“‘Do you understand what now what happened to us?’
‘I’m aware of what happened. It’s…alien to me. Frighteningly alien’” (Butler 16).
As I dove right into Lilith’s Brood, I thought about what it means to be “alien,” particularly what it meant to those in the 1980′s world that Octavia Butler was writing in. There resides the obvious “extraterrestrial” of which we and undoubtedly Butler are all familiar with. But as I read about Lilith’s first encounter with an Oankali, this phrase struck me. Stripping it down to its element, to be “alien” to something means simply to be unfamiliar with it, to be estranged from it. So as I read Butler’s vivid description of Jdhaya, with his face with no eyes or ears and his many slug-like sensory tentacles, for some reason this did not at all seem alien to me. In one sense, I was even fully expecting it. But the statement above shocked me. Jdhaya attempts to explain to Lilith why they had come to Earth, and he says that upon coming and seeing the world in such a nuclear disaster, the Oankali originally suspected a consensus of suicide of the human race, but is surprised to find that this was not the case. When reading of Lilith’s first description of this “humanicide” (8), I’m sure almost every reader of the day knew exactly what Butler was describing: a Soviet-U.S. caused Nuclear Winter. Written in the dusk of the Cold War in 1987, this topic was still much discussed and much feared.
Thus to see the “Alien” in this novel describe this nuclear armageddon as something “Frighteningly alien” to him puts the entire concept of cognitive estrangement in reverse. The very familiar fear of mass genocide from a species that almost entirely views it as evil is to the extraterrestrial something that is completely unfamiliar and instead has to be learned.
To me this gave the novel a new perspective of what it means to be “alien.”
