Dr. Adam Johns
Seminar in Composition
December 5, 2008
Opening up to Oankali Values
According to King Whitney Jr., “Change has a considerable psychological impact on the human mind. To the fearful it is threatening because it means that things may get worse. To the hopeful it is encouraging because things may get better. To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better.” In Octavia Butler’s science-fiction novel Lilith’s Brood, the Oankali are a life form that has survived millions of generations because of the unique ability to change. It’s not only that they do change, they must change. They have to mate with other species to become an entirely new species in order to maintain existence. Humans should be more like the Oankali when it comes to adaptability. We should be more accepting of change as the Oankali are and we should look to the Oankali for the necessary changes that could benefit society. The Oankali are not afraid of change but humans are set in their ways and unfortunately, it’s the humans’ values that need change the most. As they have adapted, the Oankali have developed a better set of values and our society should better exemplify these Oankali values.
The most notable change that accompanies the lifestyle of the Oankali is the change of sexual practices. Reproduction with the Oankali is very different from the sex that humans are accustomed to. The traditional sex between a man and a woman will no longer produce children and once the humans choose to stay with the Oankali, sex, along with other forms of touching, will no longer be pleasurable; it will be repelling. The Oankali way of mating requires five members: an ooloi, two males, and two females. It is no longer a union between one man and one woman. Sound familiar? That’s right! The great homosexual marriage debate! A construct child, made from an ooloi, two males and two females, can feel a piece of each parent in itself and it’s essential for each parent to be there for the child, (and the birthing mother) for the birth and for some time after. Without them present, the child is likely to become ooloi. The child needs to feel the presence of each parent and spend time with them to learn all that it can from each one. This non-traditional combination of parents is exactly what these construct children need to be brought safely into the world. Butler is making her point that non-traditional families that are increasing in numbers in the modern world are perfectly capable of raising a perfectly normal child. Homosexual organizations used to be fighting for social acceptance, now they fight for the right to marry and adopt. There are certain states that flat out ban gay adoptions, but in other states, adoption agencies have been more accepting depending on the religious affiliation of the agency and the type children they place. A study conducted by Rutgers University shows that though fundamentalist Christian agencies were unwilling to give homosexuals a child, Jewish-affiliated agencies as well as public and private non-affiliated agencies are much more accepting of homosexual applications (Adoption). Rutgers professor David Brodzinsky stresses that "with over a half-million children in foster care and more than 100,000 waiting to be placed for adoption, the need for more adoptive parents is evident. [. . .] There is growing recognition that homosexuals have the same capacities and can provide the same quality of care to children as heterosexuals, and the children do quite well. Homosexuals are a valuable parenting resource for raising children that need families" (Adoption). Some organizations are starting to be more open, much like some humans decided to live with the Oankali, but it would be beneficial to society if everyone could grasp these concepts. Everyone would agree that children need families that can provide love and support in a safe environment suitable for the child to grow and learn. Now people need to realize that there is no reason why same-sex parents cannot provide this environment. There is no evidence that homosexual parents cause any harm to their children more than any set of parents can do harm to their children. Why then is society so caught up with the sex of the parents? When an agency is questioning whether the couple is suitable to adopt, they should question, not their sexual orientation, but rather the key characteristic that would classify any couple, heterosexual or homosexual, as good parents. The Oankali are open to change and this is a particular area that modern society needs to learn to adapt to and come to accept. They need to learn to focus on the values rather than get caught up in the details. If a gay couple can provide suitable lifestyle for a child, then so be it. Who’s to say that a certain heterosexual household would be better off than one with parents of the same sex? Not all heterosexual parents are models of perfection anyway.
There are plenty of heterosexual households that should never have had kids. There are parents that fight constantly, that use drugs or illegal substances, act out towards each other in abusive manners, and use profane language and derogatory comments among many other actions not conducive to the upbringing of a child. “‘One out of every two marriages,’ claims Libby Bortz, a psychiatric social worker and community activist in Denver, ‘contains one episode—at least one episode—of physical violence,’ and ‘one of every three or four . . . female children under the age of eighteen experience sexual abuse’” (Bennett 78). The resisters may have paired up man with woman but their lifestyle is not perfect for the upbringing of a child. In fact it is rather hostile. The day Akin is brought to Phoenix a fight breaks out when Tino’s father showed up at the Rinaldi’s house with a gang of his friends to take revenge on the raiders. Shots were fired, furniture was smashed, dishes were broken, people cursed as by the end of it, two lay dead and two wounded. This is not the environment a child should be raised in and in the modern society violence is not limited to households.
Children in this day and age grow up in a cruel and unsympathetic world. Rape, burglaries, drug deals, shootings, stabbings and murders dominate the news, depressing anyone who watches. There are several active rival gangs that continue to attack and kill the members of the opposite gang in a constant cycle of revenge. It’s this kind of endless violence, thievery and recklessness that corrupts the innocence of our youth. These negative influences are absent from the Oankali villages because the Oankali also suffer the pain they inflict on others. As an infant, Akin “had learned [this] important lesson: He would share any pain he caused. Best, then, to be careful and not cause pain” (Butler 257). It’s a perfect reinforcement of the Golden Rule: “Do onto others as you would wish them do onto you." The Oankali can live in this way because they are avoiding their own personal pain but all people should live their lives according to this rule in order to make their world a better place. The Oankali take this aspect a step further. Not only do they avoid hurting others because they don’t want to feel the pain, they also simply hate to see others suffer. Even when hearing the man that murdered Tino scream out in pain, “Akin tried not to feel the anguish that came to him reflexively when he saw a Human suffering [and] one part of his mind screamed for an ooloi to save [the] irreplaceable Human” (Butler 357). Their species has the ability to heal themselves quickly and heal others as well. It upsets them to see a resistor that is hurting and it upsets them even more to see a resistor that is hurt but won’t let the Oankali help them. Humans don’t have the ability to lay their hands on their neighbor and watch them miraculously heal but they do have the ability to care. It’s as if people have become insensitive to the pains of their neighbors and insensitive to the downbeat news. Many people just don’t watch anymore claiming, “The news is just depressing; it just full of bad stuff.” Maybe things have gotten so bad because people just don’t care anymore. The Oankali do not have this option.
In Butler’s novel, humans had the option of joining the Oankali or becoming resistors and the division shows how people place value on different aspects of life. The resisters could not have children so they spent their days building and scavenging, trying to fill the void and find purpose in their lives. They told themselves they were getting ready for the day when they would have children as they continued to build up their town. They had “real houses” with glass windows and they had mills for power (Butler 279), but focusing on their material possessions could not make them happy, even though they felt that their hard work was necessary. Tino, in disgust of the primitive appearing lifestyle of Lo criticized, “You’ve got kids to plan for and provide for, and you’re going to let them slide back to being cavemen!” (Butler 280). He couldn’t imagine why the Oankali didn’t use the resources they had to make their living arrangements great—great according to their human definitions that is. Their values are clearly flawed when they discover the technology to develop guns and start using them against each other. The Oankali may not have houses but they live comfortably in a peaceful community with family and have everything they need. They don’t need big fancy houses, it’s the people in the house that matter and without all the distractions that the resisters work to develop, the people of Lo and villages like it are able to see what’s important more clearly. When I had the opportunity to visit Quacha Birra, Ethiopia, a small sub-Saharan African village, not even depicted on the maps, I noticed that the community was completely devoid of “stuff”. They didn’t have any of the gadgets we “can’t live without” and they didn’t seem to miss them. Value was not placed on material objects, but rather on their love of God and love for each other. They had an incredible sense of community and their kindheartedness radiated from their daily demeanor. We met a family living with HIV. The husband and wife, dirty and skinny, stood with their two poorly dressed little girls and welcomed us into their home. There was obviously no abundance of food or money and yet they passed around a basket with a mango for each of us: a gift for our generosity. This genuine act of kindness served as a perfect example of the hospitality we are all capable of. It struck me that they gave so much despite their poverty in comparison to our giving from our abundance. Without all the extra commodities the Africans I visited, much like those that coexist with the Oankali, have a much better grasp on what’s important and are living a lifestyle where they can experience what is meaningful. Sometimes real houses with glass for windows can just get in the way.
The thing about the Oankali is that they recognize that change is going to occur and they don’t try to prevent it from happening, as humans tend to do. Lilith is deeply disturbed by the new family structure Nikanj describes. It tells her that “Families will change, Lilith—are changing. A complex construct family will be a female, an ooloi, and children. Males will come and go as they wish and as they find welcome” (Butler 260). Lilith thinks it’s wrong for fathers to not want “the ability to be fathers to their kids” but Nikanj assured her that this was just part of the changes of the trade and the construct children would not find it as upsetting as she did if the father did not stick around. In the United States, men are not particularly monogamous anyway. Not only do women seek more commitment than men, they also “honor it more in practice” and in the case of cohabiting, “twice as many cohabiting men as women were unfaithful in a given year” (Bennett 78). Society is trying to fight the natural tendencies of men. But why fight it? America holds this image of the perfect family: a mother and father with 2.5 children, who sit down for breakfast and pass the orange juice around the table. But this is not an accurate picture of American life. “Over half the marriages in this country end in divorce, with infidelity blamed for 17 percent of more” and in 2005, the United States employed over 18,000 marriage and family therapists, compared to the 3,000 in 1970 (Libaire). The rate of affairs is not what’s important; it’s the attitude towards the affairs that matter. Americans have affairs at about the same rate as the French, but according to Pamela Druckerman, author of Lust in Transition, a book on infidelity, “adultery crises in America last longer, cost more, and seem to inflict more emotional torture than they do in [other countries]” (Libaire). Americans need to stop putting so much stress on the pursuit for perfectness and start excepting things for what they are. The Europeans have the right mindset; affairs aren’t that big of a deal. There’s no need to wrap so much emotion around it. The perfect nuclear family is rare and since this is not going to change, we should just change the mindset of society to account for this fact, much like the Oankali has done. In Lo, some men stayed with their families because they wanted to but men were not required to stay and those who left were not looked down upon. If it takes a village to raise a child then the fathers aren’t really all that necessary anyway.
Someone might argue that the Oankali are no role model for values. The very way that they destroy cultures and civilizations just to maintain their own existence should immediately take them off the pedestal. Little by little, they forced humans to give up their humanity and they took from them what was never theirs to take. They are bullies who take advantage of less developed life forms. But, in the Oankali’s defense, humans were never on the right path. Our values are all wrong and we are doomed to failure from the start because of the human contradiction: we are both intelligent and hierarchical. We are smart enough to develop weapons but the hierarchical aspect entails that we will use these weapons against each other, which will lead to our demise. In this case, the Oankali were only steering us in the right direction. They were saving us from our inevitable and eventual downfall after saving us from our first failure. They’re not bullies, they’re rescuers, and so their values should be an example for humans to strive for.
When the Oankali find a new trade partner they go about the exchange with an open mind. They realize that the change will be a complete metamorphosis. Not only will the species change physically, they will have a new way of life. Humans, as a species, are comfortable with the way things are. Any new development or way of thinking that could potentially pose some sort of threat to the way things are and have been for years is scary. So scary, in fact, that we must protest in front of churches, universities and whoever else we can point a finger at and broadcast our concerns on weekly news magazines like 20/20 and 60 minutes so that all can join in the fear. It’s true that the Oankali are different, but why does different have to be so frightening? The Oankali might always look alien to humans but their values shouldn’t. They exemplify openness to new ideas and put stress on that which should be important. Butler would agree that humans should be more like the Oankali.
Works Cited
"Adoption More Open for Gays and Lesbians". USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education). . FindArticles.com. 04 Dec. 2008. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1272/is_2695_131/ai_99849663
Bennett, William J. The Broken Hearth : Reversing the Moral Collapse of the American Family. New York: Doubleday, 2001
Libaire, Jardine. "Why French Men Don't Get Caught." 21 Feb. 2007. Best Life Magazine. 1 Dec. 2008
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