leynes's Reviews > Kindred

Kindred, oh my fuck, where do I even start? Definitely one of my favorite reads from this year and definitely one of the most fucked up things I've ever read in my entire life. This book is not for the faint of heart. It is literally every Black person's literal nightmare. It will make you sick, it will make you think, it won't leave you. It will stay with you.

"There’s worse things than being dead."

Written in 1979, Kindred remains Octavia E. Butler's most popular work until date. It is a common choice for high school and college courses as well as book clubs and reading programs. And I sure see why. This novel begs to be discussed in a group, preferably in a safe space (which schools and colleges can't always provide, unfortunately), but this books opens up so many important topics, interesting questions, moral dilemmas ... I'm actually saddened that my reading experience was a solitary one. When I reread it (and I sure will in the future), I'll definitely pick a reading buddy!

Kindred is the first-person account of a young African-American woman writer, Dana, who finds herself being shunted in time between her Los Angeles, California home in 1976 and a pre-Civil War Maryland plantation, where she meets her ancestors: a proud Black freewoman and a white planter who has forced her into slavery and concubinage. As Dana's stays in the past become longer, she becomes intimately entangled with the plantation community and has to make many hard choices to survive – and to ensure her return to her present home!

Butler's debut novel explores the dynamics and dilemmas of antebellum slavery from the sensibility of a late 20th-century Black woman, who is aware of its legacy in contemporary American society. Through the two interracial couples who form the emotional core of the story, the novel also explores the intersection of power, gender, and race issues, and speculates on the prospects of future egalitarianism.

"I don’t have a name for the thing that happened to me, but I don’t feel safe anymore."

Butler explores how a modern Black woman would experience the time of slavery. During an interview, Butler admitted that while reading slave narratives for background, she realized that if she wanted people to read her book, she would have to present a less violent version of slavery. Still, Kindred is not for the faint of heart, and Butler's depictions of slavery and the violence (especially sexual violence towards Black women) that goes along with it are hard to stomach. Her descriptions are vivid and feel authentic. As a reader, you are transported alongside Dana to life on an Eastern Shore plantation pre-Civil War.

Butler portrays individual inhabitants of the plantation as distinctive people, giving each his or her own story. Robert Crossley argues that Butler treats the Blackness of her characters as "a matter of course", to resist the tendency of white writers to incorporate African Americans into their narratives just to illustrate a problem or to divorce themselves from charges of racism. Thus, in Kindred the enslaved community is depicted as a "rich human society": the proud yet victimized free-turned-enslaved Alice; Sam who has to work on the fields and hopes Dana will teach his brother how to read and write; the traitorous sewing woman Liza, who frustrates Dana's escape; the bright and resourceful Nigel, Rufus's childhood friend who learns to read from a stolen primer; most importantly, Sarah the cook, who Butler transforms from an image of the submissive, happy "mammie" of white fiction to a deeply angry yet caring woman subdued only by the threat of losing her last child, the mute Carrie.

But Butler doesn't just excel at writing Black characters, her white characters are just as well-written and interesting. The enslaver Rufus and his father Tom Weylin are easy to loathe and hate, yet Butler hammers home that they are human, they're not monsters: "He wasn't a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper."

One of the most interesting (and heartbreaking) relationships in the book is between Rufus and Alice. While Rufus seems to hold all the power in his relationship with Alice, she never wholly surrenders to him. Alice's suicide at the end can be read as her way of ending her struggle with Rufus with a final upsetting of their power balance, an escape through death, as something that he can't take away from her. It's a bleak interpretation but a fitting one, taking into consideration that an enslaved woman like Alice held no power except for the one over her own death.

"I can’t advise you. It’s your body."
"Not mine." Her voice had dropped to a whisper. "Not mine, his, He paid for it, didn’t he?"

Kindred portrays the exploitation of Black female sexuality as a main site of the historic struggle between master and slave. Diana Paulin describes Rufus's attempts to control Alice's sexuality as a means to recapture power he lost when she chose Isaac as her sexual partner. Compelled to submit her body to Rufus, Alice divorces her desire from her sexuality to preserve a sense of self. Similarly, Dana's time traveling reconstructs her sexuality to fit the times. While in the present, Dana chooses her husband and enjoys sex with him; in the past, her status as a Black female forced her to subordinate her body to the desires of the master for pleasure, breeding, and as sexual property. Thus, as Rufus grows into adulthood, he attempts to control Dana's sexuality, ending with his attempt at rape to turn her into a replacement of Alice. Since Dana sees sexual domination as the ultimate form of subordination, her killing of Rufus is the way she rejects the role of female slave, distinguishing herself from those who did not have the power to say "no."

Keeping Butler's other work in mind, it's also interesting that he bond between Dana and Rufus can be interpreted as a symbiotic relationship between enslaver and enslaved: they are continually forced to collaborate in order to survive. In a fucked up way, they are dependent on each other. A fact that is seen in Dana's feelings towards her enslaver-ancestor: in addition to fear and contempt, there is affection from familiarity and the occasional kindnesses. The novel often made me uncomfortable because I felt like Dana had to much empathy for/with Rufus. Not gonna lie, I hated the guy from the first time we meet him to the last. But Dana has patience with him, even forgives him many times when he hurts her... the only thing she cannot forgive is when he hurts other people.

In several interviews, Butler has mentioned that she wrote Kindred to counteract stereotypical conceptions of the submissiveness of enslaved people. While studying at Pasadena City College, Butler heard a young man from the Black Power Movement express his contempt for older generations of African-Americans for what he considered their shameful submission to white power. Butler realized the young man did not have enough context to understand the necessity to accept abuse just to keep oneself and one's family alive and well.

"I'm not property, Kevin. I'm not a horse or a sack of wheat. If I have to seem to be property, if I have to accept limits on my freedom for Rufus's sake, then he also has to accept limits - on his behavior toward me. He has to leave me enough control of my own life to make living look better to me than killing and dying.”

"If your black ancestors had felt that way, you wouldn't be here," said Kevin.

"I told you when all this started that I didn't have their endurance. I still don't. Some of them will go on struggling to survive, no matter what. I'm not like that."

Thus, Butler resolved to create a modern African-American character, who would go back in time to see how well he (Butler's protagonist was originally male) could withstand the abuses his ancestors had suffered. Therefore, Dana's memories of her enslavement, as Ashraf A. Rushdy explains, become a record of the "unwritten history" of African-Americans, a "recovery of a coherent story explaining Dana's various losses." By living these memories, Dana is enabled to make the connections between slavery and current social situations, including the exploitation of blue-collar workers, police violence, rape, domestic abuse, and segregation.

Kindred reveals the repressed trauma slavery caused in America's collective memory of history. In an interview on 1985, Butler suggested that this trauma partly comes from attempts to forget America's dark past: "I think most people don’t know or don’t realize that at least 10 million blacks were killed just on the way to this country, just during the middle passage....They don’t really want to hear it partly because it makes whites feel guilty."

In a later interview with Randall Kenan, Butler explained how debilitating this trauma has been for Americans, especially for African Americans, as symbolized by the loss of her protagonist's left arm: "I couldn’t really let [Dana] come all the way back. I couldn’t let her return to what she was, I couldn’t let her come back whole and [losing her arm], I think, really symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn’t leave people quite whole." Many academics have extended Dana's loss as a metaphor for the "lasting damage of slavery on the African American psyche".