Bigotry

Although the Oankali are firmly represented as antagonists throughout the novel, Butler uses the slippery ethics of their project with humanity as a means of exploring the complex relationship between instincts and prejudices. On the one hand, Lilith’s distrust of her alien captors registers as understandable and sympathetic to a human audience; she is, after all, being held captive in a strange place by a group of people who speak an unfamiliar language and have an unfamiliar appearance. When it is understood that these captors are aliens, the disturbance that Lilith feels does not register as prejudice or bias. Butler, though, seeks to interrogate why this might be; the relationship that Lilith has with the Oankali is, at times, meant as a means of exploring the genesis of human prejudice. After all, Lilith’s revulsion toward the Oankali would be more than distaste if it...