Vegan Book Club discussion
August 2019: Dawn
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Part I: Womb
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Tessa, Founder + Curator
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Aug 07, 2019 10:30AM
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I'm very curious about the Oankali: how do they live, how do they interact with each other, how will they interact with Lilith, are they as calm and kind as Jdahya...and what about the ooloi and their obsession with the cancer?
A part that immediately stuck out to me was when Lilith learns what these alien creatures have been doing to her:
"This was one more thing they had done to her body without her consent and supposedly for her own good. 'We used to treat animals that way,' she muttered bitterly[...]'We did things to them - inoculations, surgery, isolation - all for their own good. We wanted them healthy and protected - sometimes so we could eat them later.'"
This brings up so much re: consent. Who are the Oankali or the ooloi to make these decisions for the humans? What gives them the right to decide how the humans will live or die, what they will do, what their children will look like? As Lilith points out, it is very much how humans treat animals raised for food...and she doesn't compare the two in a positive way.
Jdahya seems very kind, despite all of this, and I'm very interested in seeing how the story develops. I want to meet more of the Oankali, in particular the ooloi. I also really want to see the child Lilith shared a room with. Will they recognize each other, will there be some sort of parent-child bond?
I'll keep sharing my thoughts from the bus lol. I hope y'all are enjoying Dawn as much as I am so far!
I'm feeling the same way. I didn't grow up reading science-fiction so Dawn is somewhat out of my comfort zone, but I'm enjoying it in the sense that it's a conceptually interesting page-turner and I want to find out what happens next. This may sound weird - and I'm sure it's a bias - but I'm not sure if it's well-written or simply outside the norms and conventions of what I'm used to reading. For example, in every writing class I've ever taken, we've always been told to "show, not tell" so I'm not used to being told exactly what someone is feeling or thinking in quite this way. I'm not used to having such access to someone's internal experience. Usually, these things are left unsaid or inferred indirectly in other ways, so I'm finding it strange to be told things so directly and unambiguously. On the other hand, a lot more "happens" in this book than in most other books I read and I'm enjoying the pacing of the plot and admire the way Butler builds a sense of anticipation.
I'm also interested in the themes and concepts around consent, exploitation and the use of another being's body as a means to an end. I'm finding the Oankali somewhat confusing and ethically inconsistent. On the one hand they don't eat animals or wish to be violent towards humans, but on the other hand they see no issue with holding someone captive and causing them psychological/emotional harm. The book raises the question about who gets to define harm or what counts as violence. It's also tricky because the Oankali have apparently rescued and saved the last remaining humans so they have benevolent qualities, but at the same time it doesn't feel like benevolence or compassion as their motivation is to use the rescued humans as a resource. Right now, I feel like I'm trying to make direct comparisons to veganism because I'm obviously reading it for a vegan book club, but I'm not sure if Butler is definitely making an argument for non-speciest veganism or if it's just that she doesn't think that treating humans this way is acceptable. Perhaps that will become more clear by the end of the book.
One of the most interesting parts of this section is the idea that humans have a mismatched pair of genetic characteristics - Intelligence plus the fact that we are Hierarchical - and that "Either alone would have been useful, would have aided the survival of your species, but the two together are lethal." It's interesting to think that hierarchies might not be bad in and of themselves, but that it's the combination of hierarchy along with intellect that is problematic - our consciousness of being "higher" or "lower" that causes psychic and emotional pain. I think of this when I look at our 8 rescue ducks. They have this complex pecking order and some are picked on and bullied by the "top ranking" ducks. It upsets me to see it because I hate bullying or leaving others out, but it doesn't seem to bother the ducks or cause them any particular distress. They're super intelligent animals in their own way, but I sometimes envy them their lack of humanlike consciousness. Maybe ignorance is bliss after all :)
Ayoola wrote: "Earlier today, I came across an essay about how this Xenogenesis series can be read as an allegory for colonization: one group saves another group from themselves, wipes away their own understandin..."Hi Ayoola, that's super interesting and makes total sense, I'm going to look up that essay.
I'll also add Decolonize Your Diet to my list of books to read, thanks for the tip. I read these articles a few months back and keep meaning to read more in-depth about colonization/decolonization as it relates to food:
https://foodispower.org/our-food-choi...
https://hiplatina.com/vegan-chef-deco...
Ayoola wrote: "Debora, with regard to your question about whether it’s the conventions of the genre or Butler’s talent as a writer, the answer is both. Genre fiction tends to have very different rules from litera..."The further along I've read, the more I'm letting go of my biases about what a "good" book should read like. I'm just heading into the final section and will probably jump right into the next book in the trilogy. I'm actually looking forward to reading more sic-fi after this, it's so immersive and a great way to fully detach myself from the immediate world around me. I read her novel Fledgling a couple of years ago, but I don't think I was in the right head space for it, so I'm going to re-read that at some point this year and see if I can get into it.
