Octavia Butler, Chapter 1 from Imago


1. Nikanj, the protagonist of Octavia Butler’s novel Imago, is the child of five parents--two human, and three Oankali (alien); two male, two female, and one ooloi that is neither male nor female nor a combination, but as Nikanj says, "a different sex altogether." In what ways might this parentage undermine traditional conceptions of gender, the family, and related social structures?

2. Throughout Western history, hybrids of various kinds (human/animal, human/machine, human/alien) have typically been seen as "monstrous." Why? Recently, postmodern theorists such as Donna Haraway have posited the hybrid figure of the cyborg as a model for imagining the possibilities inherent in the "partial identities and contradictory standpoints" of postmodern subjectivity. How does Nikanj’s experience of the world differ from that of the humans and the Oankali? What are its advantages?

3. In Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy (of which Imago is the third book), the Oankali are aliens who rescue the last human survivors of an apocalyptic war and offer them the choice of joining (and interbreeding with) them or of emigrating to a human colony on Mars. At one point in this chapter, Nikanj tries to explain to two humans who plan to emigrate that, as a species, humanity is doomed because it is both intelligent and hierarchical. Why should this combination be lethal? Does Nikanj’s argument provide a valid or useful way of understanding human history?