“Eli says we’re preserving humanity. I agree with him. We Are. Our own humanity and everyone else’s because we let people alone. We isolate ourselves as much as we can, and the people outside stay alive and healthy – most of them…Before, I was a private hauler. You know. Good money, if you survive. My truth broke down all the way over on I-Fifteen, and Eli caught me outside. When I realized what he had done to me, I thought I would bide my time and kill him. Now, I think I’d kill anyone who tried to hurt him. He’s family.” (525)
Clay’s Ark offers issues focusing around various topics of ethics, enslavement, and control. People are unable to control their actions that are a result of the extraterrestrial disease. Lupe justifies their actions by saying they are saving their humanity and sanity by creating a strong knit community; in this sense, Eli has created a community that strives to protect the human mind rather than body. Lupe’s argument also states that they are saving the humanity of people on the outside because, physically, they will remain uninfected if they remain separate from them. Looking at the end of the passage, we can tell that there is a strong sense of loyalty to Eli because of the way Lupe directly relates to him as “family.” Again, Butler sets up yet another binary of the mind and body. Because the characters in this novel are unable to protect their body from this contagious disease, perhaps they feel the need to justify the actions of community by continually asserting that they have control over other actions. Such as the amount of control Meda exerts when Blake and his daughters appear. Meda’s actions are assertive as she claims that “all three of you are here to stay.” (478) The control seems most evident by the fact that in this society, “none of us are rapists here. No one is going to take your kids to bed against their wills… our men don’t rape. They don’t have to.” (488) I think Butler creates this non-rapist society (which is completely opposite from what we have seen in the other novels in Seed to Harvest) because she wants to implement some form of a Utopia-like aspect. If this were a society where the men were just as bad as Doro, it would be easy for us, as readers, to write them off as bad. But Butler adds this factor of a tight family circle, which loves their children despite mutation due to the disease, to force us to question the society as a whole.
Reading this novel, I began to think back to our class discussion about parasitic versus symbiotic relationships. Despite the negative and terrifying ways Butler describes the disease, those infected are eventually able to be completely accepting of their changed lifestyle. It is as though the disease is manipulating their prior emotions as “the organism changed, adapted, and chemically encouraged its host to adapt.” (494)
I suppose one of my questions is: If the disease was intentionally controlling the people living in Eli’s new community, could we still consider it to be a symbiotic relationship? Despite the fact that those infected are persistent on maintaining a close structure and there is some benefit of a sense of “community,” does the good outweigh the cost of kidnapping people like Keira, Rane, and Blake? Is the suffering of few, to preserve the whole, justify the actions of Eli’s community?
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