Having read Octavia Butler’s work before, I felt ready to step into her universe and understand the ideas Butler presents in the “Lilith’s Brood” trilogy. I also tried to remember Dr. McCoy’s PSA about Butler’s intentional traps: Butler purposefully creates situations that WE as humans may find similar to things that have gone wrong in our history. She does this to trigger our senses that something is wrong and we shouldn’t be okay with what is happening. While I read, I didn’t feel like the Oankali were out to get Lilith or the humans. It seemed to me that, based on the rules Butler set up for this world, the Oankali did what they thought was right for the humans. They didn’t, or couldn’t, consider what the humans desired, and they simply took the most efficient route and gave them what they wanted in a “good-faith” attempt to fulfill the humans’ unconscious needs. While I do consider my classmates’ feelings of suspicion about the Oankali’s intentions I’ve heard during our class discussions about Dawn, I had a hard time feeling fearful or doubtful of the Oankali throughout the book.
Something that did, however, trouble me at the beginning of the novel was the image of Lilith and Jdahya’s first encounter. When the narrator detailed how Lilith slept on the floor beside the bed so she wouldn’t see Jdahya at all, or how she hid in the bathroom away from him, I felt that I would have had to do the same thing to sleep at all that night. I would’ve had an issue trying to interact with or touch the Oankali, especially if I thought about Lilith’s description. “She found herself still unable to take even one more step toward him. ‘Oh god,’ she whispered. And the hair–the whatever-it-was–moved…Medusa. Some of the ‘hair’ writhed independently, a nest of snakes startled, driven in all directions” (Butler 13). That archetypal mistrust of snakes is hard to overcome and provided me with the first troublesome aspect of Lilith’s story.
A part of the novel that concerned me more while reading was the pushback Lilith received while trying to “mother” the humans into being ready to return to Earth. I never wavered in my trust towards Lilith while reading the novel. I felt that for the most part, Lilith did what she thought was “right” concerning whatever situation she was in. When Nikanj began growing its sensory arms for example, “Nikanj lay down again and seemed to tremble…She neither knew nor cared what was wrong with it. She left it where it was and went out to get food…Angrily, she reopened the food compartments, took out extra food and went back in to Nikanj…She had not been able to leave Nikanj trembling in its bed while she enjoyed her greater freedom” (Butler 115). Lilith stayed with Nikanj and couldn’t bring herself to leave it while it went through “puberty”. I felt that Lilith’s actions throughout the rest of the novel reflected her intrinsic desire to care for others.
That reasoning is why I felt unsettled when humans such as Tate, Gabriel, Curt, and Peter seemed to turn their backs on Lilith so quickly. While reading I was only able to experience the book through Lilith’s perspective, so it was exceedingly difficult to imagine myself in any other character’s position. It felt like Lilith was shoved into the position of Awakening humans and training them to return to Earth. I was upset that she faced so much resistance from her own species after begrudgingly living with the Oankali for so long. While the idea of consent between humans and Ooloi is a valid concern many people have while reading this book, I couldn’t imagine why violence was the go-to solution for Lilith’s doubters. I felt like I was experiencing the same emotions as Lilith while reading the novel, and I wanted the story to work in her favor.
I could not understand why the humans’ instinct was to separate from each other, break off into “teams,” and turn their training into a kind of fight. Whether the fight was between them and Lilith, or them and the Oankali, it didn’t seem to matter. Fear of the unknown was what united the humans. All they knew for sure was that the Earth had become uninhabitable. Why would they try to assume anything else other than what they know? I can understand why the “kill or be killed” survival method is necessary in some life-or-death situations, but I’m not sure this was one of them. While reading I tried to determine what might be best for any group of humans to do in a humans vs. aliens “war” situation. Most often I thought camaraderie would be a crucial component for survival, so I couldn’t understand why many characters didn’t naturally gravitate towards that.
It made me remember what Nikanj tells Lilith about the human race, “‘You are intelligent,’ he said. ‘That’s the newer of the two characteristics and the one you might have put to work to save yourselves. You are potentially one of the most intelligent species we’ve found’…‘What’s the second characteristic?’ ‘You are hierarchical. That’s the older and more entrenched characteristic…when human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as a problem, but took pride in it or did not notice it at all…That was like ignoring cancer” (Butler 41). If I assumed the humans in Butler’s novel have the same “fight-or-flight” response as we do, then I could argue that many humans in “Part IV: The Training Floor” were wrestling between the two. I could also claim that there is another option in the “fight-or-flight” response. That third option would be: to understand. I believe that Lilith pushes past the initial fight or flight response and tries to understand why the Oankali act the way they do, even if she can’t fully do so. Many other humans, however, don’t take any time to think about why the Oankali do anything. They see a threat immediately and want to take action to dispose of it.