Journal Entry 1 by Lorelei03 from Flushing, New York USA on Sunday, March 05, 2006

book two of Xenogenesis

In memory of Octavia Estelle Butler(d 2006), the first African-American woman to gain popularity and critical acclaim as a science fiction writer I will be sending 4 of her books out as rings.

Through her work, Butler explored issues of race, gender, power, and what defines humanity.

This is the second book of Xenogenesis trilogy, a sequel to Dawn. Dawn ended when Lilith turned out pregnant in the Oankali spaceship. Adulthood Rites is set in the time the baby is already two years old, and those humans who agreed to the Oankali's idea of "gene trade" built a village called Lo on Earth with the Oankali. Akin is the first humanborn male construct baby, son of Lilith, her long-dead husband, and three Oankali (female, male, and ooloi). Unlike other constructs, he looks fully human except for the tongue. He uses his tongue to "taste" cells, genes, and most molecular structures (the Oankali use tentacles to do the same), and is quite intelligent for a human of his age, like other Oankali children. Humans who do not agree to the "trade" are called "resisters," and live in separate communities on Earth. Since the resisters are sterilized, some of them attempt to kidnap construct children. Akin comes to be abducted by raiders who sell babies to resister villages. Living in the village called Phoenix, he learns how his alien perceptions are different from humans, but also understands anger and desperation humans feel in the condition that they are going to extinct without producing human descendants. When he is about three years old, his parents find him and return to Lo. When he is around 20 years old, right before his metamorphosis begins, he meets the Akjai and decides to rescue human roots by fertilizing them. (The Oankali consists of three groups, Dinso, Akjai, and Toaht. Dinso means "trader," those who genetically blend with other species. Akjai are those who remain purely Oankali. These seem to be their occupations rather than policy or life style.) Some constructs and Akjai consent to Akin, and he chooses Phoenix village to work together.
Review
Dawn mainly illustrated the alienness of the Oankali that gives terror to humans, with a focus on Lilith who feels alienated from both. Adulthood sheds light on Akin, a human-Oankali construct, who tries to understand both standpoints as he grows up. In this sense, this is an initiation story of an alien boy, which is very unusual as a Sci-Fi setting. He learns about how humans care about human looks. In Phoenix village, he sees two construct girls kidnapped like himself. They have little tentacles on some spots of the body, and thus villagers plan to cut them off to normalize and humanize them. He also comes to realize that his look, although very human, cannot be well accepted in villages of English-speaking people because of his brown skin and Asian look (his human mother is African American, his father, Chinese). He learns that humans can be very dangerous when they notice utter difference in him (his tongue), so he becomes careful of telling how his tongue functions. He is always frustrated, because he wants to stay somewhere, but cannot anywhere. He is determined to be a nomad. As an initiation story, he learns his body and sex as well. It is when he metamorphoses into an Oankali body that his sexuality awakes. The Oankali body is very sexually pleasurable in the sense that it can enjoy boundary-less union with others and arouses pleasurable images and emotions in the body by chemical stimulation (like drug in effect). When Akin meets an ooloi and experiences this union with it, he at first fears the sense of being drowned in the vast boundary-less fluidity, but soon starts to enjoy the communion.
The idea that differences are originated in body rather than culture or social norms is called essentialism. In this sense, this novel is very essentialist. It says that humans have unavoidable contradiction which leads them to extinction, that is, contradiction of intelligence and hierarchy. The Oankali say the Contradiction is genetic, and thus, it is impossible to start over from scratch. Humans repeat destruction, and it is not because humans have that tendency culturally or socially, but because their genes are programed that way. Since this is a science fiction, it is not simply essentialist but constructionist as well. If genetically contradictory, let us change genes. The Oankali manipulate this contradiction by blending other genes with humans, and it is how they reproduce "constructs." Body tends to be considered as the site of essentialism, but in this novel, the body--the flesh-- is exactly the possibility of constructionism. The Oankali body goes against the notion of cybernetic body, to aim at the same goal. It is interesting to see how Butler uses anti-machine (almost ecologist) metaphors to deny essentialism of body. This is very new because cyberfeminism appeared as a counter reaction to ecologist feminism (celebration of Mother Earth and revisit to nature, etc.) and claims on the amalgamated body of machine and computer against ecological/natural body. Xenogenesis trilogy tries to go between the two, by appreciating "nature" and still maintaining the constructedness of the body.
KS 5/26/99 http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/k/x/kxs334/academic/fiction/butler_adult.html