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Research essay focusing on Octavia Butler's Kindred
Research essay focusing on Octavia Butler's Kindred
Slave narratives as the quintessential literary genre
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Kindred
In Octavia Butler’s novel "Kindred," A young African-American woman writer named Dana who is married to a white man named Kevin whom is also a writer. Dana is pulled back into time during the 19th century. Dana comes face to face with many obstacles and is forced to deal with her "people’s past" (Harris) until she returns to her present day life in California. Throughout the book; Dana continues to save Rufus, her ancestor, and slowly begins to accept slavery in order to survive.
Dana is pulled back into the past whenever Rufus is faced with a life or death situation. On her first trip back into time, Dana finds Rufus drowning in a river. She pulls him out safely and begins to give him mouth to mouth resuscitation. Rufus’ mother, who saw the whole thing, begins hitting Dana while screaming, “You killed my baby!” (Butler 14). A few moments later Dana comes to face her first racial encounter with Tom Weylin. She turns to face the end of a long barrel of a shotgun. Almost immediately Dana becomes dizzy and passes out to wake up in her and Kevin’s home in California.
On Dana’s second trip back to the Weylin plantation, she finds Rufus holding a piece of wood on fire. The draperies on the window were burning. Dana manages to put out the fire by throwing the drapes out of the window. Once the two begin talking, Rufus tells Dana that she is supposed to her him ‘Master’. This starts to make Dana laugh
because she is not going to call a little boy master. Rufus replies to her with, “You’re supposed to. You want me to call you black” (Butler 30). During this time it was natural for whites to refer to blacks as niggers openly. Dana did not approve of Rufus using that word around her. Dana eventually has to leave the house in ...
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...back for good to Kevin and 1976. However; she left a piece of herself behind, emotionally and physically. She experienced first hand what it was like to live as a slave. She lost her arm on her way back home because Rufus was holding in it her arm when she vanished, forcing her to leave the arm behind with Rufus.
Works Cited
Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press, 1988.
Govan, Sandra Y. “Homage To Tradition: Octavia Butler Renovates The Historical Novel.” MELUS. 13. (1986): 79-96.
Harris, Edward. “Octavia Butler’s ‘Kindred’: What Would You Do?” Epinoins. 10 Oct. 2008. .
Steinberg, Marc. “Inverting History in Octavia Butler’s Postmodern Slave Narrative.” African American Review. 38.3. (2004): 467-476.
Yaszek, Lisa. “A Grim Fantasy: Remaking American History in Octavia Butler’s Kindred.” Signs: Journal Of Women In Culture And Society. 28.4. (2003).
A large message Kindred sends to the reader is how one individual with a large amount of power can destroy other people's lives solely on their own whim. Rufus is the character who exemplifies this theme the most, especially with Alice. When Rufus begins to pester Dana to speak with Alice, she begins to worry that Rufus will exhibit his power on her: “I had thought that eventually, he would just rape her again” (Butler 110). The most disturbing part of this sentence is the casual tone used towards it. Dana already knows the type of power Rufus takes against Alice, which is constantly sexually violating her. Since he already put her through the abuse once, Dana knows he will do it again. In Dana’s last time travel, she begins to truly reflect
The book follows Dana who is thrown back in time to live in a plantation during the height of slavery. The story in part explores slavery through the eye of an observer. Dana and even Kevin may have been living in the past, but they were not active members. Initially, they were just strangers who seemed to have just landed in to an ongoing play. As Dana puts it, they "were observers watching a show. We were watching history happen around us. And we were actors." (Page 98). The author creates a scenario where a woman from modern times finds herself thrust into slavery by account of her being in a period where blacks could never be anything else but slaves. The author draws a picture of two parallel times. From this parallel setting based on what Dana goes through as a slave and her experiences in the present times, readers can be able to make comparison between the two times. The reader can be able to trace how far perceptions towards women, blacks and family relations have come. The book therefore shows that even as time goes by, mankind still faces the same challenges, but takes on a reflection based on the prevailing period.
battle her conscious mainly because she doesn’t know if she is morally bound to let Rufus live or die. Dana begins to slowly understand her life relies on Rufus’s actions after she has been put into several situations in which she has had to save his life. She starts to ponder and make the conclusion that if Rufus survives, she will also survive and make it back to California. Dana continues to go along with this mindset for a while, but eventually she starts to second-guess it, and therefore fights her conscious.
The word is taught by many to be said to any slave during this time period. I thought that there were white slaves? Where they called “niggers” as well? Indeed, there were white slaves that were called “niggers” along with black slaves. Many people are unaware of this fact and only subject the term to only be meant for black people. Since this new knowledge had be brought to light, the word “nigger” consequently does not refer to just blacks but rather both blacks and whites. The term groups together any property owned during this time period that was marked as a slave. The African American slave owners during this time were not called subject to the word. This is because a “nigger” was someone of low class or even just a piece of property that could be replaced. Another misconception is that there were in fact many black slave owners as well as white slave owners. The meaning of the word is arguably the most contemptuous word in the english language. “You are a white nigger!” “You are black nigger!” These two sentences mean the exact same thing. This term, as horrible as it is, should be just as offensive to white as it is to
Kindred by Octavia Butler is an incredible book that leaves the reader hypnotized. This story educates people on the first hand abuse of slavery. Butler took a woman of the modern era and transferred her back into a period
According to Miletic, the organization called for authors and artists to move past representing slavery, and create a new genre of African American Literature without returning time and time again to speculative slave narratives and imagery. Butler took a stand against this push, while also, seemingly contradictory, but in fact complementary, conformed to it. On one hand, Kindred is very obviously a novel that has slavery in the forefront. However, Octavia Butler created her own genre of African American Literature through her decision to make Dana foreign to the Antebellum era. She is a traveler on journey, whether than journey is time travel, a journey through multiple dimensions, or something else entirely is ambiguous, but the quasi science fiction journey aspect of the novel sets Kindred apart as a book redefining the African American genre as the Black Power and Black Arts movements called
Butler alludes to the significance of the problem by choosing the adjective kindred as a title for her work. Throughout this novel, familial bonds are built up, and at the very end get a perverse form because of gender and racial mistreatments. Throughout time, Dana witnesses families clinging to each other while they are treated unjustly. The veracity of this assertion is confirmed by examining scenes where the heroes stick together with their family because they are put in circumstances where it is impossible to escape racial violation. An example of such a case is the incident between the slave called Tess and Dana. After Weilyn sells the man for attempting to flirt with Dana, other slaves try their best to not displease their masters because they do not want to be separated from their family. This scene suggests that racial violation was so horrifying that African Americans could not even choose to live with their family, and it made them even more dependent on each
...courage to survive in the world. On the other hand, her portrayal of marriage and the black family appears to be negative. Marriage is seen as a convenient thing—as something that is expected, but not worth having when times get rough. At least this is what Lutie’s and Jim’s marriage became. The moral attributes that go along with marriage do not seem to be prevalent. As a result, because marriage and the black family are seen as the core of the black community, blacks become more divided and begin to work against themselves—reinforcing among themselves the white male supremacy. Instead of being oppressed by another race or community, blacks oppress themselves. Petry critiques these issues in the black community and makes them more applicable to our lives today. These issues still exist, but we fail to realize them because of our advancement in society today.
...the story concludes with the woman "crouched," still naked, "in the underbrush" below her house and marveling how strange it is to be seeing her husband at last after "having wanted so desperately to get home," and yet now feeling "no emotion" at what she saw. (138)
Alice and Kevin have an interesting start to their relationship. Initially, it appears that Dana is not interested in Kevin, as she tries to reject communication and his advances through buying her lunch. This distance on Dana’s part allows readers to contemplate whether Dana is put off by Kevin’s obtrusive attitude because he is a man, because he is white, or a combination of the two. As the novel advances, Butler continues to focus Kevin’s faults in his marriage because of his identity as a white man.
...borhood she will not return until she thinks about the other women like Sally, who can not leave the neighborhood and she chooses to eventually go back to help them.
A BRIEF CONVERSATION WITH OCTAVIA E. BUTLER http://www.plcmc.lib.nc.us/novello/1999/listen/obutler.htm ESSAY ON OCTAVIA BUTLER http://www.towanda.com/sela/essay.htm Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy: A Biologist’s Response by Joan Slonczewski, presented at SFRA, Cleveland, June 30, 2000 http://www2.kenyon.edu/depts/biology/slonc/books/butler1.html Xenogeneis Patterns of Octavia Butler http://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/butler/butler_octavia0.html Voices from the Gaps Woman Writers of Color http://voices.cla.umn.edu/authors/OctaviaButler.html Octavia E Butler works and more. http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/authors/Octavia_E_Butler.htm Online Literary Criticism Collection Octavia E. Butler http://ipl.sils.umich.edu/cgi-bin/ref/litcrit/litcrit.out.pl?au=but-616
Sex in Kindred is far from the fun pleasure of sex in the Dominican world. Due to the culture normality for relationships in the early 19th century, sex is secretive, often violent and has a negative connotation. A clear example of the violent nature of sex in Kindred, is Rufus raping Alice repeatedly and ultimately doing anything to maintain his pleasure of raping her. “I was beginning to realize that he loved that woman- to her misfortune. There was no shame in raping a black woman, but there could be shame in loving one (124 Kindred). Rufus used his status as a powerful white male to obtain Alice, however the relationship between the two of them is extremely violent, it may be love, but only physically. Rufus continues to rape and beat Alice despite her unwillingness because she as a black woman, could not have refused his offer. In addition to the violent domestic relationship between Alice and Rufus, Dana goes through a similar experience as one of the white policemen chases her off into the woods ripping off her clothes. This indicates the negative violent form of sex that was embedded in a black woman’s life in the early 19th
In most relationships, friendship or sexual, trust is one of the main aspects that determine whether or not the relationship will last. In Octavia Butler’s Kindred, relationships are a major topic. Specifically, one that involves two different races which was never a big factor until time travel introduces them to the antebellum south. The trust Kevin and Dana displays shifts due to the novum of time travel and the way they view their own relationship in modern day 1970 to the antebellum south.
What would you do if you lived in a world without color, feelings; a place without memories?