I Collect Tubers

A Conditional Essay on Octavia E. Butler’s Dawn

By Miriam Akervall

If you were the kind of kid who talked to trees and expected them to talk back (or if you’re just wondering about the staggering lack of gender-fluid, alien polyamory in literature), then Dawn by Octavia E. Butler is, finally, your belated reply. Butler is well known for the Earthseed series, which won her a MacArthur Fellowship in 1995, but this 1987 novel is the first in the more speculative Xenogenesis trilogy. 

After the final atomic war ends human civilization, the Oankali arrive on Earth. They are genetic colonizers traveling space to sample interplanetary species. Their survival depends on merging their own DNA with what they discover. The Oankali decide to steward the surviving humans of Earth, but in turn, humans lose the ability to reproduce independently and must agree to join Oankali families. These families consist of a female or male human mate, a female and male Oankali mate, and a partner whose sex is called ooloi, neither male nor female.  

I suspect that my love for dystopian science fiction is related to the effects of genocide that linger in my family. We never talked about the missing names, nor what my grandmother experienced during those years; we existed perpetually on an emotional edge. Mom insisted on locked doors, an alarm set every night. She kept our number out of the phonebook, stockpiled food, and carefully shredded our mail before throwing it away. 

As an adult, I’ve made peace with the things that she needs to do to feel safe (I am myself known to keep a robust supply of canned goods, tubers, and trusted friends on hand at all times). But, as a kid, I pushed back against this behavior. Nose constantly in a book, I wanted to be brave like an Animorphs hero, to leave the doors open, to believe in the possibility of a confident existence —especially as someone who already felt alien in their own body. As an adult, survival narratives attract me for their stressful insistence on continuing. Sometimes toward safety, and sometimes out into the endless, shapeshifting possibility of outer space. Out there where relationships can take any shape and include any being.

Dystopian literature gives shape to the instinct for self-preservation that lives on in the body after terror: “paranoia” becomes “preparation.” In the wreckage of a future Earth, Butler not only invites the end but imagines what comes after.

The story of Dawn begins when Lilith Ayapo, a human survivor, wakes up on what she gradually understands to be a ship. She is met by an eyeless, gray-skinned creature named Jdhaya, who is covered in what appears to be living hair—and what turns out to be tentacles.

“‘We are Oankali.’  

‘Oankali. Sounds like a word in some Earth language.’  

‘It may be. But with different meaning.’  

‘What does it mean in your language?’  

‘Several things. Traders for one.’  

‘What do you trade?’  

‘Ourselves.’”  

Trading as the hallmark of the alien body makes sense to me. I grew up under the shadow of an engaged sympathetic nervous system. Someone was usually slamming something, or crying, or just gone for a while. As a teen, I was also trying to figure out how to occupy my body, and looking around for examples. Trading was, for me, a way to exit my environment, pick up pieces of identity, and see what stuck.

At eleven, new to middle school and its long squeaky hallways, I befriended a classmate in Home Economics. We wore matching sweatbands and studded cargo pants, and we called each other “Billy” and “Philip.” We redesigned our AOL profiles, insisting that the digital world recognized us by those names. Our exchange was mutual, sealed in ramen noodles and converse shoes. 

The following year, I was absorbed by a loud and confident group of (mean) girls. Like most tweens, I wanted to disappear. It was a relief to have a background to fade into. I thought I could trade in the pieces of me that weren’t like them and get something sleek and self-possessed in return. Instead, the things that made me different from them also made me a target. The year after that, I kept to myself.  

My friendships continue to be the central balancing force of my life, though it took me until my twenties to find relationships that did not demand the kind of trade that sacrificed the essential but enhanced the parts that felt good instead. Trades that created more doors and left them swinging wide on their hinges. 

Lilith Ayapo remembers the war, but not her capture. After a difficult adjustment period, she agrees to partner with Ninkaj, an ooloi. She falls in love with Joseph, a human survivor, and becomes close with Ninkaj’s male and female Oankali partners. The five of them become a family charged with embodying the living example and hopeful leaders of the transition to survival.  

When a perceptive lover mailed me a copy of Dawn in my mid-twenties, it was the closest I’d felt to myself since my friendship with “Philip.” I began to wonder about the parts of Billy that I still hadn’t outgrown. Nonbinary and genderqueer representation in fiction is often secretively layered and sparse, but the relationships between the Oankali family members explode the limitations of the nuclear foundation of love. I recognized this before I had the words to describe it. Dawn is a book that makes room for more than two kinds of bodies to occupy it.

Butler challenges the reader to ask not only what makes us human, but how the alien body might take up space and maybe even fit into the context of this planet. In the end, I claimed my queerness as if to say: what if out there was here? What if I unlocked a new context altogether?

Miriam Akervall is a first-year MFA candidate in poetry. They were born in Lund, Sweden and spent part of their childhood there before moving to Ann Arbor, Michigan. They are interested in secrets, the physical aspects of memory, and in spinning both proverbial and actual yarn. Their poems appear in Stone Journal, Ariadne Magazine, Voicemail Poems, and Apiary Magazine. They call Michigan and Idaho home.