According to our universally accepted source of all information, AI (please note my sarcasm), when asked the very unnuanced question, “Who is the villain of Octavia Butler’s Dawn (1987)?” the AI gave a very straightforward answer. “In Dawn by Octavia E. Butler, the Oankali are the colonizers who control the humans. The humans themselves are also responsible for violence.” Now, I interpret this as AI labeling the Oankali as the story’s villain, though they acknowledge that humans contribute to some of the violence in the book. I find it interesting—yet not surprising— that AI would use the term “colonizers” to describe the Oankali.
This brings me to my initial thoughts of being troubled, disturbed, and unsettled. As many of my fellow readers agree at first glance and possibly reinforced throughout the book, the Oankali seem to have colonized Earth. Colonization is defined as “the establishing of a colony…subjugation of a people or area, especially as an extension of state power.” The troubling thought created by labeling the Oankali this way is that it inadvertently justifies real-world colonization—such as in the Americas by British, French, and Spanish colonizers— as a means of survival. Insinuating that colonizing and displacing the Native population was mandatory for the colonial powers to survive. This, of course, is not true. Colonialism is not a necessity for human life.
What the Oankali must do, gene trading, is, in fact, a necessity for Oankali life. Jdahya explains this to Lilith. “We do [gene trading] naturally. We must do it. It renews us, enables us to survive as an evolving species instead of specializing ourselves into extinction or stagnation” (43). Out of all the alienness in this book, the concept of necessary gene trade with another species is difficult to wrap my head around. What doesn’t help is my seemingly endless list of unanswered questions surrounding this process in this book. However, I can assume some—most likely not all— of my questions will be addressed in the following two books in the trilogy. My most pressing questions include: What does an extinction of the Oankali look like? How often will the Oankali have to gene trade? To what scale must they trade? How much have the Oankali changed from each other? Furthermore, is there a gene-traded genetic cousin of the Oankali, such as the human being, to the lesser great apes? (notice my inherent hieratical language.)
At my core, I am troubled by the assumptions I cannot make about the Oankali. I dislike how humans—specifically Lilith— are treated as experiments and must suffer casualties throughout the book. But again, it troubles me more that I can not, in good faith, damn the Oankali for what they must do to survive. Knowing this, I have an increasingly unsettling thought regarding my AI quote. “In Dawn by Octavia E. Butler, the Oankali are the colonizers who control the humans. The humans themselves are also responsible for violence.” Is this true? Are the humans the ones responsible for the violence in the book?
The Oankali—based on Butler’s world-building– has discovered, through human genetics, that human nature is “composed of two traits in tension with each other: the much older hierarchic trait that constantly stomps on the younger intelligence trait.” as stated in a class discussion. It took roughly two weeks of reading Dawn and participating in class discussions to wrap my head around this idea. It seemed as though I was not alone. Beth exclaimed, “There was understandably some dismay among participants at this Oankali claim that is true within the world that Butler has built.”
Though I took comfort in the fact that my classmates also struggled with this concept, I quickly learned that I had a different problem than the rest of my class—based on those who chose to voice their objections. What made me troubled, disturbed, and unsettled was the claim that humans are genetically predisposed to hierarchy. I outright challenged this in class many times, so confident in my stance, taking my background in anthropology to mean my word on human evolution and human behavior is, in fact, law.
What a humbling experience this was. I am proven wrong within the book when Lilith is labeled as a leader and teacher and, at times, perceived as a captor and traitor (all hierarchal positions created by and sustained by humans alone). What profoundly changed my thinking, though, was a comment made by Beth. She gently reminded me that though human beings are not genetically predisposed to create human-centric hierarchical governments, such as the aforementioned colonial powers, we are undoubtedly hierarchical at our core. Beth asked me a straightforward question: What do humans do for food? Incredibly humbled, I realized the human predisposition to categorize ourselves as our species above others, the plants and animals that we must eat to survive. Rarely do we ask the animals, and never do we ask the plants if they can allow us to eat them humanely. Just as the Oankali must gene trade with humans in this book, never mind whether or not they ask.
The difference between human consumption of plants and animals and the Oankali relationship between humans paints humans in a much more troubled, disturbed, and unsettled light. This is because, unlike humans, the Oankali do not see the world as hierarchical.
Most of my classmates questioned or even rejected the Oankali statement that they are not genetically hierarchic. Many of my classmates clung to one quote from the book. “And in spite of Jdahya’s claim that the Oankali were not hierarchal, the ooloi seemed to be the head of the house.” (53). This is what Lilith perceives to be true based on her experiences as a hierarchical human.
We are reminded that Lilith is an incredibly convincing protagonist, but we cannot take her word as law. Butler tasks us with challenging the internal scripts running through our minds about what we understand about the Oankali; I believe this in and of itself is evidence to support the Oankali’s claim that humans are hierarchical to the point of disrupting our own intelligence. We are given a fact: The Oankali do not and cannot be hierarchical, and we actively choose to fight this despite the evidence we are presented. Not unlike the flat-earth and parallel anti-ship argument presented in the book.
Perhaps what troubles, disturbs, and unsettles me the most is that I can see where both sides are coming from—something I usually take pride in. While I am quick to side with the humans who are obducted, isolated, manipulated, and ultimately bred by the Oankali, how can I wilfully ignore the needs of the Oankali who have rescued, healed, and housed the human race?