Foreignness and the Other Quotes in Speaker for the Dead

The moment when the colonists realize the piggies are intelligent could be seen as the moment when they stop being foreign; they're not animals anymore. But it could also be the moment where they are foreign. Animals aren't foreigners, after all—they're animals. It's only somebody else who can be somebody else though, so you've got to be human to be alien.

The characters use these categories throughout the book. Varelse, or true aliens, is an important category, but Shmoop wonders how much sense it makes. Varelse is supposed to include all animals, but dogs and cats aren't strangers and we definitely know what causes make them act (food and ear scratches, namely). In fact, often you can understand animals better than people, really. Maybe the truth is that categorizing your ethical and personal relations with others like this may not be quite as good an idea as Demosthenes thinks it is.

This is when Ender first meets Bosquinha. As a Speaker, Ender is greeted by the Lusitanians with both fear and loathing, so Ender is right away associated with the piggies—a stranger, even if he doesn't have a snout.

Possession here is a metaphor for turning into the stranger—accepting the other makes you the other. So Miro and Ouanda have become piggies by thinking of the piggies as human. You can be possessed by difference and change—which is actually a kind of comforting thought if, like Ender, you want to stop being who you were. The Exorcist as growth experience, with less blood and a romantic soundtrack.

Ender says Miro and Ouanda are condescending because they don't treat the piggies as equals, but isn't Ender pretty condescending himself? He's always lecturing people and handing down wisdom. Maybe it's just not condescending as long as you're the star of the book?

Foreignness is a function of how you define community or how you see yourself. Miro and Ouanda have decided that the piggies are part of their community, which makes them outlaws to those who define the community differently. As Shmoop discussed in elsewhere in the "Themes" section, individuals in Speaker are often defined by their communities, rather than the other way around.

This is one of the few times anyone really wins an argument with Ender. Human, the piggie, insists that Ender can't withhold knowledge, that the piggies should decide for themselves what they need and what they don't. Condescending imperialism is the same as genocide—if you're equal, you need to be equal. Ender is in fact guilty of some of the condescension he was criticizing Miro and Ouanda for, and Human calls him on it.

At first we think the fence is for the piggies's protection (as in the Prime Directive in Star Trek); then the novel switches and says, no, it's there because humans are afraid. This is a nice reversal, but sort of ignores that colonization doesn't usually involve fences. Why isn't anyone in Lusitania interested in getting out of the fence to take land, food, or just to screw with the piggies the way colonizers often just exploit the colonized for the hell of it? Ender's analysis of colonization is cynical, but not really cynical enough, given most of human history.

Leaf-eater is accusing Human of the same thing that Quim accused Olhado of—being possessed by the other and abandoning his community. In their distrust of the other, the humans and the piggies are pretty similar.

Human has a point, but this time he doesn't win the argument. Note that it's Ender who gets to decide whether and to what extent it's necessary to change the piggies. In this case, he's saying they can't go to war with one another, and it's hard to argue with that. But why does he get to decide? Because he's got better weapons and can tell them what to do? Or, more charitably, you could say that they're all trying to become one community, and so they're not figuring out how much to change the piggies, but how and in what ways to change each other.

Ender is here explaining why Mandachuva was going to be taken to the third life. Basically, he was being honored for recognizing that the piggies could handled the Descolada virus and the humans couldn't, and so humans weren't better than piggies. He's honored for recognizing that racism is false.