At first, I was excited to read Kindred, because it had time travel in it, and I couldn’t imagine not liking a book with that device. I was very surprised, however, to find that device in a book about African Americans, but I am not sure why I was surprised. I read the first chapter of “Kindred” in January and had to wait until March to finish it because of other reading obligations. By this time I was very excited about getting back to the book.The story begins with Dana, a black woman who lives in LA, and her husband Kevin, a white man, as they move into a new home. Dana is then wrenched back to antibellum Maryland to save the life of a boy, Rufus. She is then thrown back into modern-day LA. Over time, Dana keeps being pushed back into the past to save Rufus’s life, and in those intervals she learns first hand what it is like to be a slave. Her husband Kevin also travels to the past, and he learns, sometimes the hard way, what life was like for whites who were and who weren’t slave owners and what there relationship was to non-whites at the time. This is a fascinating premise, and finishing the book was as satisfying as I had hoped. It was a very thought-provoking read, and I think it would be a valuable read for anyone regardless of whether science fiction, which it is in a way, is of interest to the reader.
This posting definitely has some spoilers in it, as well as assuming that the reader of this post has already read the book. This was written awhile back and is not in the style of some of my other posts, but I’ll post it as is without changes. In general it looks at a variety of questions I thought about while reading the book, but is somewhat disjointed, more so than my other posts.
We like to think that our ancestors had dignity, honor and lived good lives, because otherwise, we might enherit some of their bad traits. In this book, Dana is given an in-the-face introduction to her great-great-grandparents, the Weylins, and they weren’t the noble people she had dreamed they’d be–they weren’t even the race she dreamed they be. One thing to think about is that Rufus is one of Dana’s ancestors because of how Rufus treats Dana. Are we outraged that he would rape her because we are sympathetic to her? Because we would be outraged by any rape? Or because he would be raping one of his own descendents? At one point I think Butler is making an analogy between being a woman and being raped and being black and being a slave for Kevin, Dana’s husband. He may be able to understand (although I have my doubts) that he can never know what it is like to be raped because he is not a woman, and that similarly, he could never know what it is like to be a slave because he is not black. It is not a part of his heritage, not a part of his history.
In the first chapter of Kindred, Dana has to convince the police that Kevin did not hurt her, and that it was not his fault that she had to have her arm amputated. This is in direct contrast to what would have happened to her in Rufus’s time, because at least not in Butler’s version of antebellum Maryland, no one would have detained a white man for harming a black woman.
It is very strange for Dana to be living in the past. She is living in a time that she has studied and she knows how the story will end, so to speak. Thus, she thinks a lot about the time she is living in and how everyone behaves in the situations they are in. Even when she begins to accept her life in Maryland, she never lives it in the same way as everyone else does; she is hyper-aware of her actions and the actions of others and is continually putting those actions into the context of what she knows about the past and the others, black or white, do not have that advantage.
In a way, antebellum Maryland is more accepting of the relationship between Dana and Kevin than is contemporary Los Angeles. Mr. Weylin takes the sexual relationship between Dana and the white man, Kevin, presumed to be her owner, as the natural state of the relationship between female slave and slaveowner. However, neither Dana’s nor Kevin’s families in Los Angeles accept this mixed couple.
I have purchased some of Octavia Butler's other works and am eager to read the books she has written, many of which can be classified as science fiction but address the questions of race and genetic origin.
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