Do we trust the Oankali?
Most of the members of the class said yes. I think we need to reconsider whether or not we really feel this way about them. With a novel full of aliens, in the extraterrestrial context, surprisingly very little seems foreign or “alien.” The opening paragraphs describing Lilith’s cell while “Awakening” strike a remarkable resemblance to a hospital room; from the “doorway that probably led to a bathroom” to the “lumpy cereal or stew” to the “scar across the abdomen.” When the Oankali are describing what had happened to the Earth, they describe a world destroyed by war, something not foreign or surprising in the age of the atom and hydrogen bombs. So with very little seeming foreign or “alien” within the text, I find my classmates’ trust in the Oankali the most strange or “alien.”
How can we trust beings who have locked Lilith in a prison, keeping her in her own words “helpless, alone, and ignorant?” These are beings who twice had not given Lilith a bathroom in her “windowless [and] doorless cubicle;” a bathroom with which she considered a “luxury” because it “had not only a toilet and a sink, but a shower.” How can you trust the beings who without her consent left a “long scar across her abdomen?” Beings who allowed her to get to such a state as to which she began “a search for some crack, some sound of hollowness, some indication of a way out of her prison.” Even after the Oankali began to allow Lilith to learn about their intentions, appearing as doing good and helping the human species, Jdahya says things like “several [humans] have tried to kill me.” This could be interpreted as implying that because he is still alive, those attempts have failed, and not to try anything similar; implying that they are in charge. The entire tone of the first couple chapters seems to imply an unknown danger, the fear of something foreign. It is because of this that I find it “alien” that my classmates would be so open to trusting the Oankali.
