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.