Kindred.

[starlady]

Butler, Octavia. Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. [1978]

I read this for calico_reaction's February book club; I'm only…nine days late. In my defense, I can only say that it's as harrowing as it is excellent. ETA:calico_reaction's review is here. /eta

The plot of Kindred is both simple and (I'd wager) familiar to many readers of sff: In 1976, black woman Dana Franklin is repeatedly brought back in time and space from her home in California to Maryland from 1819 to the 1830s so that she can save the life of white slaveowner Rufus, who is her many times removed ancestor; if she doesn't save him (and as Rufus grows up, Dana is increasingly tempted not to save him), she will kill not only herself but all the members of her family. What she has to do to ensure her own existence gets progressively more horrible even as she progressively loses her distance from the time she visits in every way; Dana quickly becomes a de facto slave, instead of a woman pretending to be a slave, and winds up countenancing some of the worst sorts of things that happened under slavery to make sure that she stays alive, through time, to go back to them.

This book is a classic, and deservedly so, so I don't feel too guilty saying that it took me rather longer than usual to get into it on account of some excessively expository dialogue in the beginning, but once I was engrossed I was unequivocally hooked. Butler does a number of interesting things at the level of architectonics, most crucially the fact that both Dana and Rufus are doubled in the book--Rufus says repeatedly that Dana is the same as Alice, Rufus's enslaved mistress and Dana's ancestor (the two women even look alike; other slaves call them sisters), while Dana quickly loses her ability to tell Rufus apart from her white husband Kevin. I would have to think more deeply about this fact than I have the time to make a sweeping statement about what that means beyond the text, but I think in some ways it's related to what Dana herself experiences, namely how easy it is to become accustomed, even reconciled, to the fact of slavery, to the fact of being a slave, how much mental and spiritual effort it takes to struggle against that reality. The lability of freedom, I'd say, maybe? And I do mean freedom very specifically (as opposed to liberty).

The book of course also has some pointed things to say about gender; I can't help but think it highly significant that Dana wanders around the 1800s in jeans and blouses--the one time she does go back in a 1970s dress, she's told by Tom Weylin, Rufus' father, to "put on something decent", which she does: trousers. And the one time she tries to escape north, Dana does so cross-dressing in C19th men's clothing (and fails, which is also significant). There's also a pointed metatextual irony in Dana's remark about Rufus that "I was the worst possible guardian for him--a black to watch over him in a society that considered blacks subhuman, a woman to watch over him in a society that considered women perennial children." In 1978 when Butler wrote those words it was even more true than it is now that black people and women (and many other groups, and intersectional members of all of them) are still struggling to force society to recognize that they are full human beings in their own rights. I don't think anyone can have a leg to stand on if they want to say that Octavia Butler is anything but unflinching.

The bluestreak 25th anniversary edition, which is very nice, includes a critical essay by Robert Crossley of UMass-Boston which positions Kindred as a (modern) slave narrative, with which statement I'd agree wholeheartedly (at times Dana even cites the archetypal slave narrative, Frederick Douglass' autobiography), but when Crossley states flatly that Kindred isn't science fiction I had to laugh: there's a point at which your denials only make you look dumb, and in the case of Kindred it also leads me to question how closely Crossley actually read the text, since at one point Butler explicitly (through Dana) declares in-text that the book is science fiction: "Time travel was science fiction in nineteen seventy-six. In eighteen nineteen--Rufus was right--it was sheer insanity." So there you have it: science fiction.

Finally, I really liked the ending, both for what happened to Dana and for what Dana did; I think in some ways it's the most ethical--or maybe the most liberated--action in the entire book. And I think that the price Dana paid was fair, once you get past the fact that there is no justice in what happened to her at the larger level, or in the existence of slavery as an institution ever, let alone for as long as it lasted in the United States. Like the song says, "the only thing we did was right was the day we started to fight."

ETA: Rereading what I've written, I see that I've mostly failed to address the book's real subject matter; as calico_reaction notes, despite the overlay of time travel Kindred is essentially historical fiction about (the experience of) being a slave, and that's what makes the book so harrowing, and at times horrifying: Butler doesn't spare Dana and the reader, since Dana experiences or witnesses almost the entire gamut of violence to which slaves were subjected by their white masters and white society. But equally importantly, Butler also writes the slaves on the Weylin plantation with whom Dana connects as fully fleshed human beings making impossible choices and doing their best in impossible circumstances; people like Sally and Carrie and Nigel and Alice are far more sympathetic than Rufus or even Kevin, and deservedly so. Kevin in particular can never fully understand what Dana experiences, even though he knows what happened intellectually, which…neatly encapsulates the dilemma of being an "ally", or so it seems to me (quote marks because I dislike that word in this context). But I think another of this book's triumphs is precisely that it illustrates that, that Kevin remains on the outside even in the C19th, that it's Dana's experience and Dana's choices with which the reader sympathizes to an excruciating extent, that it's her story rather than his or Rufus's, that it's her experience of slavery that we are made to grapple with. To a contemporary reader it's a hugely discomforting book to read (and Butler actually implicitly discusses why in-text, when Dana mentions having to modify her direct 1970s prose to fit the more florid 1820s style when she writes Rufus's letters), which is unquestionably a good thing; slavery is an experience no contemporary reader will ever have, but whose legacy in the form of racism and the systems of oppression that structure our society is still very much present. And Dana's story forces the reader to confront that too.

I don't know; I feel like I'm speaking from ignorance here, and that I've said more than enough. It's definitely time to go to bed. /eta

Comments

[scottishrefugee.livejournal.com]

Oooh, Kindred. What a wonderful book. We read it at uni as part of our third-year course on sci-fi, and I got so enthralled by it that I wanted to have it as the main subject of my degree thesis. Unfortunately, it had been translated only a few months before - which fairly irked me; it was a 1976 novel, and it got translated in Italian only in the 2000s? WTH? - and thus I had to change book and author. Lucky me. Well, I chose Ursula K. Le Guin's The Telling, so I really cannot complain - another inspiring novel, as far as I'm concerned.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

I definitely want to read more Butler.

The pace of translation in general can be really frustratingly slow, sometimes, especially compared with what gets 'fast-tracked.'