’s future, which sets us up for the second novel. Adulthood Rites explores the new world that’s being created on Earth through the eyes of Akin, the first human-born male construct. His function in the series is to help humanity regain some of what it has lost through Oankali domination. He takes the form of those who rebel most against the Oankali – human males. Butler explores the societal structures which make males so averse to Oankali relationships (their pride, or their lack of submissiveness.) Akin works to restore the choice of fertility sans Oankali to humanity with the invent of the Mars colony. It creates a future where humanity will continue unchanged by Oankali genetics, an important step in the series to restore the balance of power. Akin ends the novel by metamorphosing into a thoroughly Oankali-looking individual, a bittersweet ending which continues the theme of balance – since he spends his childhood looking so human, he must spend his adulthood looking very un-human. Now he will be rejected by those very humans he helped to save. For the third novel, Imago we move away from male and female in order to explore the vision of the Oankali, which has always been most apparent in the Ooloi. Jodahs as an ooloi shows the full potential of the merging of human and Oankali. It takes parts of each species and is better than either, greater than the sum of its parts. We also see how the combination of human and Oankali can lead to greater disaster than ever before with the near-failure of Jodahs’s sibling. The series ends on a hopeful note, with Jodahs uniting human and Oankali better than ever. Lilith looks on, amazed at Jodahs’s ability to transform hostile communities into ones that look forward to change with open hearts. Butler shows that the errors that were created in the first book have been resolved. Though so many parts of her novels seem to look on humanity pessimistically, her series has an overall optimistic cant to it. Given time, even the worst transgressions are corrected. Quite literally, through combined effort, our children’s future will be better than our own. I greatly enjoyed Butler’s take on alien and human psychology. She approaches diversity across race, gender and species with even-handed reason, an understated grace, and an unflinching gaze towards a better future.