The Oankali Approach to Remembering in Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood

Abstract

The Oankali Approach to Remembering in Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood R. Nicole Smith (bio) In the tradition of speculative fiction, this essay asks, “what if?”: What if we reconstructed the path to Black liberation using a new framework for remembering? Instead of navigating rememory of the cultural and historical traumas of chattel slavery and colonization, we would prioritize remembering these important histories as collections of cautionary tales to be honored, retold, and reinformed. In this model, historical narratives about genocidal pasts would not transmit the emotional trauma of these stories to future generations. Instead, these past accounts would persist as contributions to a data stream that honors the holistic, traumatic experiences of ancestors’ experiences and retain these historical narratives as fluid and intentionally instructional information. Evoking the characteristics of Sankofa, members of the African diaspora would engage this information as protected data that shapes liberated, contented Black futures. There is precedent for employing an ethos of contentment as a framework for liberation. One example lies in activist adrienne maree brown’s concept of pleasure activism. The author describes her concept as, “. . . the work we do to reclaim ourselves as whole happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy” (9). Another model exists in cultural strategist Anasa Troutman’s use of love as a philosophical framework for her social justice activism (Troutman, From Justice to Joy). The Oankali aliens in Octavia Butler’s first-contact trilogy Lilith’s Brood (2000), originally published as Xenogenesis (1987–1989), offer a similarly unique, albeit figurative model for Black liberation through the aliens’ approach to memory. For the Oankali, memories are material to be “examined, memorized, and either preserved alive or allowed to live their natural span and die” (693). Their primary view of memories as data does not invite an emphasis on the emotional pain associated with cultural, historical, and related, individual traumas. Instead, the outcome of the Oankali approach to memory engages remembrance as a Sankofa-inspired data stream, a resource that shapes the future. This extraterrestrial model for engaging memory offers a more expedient and sustainable path to healing than rememory. Toni Morrison introduces readers to the term rememory in her novel Beloved. Morrison describes this term as “recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past” (Source, 323). Morrison continues, “Therefore not only is the major preoccupation of the central [End Page 163] characters that of reconstituting and recollecting a usable past . . . but also the narrative strategy the plot formation turns on the stress of remembering, its inevitability, the chances for liberation that lie within the process” (323, my emphasis). Sethe, the protagonist in Beloved illustrates this tension in her conversation with her daughter Denver and describes rememory as a remembrance that exists as a tangible image, almost like a photograph. You can even, she tells her daughter Denver, bump up against someone else’s rememory - especially if you stand in the place where the memory originated. She calls a person’s initial experience with this, a “thought picture” (Beloved, 35–36). For Sethe, rememory lives and breathes and endangers. As such, it can linger in a place, almost like a ghost, and cause psychic and emotional damage (McDonald 36). She warns her daughter Denver to never return to the Sweet Home plantation Sethe escaped from because, “if you go there (you who’ve never been there) and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again . . . it is waiting for you” (Beloved, 36). Here Sethe, like the Oankali, presents to her daughter an approach to memories that she thinks will enable Denver to survive. However, unlike the Oankali, Sethe’s approach prioritizes the persistence of the past in the present. In doing so, she paints trauma and its companion, rememory, as temporal fixatives that do not offer psychological or emotional room for sustained healing and future building. Sethe’s narrative becomes unstuck when she gains the ability to instead place emphasis on present experiences. Sethe processes her pain and engages her memories as information that constantly informs her present moments. Following the Oankali model, Sethe examines her memories and...