Images of Slavery

Octavia Butler’s Dawn and Hortense Spillers’s Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book all are groundbreaking pieces. However, this is not what draws the three together. They are related instead by their use of the African American female and her role in history.

In Dawn, Butler creates a dystopian world where the Earth’s population is nearly destroyed and the few survivors are “saved” by aliens called Oankali. Her heroine, Lilith, whose name is symbolic of Adam’s first wife who becomes the snake to lead them out of Eden, if awakened by the aliens, and it quickly becomes evident that they are not just here to save our “race.” Instead, the Oankali and the Ooloi view us as “trading partners.” The aliens have kept Lilith in suspended animation for approximately 250 years, and through her and other humans, they are able to take traits of our species and use them to adapt themselves.

When Lilith is awakened, it is reminiscent of a slave being startled by drastically different conditions. They keep her alone, and she nearly loses her saniy. Eventually Lilith comes to accept the Oankali, but it isn’t until she meets another human, Paul Titus, that she realizes her, and the other human’s purpose. They want her to “giv[e] them a human child to tamper with” (D 92), This suggests that the aliens have no interest in saving the humans, just evolving themselves into what they saw themselves as, a more perfect being. Like the white slave masters who saw some primal desire in the slave women they captured, the Ooloi have a twisted sexual desire for the humans. The Ooloi can also be viewed as slave masters because when they woke people, they didn’t automatically tell people what was going on, they interrogated them and “wanted to see how each individual broke” (D 120). This idea shows that the Ooloi needed to see what pushed each human to his or her limits, so that they could control every person.

It is ironic that Butler’s hero is a black female because the African slave woman was often left out of slave history, as Spillers says. Spillers says that for the African slave woman, “rape … [became a series of ] externalized acts of torture” (68). When comparing this to Lilith’s description of the sexual acts with Nikanj, her Ooloi companion, she says “it would have outsold every illegal drug on the market” (D 170). Obviously this sexual connection could be used to control the humans. Butler mirrors her story off the story of slavery, by having the Oankali wipe the humans minds of being saved, it directly parallels the fact that woman weren’t discussed in the Middle Passage. Also, the fact that Lilith, a black woman, is the leader is ironic because as Spiller says, in “African cultures… [women] performed hard tasks… so much so that the quintessential ‘slave’ is not a male, but a female” (72-3). This is shy the Oankali decide to make a woman the leader, she is used to being the leader of the home and is also easier to control.

In the end of the novel, they travel northward down a river on an illusion of Earth, which is obviously symbolic of slaves heading north to freedom. Unfortunately, the human’s cannot escape since they aren’t really on Earth, but it is here where Nikanj reveals the true price that the humans are paying. They can no longer reproduce without the Ooloi. This means that our species is now dependent on them, and that the children created will not be human, “[i]t will be a thing. A monster” (D 246). While Nikanj tries to comfort Lilith by telling her that her child will be mostly human, this final scene breaks her, because she will never be able to return to Earth now. Nikanj says “it will be my first child” (D 246); this takes away the child from Lilith, and makes it not her own child. This is something that was common in slavery, and as Spillers says on pages 77 and 78, “even though the enslave female reproduced other enslaved persons, we do not read ‘birth’ … because the female, like the male, has been robbed of the parental right.” This shows the ultimate cost of the Oankali’s actions. Humans are a tool which the ooloi can control society. We have lost everything, and are now truly slaves without a hope of real freedom.