Contemplating and Contesting Violence in Dystopia: Violence in Octavia Butler’s XENOGENESIS Trilogy

Abstract

This paper considers the modern understanding of violence—its complexities, realities, and subtleties—in the context of Octavia Butler’s science fiction trilogy, XENOGENESIS. The first part presents a general discussion of violence and dystopia in a modern context, with a brief overview of the trilogy’s plot. The second section briefly defines the ethical dissimilarities between the story’s Humans and aliens, studying the explicit and implicit manifestations and regulations of violence in and between each community, while paying particular attention to the subtly coercive violence managed by the dominating, yet ostensibly benevolent, alien Oankali race. In Butler’s problematizing of “easy” utopian strategies for eliminating violence, the dystopian trilogy poses a relevant challenge to justice today, raising important questions: Why do we still turn to violence as an answer to conflict? Why do we confuse calculated pretenses of justice in which violence hides itself—that is, forms of authority that underlie self‐serving motives of the state, which are sometimes mimicked by its citizens—with the incalculability of justice? The third and final section reflects on the importance of the challenges of XENOGENESIS in light of justice today.

Keywords:

• Violence
• Utopia: Xenogenesis
• Octavia Butler
• Justice
• Utopian Literature

Acknowledgments

I would like to extend my sincere thanks to Dr. Naomi Jacobs (University of Maine), Tina Karwalajtys, and Sabine Milz for their support, input, and helpful editorial comments as this paper evolved. A much earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2001 annual meeting of the Society for Utopian Studies, Buffalo, New York. Please see http://www.utoronto.ca/utopia. Thanks also to David Braid and to Lisa Trubitt and the editors of CJR. This forum on justice and utopia is an important one that will hopefully spawn much more needed dialogue.

Notes

[1] Stewart and Strathern explore various types of ethnic conflict around the world, focusing on Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, Rwanda‐Urundi, and Northern Ireland.

[2] Saint Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) challenges Plato’s Republic in the introductory poem by Mr. Windbag: “NOPLACIA was once my name,/That is, a place where no one goes. Plato’s Republic now I claim/To match, or beat its own game” (p. 27).

[3] I consider this question at length in my paper “Nietzsche, Justice and the Limits of Calculation” (2001). Nietzsche’s (1967) On the Genealogy of Morals provides an interesting framework in which to understand how power functions in light of one’s understanding of what is good and evil.

[4] For a complete “Biography of Utopian Fiction from 1836–1988,” see Kessler (1990). For a more recent bibliography, consult Moylan (2000).

[5] The existential crisis faced by the main protagonist demonstrates the balancing act between following the rules of the state and finding clandestine ways to resist its repressive ideology and absolute will. The great value of dystopia is in its description of how its citizens are formed: by their dependence on power as much as their opposition to power.

[6] When speaking about Butler’s fiction, Thomas Disch emphasizes her thematic interests:

A first serious of Patternist novels ran to five volumes, and that was followed by the XENOGENESIS trilogy. Both sequences concern the interracial, or interspecies, breeding of humans to improve the species—in the first case, to create mutants with psychic powers; in the second, to defuse human aggressiveness. She has a New Age enthusiasm for telepathy, out‐of‐body experience, and kindred knacks, but her eugenics programs are run by malign supernatural beings or by Strieber‐style alien experimenters. Her black heroines must endure rape, incest, slavery in the Old South, all for the sake of improving the race. (Disch, 1998, pp. 198–199)

[7] Dorothy Allison praises Butler for creating “books with female characters who heroically adjust to family life and through example, largeness of spirit, and resistance to domination make the lives of those children better—even though [this] means sacrificing personal freedom” (1990, p. 471).

[8] Throughout Dawn, Lilith is an easy target for angry Humans unable to strike back directly at the Oankali. The Humans find her a convenient scapegoat: when Lilith tells Akin her story, she says:

Her name was an epithet among English‐speaking resisters.… [T]hey blamed her for what the Oankali had done to them because she was the person the Oankali had chosen to work through. She had had to awaken groups of Humans from suspended animation and help them understand their new situation. Only she could speak Oankali then. Only she could open and close walls and use her Oankali‐enhanced strength to protect herself and others. That was enough to make her a collaborator, a traitor in the minds of her own people. It had been safe to blame her, she said. The Oankali were powerful and dangerous, and she was not. (Butler, 1988/2000, 1988, p. 438)

Lilith becomes the bureaucrat par excellence: she is a figure of power and knowledge who does the “dirty work” for the Oankali.

[9] This list of categorized violence is taken from the WHO World Report on Violence and Health (Krug et al., 2002). This book defines interpersonal, collective, and social forms of violence in more detail.

[10] Such examples create pessimism toward the Humans, especially among the Oankali and their children, like Shkaht, who are repulsed by Human violence: “Humans had come to their own end.… [T]hey were flawed and overspecialized. If they hadn’t had their war, they would have found another way to kill themselves” (Butler, 1988/2000, p. 378).

[11] Akin, Lilith’s construct alien‐human male son, sees a need for a better solution to the Human Contradiction, believing their displacement from Oankali rule on a separate Mars colony will somehow restore the Human sense of dignity, freedom, and reason to live:

They were not killing each other over the Mars decision, but they were killing each other. There always seemed to be a reason for Humans to kill each other. He would give them a new world—a hard world that would demand cooperation and intelligence. Without either, it would surely kill them. Could even Mars distract them long enough for them to breed their way out of their Contradiction? (Butler, 1988/2000, p. 497)

Akin’s concern for the Human right to peaceful, isolated existence shows his sensitivity to change. His obsessive desire to restore justice to the Humans separates him from his Oankali forefathers, who would never offer Mars to humanity. Akin gives Humans hope for independence: “I am a part of you. Because I say you should have one more chance to breed yourselves out of your genetic contradiction” (Butler, 1988/2000, p. 501). Though the Oankali definition of freedom differs from Akin’s, his Human personality affords him an alternative means to free the Humans and also deal with Human violence. Recognizing and sympathizing with the source of Human rage, Akin is able to offer a communal goal that demands “cooperation and intelligence.”

[12] Such unforgiving attitudes deny Humans the power fundamentally to change their circumstances and peacefully gain justice for their oppression. XENOGENESIS makes absurd the Human rejection of alternatives to violence, such as Mars. The Mars colony possibility is also problematic because of the ethics of the territorial displacement; however, Mars as a short‐term solution to Human suffering is still not deliberated at length by the Humans. Only Tate is initially open to dialogue, while the other Phoenix resisters fail to acknowledge it as an alternative—some are preoccupied with retrieving Earth, others cannot forgive the Oankali, etc. In Adulthood Rites (Butler, 1988/2000) Mars is not the central focus for the Humans. Akin’s dream is not big enough to convince the Humans to stop at once the violent raids, killings, and arson in Human resister cities like Phoenix. In subtle ways, Butler certainly struggles with the modern problem of violence that halts solidarity among people. In XENOGENESIS, the Humans’ failure to trust one another and work together to endure their situation of strife initiates their lack of solidarity.

[13] The theme of instability in the Humans who find no meaning in life is symbolized by the setting. Upon Akin’s return to the once utopian, post‐war city of Phoenix, years after his first childhood visit, he is forced to compare “Phoenix as he remembered it to Phoenix now. There was trash on the street. Dead weeds, food waste, scrap wood, cloth, paper. Some of the houses were obviously vacant. A couple of them had been partially torn down. Others seemed ready to fall down” (Butler, 1988/2000, p. 482). Without the Oankali, caretaker‐style conscience that supports environmentally‐friendly waste disposal and overall respect for life, the many resisters of Phoenix—initially the most beautiful resister city—fail to “distract” themselves long enough to fight the Human Contraction that guides Human destruction of the environment. As a sub‐adult near metamorphoses, the stage of alien life prior to Oankali‐construct adulthood, Akin finds himself among Humans who have degenerated into a violent state. Neci will not see past his alien qualities: she attempts to kill Akin in his sleep, even though he wants to help free Humanity from its bondage of sterile existence.

[14] In Adulthood Rites (Butler, 1988/2000), Akin represents the hope of conscience in the next generation of Human‐alien constructs: unlike the Human resisters who see no need to interact with the Oankali, Akin learns to understand the complexities of both races and teaches the traditionalist Oankali Akjai about his own experiences of suffering that makes him identify with the suffering of the Humans. Akin’s presence in the text guides a sort of idealistic hoping for justice. He is a prophetic figure while also representing the problematic way that one’s status affords a voice for justice. While his mother, Lilith, is firmly assured that she will never understand the Oankali—her communicative abilities are too primitive (in her Human Contradiction) for her to grasp Oankali ways—Akin, on the other hand, is invited to participate in Oankali consensus because he is half Oankali. Through the Oankali/Human divide, Butler successfully demonstrates realities of class struggle and the violence imposed on individuals because of their lack of status. Butler’s thematic emphasis on silence, both Human and Oankali, further criticizes the injustice of denial that creates the perspective that only some voices are worth hearing. While Akin’s plight is a heroic attempt to highlight freedom for the Humans, his efforts rest upon his ability to access the Oankali, whose consensus is always and wholly inaccessible to the Humans.

[15] Even when Akin, a minority of one, is allowed to stay with the resisters and learn about their suffering, he is strategically chosen by consensus to give Humans the Mars alternative, an ingenious way to alleviate burdens of guilt.

[16] One cannot help but align the alien disposition as Butler’s critique of the empty quality of accountability today, a phenomenon which constantly displaces responsibility, as in governments or large corporations where the question of who will be held accountable gets lost in a ladder of hierarchy. Throughout her trilogy, Butler seems to question the relationship between deliberation, action, and consequence in the effort to mediate between those ideologies of the Oankali which also evade accountability to justice.

[17] In light of this understanding of justice as response to others, Adulthood Rites certainly affords its protagonist more success in penetrating and paralyzing the state: Akin, for instance, takes an entire Oankali ship to demand justice, a response to Human suffering. Though many do not take Akin seriously because he is a child, he especially clarifies his own experiences of “abduction, captivity, and conversion” among the resisters to try to teach the Oankali a lesson about otherness: “You should at least know [the Humans] before you deny them the assurance the Oankali always claim for themselves” (Butler, 1988/2000, p. 468). This hopeful endeavor criticizes Oankali avoidance, which claims to know Humans while it fails to understand them. Akin’s inability to “understand their [Oankali] reactions” as characterized as “a turning away, a warding off, a denial, a revulsion” (Butler, 1988/2000, p. 469) resonates as further criticisms of violence rooted in a negligence to fully comprehend the feelings of another.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christina Braid

Christina Braid is an independent scholar.