Octavia E. Butler is rightfully known as one of science fiction’s most acclaimed writers. Butler, an African American woman, grew up reading science fiction in an era when sci-fi was dominated by white male authors writing for an overwhelmingly white male audience. In her own stories, Butler made use of the genre to better explore its potential as a means for social commentary and possibility. “Her novels pointedly expose various chauvinisms (sexual, racial, and cultural), are enriched by a historical consciousness… and enact struggles for personal freedom and cultural pluralism,” writes Robert Crossley in an introduction to one of her books (xvii).
Academic analysis aside, Butler’s works are highly personal and nuanced in their dealings with society’s “chauvinisms,” and they should not be read merely as political allegories. Rather, she masterfully employs the unique playing field of the fantasy genre to (paradoxically) render more visible the reality of social injustice. This isn’t to mean that Butler relies on fantastical tropes or clichés; on the contrary, her works might seem to stray far from the conventional ideas of the sci-fi/fantasy genre at first glance.
Butler’s self-termed “grim fantasy” novel, Kindred, is one of her more “realist” works in that the story takes place in our world (albeit circa 1976). The main character, Dana, is an African American woman and struggling writer who has just moved into a new apartment with her white husband, Kevin. However, the beginning of Kindred immediately alerts the reader to the supernatural element that drives the novel, i.e., the fact that Dana is somehow transported multiple times from 1976 Los Angeles to 1819 Maryland to save the life of a white child, who later becomes a slaveowner and Dana’s ancestor.
Time travel in a fantasy novel—a cliché? Certainly the device of time travel as a way to “literally” explore the past has been used before (one example I can think of is The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen [1988]). And I’m sure that I’ve read other books in which the protagonist is called upon, in a bizarre paradox, to ensure the survival of a future ancestor.
However, Kindred unfolds in a manner that is anything but clichéd. Butler relegates the method and manner of time travel to the background of the novel and focuses on the repercussions, both personal and social, of the meeting of characters from 1819 and 1976. Relationships within and between members of different racial/class backgrounds, rather than the fantastical plot or even the historical aspect of the setting, become the heart of the story.
Butler probes into the painful and complicated implications of lived history (not the watered-down accounts in textbooks or what Dana calls “television and movies, [with] the too-red blood substitute streaked across their backs… and their well-rehearsed screams” [Butler 36]*) on Dana’s relationship with other slaves, with her husband Kevin, and most importantly, with her future great-grandfather, Rufus Weylin, a man who comes across as alternately sympathetic and monstrous, a product of his time. Ultimately, the conflict between Rufus’s slave-master mentality and Dana’s autonomy becomes impossible to reconcile, and Dana must kill her own ancestor in order to survive. She returns permanently to 1976, (mostly) intact, but no character, black or white, is left unscarred.
The element of time travel distinguishes Kindred from both historical fiction and first-person slave narrative by allowing readers to witness the full horrors of slavery in the nineteenth century, while figuratively acknowledging its continued specter in present-day America. This lens we get through the reactions of Dana, a wry and perceptive 20th-century African American woman, as she learns how it feels to be treated as sub-human property (though she is still more privileged than the actual slaves of Weylin’s plantation). In a departure from other time-travel stories, characters from 1819 are semi-aware of Dana’s unusual status — she often disappears before their eyes just as she is about to be killed in their time (which is the only explanation given as the mechanism for Dana to return to the present**) and then returns, some years later from their point of view, looking about the same age. Butler emphasizes the juxtaposition of past and present by making Dana’s time-trips erratic and spontaneous, whisking her back and forth between 1819 and 1976 and allowing her no time to adjust to either era.
After reflecting on the nature of the book, I can understand why booksellers might want to shelve Kindred in the (African American) literature section, as opposed to sci-fi/fantasy — it is less about a fantastical realm than it is about our own world (and a very ugly aspect of it to boot). Kindred rightfully belongs in the canon of stories exploring American history, even if it takes a fantastical approach to the subject.
*This is when Dana witnesses a real beating for the first time.
**This mechanism becomes a significant turning point in the plot when Dana is driven to attempt “suicide” in order to leave the past after… well, I can’t adequately explain why without spoiling even more of Kindred than I already have, so I would just encourage you to read the book.
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Works Cited
Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. 1979. Boston: Beacon Press, 1988. Print.
Crossley, Robert. Introduction. Kindred. By Butler, Octavia E. Boston: Beacon Press, 1988. ix-xxii. Print.