Octavia Butler’s Kindred came into my life one afternoon on one of my weekly trips to Barnes and Noble, and from the second I started reading it I could not put it down. Set partly in the decade succeeding the Civil Rights Movement, and partly in the antebellum south during the early nineteenth century, Octavia Butler’s Kindred is a haunting tribute to a past that finds itself erupting in the present. In a story that seeks to demonstrate the deceptive proximity of the past to present-day life, Dana, an African-American writer, is involuntarily transported back in time to her worst nightmare: the height of slavery in Maryland, the year 1815. Drawn back to the past by forces entirely out of her control, Dana is inextricably linked to this time in history by her many times great ancestor, the white son of a wealthy landowner, Rufus Weylin.
Throughout the novel, the past is seemingly catching up to the present, the realities of the two time periods becoming blurred and unclear, until ultimately the two fatally collide. As a result of this, Dana and her husband, a white Kevin, find themselves wondering what is real and wondering where to call “home”. By manipulating and confounding time, Butler demonstrates the fragility of progress in the present, the striking similarities between a horrific past and an illusive present, and the way in which the two inevitably inform and determine each other. We are reminded that the past is not so distant from the present, as what seems like a faraway nightmare is actually a very pressing reality. As demonstrated by Dana and Kevin’s relative ease in adjusting themselves to the antebellum south, it becomes clear that perhaps not much has changed from the time we wish most to forget.
Throughout the novel, Dana is pulled back to the past in order to save her troublesome great ancestor Rufus from death. As Dana’s very life in the present could be threatened by the sudden death of a relative from the past, she is forced out of indifference to what happened a century before. Through this symbolic interdependence of the past and the present as exemplified through Rufus and Dana’s codependence, we are reminded that we are directly affected in the present by what happened in the past. As a result, history is not an irrelevant entity to be ignored, but is something that we must contend with in order to better understand our present.
Even though this is obviously a work of science fiction, it is unbelievable how invested you become as a reader in Dana’s experiences of going back to the period of slavery preceding America’s Civil War. As with each trip back to this era, Dana becomes frighteningly more accustomed to slave life. As Dana is far removed from this era of slavery in her 1970s world, it is amazing to see how easily one can accept the common sense that was produced by the white, racist hegemony of the time. This is the result of an ongoing process of racial formation, whereby “human bodies and social structures are represented and organized” in accordance with the hegemony of the time (Omi and Winant, 55). Thus, African Americans were posited as biologically inferior, primitive, and sub-human, and such racial ideologies were at work in order to accommodate racial projects like slavery.
In the novel, Dana begins as merely acting the “role” of slave, as she says she wasn’t “really in” but instead was an “observer watching a show…watching history happen” around her (Butler, 98). However, this begins to change as Dana’s trips to the past become longer and more frequent. Because of this, she is forced to “act” the part so much that it becomes her reality. At one point, she receives a brutal whipping from the white wealthy plantation owner she works for and when she ultimately returns back to the present, the scars are still very much present. These kind of physical changes become more pronounced throughout the book, until ultimately Dana begins to feel like the past is more real than her present.
The novel also discusses life in the present day 1970s in between Dana’s trips to the past, and we see that while the institutional racism of the past through slavery is over, it is still prevalent in other ways. This is demonstrated in the reactions people have to Dana and Kevin’s relationship, as the idea of interracial marriage was not yet widely accepted in the 1970s. Dana and Kevin’s boss at the labor agency often harasses the couple with overtly racist remarks, yelling out obscenities like, “chocolate and vanilla porn” (Butler, 56) when he sees the two of them together. This idea is further reiterated by both Dana’s and Kevin’s families, who stand in staunch opposition to their interracial marriage. Furthermore, as Dana visits the past more and more frequently, she begins to see Kevin differently because he is white. She is no longer able to be colorblind and is so affected by the white racist monsters she faces in the past that she can no longer tell the difference between them and her loving husband. Kevin also accidentally travels back to the past with Dana a few times and assumes the role of her slave owner. This creates tension as well since Kevin also acclimates to his part and as a white man faces a very different experience in the slaveholding past than Dana does. The effect of this juxtaposition of the past and present demonstrates that while times have changed, it is questionable by how much.
Kindred is a fast, riveting, and sobering read about the limited sense of progress experienced following the Civil Rights Movement. Compared to the everyday atrocities and injustices that occurred in a time like the antebellum south, the progress of the present appears to be disproportionate and ineffective in its goal to cure the disease of racism. As a result, it behooves us to take a good look at history, lest it should be repeated. After all, Dana isn’t the only one with ancestors who suffered in the past, and isn’t it to them that we owe remembrance at the very least? By employing the first person, Butler is able to transport us back to the evils of our collective history, and we are all invited to take a good look at what we don’t want to see. Unfortunately, as Butler articulates in so many ways, attempts to escape the past are futile at best, as it doesn’t take a trip back in time to see that things are still not how they should be.
Works Cited:
Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979.
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