'The human contradiction': identity and/as essence in Octavia E. Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy.

ABSTRACTS

In Octavia E. Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy (1987-89) aliens seek to interbreed with the survivors of a nuclear war to remove a conflict between humanity's genetic traits: intelligence and hierarchical thinking. Extant criticism shows Xenogenesis contributing to debates about race and identity politics. Race does not evaporate upon contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence; rather, race persists not in a sense that makes Xenogenesis a neo-slave narrative, but in other participations in the African-American literary tradition and assertions of black cultural heritage. Gender also persists upon contact with Butler's aliens. Xenogenesis does not theorize gender as an essentialism; rather, it ascribes behaviour to genetics in order to critique hierarchical thinking.

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Anything to do with Humans always seems to involve contradictions.

Octavia E. Butler 

Octavia E. Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy--Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), Imago (1989) (1)--is set approximately two hundred and fifty years after a nuclear war on Earth. An alien race known as the Oankali has retrieved human survivors for the purpose of breeding with them, thereby providing the aliens with the human genetic information that they value, and eliminating what they call 'the human contradiction' (Rites, p. 442), humanity's 'lethal' combination of 'mismatched genetic characteristics': intelligence and hierarchical thinking. The latter trait, which humanity shares with other terrestrial animals, is older, and is therefore served by the former (Dawn, p. 38). The offspring of human-Oankali mating will inhabit the Amazon basin and be free of this genetically rooted contradiction that led to the war that nearly destroyed all life on Earth. 'Contradiction' is something of a motif in these novels, as Jim Miller's synopsis suggests:

Butler's aliens are both colonizers and a utopian collective, while the captured/saved humans are both admirable survivors and ugly xenophobes. Lilith Iyapo, the main character in Dawn, is both the mother of a new race and a Judas to humanity. In the process of reading the trilogy, we confront and negotiate these contradictions, as Butler prods us to move beyond old dilemmas and imagine a different future. (2)

Moreover, Butler's aliens, the Oankali, come bearing the gifts of making the planet liveable once again and liberating humans from the hierarchical thinking that ensures their extinction. That extinction could be seen as hastened by the cross-breeding that the gene-trading Oankali offer/impose, which simultaneously extends both species' existence into the future. 'Contradiction' also connects Xenogenesis to concepts such as the Hegelian dialectic and Derridean deconstruction, despite Butler's ostensible allergy to critical theory. (3)

In American society 'race' appears to be another sort of contradiction. Efforts to combat racism by declaring race to be 'merely' a social construct or scientifically--genetically, to be specific--meaningless often fail to consider adequately the race consciousness and/or race pride that contribute to the ability of raced groups to endure, resist, and dismantle the racism they encounter. Although there is no denying that the racial categories with which we are familiar have little or no meaning at the level of molecular biology, there is also no denying that race has been a structuring element in American society, politics, and culture since the country's origins. Although Donna Haraway rightly calls race 'a fracturing trauma in the body politic of the nation', when she states that 'race has a lot to answer for', (4) she may be more correct than she realizes. As a text by an African-American writer that focuses on genetic engineering, Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy has much to contribute to ongoing debates about race and identity politics, and much of the extant criticism on the series is oriented towards such issues.

Because of Butler's tendency to revise and respond to works and tropes from the traditions of African-American literature and SF simultaneously, Roger Luckhurst has described her fictions as 'miscegenate'; although some find this term to be irretrievably linked to discourses dedicated to maintaining racial purity, Luckhurst employs it in order to speak to how Butler's 'discomfiting hybrid texts' have generic identities that are difficult to fix. (5) The hybrid aspect of Xenogenesis is analysed with further specificity by Cathy Peppers, who identifies how the trilogy places some of 'our culture's most powerful origin stories'--the biblical story of sexual differentiation, the sociobiological narrative of the genetic production of identities, and the palaeoanthropological story of evolution from prehistoric ancestors--in dialogic relation with each other and with 'the narrative of the African diaspora and slavery (a/the origin story of African-American identity)'. (6) The interrogation and 'retelling' of narratives of origin is a key component of Haraway's 'A Cyborg Manifesto', which asserts 'the cyborg myth' as a figure for an identity politics that 'skips the step of original unity' and embraces 'transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and contradictory standpoints'. (7) The cyborg serves as an antidote to, among other things, the conception of 'woman' as pure and whole, which enabled early Second Wave feminism's innocence to differences of race, class, and sexuality. For example, Haraway writes that '"women of colour" might be understood as a cyborg identity (because it is) a potent subjectivity synthesized from fusions of outsider identities'. (8) The 'Manifesto' lists Butler among the SF writers invoked as 'theorists for cyborgs', and pays particular attention to both 'Lilith' as an allusion to 'Adam's first and repudiated wife' and to the 'intimate fusion' of humans and Oankali. (9)

Like the cyborg and the miscegenate text, the posthuman body 'refuses fixity, definition, (and) boundaries' according to Naomi Jacobs, who interprets the Xenogenesis trilogy as 'a series of perspectives on posthumanity', that is, participating in 'the postmodern critique of the humanist subject: the critique of the individual as a rationally self-determining, self-defining being, and of individual identity as the source of agency'. (10) Although Butler betrays some misgivings about the utopian, posthuman future offered by the Oankali in this series, Jacobs argues that the posthuman provides both the best hope for Butler's fictional humans and a hopeful tone within the trilogy itself. Jacobs's reading of Xenogenesis as a 'critical dystopia'--Tom Moylan's term for texts engaged in 'making room for and giving voice to emergent forms of political consciousness and agency that speak to the condition of the times' (11)--differs from that of Hoda M. Zaki, who is troubled by 'Butler's unmediated connections between biology and behavior', which foreclose the possibility of social and political change; Zaki therefore characterizes Butler's writing as a form of 'pessimistic, or anti-utopian, dystopianism', informed in part by an African-American 'critique of the liberal feminist imagination and politics expressed in contemporary feminist SF'. (12) Moreover, Zaki sees Xenogenesis as Butler's contribution to the debate within feminism on essentialist and materialist approaches to gender. The trilogy imagines 'the human contradiction' to be genetically based, and human-born males as more likely to express the contradiction than females, on which Zaki bases the contention that Xenogenesis promotes 'an essentialist view of human nature similar to that of some radical feminists, such as Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray'. (13) Zaki's reading has implications, problematic ones, for how the reader interprets the explanation given for the Oankali's choice of Lilith as leader of the human survivors. Lilith's lover Joseph asks her, 'Do you understand why they chose you--someone who desperately doesn't want the responsibility, who doesn't want to lead, who is a woman?' (Dawn, p. 157). Gender essentialism would establish a causal link between Lilith's gender and her ambivalence to the power concomitant with leadership. However, the assertion that women are innately reluctant to occupy leadership positions, quite evidently, is at odds with (contradicts) both Xenogenesis's feminism and the reader's common sense.

Essentialism--identifying an individual, group, or oneself as belonging to an identity category 'on the basis of transhistorical, eternal, immutable essences' (14)--is also a concept frequently discussed and, above all, critiqued by Walter Benn Michaels, whose 'Political Science Fictions' includes readings of texts by SF writers such as Orson Scott Card and Kim Stanley Robinson; the essay makes particularly intriguing use of Butler's work. Like Zaki, Michaels takes the Xenogenesis trilogy as an opportunity to comment on 'the essentialist/ antiessentialist debate', but, unlike Zaki and other participants in that debate, he sees the two positions as more similar than different, because they both have an investment in 'maintaining difference'; whether the status of that difference is physiological or cultural, essential or constructed, is of secondary importance. (15) Michaels applies a similarly deconstructive approach to what he identifies as the key conflict in Xenogenesis, a conflict that is described by Lilith to her 'construct' (that is, human-Oankali hybrid) son Akin, who recalls his mother's counsel in Adulthood Rites:

'Human beings fear difference,' Lilith had told him once. 'Oankali crave difference. Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status. Oankali seek difference and collect it. They need it to keep themselves from stagnation and overspecialization. If you don't understand this, you will. You'll probably find both tendencies surfacing in your own behavior.' And she had put her hand on his hair. 'When you feel a conflict, try to go the Oankali way. Embrace difference.' (Rites, p. 329)

According to Michaels, 'it is not difference itself but one's attitude toward difference that is the source of conflict' in Xenogenesis. Instead of simply pitting humanity against alien invaders, the series foregrounds contending attitudes towards difference: the Oankali are genetically compelled to seek out and engage in genetic 'trade' with species other than their own, whereas some of the rescued humans become resisters, holdouts who cannot get over the alienness of the Oankali and reject their offer of trade in a futile effort to maintain the purity of the human race, even though reproduction is possible only by mating with the Oankali. 'Butler seeks to replace the conflict between identities with the conflict between identity and difference'. (16) Michaels shrewdly demonstrates that resistance to mating with the Oankali is itself as much a desire for difference as a desire for the purity of racial identity: 'Insofar as identity and difference are complementary rather than oppositional terms, the human desire to stay human is simultaneously (and without contradiction) the desire to stay the same and the desire to be different' (p. 658). In other words, the resisters seek to 'embrace' their own difference from the Oankali. Therefore, 'the politics of difference are a form of rather than an alternative to the politics of "identity and substantive unity" according to Michaels; 'valuing difference and valuing sameness are just two different ways of doing the same thing' (pp. 658, 662).

Michaels deploys 'Political Science Fictions' as part of his ongoing critical effort, 'both to historicize and discredit [...] the primacy of the subject position', a project that has 'focused primarily on the racial subject' (p. 661). (17) For Michaels, any conceptualization of identity is inescapably essentialist, and therefore intellectually bankrupt, even if it has anti-essentialist aspirations. 'Notions of cultural identity or of antiessentialist racial identity are in fact deeply reliant on some form of the essentialism they claim to transcend', Michaels states; 'to make any use of the notion of cultural identity we must (and do) treat culture as if it worked the way we think race does' (p. 661). In the process of making these more general assertions, he makes a subordinate claim that the encounter with the Oankali reveals categories of difference among human beings--most significantly, racial categories--to be meaningless:

Human beings of different races are forcefully reminded of the irrelevance of their phenotypical differences by the fact that they are being asked to breed with aliens who look like sea slugs with limbs and tentacles. The difference between black and white skin looks pretty insignificant compared to the difference between humans and walking mollusks. (p. 650)

This is exactly the logic that informs the position of the xenophobic resisters, who provide an example of the persistence of race in SF in general and in Butler's trilogy in particular 'as a theoretical model' (p. 654). Michaels recognizes the resisters as objects of the trilogy's critique as opposed to unproblematic protagonists. However, he argues that at the level of intra-species humanity, both Xenogenesis and its genre 'undermine racial difference as an empirical phenomenon' (p. 654); as such, they serve Michaels' purpose of diligently subjecting 'race' to a persistent, rigorous, dismantling analysis.

To quote Lisa Duggan, who contributed a response to the same issue of New Literary History in which 'Political Science Fictions' originally appeared, 'there is much to take issue with' in Michaels' arguments. (18) The scepticism towards identity politics is part of a trend among those left-wing intellectuals who argue that 'micropolitics' have fragmented and distracted the left from a focus on economic equality and 'class' as the key identity category. Such arguments construct their own nostalgic narrative of the left's original wholeness and purity before identity politics. (19) Moreover, it is frequently the identities of African-Americans, women, and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) communities that are seen as problematic; rarely do these arguments scrutinize whiteness and/or masculinity as categories for identity politics. As for the critique of essentialism, instead of simply labelling it faulty logic, I prefer the position theorized by Diana Fuss in Essentially Speaking, that the evaluation of a position as essentialist or anti-essentialist is not as important as the politics that informs either of those strategies. Whereas Michaels sees 'essence' and 'identity' as effectively the same in that they both have an investment in asserting and maintaining difference, Fuss makes a different deconstructive argument, namely, that essentialism is essential to the notion of a constructed identity; it is the Other against which social constructivism constructs itself. Moreover, Fuss argues, 'social constructivism can be unveiled as merely a form of sociological essentialism'. (20) For Michaels, any concept of identity is essentialist and therefore must be abandoned; for Fuss, the politics to which a theory of identity is articulated takes priority, and a rush towards constructivism may simply be the exchange of one essentialism for another.

Michaels' comments on Xenogenesis and SF also deserve analysis. The characterization of alien encounters as proof of the limitations of the racial categories with which we are familiar has some merit; an investment in a common humanity that transcends race can be and has been a powerful anti-racist tool and inspiration. And Xenogenesis contributes to such an effort when Akin's Oankali father Dichaan explains to his construct son, via the Oankali method of direct neural contact, that the phenotypical differences of hair texture and skin colour between Akin's human parents, Asian Joseph and African-American Lilith, is a product of geography and culture:

'The differences you perceive between Humans--between groups of Humans--are the result of isolation and inbreeding, mutation, and adaptation to different Earth environments,' he said, illustrating each concept with quick multiple images. 'Joseph and Lilith were born in very different parts of this world--born to long separated peoples.' (Rites, p. 262)

In the history of SF, however, the argument that race does not matter in a futuristic setting where humanity has 'evolved' beyond such concerns, or where it is confronted with extrasolar species, has had some particularly noxious effects; the ostensible 'colour-blind' quality of SF sanctioned the absence of black characters and writing by black writers. (21) The assumption that SF operates beyond the realm of racial concerns informed white antagonism towards attempts within the genre to discuss racial matters. In an interview with The Black Scholar Butler describes, for example, how an African-American writer who otherwise favourably reviewed Star Wars (1977) upon the film's release received 'three pounds of hate mail' in response to his observation that the film featured absolutely no human beings of colour. (22) Butler has also noted that 'many of the same science fiction writers who started us thinking about the possibility of extraterrestrial life did nothing to make us think about the here-at-home variation--women, blacks, Indians, Asians, Hispanics, etc.'. (23)

But if racial difference among humans persists in Xenogenesis, it would initially appear to be of the most antagonistic kind. The resisters' racist attitudes towards the Oankali are made explicit in their admiration of the appearance of the immature construct children, like Akin, who have not yet begun to grow sensory tentacles and are viewed by the resisters as 'beautiful' because they look so 'human' (Rites, p. 385). The raiders who kidnap Akin refer to the construct child as a 'mongrel baby' (Rites, p. 321). The resisters kidnap construct children who have yet to develop external Oankali physiological features, in futile hopes that they will be able to produce 'pure' human children without Oankali 'blood'. So despite what happens to race as a category used to classify different human beings, in its capacity to inform racist attitudes towards the Oankali the concept persists, as Zaki explains:

Even when (Butler) describes the diminution of racial antagonisms among humans upon encountering a new extraterrestrial Other, she foregrounds how we seize upon biological differences between the two species (i.e. human and Oankali) to reassert, yet again, notions of inferiority and discrimination. For her, the human propensity to create the Other can never be transcended'. (24)

Racism does not vanish upon the arrival of aliens; the human propensity for hierarchical thinking sustains it and maps it on to another group, at a higher, species-oriented, taxonomic level. And the diminution of race and racism at the human level goes only so far in Xenogenesis. The resisters divide themselves into villages that are organized around language, religion, ethnicity, and/or nationality; the villages bear names that announce the origins of their inhabitants, such as Hillman, Siwatu, and Vladlengrad. In Adulthood Rites Akin contemplates the resisters' maintenance of these categories as well as the persistence of the persecution and exclusion based upon them:

He knew the people and languages of a Chinese resister village, an Igbo village, three Spanish-speaking villages made up of people from many countries, a Hindu village, and two villages of Swahili-speaking people from different countries. So many resisters. Yet there were so many more. He had been driven out of, of all things, a village of English-speaking people because he was browner than the villagers were. (Rites, p. 434)

If the resisters represent the persistence of race in Xenogenesis, then it would seem that there is little to recommend it, even as a theoretical concept. 'Throughout the trilogy, those human beings who hold most tightly to their human identities', Jacobs writes, 'are also the ones who exhibit the worst elements of humanity'; (25) and that applies to at least some resisters who cling to racial identities as well as, or as part of, their humanity.

The Oankali have also divided themselves into groups, however; they are organized according to how they will function following the 'trade' conducted with humanity: Dinso will breed with human beings and stay on Earth. The Toaht will breed with human beings but will leave Earth's solar system in search of more 'trade'. And the Akjai will leave Earth unchanged, without engaging in genetic commerce with humanity. Oankali also belong to family groups as designated in their full names. Moreover, the category of 'construct' takes on a distinctly political meaning when one of Lilith's children--Jodahs, the protagonist-narrator of Imago--is discovered to be ooloi, the Oankali's name for their third sex, which is adept at manipulating genetic information. The Oankali's concern over the immense damage that could be done by the first construct ooloi, 'the premature adulthood of a new species' (Imago, p. 742), forces Jodahs to choose exile either in Earth's tropical rainforest or on-board the Oankali's spaceship. Although family and function groups do not have the antagonisms of human racial and ethnic groups, the example of Jodahs demonstrates that identity categories are still pertinent and have a social and political significance, even among the Oankali.

It should also be noted that racial difference as a theoretical phenomenon persists not only as the resisters' xenophobic response to the Oankali or to other humans; it also informs the construction of the subject position from which Butler writes, and enables an assertion and celebration of intra- and extra-textual cultural diversity that the novel and its author endorse. Although Michaels acknowledges that both Butler and Lilith Iyapo are African-American, he does so to emphasize, by way of contrast, his reading of Xenogenesis as a critique of race (whether as theory or epistemology, cultural identity or 'essence'). Unlike most of the other extant criticism on the trilogy, 'Political Science Fictions' fails to--or, rather, Michaels chooses not to--consider the extent to which the trilogy participates in a tradition of African-American letters. For many readers this participation is evident in apparent allusions to slavery. During their initial meeting, Lilith asks her Oankali interlocutor, Jdahya, if the Oankali engage in the 'trade' of slaves; Jdahya replies, 'No. We've never done that' (Dawn, p. 24). Nevertheless, many readers have taken Xenogenesis to be the story of humanity's enslavement to the Oankali and of a relationship mirroring that between slaves and their owners during the era of American slavery. Michelle Green argues that in Butler's trilogy, humans 'have been constituted as the colonized Other by' and 'are like animals to' the Oankali, who reduce human beings to 'package(s) of genes'. (26) Boulter identifies the two hundred and fifty years Lilith spends in suspended animation before her awakening as a 'temporal distortion' comparable to that frequently experienced by the protagonist of Butler's Kindred, who travels between (post-)modern and antebellum Americas, and to the experience of enslaved Africans who endured the Middle Passage. (27) Haraway regards this dislocation as extended to all of the 'other captive fragments of humanity packed into the body of the aliens' ship'; like Michaels, Haraway sees the human survivors as 'deracinated'; (28) however, it would be more accurate to describe the non-black humans who experience their own version of the Middle Passage as exactly the opposite.

The 'slavery' hypothesis allows readers to view race not as essence but as a culmination of historical events; that is, the trilogy's white characters live a history comparable to that which contributed to the production of African-American identity. Such readings support a view of the Oankali programme of interbreeding with humanity as a form of 'coerced miscegenation', (29) comparable to the rape of black slave women by white owners and overseers, which would increase their owners' stock. The Oankali named Nikanj impregnates Lilith using genetic material he collected from her deceased lover Joseph; Amanda Boulter argues, 'Lilith has not consented to this pregnancy and experiences it as an invasion of her body', and although she does develop affection for her offspring, 'Lilith's response to her pregnancy echoes the ambivalent feelings of these women slaves whose pregnancies were the result of forced matings or rape'. (30) Boulter draws specific parallels between Dawn and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), for example. These readings of Xenogenesis draw from a variety of further textual examples. Without Lilith's consent, the Oankali remove a cancerous growth--loaded with valuable genetic information that later helps to save Nikanj's life--from her body and extend her life expectancy to over one hundred years, procedures she learns about after the fact. Lilith is compared to 'an experimental animal' (Dawn, p. 60), a sense that is more pronounced when she encounters Paul Titus, another African-American human survivor who tries to rape her. Nikanj later explains that the Oankali had no way of anticipating Titus's violent behaviour, but Lilith's attempts at reasoning with Titus include a warning to her attacker against the reduction of both of them to the aliens' sub-human pawns: 'animals get treated like this. Put a stallion and a mare together until they mate, then send them back to their owners. What do they care? They're just animals! [...] Don't make yourself their dog! [...] Don't do this!' (Dawn, p. 95). Given the prominence of literacy and freedom as a theme in early African-American autobiographies and throughout the tradition of African-American literature, Lilith's inability to access tools of writing, initially prohibited by the Oankali, seems to secure the link between Xenogenesis and slave narratives. The entire Oankali project is itself scrutinized in Adulthood Rites, when the experiences of Akin among the resisters convince the construct son of Lilith, Nikanj, and the deceased Joseph, whose name alludes to the father of a saviour, that humans deserve to have the option to determine their own futures without Oankali interference, and they prompt Akin to convince the Oankali to allow resisters to colonize Mars.

There are real limits to reading Xenogenesis as a neo-slave narrative, however. Like 'Bloodchild' (1984), Butler's Nebula Award-winning short story that also addresses reproduction and human-alien contact, Xenogenesis rewrites the typical colonialist SF narrative, presenting something other than a wagon train to the stars, not 'the British Empire in space' or Star Trek. (31) But although there is an anticolonialist approach to the human side of Butler's contact narratives, the author's aliens, whether 'Bloodchild"s Tlic or Xenogenesis's Oankali, are not necessarily figures for white slave owners and overseers. 'The only places I am writing about slavery', she maintains, 'is where I actually say so', (32) as in Kindred, for example. In fact, the author's race has overdetermined these stories' interpretations, leading readers mistakenly to see both storylines as imaginative recreations of ante-bellum American slavery. As Jacobs explains, '(Butler) is generally more interested in issues of "symbiosis" than of slavery'; (33) Butler explores the 'unusual accommodations' that aliens and humans would have to make for one another. (34) A kind of counter-argument can be found in Peppers's suggestion that the Oankali/human symbiosis is not unproblematic and that it frightens the resister humans the same way that humans fear beneficial symbioses--for example, mitochondria, beneficial types of bacteria--except that slavery provides a 'good historical reason' for the former. Butler, 'constructed as (a) raced object' by sociobiology, is therefore appropriating scientific language and engaging in a bit of narratological turnabout, 'changing the sociobiological story from within' by placing 'the discourses of slavery and sociobiology in continuous dialogue'. (35) However, Jacobs's arguments against the 'slavery' hypothesis are just as convincing. Acknowledging Lilith's 'loss of choice and agency' and infantilization at the hands of the Oankali, she contends that the aliens are driven to breed with humanity not out of lust or greed, but because of their own biological compulsion to embrace difference. (36) Moreover, the Oankali have no idea what their genetic commingling with humans will produce; (37) there is no goal, purpose, or end to the Oankali project other than the production of (more) difference. As for Lilith's temporal dislocation, Haraway observes that 'nuclear catastrophe, even more radically and comprehensively than the slave trade and history's other great genocides, ripped all rational and natural connections with past and future from (Lilith) and everybody else'. (38) And by the end of Imago, Lilith explains to Jesusa that she has since 'understood' and 'accepted' her impregnation via Nikanj and the family it produced; she even goes as far as saying, 'Now I feel as though I've loved Nikanj all my life' (Imago, p. 671), a statement that reads like something more than simple Stockholm Syndrome.

Despite the limitations of the slavery hypothesis, race still matters in Xenogenesis. Understanding the trilogy as performing its own assertion of African-derived cultural heritage does not depend solely on interpreting the Oankali as slave-masters. In her Patternist series, Parable books, and Kindred, Butler has demonstrated a purposeful interest in exploring and asserting the histories and cultures of the African diaspora, and Xenogenesis continues this trend. (39) For example, the narrative trajectory of Adulthood Rites, related 'carefully, in the manner of a storyteller' by Akin to an Oankali, passes through 'abduction, captivity, and conversion', an evident allusion to The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) and its structure, even though this passage characterizes Akin's experiences among belligerent human resisters, not the Oankali. Lilith retains the surname 'Iyapo' from her deceased Nigerian-American husband, and gives her multiracial, that is, human (African- and Asian-American) and Oankali, construct son the name Akin, which is Yoruba for 'hero' or 'brave boy', appropriate for 'the first boy born to a Human woman on Earth since the war' (Rites, p. 351). Akin befriends Shkaht and Amma, two construct siblings who are also abducted, and who are children of a Ghanaian mother. Moreover, the author has commented on how she has researched Ibo life and Yoruban mythology specifically to allude to it in her writing, to 'make use of it' in the same way that classical Greek mythology is commonly invoked. (40) To the extent that Xenogenesis engages in a critique of race as a theoretical concept, its investment in the assertion of a black, African-derived cultural identity suggests that the real target of Butler's critique is the racist deployment of race by white supremacy. The evaporation of racial difference among humans upon contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence (limited as it may be), on the one hand, and the assertion of race as (African and African-American) cultural identity, on the other, may appear as a(nother) contradiction; however, they are really two different arguments operating in the two different contexts that Michaels identifies: the epistemological and the theoretical, respectively. Both are aimed at dismantling the racism, a most pernicious form of hierarchical thinking, that targets people of colour in the United States; and both support the trilogy's theme of embracing difference. A critique of race as biological essence removes an impediment to embracing difference among humanity; and in order for difference to be embraced it must be cultivated, articulated, and valued. Butler's Xenogenesis performs both of these, only apparently contradictory, functions.

The notion that meaning would cease to accrue to racial categories with which we are familiar upon contact with a species from another world prompts a different but related question: What effects does the arrival of the Oankali have on human gender categories? This issue is prompted also by Butler's own stated co-commitments to the ongoing black liberation struggle and to feminism. (41) Xenogenesis addresses topics such as family and reproduction, which are of relevance to gender studies as well as to race theory, particularly given Samuel R. Delany's observations about the etymological linkage of 'race' and 'family' and that 'you can't very well have race without sex'. (42)

In Xenogenesis these issues tend to coalesce around the ooloi, the Oankali third sex whose name means 'treasured strangers' (Dawn, p. 106). The ooloi initially seem androgynous, an adjective used to describe Nikanj's voice (Dawn, p. 151); for example, they take the third person neuter pronoun, which may play a role in making Imago's ooloi protagonist its narrator as well, thus avoiding the confusion that a third-person narrative full of 'it's would create. The ooloi also function as an object of desire for males and females, humans as well as Oankali, as is evident in Jodahs's relationship with the human siblings Jesusa and Tomas; Jodahs even has the ability to change shape to approximate the ideal sex object of each of his human partners. Therefore, the ooloi queer traditional family structures and gender roles. Any consideration of the ooloi, however, must include the observation, articulated by Jodahs, that although 'there were still some Humans who insisted on seeing the ooloi as some kind of male-female combination', in fact 'the ooloi were no such thing. They were themselves--a different sex altogether' (Imago, p. 524). The ooloi are a sex as opposed to no sex or both sexes; therefore, they do not represent an obliviousness to or transcendence of gender categories so much as a reinscription and revision of them. Although some humans, as Jodahs suggests, see the ooloi as between masculinity and femininity, others persist in ascribing conventional human gender categories to the ooloi, even though they know better. Within Jdahya's family, for example, Lilith perceives the ooloi named Kahguyaht as 'the head of the house' (Dawn, p. 48), despite the Oankali's denial that they are hierarchical. When Lilith later corrects Paul Titus for referring to the ooloi Nikanj as 'he', Titus replies, 'When they woke me up, I thought the ooloi acted like men and women while the males and females acted like eunuchs. I never really lost the habit of thinking of ooloi as male or female' (Dawn, p. 89).

Resister men have a particular aversion to 'trade' with the Oankali because it requires including an ooloi in their sexual intimacy with a woman; even though ooloi are neither male nor female and sex with the Oankali is neurochemical as opposed to genital, resister males compare the experience to being 'taken like a woman' (Dawn, p. 203). Moreover, upon awakening on-board the Oankali ship, the incredulous human men and women who become resisters perform the basest of patriarchal behaviours. Women seek to put themselves 'under the protection' of men (Dawn, p. 141); one man 'decided to impress his followers by helping one of them get a woman' (Dawn, p. 176), and the man who later kills Joseph declares, 'We pair off! [...] One man, one woman' (Dawn, p.176). The trilogy also describes numerous abductions of women and violent sexual attacks against them in the South American rainforest on Earth outside the safety of the utopian human-Oankali 'trading villages' in the social wilderness inhabited by the resisters and by raiders upon resister villages. Although Xenogenesis is critical of these remnants of patriarchy and heterosexism, they and the conception of fixed binary gender categories on which they are based, which Lilith calls 'back-to-the Stone-Age, caveman bullshit' (Dawn, p. 178), quite evidently do persist despite humans making both social and sexual contact with an alien race with very different sexual and social structures.

There may even be some question as to whether the Oankali themselves are beyond gender. The families that the Oankali form with humans are structured around a gender-based balance and symmetry: two males (human and Oankali), two females (human and Oankali), with an Oankali ooloi at the centre. (Oankali male and female partners are usually siblings.) For example, Dichaan reflects on how he 'had been born to work with a Human male parallel--to help raise children with the aid of such a person', but, with Joseph's death, Dichaan 'had had to limp along without this essential other' (Rites, p. 314). This balance extends to the construct offspring of human-Oankali mating. The metamorphosis of Akin's newborn sibling into a female depends on his own proximity and is therefore endangered by Akin's abduction. Jodahs's metamorphosis into an ooloi is a surprise and source of conflict, but it comes as something of a gift to his ooloi parent Nikanj, who was lonely for a child whose sex matched its own. Indeed, much of Adulthood Rites and Imago concerns their protagonists' relationships to other family members and the relevance of gender to those relationships.

Whether or not gender persists, the issue of essentialism certainly does in the extant criticism on Xenogenesis. Fuss's admonitions aside, there are conflicting interpretations with regard to whether Butler's representation of gender in this series is essentialist. Haraway's citation of the trilogy as an example of cyborg feminism locates it in a 'post-gender' conceptual field. (43) Clearly, the Oankali represent an anti-teleological interrogation of origins. 'From the perspective of an ontology based on mutation, metamorphosis, and the diaspora, restoring an original sacred image can be a bad joke', Haraway writes; 'Origins are precisely that to which Butler's people do not have access [...]. Their own origins (are) lost to them through an infinitely long series of mergings and exchanges reaching deep into time and space'. (44) When applied to gender, the Oankali example rescues the category 'woman' from a preoccupation with 'a pure or original femininity, a female essence, outside the boundaries of the social and thereby untainted (though perhaps repressed) by a patriarchal order', (45) from the notion that it ever existed in a state of purity, wholeness, and completeness. As such it is a useful antidote or counter-narrative to patriarchal narratives about the origin of woman (for example, the biblical book of Genesis) and to a type of essentialist feminism that imagines a transcendent category of 'woman' that disregards the differences that race, class, sexuality, generation, etc. make to gender, namely, a feminism that ignores difference instead of embracing it.

However, the emphasis on the genetic hard-wiring of humanity, and the Oankali as well, calls readings like Haraway's into question. On the face of it, 'the human contradiction' is a statement about human nature, a claim that the hierarchical thinking for which there are all too many examples in human history is an inevitable consequence of human DNA coding. Luckhurst cites a passage from Adulthood Rites in which Akin tells a resister, 'Human purpose isn't what you say it is or what I say it is. It's what your biology says it is--what your genes say it is' (Rites, p. 501). Akin makes this statement after he has persuaded the Oankali of the necessity of a resister colony on Mars. A year among the resisters and his time among the Akjai of the Oankali have convinced him that offering the human survivors the option of social and genetic autonomy is the right thing to do; however, his only real hope for the survival of the human race on Mars is that 'chance exists. Mutation. Unexpected effects of the new environment. Things no one has thought of. The Oankali can make mistakes' (Rites, pp. 501-02). Imago, set fifty years after the Mars colony project was begun, sustains the sense that the human contradiction spells those resisters' ultimate doom. 'I understand that Humans must be free to go', Jodahs tells a human, 'you might last a long time, but in the end, you'll destroy yourselves' (Imago, pp. 530, 531). With so much being determined by biology, Luckhurst asks, 'how could Xenogenesis ever be unproblematically celebrated as an anti-essentialist "cyborg origin" story?'. (46) The critique of patriarchy housed in the notion that men are more susceptible to the human contradiction than women is, as Zaki notes, an essentialist argument, (47) one that naturalizes gender differences instead of revealing them to be matters of convention with histories to be unearthed and analysed. Butler has even employed what is arguably essentialist language to explain her interest in the issues that the trilogy addresses: 'Perhaps as a woman, I can't help dwelling on the importance of family and reproduction'. (48) The author has also stated that one of the sources that informed the creation of both Xenogenesis's human characters and the Oankali was a television programme on Jane Goodall that featured a group of chimpanzees who distanced themselves from another with physiological (polio) and behavioural differences (walking upright). 'What I was looking at was our, shall I call it, natural competitiveness and xenophobia', Butler states; 'so I thought, what kind of people would xenophilic people be?'. (49) They are people, it would appear, whose behaviour, whose drive to pursue and embrace difference on a genetic level are also chalked up to their genetic nature. 'We are as committed to the trade', Jdahya tells Lilith, 'as your body is to breathing' (Dawn, pp. 42-43). Again, the ooloi provide important examples in this regard as they are not some kind of combination of male and female but a discrete third gender, one that performs roles and functions distinct from the others. The ooloi are the Oankali's experts at genetic knowledge and manipulation thanks to their yashi, a highly developed organ lodged between their hearts that allows them to manipulate DNA. Moreover, ooloi can see in infrared, possess an extra pair of limbs, 'sensory arms' that look like elephant trunks and function as sexual conduits for their male and female partners. All Oankali tentacles can sting, but only the ooloi can attenuate their sting to a non-lethal level. Similarly, the ability to heal others is developed further in ooloi than in male or female Oankali.

The conception of gender difference as an essential difference in both human and Oankali contexts would appear to support Zaki's evaluation of Xenogenesis as 'essentialist'. However, to the extent that essentialism 'is viewed as precisely that which seeks to deny or to annul the very radicality of difference', (50) it would also work against what Zaki sees as a key feature of Butler's fiction in general, that is, 'an implicit and internal critique of and rebuke to one aspect of liberal feminist ideology: its claim to speak for all women, regardless of class or color--a claim founded upon the assumption of a transhistorical and transcultural, engendered unity of all women'. (51) Lilith's portrayal as an 'ontologically nurturing and pacifist' mother figure, for example, is a trait that Xenogenesis has in common with the same 'Anglo-American feminist utopias' to which it critically responds. (52) Zaki's observations, therefore, suggest a contradiction between the essentialism in Xenogenesis and the trilogy's key theme: 'embrace difference'.

Other critics caution against hastily employing (or inflicting) the 'essentialist' label. Green notes that 'Butler's 'essentialism' is tricky (because) her novels focus on the exceptions to the rules she posits as human norms rather than those who exemplify them'. (53) Boulter identifies the biological as, in effect, hardware instead of software; she reads Xenogenesis as deriving content from biotechnology's assertions during the 1980s and 1990s that 'biology is destiny', but 'the social and not the natural world is its ultimate programmer'. (54) With these caveats in mind, Michaels' presentation of Xenogenesis and its genre as committed to physical rather than cultural difference--'the otherness of the alien is the otherness of its body' (55)--can be shown as overstating its case. Like any of the numerous alien races in SF, aspects of Oankali society and culture--for example, family structure, eating habits, the inability to lie except by omission, and a general dislike of music--strike the stories' human characters and the reader as being as alien and different as their appearance. The Oankali bear a similar attitude towards humanity; in Dawn Nikanj tells Joseph, 'you're more than only the composition and the workings of your bodies. You are your personalities, your cultures. We're interested in those too' (Dawn, p. 154); and in Adulthood Rites he tells the former resister Tino, 'We need cultural as well as genetic diversity for a good trade' (Rites, p. 289). As for gender essentialism, Lilith has her own doubts about a necessary link between gender identity and behavioural traits: 'How much did sex determine personality among the Oankali? She shook her head. Stupid question. She did not know how much sex determined personality even among human beings' (Dawn, p. 82). This statement casts new light on Joseph's explanation of Lilith's leadership: her ambivalence towards the position is not necessarily determined by her gender. Miller argues that the series asserts '"women's" values of healing, teaching, and sharing' as methodologies to be learned, cultivated, and employed by the entirety of humanity 'in a non-essentialist manner'. (56) Butler has made comments that bear out the wisdom of these approaches, despite her arguably essentialist statements cited above. In her interview with Larry McCaffery, Butler states: 'It's important to me that my stories are about people who do such-and-such, rather than about people who are such-and-such', (57) suggesting a greater focus on performance than ontology. 'I do think we need to accept that our behavior is controlled to some extent by biological forces', she explains, 'but I don't accept what I would call classical sociobiology. Sometimes we can work around our programming if we understand it'. (58) Readers sensitive to the essentialism in Xenogenesis, therefore, should keep in mind Jacobs's response to Zaki's reading, which encourages a reading of Butler's trilogy 'as a metaphor rather than a manifesto', (59) that is, as a description of human behaviour writ large in order to bring attention to the folly of that behaviour.

Indeed, Xenogenesis's representation of late twentieth-century humanity approaches the satirical. Peppers states that the trilogy 'raises the question of how far our biological nature determines our cultural structures and human behaviors', (60) which is congruent with the first part of Butler's statement above. However, readers should also appreciate how the trilogy brings a severe critique to bear on a particular human behaviour--hierarchical thinking--by imagining it as part of humanity's biological hard-wiring. Xenogenesis was conceived in a fit of pessimism comparable to that expressed by Swift or Twain, generated by doubts about humanity's ability to cease its habit of engaging in successive, self-perpetuating, 'simple one-upmanship', (61) which threatens all life on the planet when thermonuclear warheads are involved. It is hierarchical thinking that Butler detected in Cold War-era rhetoric in the 1980s, particularly in the Reagan Administration's delusional statements about achieving victory through nuclear warfare, which Butler identifies as an 'inspiration' for writing Xenogenesis. (62) 'It's less a matter of being programmed for self-destruction than it is that self-destruction occurs because we're not willing to go beyond that principle of who's got the biggest or the best or the most'. (63) Here, Butler locates the human contradiction not at the level of the biological, of genetic 'programming', but, rather, as 'principle', at the level of culture and convention; this same principle structures and enables racism, sexism, and homophobia, as well as the condescending and/or dismissive attitudes toward SF that the genre continues to endure. In a series that encourages readers to 'embrace difference', it is not those differences, or whether they are constructed or essences, that occupies Butler's concern or interest; rather, it is the tendency to arrange groups vertically, to ascribe value to those at the top and to deny the value of those at the bottom that worries her. This is not to say that, after all, the question of identity and/as essentialism is irrelevant to Butler, but that racial and gender identities are not necessarily essences for her; and if, following Walter Benn Michaels, we deem the critique of hierarchical thinking via its figuration as a human essence to be incongruent with the assertion of the race pride and gender-identity-based feminism that Michaels would see as inescapably and irredeemably essentialist, that is a contradiction in which Xenogenesis sits quite comfortably.

This essay is respectfully dedicated to the memory of Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006), in honour of her contributions to science fiction and African-American literature.

(1) Later published together under the title Lilith's Brood (New York: Warner Aspect, 2000): Dawn, pp. 1-248; Adulthood Rites, pp. 249-517; Imago, pp. 519-746. (Subsequent references are to this edition and will appear in the text.)

(2) Jim Miller, 'Post-Apocalyptic Hoping: Octavia Butler's Dystopian/Utopian Vision', Science Fiction Studies, 25.2 (1998), 336-60 (pp. 339-40).

(3) Steven W. Potts, '"We Keep Playing the Same Record": A Conversation with Octavia E. Butler', Science Fiction Studies, 23.3 (1996), 331-38 (p. 331).

(4) Donna J. Haraway, Modest Witness @ Second Millennium: FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 213.

(5) Roger Luckhurst, '"Horror and Beauty in Rare Combination": The Miscegenate Fictions of Octavia Butler', Women: A Cultural Review, 7.1 (1996), 28-38 (pp. 30, 31).

(6) Cathy Peppers, 'Dialogic Origins and Alien Identities in Butler's Xenogenesis', Science Fiction Studies, 22.1 (1995), 47-62 (pp. 48, 49).

(7) Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 175, 154.

(8) Haraway, Simians, p. 174.

(9) Haraway, Simians, pp. 173, 179.

(10) Naomi Jacobs, 'Posthuman Bodies and Agency in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis', in Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, ed. by Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 91-111 (pp. 94, 91).

(11) Quoted in Jacobs, p. 109.

(12) Hoda M. Zaki, 'Utopia, Dystopia, and Ideology in the Science Fiction of Octavia Butler', Science Fiction Studies, 17.2 (1990), 239-51 (pp. 240, 245, 239).

(13) Zaki, p. 241.

(14) Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature & Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. xi.

(15) Walter Benn Michaels, 'Political Science Fictions', New Literary History, 31.4 (2000), pp. 649-64 (p. 656); repubd in Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 26-40.

(16) Michaels, p. 657. (Page numbers refer to New Literary History and will henceforth appear in the text.)

(17) See also Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); and 'Autobiography of an Ex-White Man: Why Race Is Not a Social Construction', Transition, 7.1 (1997), 12-43.

(18) Lisa Duggan, 'Dreaming Democracy', New Literary History, 31.4 (2000), 851-56 (p. 854).

(19) For a convincing counternarrative see Grant Farred, 'Endgame Identity? Mapping the New Left Roots of Identity Politics', New Literary History, 31.4 (2000), pp. 627-48.

(20) Fuss, p. 6.

(21) See Charles R. Saunders, 'Why Blacks Don't Read Science Fiction', in Brave New Universe: Testing the Values of Science in Society, ed. by Tom Henighan (Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1980), pp. 160-68; and Robert Crossley, Introduction to Octavia E. Butler, Kindred (Boston: Beacon, 1988), pp. xiv-xv.

(22) Frances M. Beal, 'Black Women and the SF Genre: Interview with Octavia Butler', Black Scholar, 17.2 (1986), 14-18 (pp. 17-18). It is possible, if not likely, that the film review in question was authored by Samuel R. Delany.

(23) Quoted. in Sandra Y. Govan, 'Connections, Links, and Extended Networks: Patterns in Octavia Butler's Science Fiction', Black American Literature Forum, 18 (1984), pp. 82-87 (p. 87).

(24) Zaki, p. 241.

(25) Jacobs, p. 98.

(26) Michelle Erica Green, '"There Goes the Neighborhood": Octavia Butler's Demand for Diversity in Utopias', in Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference, ed. by Jane L. Donawerth and Carol A. Kolmerten (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994), pp. 166-89 (p. 188).

(27) Green, p. 180.

(28) Haraway, Simians, p. 228.

(29) Peppers, p. 50.

(30) Amanda Boulter, 'Polymorphous Futures: Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy', in American Bodies: Cultural Histories of the Physique, ed. by Tim Armstrong (New York: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 170-85 (pp. 175, 177).

(31) Octavia E. Butler, Afterword to 'Bloodchild', in Octavia E. Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1995), pp. 30-32 (pp. 31, 32).

(32) Quoted in Potts, p. 332.

(33) Jacobs, p. 104.

(34) Butler, Afterword, p. 32. See also 'An Interview with Octavia E. Butler', in Across the Wounded Galaxies, ed. by Larry McCaffery (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), pp. 54-70.

(35) Peppers, pp. 53, 52.

(36) Jacobs, p. 99.

(37) Jacobs, p. 102.

(38) Haraway, Simians, p. 227.

(39) The Patternist series comprises Patternmaster (1976), Mind of my Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980), and Clay's Ark (1984). Kindred was published in 1979. Parable of the Sower appeared in 1994 and Parable of the Talents in 1998. Butler was planning a third volume in this series, to be called Parable of the Trickster, but it was never completed.

(40) Steven Piziks, 'Interview with Octavia Butler', Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine, 37 (1997), <http://www.mzbfm.com/butler.htm> [accessed 21 December 1999, no longer available] ([section]99 of 126).

(41) Randall Kenan, 'An Interview with Octavia Butler', Callaloo, 14.2 (1991), 495-504 (p. 501).

(42) Samuel R. Delany, 'Some Queer Notions about Race', in Dangerous Liaisons: Blacks, Gays, and the Struggle for Equality, ed. by Eric Brandt (New York: New Press, 1999), pp. 259-89 (pp. 269, 270).

(43) Haraway, Simians, p. 150.

(44) Haraway, Simians, pp. 226, 227.

(45) Fuss, p. 2.

(46) Luckhurst, pp. 36-37.

(47) Zaki, p. 241.

(48) Quoted in Potts, p. 333.

(49) Piziks, [section]111 (emphasis added).

(50) Fuss, p. xii.

(51) Zaki, p. 246.

(52) Zaki, p. 246.

(53) Green, p. 167.

(54) Boulter, p. 171.

(55) Michaels, p. 650.

(56) Miller, p. 344.

(57) In Across the Wounded Galaxies, ed. by McCaffery, p. 68.

(58) Quoted in Potts, p. 333.

(59) Zaki, p. 109.

(60) Peppers, p. 55.

(61) Quoted in Across the Wounded Galaxies, ed. by McCaffery, p. 63.

(62) Ibid., p. 67.

(63) Ibid., p. 63.

JEFFREY A. TUCKER

University of Rochester