Imago

Jodahs is the novel’s protagonist and fulfills the archetypes of the outsider, the exile, and the mediator by exploring the complexities of belonging and identity formation. As an unexpected and unpredictable ooloi construct, Jodahs begins the novel as an outsider whose newness is perceived as a potential threat. Jodahs’s first-person perspective offers critical insights into both the Oankali’s and humans’ failure to accept difference. From Jodahs’s point of view, its outsider status is not due to it being an “accident” or a “devil,” but due to each species’ acts of Othering. The Oankali cannot accept Jodahs’s newness without wanting to control it, and the humans’ hatred is rooted in a xenophobic drive to keep their species “pure.” As an outsider, Jodahs challenges normalized assumptions about human and Oankali identity and represents a necessary break in the status quo. In doing so, Jodahs catalyzes the need for change and the potential for improved relations between the species.

As a figure of exile, Jodahs represents the loss of home and the desire for belonging. In many ways, Jodahs’s experiences resemble the ways humans have been internally displaced on Earth or exiled on Mars. Like humans, Jodahs is in search of a home. Yet, just as its outsider status offers Jodahs a critical perspective, it also offers a complex negotiation of what it means to belong. For Jodahs, a sense of belonging is not solely about a return to one’s origins or an essentialized past, as the humans wish it. Jodahs explains to its siblings that the homeship is a place it would visit, but the ship is not its home: “People go there to absorb more of our past sometimes. I wouldn’t mind that. But I can’t live there” (90). Jodahs represents a diasporic sensibility of “becoming,” to borrow cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s concept of cultural identity. The Oankali are a nomadic species with a fundamental drive to merge with diverse forms of life. Home is not where one maintains a static place and identity, but rather, a site of transformations.

By the end of the novel, Jodahs transforms into a figure of mediation and fluid identity. As a non-binary third-sex ooloi construct and a shapeshifter, Jodahs challenges the stark binary of sex, gender, and sexuality and humanity’s hierarchical social organization. After one of its trips in the forest, Jodahs tells its siblings, “My body wanders. Even when I come home, it wants to go on wandering. […] Changing doesn’t bother me anymore. […] At least, not this kind of deliberate, controlled changing. I wish it didn’t bother other people” (89-90). Having accepted who it is in Part 2, Jodahs spends Part 3 successfully advocating for its right to exist and reproduce with willing mates to construct a new species. Jodahs’s role as a mediator moves beyond the binary of Oankali versus human relations and incorporates the diversity of lifeforms stored in its yashi and the symbiotic ecology between the land, the living town, and their new community.