I devoured Octavia Butler’s Kindred last night and I am just in awe of this woman. What an excellent storyteller! She grabs you from the opening lines and keeps you on your toes the whole time. [SPOILERS AHEAD]
I did however begin to hate the main character, Dana, whose empathy for her white ancestor, even when he repeatedly proves himself a brutal slavemaster, always ready to embrace the worse of his position as a white plantation owner in the antebellum South, just made me sick. Allowing and encouraging her black ancestor, formerly a freewoman at that, to submit to rape/sexual intimacy with her white master—formerly her childhood friend!—made me stop rooting for her.
I’m pretty sure Butler wanted us to see that there are no ethical choices for a modern day chrononaut who has to not only go back to the time of slavery, but whose black female body will immediately place her in mortal danger or at least under servitude. She makes that clear when Dana’s white husband, Kevin (and I love how and when Butler reveals his race) is accidentally brought to the past and must fall into the role of slaveowner, of his own wife! The possibilities, freedoms, and ethics of the present cannot be transported unaffected to the past, no matter how much we want to. I also like how Butler showed that with our judgments of Sarah, the “mammy” figure, even if I don’t like how she asks us to equally rethink our judgments of the white not-quite-racist master.
It’s really powerful how she shows that the black female chrononaut is completely without control of when and why she travels to the past; in fact, her travel to the past is entirely in the hands of a white boy then man, and always in the service of saving that white man’s life. This white man’s needs supersede her own and interrupt her present-tense life with her husband (literally reaches into her present, into the sanctity of her home and pulls her out of moments of pleasant and volitional domesticity) who is a contemporary echo of the slaveowners. —Is this to suggest that if her husband had been born in that age he too would have been just like the Weylins? That our progressive whites of today are only different because of their time?
Dana’s only way to return to her own time/life is when her life is threatened, but she soon realizes that the brutalities of slavery are not enough to trigger fear of death: because of the value of the enslaved as labor and property, very rarely will a slavemaster kill you. It means she must endure all kinds of brutalities without having the power to escape to the present. I was never convinced about why she and Kevin never try to run away to freedom in the north—I would have wanted to see if Rufus could call her back to save him if she were in his own time but in a separate place.
Anyway, for my own research, I’m particularly interested in the ways that Butler constructs for us a story about a black female chrononaut without mechanical time machines, scientific discoveries and experimentation, or any reference to science or physics. Instead, in this speculative story, she interrogates the entanglements of lineage and genealogy that result from the brutalities of slavery. Dana is inextricably linked to the fate of her white ancestor and cannot preserve her genealogy without consenting to and encouraging the rape of her black ancestress, without saving her white ancestor’s life even when he harms her, threatens her, puts her and those she cares about in danger.
In a stunning moment of defiance even amid powerlessness, it is only through slitting her own wrists that she can briefly exit the past. In Butler, it is not the specific place that provokes time travel, but US history itself: the 1976 present is the bicentennial of 1776, the day of US independence. The events of the novel take place a few weeks leading up 4 July (and come to an end on that day)—surely a commentary on whose freedoms are marked by that declaration/day.
I also loved the metafictional elements, where Butler suggests that Dana grows to understand in an embodied, visceral way, what slavery was really like through living it in her black female body; that TV and even books didn’t do it justice. And yet, Butler’s novel gives us a close approximation of living that time along with Dana.
Finally, even as there is no scientific patter anywhere in the story, the novel is replete with meditations on the mechanics of time travel: paradoxes, relativity etc. Butler reinvents the grandfather paradox as a great(great)grandfather paradox: my ancestor is a slaveowner, no matter how almost-benign, but to ensure my own existence, I must save his life and protect him, even at the expense of the liberty of my black ancestress. Time travel is not a source of adventure and liberty for Dana; she is tasked, not with preventing the injustices of the past—killing the bad guy, changing the outcome of a horrific historical event—but rather to preserve it in all its horrific detail. She has no power over the past; her best efforts have perhaps the marginal effect of making her white ancestor not a raging racist but a man who will weaponize his white privilege over his black slaves, even the woman he claims to love.
The awfulness of this appears in the novel’s climax, when he attempts to use this totalizing power/privilege to rape Dana. And Dana’s recognition that her powerlessness extends even to this: that to save her life in the future/present has meant submitting to anything this man wants in the past. Ugh.
And of course the ending (also the beginning) where we realize that even successfully returning to her own time does not come without bodily consequences; Rufus retains his hold on her, literally, even in death. Imagine the strength of his hold on her body and its freedom of movement that allows him to capture it, but also the matching/stronger desire Dana has to escape that allows most of her body to find its way home.
Ugh - what a brilliant mind!