Analysis Of Octavia Butler's Kindred

Octavia Butler’s Kindred is often hailed as a great work of science and speculative fiction due to the way the protagonist, Dana, unwillingly time travels back to slave-era Maryland to save her white ancestor when he places himself in life threatening situations. However, many theorists also place it in the neo-slave narrative genre because of the first person narration, and the way the novel attempts to give a voice to the silenced slaves of that era. I would argue that Kindred’s genre bending allows Butler to explore the fluidity of the past for American, particularly Black Americans. Ron Eyerman states that “the past becomes the present through the embodied reactions of individuals as they carry out their daily lives” (5). Therefore, incorporating

But, I will argue that rather than obliterating thought and language, pain adds to them and the trauma that is born out of physical and psychological violence produces a new epistemology about one’s own agency and will. As Dana, the protagonist, is born a few generations removed from institutionalized slavery, her epistemology revolves around who she is as a woman who has never been completely stripped of her agency and will. However, through her journey, she becomes aware that she is bifurcated – not only as a woman living in two times, but also as person who is both black and a woman and of black and white histories – which necessitates a clash between who she is as a free woman in the 1970’s and who she has to be as a slave in the early 1800’s, before melding into a singular self. This singular self has a new awareness of the importance of having the knowledge of self to know that she has to consciously fight against objectification and that once that mentality is shed she has to have the will to reclaim her stolen agency. As she becomes unified, the new knowledge of herself includes who she is as a not only a descendent of slavery, but also what that entails. She has recieved an intimate knowledge of what it meant to be a slave, what it meant to be unable to dictate what one does with her body, and the problem of slaves being illiterate and unable to pass on these stories on their own. By experiencing the violence and trauma, Dana is unable to remain willfully ignorant, and is forced to confront the realities of not just her own families past, but the pasts of the people who surrounded and were connected to her family, who were not only other black slaves, but also the white people who upheld the