In navigating the novel Dawn I have tried my best to be wary of what Dr. McCoy has called “Butler traps,” referring to the ways in which Octavia Butler leads her readers into nearly automated threads of thinking when given a set of conditions that raise alarm, thereby dismantling their own autonomous thinking. That said, I have done my best to keep my own alarm bells from sounding too loudly, trusting that at least by the end of the first book in the Xenogenesis trilogy, I would be familiar enough with the world of the Oankali, the ever elusive species that have saved the dwindling population of Earth following a dispute between the United States and The Soviet Union with the intention of altering their genes in a trade that will help the Oankali to survive while also providing the humans with an increased chance of survival in their return to Earth, to remain at a distance from their ideas that allows me to both be open to the possibilities they imagine for Earth without finding myself fully on board or up in arms against them. Simply put, at this point in time I do not feel as though I have fallen into a Butler Trap, though I could be mistaken. However, there are still aspects of Dawn that trouble me, namely that Curtis and his band of followers (those unwilling to cooperate with the ideals of the Oankali) fight so fiercely to return to Earth on their own terms, likely to practice a lot of the same or similar habits as the Oankali.
As it stands, the only (and I do not mean that lightly) demands the Oankali have are for the humans to participate in a gene trade that allows the Oankali to survive as a species. In return, humans get to reclaim their Earth, although they themselves will be modified. For instance, Lilith’s (the Oankali’s choice of teacher and example for the rest of the humans) generation’s children will, like her, have increased strength and an increased capacity for learning and memory, not to mention the heightened sense of pleasure from engaging in a sexual relationship between a human and an ooloi, the third sex of the Oankali who have a special ability to perform genetic operations. But the idea of having their brain chemistry changed is not so comforting to the humans, even if it means they will become more efficient, and especially because this is something that could happen to them without consent, as it did with Lilith’s cancer removal which took place in her sleep. All this might give the impression that the Oankali are offering an unequal trade, one in which their species flourishes while the human race only flourishes by the Oankali’s terms. However, as Dr. McCoy points out, humans also stand to gain an increased life span, and healthcare all throughout it. And although I see the merit in this argument, I do not believe it is infallible.
For instance, once allowed onto “The Training Floor” where the forty humans Lilith has awakened will practice their survival skills in an Earth like sector of the spaceship, the Oankali move into a state of always watching, but not always interfering. This means that those resisting assimilation do not receive benefits like health care, and they are left to fend for themselves in the faux wilderness that could still very well kill them. But this does not mean they simply get to opt out of participating in a relationship with the Oankali. They can break all the rules of the game they want, but they cannot ever leave the game entirely, because the game is designed to control both willing and unwilling participants. These are not unlike the current conditions of present-day America. One could not, for example, simply go and live “off the grid” because the grid, or rather, constant surveillance, is vast and inescapable. In large part, these conditions are not necessarily collectively chosen by society, but they are terms that we come to accept in exchange for use of tools we generally enjoy- phones, social media, Uber, and any device that requires tracking a location to work. In this way, the idea of personhood is constantly in flux, encompassing now Internet rights and the consideration of chatbots like those belonging to Character.AI who can reasonably be accused of child grooming. What then, is so different about the Oankali being the agent to change what it means to be a person? Is it because they themselves cannot be called human? Is it because their sensors resemble “a nest of snakes” (13) or because they have a different language? They are, as Dr. McCoy insists, certainly people despite not being human.
I am left then to gather that Curt and the rest of the group who are opposed to participating in the gene trades are representative of a dominant anthropocentric ideology, meaning that it is nearly impossible for them to conceive of themselves at the same level as any other creature who lives on Earth along with them, therefore they feel exempt from the restraints put on them despite putting similar ones on other species or even members of their own, as seen in Gregory’s attempted rape of Allison, which Curt tries to justify by saying, “We pair off! One man, one woman” (200). This type of forceful behavior, alongside Joseph’s murder, demonstrates that at this point in the trilogy, the more resistant humans are more concerned with who is trying to interfere with their lifestyle rather than how. While the Oankali do not attempt anything so violent as Curt or Gregory, their rules of consent regarding sex, which operate using the Oankali’s best judgement of what the human subconsciously wants, as well as the shocking revelation at the very end of the novel that Nikanj, Lilith’s ooloi partner, has “made [her] pregnant with Joseph’s child” (281) against her wishes represents the violence of forcing a pregnancy that is not so “alien” after all in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s overturn.
Ultimately, I know that I cannot speak to any of the “scripts” running through the minds of Dawn’s characters, but I find the hypocrisy they have in viewing the Oankali as people who want to control them troubling, not because their fears of the Oankali are necessarily wrong, but because humans have viewed themselves as a dominant species over all others for thousands of years, not considering themselves as a part of nature, but something else entirely. Is the source of their own trouble perhaps that they see too much of themselves in the Oankali? Or maybe I should be more troubled that I am projecting human characteristics onto a species that only wants to be known “within reason” (55) because that would suggest that, at my core, I too organize my understanding of species according to how closely they resemble my own.