Octavia Butler: Kindred

I just finished reading Octavia Butler’s Kindred. I picked it up because I wanted to expand my sci-fi readership. And somehow a novel that is part sci-fi part slave narrative seems to feed right into my interests. It’s like reading a book co-authored by Toni Morrison and Aldous Huxley, or Alice Walker and Ursula Le Guin, or Alex Haley and Frank Herbert. Okay. You get the picture.

Now let’s talk about the novel.

Dana, living in California in 1976, is repeatedly transported to 19^th Century Maryland. Gradually she learns that she is transported by some unexplainable powers of her white ancestor Rufus Weylin who calls her into his plantation whenever his life is at risk. This starts when Rufus is a child and continues till he dies. Rufus is a plantation owner and Dana soon realizes that her journeys into the past are needed to insure her own existence, as Rufus will father Hagar from his slave Alice, and Hagar is Dana’s great grandmother. And though she begins by questioning her role in his survival, she is soon to shake that doubt and accepts this tole.

Again, what would have happened if the boy had drowned? Would he have drowned without me? Or would his mother have saved him somehow? Would his father have arrived in time to save him? It must be that one of them would have saved him somehow. His life could not depend on the actions of his unconceived descendant. No matter what I did, he would have to survive to father Hagar, or I could not exist. That made sense.

But somehow, it didn't make enough sense to give me any comfort. It didn't make enough sense for  me to test it by ignoring him if I found him in trouble again. 

Preparing to read sci-fi, this novel’s theme of slavery seems to have overshadowed the sci-fi element, at least for me. Though the actual transportation, its details and the way the characters deal with it makes this an interesting new look into sci-fi, it is Dana’s life on the plantation that is most captivating here. How would a modern day black woman deal with being a slave? This seems to be the question this novel poses. How submissive will modern day Dana be when she is hardened (or softened) by actually being a slave? And how would Kevin, her white husband, behave when, in one of her journeys, he is also transported with her? 

But Dana herself knows she is a mere observer and isn't really living the life of a slave as she begins to realize how both Kevin and herself are fitting rather too well in their life: 

We weren't really in. We were observers watching a show. We were watching history happen around us. And we were actors. While we waited to go home, we humored the people around us by pretending to be like them. But we were poor actors. We never really got into our roles. We never forgot that we were acting.

Yet, her observer state does not prevent her from feeling guilty at being the woman who saves Rufus's life. Butler highlights Dana’s feelings of guilt over any other feelings of being transported across time and place. Dana visits the plantation 6 times, saving the slave-owner Rufus from imminent death in every one of her visits. This makes her, in the eyes of other slaves on the plantation, a culprit in their enslavement. And like other submissive and complacent slaves, Dana chose her own safety, a choice she has earlier looked down upon when she notices it in another slave woman, Sarah:

She had done the safe thing - had accepted a life of slavery because she was afraid. She was the kind of woman who might have been called "mammy" in some other household. She was the kind of woman who would be held in contempt during the militant nineteen sixties. The house-nigger, the handkerchief-head, the female Uncle Tom - the frightened powerless woman who had already lost all she could stand to lose, and who knew as little about the freedom of the North as she knew about the hereafter.

And she soon admits that she genuinely cares for Rufus, even as he enslaves her, has her whipped, and almost causes her death in one instant. Guilt over rescuing a man who is constantly cruel to his slaves haunts Dana more than any other feelings she might have by leaving her time/place. However, it is finally as threat to Dana’s body that she manages to end this cycle. As long as Rufus’s interest in her is as his savior, Dana accept becoming his slave, but when he becomes interested in her body, upon the death of his Alice, she immediately decides to end this cycle and kills him. I’m not sure what to make of this. Slavery is not longer the element that repels Dana from Rufus. She seems to have accepted that, even justifies it. But in the end this is a novel about a woman whose body refuses to be violated, not about a black woman who refuses to be enslaved. And even though she utters her rejection to being his slave, she has long been accepting the duties of a slave, it is the duties of a lover, forced by a slave-owner, that she actually resists with her knife.

A slave was a slave. Anything could be done to her. And Rufus was Rufus - erratic, alternately generous and vicious. I could accept him as my ancestor, my younger brother, my friend, but not as my mater, and not as my lover. He had understood that once.

I twisted sharply, broke away from him. He caught me, trying not to hurt me. I was aware of him trying not to hurt me even as I raised the knife, even as I sank it into his side. 

Of course the body does matter here. In the end, when Dana is finally free (through Rufus’s death) she is left with her arm amputated. Her body is violated, if not sexually, then indeed physically. Her arm remains in the grips of Rufus's hand even when she manages to come back to her 1976 life. Butler argues that she does this because she refuses to leave Dana untouched by her experience, that it doesn’t make sense to her that Dana should go back to her old life untouched. But Dana is left untouched. Her life continues as it had been before. Her awareness of slavery hasn’t changed. She knew what it was as did Kevin. It might now be a more personal awareness, but it’s not a big change. And having been responsible, through saving Rufus, for so many of her slave friends being killed, whipped, and sold is too huge to be equated with a loss of an arm.

Now don’t let these questions and investigations fool you. This is a very good novel, and I don’t think Octavia Butler needs me to vouch for her. This novel is an interesting investigation of the slave mentality. It is also an interesting twist to the usually sci-fi novels. It is worth reading, interesting to read, and most enjoyable as well. As sci-fi, I wouldn’t rate it as a favorite. As slave-narrative, I also wouldn’t rate it as a favorite. But as one that combines two unlikeable themes, it stands out indeed.