BUTLER’S XENOGENESIS TRILOGY
I was at a college not too long ago where I talked about Ronald Reagan and the idea of ‘Beware of a nuclear war,’ and all that. And a young woman told me that stuff was not real. In a way, isn’t it lovely that people have forgotten? But on the other hand, isn’t it scary that they’ve forgotten?
—Octavia Butler, Strange Matings
Addressing an audience at the 2004 “Black to the Future Conference,” Octavia Butler reflected on her literary career and the driving force behind her fiction. Asked about her stint of “world saving” books from the 1980s and 1990s, namely the Xenogenesis and Parable series, the first African American female science fiction author attempted to explain what exactly she had been saving the world from. Butler’s answer in the epigraph reveals that her work responded in part to the unique American landscape of the 1980s, a context infused with Reagan conservativism and rekindled nuclear fears. Beginning with President Ronald Reagan’s sweeping election in 1980, the decade marks a poignant conservative turn in American social life with concerns about a breakdown of the nuclear family, a reinvigorated nuclear standoff, and the erosion of “traditional” American values at the forefront of the US imagination. Read against this backdrop, Butler’s speculative fictions offer a vision of America’s future that resists conservative preoccupations with tradition, the family, and national defense. This vision is no clearer than in her trilogy Xenogenesis.150
150 The novels were collected into a single volume called Lilith’s Brood in 2000. However, I retain the earlier
The three novels that comprise the trilogy, Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago, take place after a nuclear war leaves humanity on the brink of extinction. The first book begins after Lilith Iyapo, an African American woman, awakens from suspended animation several centuries later. Along with the few other human survivors, Lilith has been taken aboard the living spaceship of an alien race. These aliens, the Oankali, are “genetic traders,” combining their own genes with those of other species to carry out a form of genetic engineering. The Oankali wish to interbreed with humans in order to diversify and combine the advantages of both species. Among the benefits promised by the Oankali is the elimination of humanity’s inherent contradiction, the incompatibility between their intelligence and hierarchical
natures. The series follows Lilith and her “brood” of Oankali-human hybrids or “constructs” as they learn to adapt to life with the Oankali and eventually resettle Earth. Not all humans accept a future with the Oankali, however. Some humans resist interbreeding and react with violence against the aliens and the human collaborators. To the Oankali, this resistance is an outgrowth of the human contradiction and the self-destructive impulse that caused
humanity’s near extinction in the first place.
Published in 1987, 1988 and 1989, the books of Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy lodge a powerful critique of Reagan conservativism on reproductive grounds. With the support of the new Christian Right, Reagan resuscitated a static image of the nuclear family from the 1950s and cast himself as the defender of traditional family values against liberals within the US and, more potently, against the “evil empire” of the USSR. Such antagonisms stirred previously simmering Cold War tensions that many, including Butler, feared would lead to existential disaster. In Xenogenesis, Butler exposes the dangers of conservative reproductive ideologies premised on division. Instead, her novels advocate that surviving the nuclear
1980s requires renouncing allegiances to the nuclear family, to the nation, and even to the human. In a post-nuclear world, survival stems from the cross-race and cross-species relationships that sustain life. These relationships, what I have dubbed “vital alliances,” oppose containment thinking by breaking down categorical boundaries. By revealing vital alliances that split apart the human family, Butler’s fiction offers a means of redefining humanness itself and reconnecting humans to their environment, other organisms, and each other. The culmination of these efforts will be a wholly new form of humanity, one
unthinkable in Reagan’s pronouncement that “[as] the family goes, so goes our civilization” (“Address…1985,” par. 7).
The election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980 ushered a sweeping tide of political conservativism, neoliberal economics, and hardline military posturing into American
domestic and foreign policy. None of these trends originated with Reagan’s candidacy, but they gained traction under his campaign and presidency. Throughout the 1980s, Reagan’s administration promoted family values and hawkish defense spending as it battled “big government” and sought to cut social welfare programs. Domestically, Reagan’s New Right coalition mythologized the 1950s discourse of the nuclear family, promising to promote a return to traditional American values. A radio address by Reagan in 1986 captures his
alarmist claims that the nuclear family was in danger. These fears would be crucial in stoking anti-communist and anti-liberal sentiments:
[I]n recent decades the American family has come under virtual attack. It has lost authority to government rule writers. It has seen its central role in the education of young people narrowed and distorted. And it’s been forced to turn over to big government too many of its own resources in the form of taxation. (qtd. in Cordle,
To Reagan, the family was under threat by forces both inside and outside the nation and it became a convenient victim, justifying his conservative reforms. Reagan frequently invoked the family in speeches eviscerating big government and social safety programs intended to combat poverty. In his 1986 State of the Union address, for example, Reagan bemoaned that “the breakdown of the family, the most basic support system, has reached crisis proportions – in female and child poverty, child abandonment, horrible crimes and deteriorating schools” (“Address…1986,” par. 19). Such framing would buttress Reagan’s proposals to reduce eligibility, benefit levels, and funding of safety nets for impoverished families. The paradox between Reagan’s championing of the family in his rhetoric as he worked to reduce
government support for many American families in practice underscores the unevenness with which he applied the term.
Besides promoting conservative values to defend the family against the waste and ineptitude of big government, Reagan supported a return to conservative values as necessary to save the US from its primary ideological enemy, the Soviet Union. In a long-stagnant Cold War climate, Reagan’s bellicose attitude against the USSR heightened once-quiet fears of a nuclear war. Preeminent Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis has identified the first two years of Reagan’s administration as “the most dangerous [time] in Soviet-American relations since the Cuban missile crisis” (357). In his speeches, Reagan stoked anti-Soviet feeling by dubbing the USSR a malicious state responsible for the nuclear standoff and ultimately antithetical to core American values. The administration’s commitment to strategic nuclear defense further disrupted the tenuous nuclear balance by displacing long-held ideas about mutually assured destruction. Instead, Reagan favored the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which sought to develop technologies that could defend the country against nuclear attack.
The swift changes prompted by Reagan’s New Right coalition in domestic and international policy alarmed authors like Octavia Butler. As Gerry Canavan argues, Butler was particularly contemptuous of Reagan’s nuclear policies in the early 1980s. In a Los
Angeles Times op-ed, Butler fumed that: “Anything that promotes a false sense of security
with regard to nuclear weapons should be handled carefully” (qtd. in Canavan 109). Butler’s concern about the looming threat of nuclear annihilation, associated with Reagan’s saber- rattling, found an outlet in her Xenogenesis trilogy. In fact, Butler credits Reagan with the series’ creation. In a 1988 interview, Butler explains the germination of her project:
I tell people that Ronald Reagan inspired Xenogenesis—and that it was the only thing he inspired in me that I actually approve of. When his first term was beginning, his people were talking about a “winnable” nuclear war, a “limited” nuclear war, the idea that more and more nuclear “weapons” would make us safer. That’s when I began to think about human beings having the two conflicting characteristics of intelligence and a tendency toward hierarchical behavior—and that hierarchical behavior is too much in charge, too self-sustaining. (qtd. in Francis23)
Like other speculative fictions in this dissertation, Dawn and the other Xenogenesis novels came together during a time of heightened nuclear fears, providing an opportunity to reflect on the merits of twentieth-century American society, the real consequences of nuclear war, and the capabilities of humans to survive. In the 1980s, Reagan’s absurd nuclear strategy of a “winnable” nuclear war inspired Butler to consider, not only the heightened likelihood of a nuclear apocalypse and what devastating consequences this would entail on human
civilization but the internal contradiction within humanity as a species that predestines our self-destruction.
In this chapter, I argue that the human contradiction in Xenogenesis is not so much a biological imperative as a manifestation of Reagan ideology.151 Specifically, I read the series
151 Butler herself suggests this connection during an interview with Nibir K. Ghosh from 2004: “[Dawn] was
as a reaction to staid notions of reproduction that find corollaries in the traditional family values espoused by Reagan conservatives. The novel Adulthood Rites, in my first section, follows the human resisters who cling to traditional familial arrangements and the
conservative American lifestyle of the 1980s. The resisters construct a village, called
Phoenix, in a futile attempt to reproduce what humanity destroyed. Like Reagan’s New Right coalition, the resisters consider themselves saving an endangered idea, the American way of life vis-à-vis the American nuclear family. Donna Haraway explains the resistance project as a form of reproduction-as-sameness or “the reproduction of the sacred image of the same, of the one true copy, mediated by the luminous technologies of compulsory heterosexuality and masculinist self-birthing” (“Promises” 299). The reproduction-as-sameness that Phoenix breeds is revealed to be an ultimately abortive reproductive project—one in which sexual and racist violence, slavery, and environmental destruction are the natural outgrowths.
In the remaining portion of the chapter, I consider Butler’s trilogy more abstractly— not solely as a work of literature or as a historical artifact but as a work of theory, intervening in debates about reproduction, humanness, and survival as relevant now as in the 1980s. In the second section, I read Butler’s novel Dawn as a blueprint in crossing racial and species boundaries, which is necessary to overcome humanity’s self-destructive tendencies. My analysis of Dawn rewrites theories of alterity that are steeped in racial hierarchy. Rather than fixing a presumably white self against a nonwhite Other, Butler’s fiction organizes a concept of alterity-as-self—a new subjectivity rooted in the writings of Frantz Fanon. The concept of alterity-as-self disrupts not only the paradigm of white/black but also of human/nonhuman, underscoring the connection between these binaries. My third section considers the
the early 1980s…I decided that if so many people were buying into this nonsense, there must be something wrong with us—something basic” (qtd. in Canavan 110).
conceptual breakdown of the category human that occurs in Butler’s final book Imago. Here the category of the human is deconstructed to reveal forms of reproduction, mutuality, and futurity that promise survival. Taken together, I interpret Imago and the entire trilogy as an alt-humanist manifesto centered on a form of reproduction that requires interspecies
alliance.152 Survival in Xenogenesis necessitates recognizing the “vital alliances”—the trans- species dependencies—that encompass humanity. Butler’s fiction undergirds a reproductive politics that unsettles essentialist categories, advocates the need to think beyond the human and beyond reproduction-as-sameness, and works to stave off destruction.
Reading Xenogenesis in the context of the 1980s differs from how the trilogy has been historically situated.153 Gregory Jerome Hampton, for instance, has argued that “the Oankali aesthetic found in Dawn is analogous on several levels to that of the Yoruba
aesthetic” (74). In addition, many scholars have argued that Xenogenesis is primarily a series about slavery. In a review of the trilogy from 1990, Frances Bonner explains that:
“Concerned as she is with the specificity of the Afro-American experience, it is unsurprising that Butler again and again explores the phenomenon of slavery, in particular the initial stage in which the self—body, soul, and subjectivity—is stolen and declared an item of exchange” (53). More recently, Isiah Lavender III reads the trilogy as a meta-slavery narrative “that is clearly linked to the history of slavery through its alien colonization theme” (74). Yet these interpretations contradict Butler’s own insistences to the contrary.
152 My terminology “alt-human” versus “post-human” is intentional. Post-humanism, defined by theorists like
N. Katherine Hayles, represents a higher form of humanity—humans capable of escaping their bodies or enhancing their bodies into super-human form through emerging biotechnologies. Alt-human, on the other hand, disrupts the fundamental conceptions of humanity by deconstructing the artificial boundaries separating species from species, subject from object, and self from environment. For more on the historical understanding of post-human, see Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, page 3.
153 One notable exception is Lisa Dowdall, who embeds Xenogenesis “in the context of rapid changes to the life
In a 1996 interview, Butler maintained that: “The only place I am writing about slavery is where I actually say so” (qtd. in Francis 66). At other times, Butler was less dogmatic. She stated in a 1988 interview that: “I know some people think that [my books explore slavery], but I don’t agree, although this may depend on what we mean by ‘slavery’” (qtd. in Francis 12). In this chapter, I want to take seriously Butler’s claim that the
Xenogenesis trilogy is not about or at least not solely about slavery. Instead, I argue, Butler’s
trilogy performs important work in the 1980s by refashioning a unique politics of reproduction that contests an American ideology premised on tradition, homogeneity, national defense, and the nuclear family.
Sterility, Self-Destruction, and Reproduction-as-Sameness in Adulthood Rites
She found herself thinking of Sam and Ayre, her husband and son, both taken from her before the Oankali, before the war, before she realized how easily her life—any human life—could be destroyed.
—Octavia Butler, Dawn
After several weeks living with the Oankali, Lilith remembers her small family, her husband and son, before the nuclear war that decimated the planet and before her rescue aboard the alien’s living ship. While Lilith looks at her past with tender thoughts, her memories are filled with discord and death. Lilith recalls how Sam and Ayre perished in a traffic accident. Her husband, Sam, had taken three months to die after becoming severely brain damaged: “his eyes empty of recognition, empty of him” (Butler, Dawn 76). Rather than longing for a return to her life before the Oankali, Lilith’s memories reveal the fragility and pain associated with her old life. It is perhaps for this reason that Lilith has an easier time than the other survivors embracing the radical change proposed by the Oankali—a new
cross-species kinship arrangement in which a human female and male will interbreed with an Oankali male, female, and ooloi.154 As Lilith’s break from her previous life signals,
conventional family structures are outmoded in the strange new world of the Oankali. A mode of reproduction based on the nuclear family is untenable in Butler’s future.
This section turns to Adulthood Rites, Butler’s second novel, in order to demonstrate the sharp critique of reproduction-as-sameness circulating in Xenogenesis. Published during Reagan’s last year in office, Rites simultaneously speaks to the conservative values espoused during his administration. In Xenogenesis, Butler’s Reaganite foils are the human resisters. These humans steadfastly reject the genetic trade and eschew the Oankali-human settlements on the Earth. Stripped by the Oankali of their ability to reproduce, these humans choose hollow lives in isolation, removed from the conveniences and futurity offered by a shared existence with the advanced aliens. Thomas Foster interprets the human resistance as a “form of captivity—confinement within the familiar, the human” (151). This resistance, in other words, is really a form of self-imposed oppression, a perverse and obstinate adherence to reproduction-as-sameness. The resisters’ slavish devotion to a world that no longer exists and their stubborn desire for “pure” human children renders them sterile, violent, and
hierarchical. Consigned to the fringes of Butler’s world, these humans attempt to reconstruct what was lost by the nuclear war. The life that the resisters attempt to recreate for themselves is merely the blueprint for humanity’s own destruction.
In Rites, humans and Oankali have begun to resettle the Earth, although, due to the
radioactive fallout and the gene splicing of the Oankali, the planet is radically changed with new plant and animal life. By this time, Lilith has left the Oankali ship that saved her and
reaches the planet surface. She resides with other Oankali and human collaborators on the living settlement called Lo. While Dawn focuses on Lilith, the story in Rites follows Lilith’s construct son, the first human-Oankali hybrid male named Akin. Early on in the novel, Akin is kidnapped by resisters—the first humans who have been allowed to leave the Oankali ship after refusing to integrate into Oankali culture. Sterile and recalcitrant, the resisters live in small, makeshift settlements and desperately desire biologically pure human children. As their appellation “resisters” signifies, these characters are defined by their resistance to the Oankali and to change itself.
The conservative ideology of the human resisters resonates with conservative appeals made under Reaganism. The resister communities desire sameness—a pureness of humanity untainted by the Oankali enemy and a return to the 1980s society they left behind. A similar