59 pages • 1 hour read
Imago
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Themes
The Nature of Autonomy and Consent in Alien/Human Relationships
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses rape.
In Imago, the nature of consent between Oankali and humans has progressed since their first encounter a century earlier. In Dawn, the Oankali drugged humans and attached their tentacles to them while they were unconscious. Nikanj impregnated Lilith with a fertilized egg without her verbal consent, though in this speculative world, Nikanj had consulted Lilith’s body for approval. Butler includes several scenes of consent in the novel to suggest a closer understanding between the two species and the ambiguities of forming a radically interdependent relationship while honoring an individual’s autonomy.
The novel provides multiple scenes where Jodahs does not behave like the previous Oankali and considers humans’ permission before it acts. Even when Marina Rivas gives her verbal consent and allows Aaor and Jodahs to sleep beside her and touch her, Jodahs is “careful not to touch her in any way that would alarm her” (60). Likewise, Jodahs refrains from touching Tomás and Jesusa as they sleep, declaring, “I wanted them to let me do it” (101). In the mountain village, Jodahs treats Santos but “never drugged him in the way ooloi usually drugged resisters” (185). Like its older sibling, Akin, who advocated for human independence on Mars, Jodahs has learned the importance of giving humans autonomy, especially when it comes to physical touch.
Jodahs also obeys humans’ verbal commands to not be touched and intuits when to refrain from interfering with human emotions. When Jodahs must tell Jesusa the truth of Earth’s fate, Jesusa seeks to maintain her clarity apart from Jodahs’s influence and instructs, “Just tell me. Don’t touch me again” (115). Likewise, Jodahs resists soothing Jesusa’s anger at the prospect of Aaor’s death and realizes, “I had to keep stopping myself from giving her relief. She didn’t need or want that from me now. Both my mother and Nikanj had warned me that not every pain should be immediately healed” (162-63). Jodahs’s sensitivity is a breakthrough in human-Oankali relationships, as Jesusa’s anger is rooted in compassion and justice for Aaor. Her anger is violence but indignation that to let someone die is wrong and should not be tolerated.
Whereas in the past, humans felt condescended to and coerced by the Oankali, Jodahs specifically respects Jesusa’s boundaries. When Jesusa herself initiates a plan to return to the village and find Aaor mates, Jodahs explains that neither it nor Nikanj would have pushed her to do so. Jodahs states, “I couldn’t ask either. You had already refused. We understood your refusal” (162). The Oankali no longer assume they know better. Even Ahajas, Jodahs’s Oankali parent, advises Jodahs not to follow the siblings when they leave their forest home and reminds Jodahs that Tomás and Jesusa have survived on their own without it. Jodahs considers what humans want and what they need, even if they go against its own views and tradition— from the right to eat fish to the right to reproduce without Oankali interference.
These changes in how the Oankali treat humans demonstrate a more nuanced understanding of human behavior, one that respects their autonomy and psychological needs to express themselves and act on their own free will. The opposite of consent is rejection or refusal, making “resisters” an apt name for people who feel violated by the Oankali. Butler complicates the ethics of consent by framing many of the humans’ reasons for rejecting the Oankali as rooted in xenophobia, human purity (read “racial purity”), and heterosexist and anti-gay sentiments from the males about emasculation. Those who do not “consent” to the Oankali do so out of hatred and are the most bigoted and violent members of their community. One of the ambiguities in the novel is whether the Oankali’s pheromones violate consent by influencing human behavior. A final assurance that humans-Oankali may have a harmonious future is Lilith’s assessment that the pheromones may have helped at first, but that love genuinely developed. One interpretation of the influential scent is not that it imprisoned people, as the humans believed, but that it calmed humans and ameliorated their hatred, their prejudice, and their reactionary violence.
Reproductive and Sexual Freedom as Forms of Female Agency
Reproductive freedom is a central theme throughout the Xenogenesis series, as each novel’s plot revolves around whether and how humans are permitted to have children. The Oankali progress from the binary options of gene trading or sterilization by offering the third choice of fertility on Mars. Yet, for the humans, any form of reproductive control is a violation of their natural rights. In Imago, Butler introduces a fourth scenario that represents how humans themselves have revoked reproductive rights and female agency through social institutions that confine women’s identities in the misogynistic “virgin-whore” dichotomy.
Tomás and Jesusa’s mountain village represents the culmination of three ideological forces that repress female agency: religion, patriarchy, and nationalism. The siblings have been taught to fear and despise the Oankali as “devils” and “un-Christian,” and the elders make the sign of the cross or call upon God’s damnation when they encounter the aliens. Jodahs describes this group of leaders as “a ring of elders and aged fertiles […] There were no females present” (206). The small council of men dictates that the inhabitants must procreate within their population, and the elders assign their partners. Women are expected to have multiple births to build a nation of pure humans untouched by the Oankali, and the elders ban alien genetic treatment of inbred conditions. The founders of the village weaponize a child survivor of rape as the “First Mother,” and as Tomás tells Jodahs’s family, “They believed the Mother could be their tool to defeat you” (137). The village authorities revoke a spectrum of reproductive rights, and people who refuse to comply, especially women, are considered sinful, unnatural, and traitorous.
The dynamics of femininity in the village evoke the “virgin-whore” dichotomy. In setting the village inhabitants as peoples from Latin America and Spain, and especially with the First Mother’s origins from Mexico, Butler alludes to Latina feminist critiques and reimaginings of La Virgen de Guadalupe and La Malinche archetypes. As repressive cultural symbols, Guadalupe is the “good mother,” a self-sacrificing figure of loyalty and docility, and La Malinche is the depraved traitor. Feminist critic Gloria Anzaldua argues that Guadalupe has been stripped of her indigenous identity and sexuality to be used as an emblem of the Catholic Church, the nation, and patriarchal control over women’s bodies. She contends, “They desexed Guadalupe, taking Coatlalopeuh, the serpent / sexuality, out of her” (Anzaldua, Gloria. “Entering into the Serpent.” Borderlands/La Frontera, 1987, p. 27). Anzaldua reinterprets the snake imagery from the Christian canon, coded as evil and poisonous, to Aztec iconography of the snake as fertility, healing, and sexuality. This background offers a richer understanding of Jesusa’s character and her decisions to ally with the Oankali, whose tentacles humans often associate with snakes.
Jesusa’s decision to lead Jodahs and Aaor to her village is not an act of betrayal but of liberation. After spending time with Jodahs and its family, Jesusa learns that the lessons she was taught as a child were misrepresentations. When she examines Jodahs for the first time, she recalls, “All my life, I’ve heard that they were like snakes and the Oankali were covered with them” (111). Jodahs replies that some Oankali are covered with tentacles, but their functions more closely align with Anzaldua’s empowering descriptions of fertility, healing, and sexuality than of evil or sin. A significant aspect of Jodahs’s tentacles is Jesusa’s experiences of sensual pleasure with them, an aspect of female agency the village elders repressed and demonized. During their initial physical encounter, Jodahs narrates, “‘Touch me,’ she said. I touched her thigh, and her body flared with sexual feeling” (111). Jesusa’s sexual pleasure with Jodahs challenges the village’s dictates that women’s bodies serve the community as mothers and vessels for sexual reproduction. In challenging the village elders, Jesusa articulates female agency as one endowed with reproductive and sexual freedom.
Reproductive freedom is not only a right for humans but also for Jodahs and other new ooloi constructs whom the Oankali want to isolate and control. In the novel’s closing chapters, Jodahs draws a direct connection between autonomy and reproductive freedom and declares, “We represented the premature adulthood of a new species. We represented true independence—reproductive independence—for that species” (217). The once repressive mountain village becomes a refuge for those breaking the parameters of each species’ identity to explore new ways of being.
The Ethics of Genetic Engineering and Posthumanism
One of the central conflicts in the Xenogenesis series concerns the Oankali’s genetic engineering of humans and the premise that humans have forfeited their lives due to their genetic flaws. Butler plays with this speculative conceit, at times presenting the Oankali as a dystopian, colonizing force based in the logic of biological determinism, the scientific racism of eugenics, and the body horror of alien invasion. At other times, the Oankali’s genetic engineering represents a utopian vision of harmonious coexistence, ecological sustainability, and the demolition of hierarchies and social injustices. Some of the humans who still resist the Oankali are depicted as violent and xenophobic, and illustrate why humanity is doomed to self-destruction. In Imago, Jodahs becomes an object of Oankali scrutiny because it has no static biological identity for the Oankali to interpret and determine. As a repository of biodiversity and the first of a new species, Jodahs is a figure of biological indeterminacy and a prototype for a posthumanist/postOankali subjectivity.
Although many humans have emigrated to Mars, several resister communities remain, raiding gardens, vandalizing property, abducting women, and shooting Oankali and human allies on sight. To the Oankali, such behaviors warrant their control, yet their methods involve the ethical violations of forced sterilization and human experimentation. Jodahs narrates how the Oankali deal with violent resisters in a stark, matter-of-fact tone that recalls historical human rights abuses. Jodahs describes,
Their village […] would be gassed, and the attackers hunted out by scent. They would be found and exiled to the ship. There, if they had killed, they would be kept either unconscious or drugged to pleasure and contentment. They would never be allowed to awaken completely. They would be used as teaching aids, subjects for biological experiments, or reservoirs of Human genetic material (48).
The passage mirrors a similar description of what Jodahs fears it will face when it is exiled on the homeship. In Chapter 3, Jodahs describes the threat of being “physically altered” for being an ooloi construct. Jodahs continues, “Perhaps it would be so dangerous that it would have to spend its existence in suspended animation, its body used by others for painless experimentation, its consciousness permanently shut off” (21). The two passages highlight the plot reversal in which Jodahs might experience the same loss of autonomy the humans have by the Oankali. The similar fates are a critique of the Oankali and their problematic justifications for interfering with humanity. The Oankali are reframed as not simply merging with a new species but dominating it.
Yet, an alternative interpretation of the Oankali is one that critically responds to the historical abuses of bioengineering by imagining a post-human, interspecies, and non-hierarchical world that values change, difference, and diversity. The Oankali’s purpose in life is to explore the cosmos and acquire or “trade” genetic information to form new species, not perfect human beings. In interviews, Butler discussed her interest in exploring new biological models in her fiction and stated, “I was so happy […] to find Lynn Margulis, a biologist who talks about symbiogenesis, the evolution by symbiosis, by coming together as opposed to evolution by conflict and the strongest wins and that kind of thing” (Butler, Octavia. The Last Interview. Melville House, 2023). The Oankali fit the description of symbiogenesis theory in the ooloi’s unique organelle, a model of the single-celled organism that merged with other prokaryotes to create multicellular and more complex organisms. Jodahs explains, “The organelle made or found compatibility with life-forms so completely dissimilar that they were unable even to perceive one another as alive” (23). The Oankali’s origin is founded on living, growing, and merging rather than conquest, abjection, and othering.
The Oankali’s genetic engineering powers are almost a type of animism, where organs like yashi are personified, villages are living ships, and the homeship is a plant-like bioship. The Oankali live a life of sustainability, where animals are not eaten and nourishment is efficiently absorbed from plants, wood, and their own food production from the ship’s walls. This technology stands in sharp contrast to humans who build nuclear weapons to destroy all living things on Earth, including themselves. The Oankali represent a posthumanist vision where social hierarchies are replaced by symbiosis and ecology. This critical posthumanist world is not one that elides the histories and realities of race, gender, class, and sexuality, but rather, as shown through the protagonists Lilith and Jesusa, centers the perspective of women of color in this new imagining.
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By Octavia E. Butler
