Margaret Atwood Homelanding

Margaret Atwood brilliantly shows how humans are creatures with customs that seem strange at first but in reality make perfect sense in “Homelanding”. Homelanding is a clever account of a human who is describing her species to an alien. This creative format allows for Atwood, the author, to reflect on humanities quirks and strange habits. She also reflects on life and death, comparing and contrasting the two. She then states that she would not want to meet the leader of a foreign planet, but she would instead want to experience the life of the people on the planet.

The first part of “Homelanding” is a description of the human species, that is familiar and yet not the same. Things that define our species are made to seem foreign, with hair being described as a seaweed like apparatus, and arms and fingers being described

She tells of how death is but sleep without breathing. She tells of how our deceased are buried in their clothes or burned. Then she explains how we have a “picnic” to honor them, but the picnic is without joy. She says that these customs are the most difficult to explain because they can’t understand why a picnic with such joyous things can be so solemn. She says that she can that the alien has death as well, she can see it in its eyes. She concluded with saying how she doesn’t want to meet the aliens leader, but instead she wants to see the aliens sunsets, shoes, bad dreams, and deaths because these are the things worth seeing.

Homelanding is a great science fiction story which sheds a new light on our perspective of ourselves. By using the perspective of a human educating an alien on Earth and its customs, Atwood allows for our normality to be put into question. The best stories make you think, and Homelanding is no exception. By showing basic humanity in foreign eyes, Homelanding reminds us to respect others differences because everyone seems strange from the wrong