59 pages • 1 hour read
Octavia E. ButlerImago
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1989A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Gardens
Gardens function as a motif to connote the security of home, ecological sustainability, and the resilience and diversity of life. Lilith builds gardens as a gesture of her loyalty to humans, even though the resisters label her a traitor. The garden is her way of nourishing humans with food grown in the soil rather than produced by the ship, a reminder of Earth’s past as a home to humans. Gardens also come to symbolize home and security for Lilith when her family goes into exile in the forest. Faced with the vulnerability of Aaor’s metamorphosis, Lilith decides “it was time to plant a garden” (84), and the family sets up a permanent home to protect themselves and Aaor from resisters.
In addition to representing stability, gardens also symbolize sustainability. Lilith moves her gardens every few years, knowing when “[i]t’s time to rest this land” (39). Her practice illustrates a care for nature and its natural resources. When violent resisters destroy one of her gardens, the humans demonstrate their indifference to and exploitation of the environment and reenact their destruction of Earth.
Maintaining a garden means cherishing life, and the novel associates gardens with regeneration and growth. Jodahs learns about new crops grown in the mountain village, a sign that even in isolated places, life continues to develop and diversify. At the end of the novel, Jodahs grows its own literal and metaphoric garden, using one of its cells as a seed to build a new town, community, and species.
Yashi
Yashi is the organ that functions as a repository for various cells collected throughout an Oankali’s life. In the ooloi, it is also where genetic engineering takes place. Yashi symbolizes diversity, community, and newness, and the organ’s closest human counterparts are the heart and the womb. Located in between the Oankali’s two hearts, the organ is equivalent to the soul and symbolizes the driving principle of Oankali existence: to merge with new life. Yashi’s placement in the body’s center, with two vital organs at its sides, also connotes a nonbinary sensibility and core openness to diversity and change.
Yashi also symbolizes how the Oankali revere their symbiotic relationships with the environment and other organisms. Jodahs describes how some Oankali personify yashi: “Sometimes they talked about it as though it were another person” (23). Butler’s choice to not use a definite or indefinite article before the noun enhances the organ’s importance as more than an object, but a living entity. Jodahs compares its mature and “hungry” yashi to an infant and states, “The organ seemed to gulp and suckle the way I had once at my mother’s breast” (168). Jodahs is an unsexed Oankali, and the yashi functions as a radical critique of gendered binaries and an imaginative deconstruction of reproduction and motherhood.
As an archive of genetic diversity, yashi represents community and heritage, as Oankali grow up collecting samples to give to their ooloi, which are then passed down to the next generation of ooloi. When Nikanj bestows the contents of its yashi to Jodahs, Jodahs narrates, “[T]he world around me seemed to flare brilliant white […] There was immense newness. Life in more varieties than I could possibly have imagined—unique units of life, most never seen on Earth” (168). These “genetic memories” epitomize the Oankali’s perspective to see the world as creative, transformative, and infinite.
Water
The motif of water signifies the diversity of evolutionary life and the fluidity of identity. One of the earliest indications that Jodahs would metamorphosize into an ooloi was its ability to detect the elemental components of water and separate hydrogen from oxygen. In Part 1, Chapter 1, Jodahs realizes, “I couldn’t help separating them. But I learned them quickly and accepted them in their new complexity” (3). Jodahs is quick to accept new combinations while also acknowledging their individual parts, a stark contrast to the humans who struggle to accept new and unrecognizable forms and instead relegate them as alien and dangerous. The river water emphasizes the dichotomous perspectives of the Oankali and humans. Jodahs remarks that the Oankali regard water “clouded with sediment” as “[r]ich,” whereas humans consider it “muddy” (3). Their respective perspectives on the river water function as a metaphor for each species’ attitude about genetic diversity and hybridity. The Oankali appreciate the complexity and mixed nature whereas humans denigrate it as impure and dirty.
Jodahs is a figure of multiplicity and hybridity who functions as a foil against all those who fear difference, contamination, and what they deem are transgressions of the body and identity. Jodahs embraces its shapeshifting identity and states, “It’s easier to do as water does: allow myself to be contained, and take on the shape of my containers” (89). Water is not restricted to one static form, and Jodahs’s ooloi construct identity challenges the binaries of sex, gender, and sexuality that humans have hierarchized in their world.
The novel ends where it begins, with Jodahs near the river and contemplating the diversity of life. Now, as a mature adult, Jodahs is prepared to create a new town and a new species and chooses a site near water as the ideal location to plant its cell like a seed. Jodahs narrates, “I chose a spot near the river. […] I planted it deep in the rich soil of the riverbank” (220). Water, as a symbol for diversity and non-hierarchial thinking, is the ideal medium for new life.
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