Lilith, one of the protagonists of the whole three stories in Lilith’s Brood as a black woman, faces an alien species named ‘Oankali,’ as soon as she wakes up from the 250-year-long-sleep. This was a shocking opening act to me. Even before the novel begins, the whole earth was in the state of being alienated and all the humans are seemed to be extinct on the ground! However, few people survived and they maintain their humanity and humanness, opposing the alienated features on their earth. In this respect, the real humans’ this kind of conducts made me think about the real meaning of humanness. The humans who appear in the story are seemed to just feel the hostility towards the alien species. They also oppose to Lilith, considering her as an accomplice. The humans keep considering their own cultures and bodies as the best only, attempting to preserve their genetic structures, gender relations, or religious practices.
I rather felt skeptical at this aspect, because I was too accustomed to the circumstance of the earth depicted in the book as I read this. I felf kind of languishment on the humans who remain on the ground. I rather thought that they should accept the alien aspects and try to modify themselves in a positive way to survive! And surprisingly, my thought was similar to that of Akin or Jodahs, who are the broods of Lilith. So I thought that the most single alien aspect about the world of this book is after all, the strictness of humans, although at first I felt shocked about the horrible circumstance of the earth…
In addition, in Dawn, the protagonist Lilith mentions about the alienation of human bodies, saying “…we used to treat animals that way” (Dawn:3). Humans’ bodies have been altered to live longer and already have been internally modified in various ways, like they had done to the animals long time ago(according to the book’s time period) at laboratories. And their environment in Earth is also changed to be a home for the alien creatures. However, the surviving humans still resist and fight against the alien, which I thought as a new human model , to call for purity and reject alienness, under their strict faith on humanness.
Indeed, although the overall setting and background are alien to the readers, I felt that surviving humans’ stubborn persistence is rather alien, paradoxically, as the story proceeds.