Dear Akin,
As I look forward to your birth, I cannot help but be filled with apprehension and anticipation. You are the fulfillment of dreams I never thought I would again be able have. I believed giving birth to a child would be like bestowing life only to sentence it to death. Truly after your brother’s death long before you were even conceived, I felt the hole he had left in my life could never be filled by another. Then I met the Ooankali and your father and the whole world changed. Even now I’m not sure if it has changed for the better, save for the fact that you will soon be part of my life. As I write this I don’t truly know what you will look like, what you will think of me, what you will think of your human parents, but I hope that you will always know that I love you despite whatever you may look like. You are the first of your kind being born amidst the convergence of two races with very different paths. My path, the human path, has led our people to the brink of annihilation. The Ooankali path, which is now your path, has taken humanity from the edge of its destruction and repurposed it to preserve life. I did not say save because what I hope you come to learn is that all that humanity was is slowly passing away. Everything that made us what we are has been taken and blended and left us dead as a people. Now you will be both Human and Ooankali and share in the legacy of both races. I do not know yet what you will be whether male or female, but as for a mother’s intuition I have named you hero in my people’s tongue because I believe you will be a man to bridge the gap between our people. You will understand humanity as no Ooankali has before because you will be the first hybrid male ever to be born. The burden that will be placed upon you is enormous and I wish I knew how to guide you, but I do not know what will soon come to pass. I believe you are key because you will be a man which the Ooankali fear and do not understand. In this I believe I possess a rare insight that your other parents do not even acknowledge themselves yet or perhaps do not understand. The natural way of a Human man is to be a dominant hierarchal figure but this is a foreign way and a dangerous way to the Ooankali and they refuse to embrace it. But you will be a hybrid and I hope that in this blending you do not lose what it means to be Ooankali, but in particular what it means to be Human. Your Ooankali parents cannot and will never fully understand what they have done to our race and even fear what we may yet return to being. Despite this it is my greatest hope that you can do what no other construct has done and explain to the Ooankali and teach them why we resist and fight back against them. You may come to understand as I have that we do not fight because our bodies tell us to, but rather because our bodies are responding to the identity we have formed as a people through our history. The Ooankali see everything as an extension of biology and genetics, and ignore the will of the mind as sovereign over the body in our existence. You have a chance to change everything and I pray and will try to help you in this as much as I can, but I fear as your Ooloi parent told me once I will never understand, but he said that you would. That puts the weight of spanning the divide between resisters and Ooankali on your shoulders.