Reading: Kindred

 Kindred by Octavia E Butler is an incredibly heavy book and perhaps the one that the author is best known for. It's the kind of book that definitely is important while being unpleasant, gripping and utterly terrifying. If you want to read sci-fi/fantasy that's socially relevant, it's something I'd consider essential reading.

Not my own copy, just the first edition cover which I like better than the edition from the library. Laughing at the Harlan Ellison quote though, cruel yes, sensual? No.

 

    In Kindred, Dana, a black woman living in 1976, finds herself spontaneously traveling back through time to rescue a white boy from drowning in the river, and then again to save the boy from a fire he'd started in his room. On this second visit she pieces together that this boy is her ancestor and he is somehow calling her to him in times of danger. Dana has to protect Rufus, her ancestor, in order to assure that her own family and existence is preserved. Most horrifying of all in this disorienting situation is the fact that her ancestor is part of a slave-owning family on a plantation in the Antebellum south. She also learns that she cannot return to her own time unless she feels she is in mortal danger herself. For Dana, a modern woman living in the city, being dropped into this violent world is akin to ending up in a war zone. Her first encounter with a group of patrollers (the pre-cursor to the KKK) leaves her beaten, bruised, and nearly raped. And ironically this very encounter is what returns her to her own time period.

    Time moves differently in Dana's own time versus in the past- when she travels, very little time passes in the present, whereas in the past she's sometimes there for days or months. This is quite jarring, as the events that transpire become compressed for her. She watches Rufus grow from a young child into a vicious adult in a short span of time. Her own stays in the past start to get longer too as she isn't always immediately able to return to the present. In essence she becomes a slave and a part of her ancestor's estate.

    Over time, as Dana returns again and again to save Rufus she begins to understand and experience herself why slaves accepted their situation- that sometimes the best you can do is to survive and try to protect those close to you. She experiences firsthand the horrors and the crushing humiliation that await anyone that steps out of line. You could draw a lot of parallels to an abusive relationship with the way the reality of slavery is portrayed- the slave owners themselves are alternatingly kind and cruel, possessing the kind of skewed morals and sensibilities that have them beating slaves for minor infractions but also doing things like throwing parties for slaves' weddings, sharing moments of humor and companionship. Dana finds herself unable to hate her ancestor, even though he enacts so much casual cruelty to the people he owns (and continues to *own* people as property). What's so chilling about this book is that the evil on display is so casual and woven into the fabric of the everyday. It's the banality of evil. The white characters in this book aren't caricatures or monsters, they commit evil and cruelty on a daily basis and this evil is an inherent part of how they live, but they are just normal people. Butler does an excellent job of illustrating these characters and their internal logic.

    Dana's white husband Kevin witnesses her suddenly disappearing and reappearing tries his best to make sense of what happened. Eventually he believes her and becomes her anchor in the present time. While Kevin is a kind and compassionate person- he still is complicit in both patriarchy and white supremacy, benefiting from these things himself when he accidentally travels to the past along with Dana and has to pose as her "owner" to protect her. His character is often compared to Rufus, sometimes sharing traits and habits that remind the reader that Kevin and Dana have very different lived realities. Even in the traumatic events of the past, he doesn't quite fathom the emotional toll it takes on Dana. Kevin does end up participating in the Underground Railroad, assisting escaped slaves to safety in the North, but his bravery and ethical actions don't divorce him from whiteness. As a man, his experiences are also very different in that he is not subject to the same threat of sexual violence that Dana experiences as a woman- the threat of rape and a life of forced pregnancy is always around her, and it is the lived reality of the enslaved women she encounters and befriends. Women also have very little power in this time- the white women in this book are little more than frustrated home makers- while enslaved women are the ones doing all the work.

    Butler's work is very much concerned with power and how power structures function, including the limited ways that those without significant power try to lash out and enact some control over others in their lives. Rufus' mother Margaret has not real power in her society, so she lashes out at the slaves for not working "hard enough" or not cleaning things to her specifications. Rufus as a child with a stern father also lashes out at his mother and to others. Even among the slaves there's precarious hierarchies, backstabbing, and vying for better stations within their caste. Both the structures of family and society deal in cruelty and oppression.

    I feel that in a lot of ways, a time travel story like this could easily fall into a sort of power fantasy, or an alleviation of guilt if it was written by a white author. Dana has some advantages that the future has given her- a knowledge of very basic medicine, an understanding of germ theory, the ability to read and write (writing is her profession as well as her husband's) but her story is not one of epic triumph. She is not successfully escaping, starting a rebellion, or killing her masters- she is surviving, caring for others as best as she can, often paying the price for what she can do- like teaching slave children to read and write. Every decision she makes is weighed against her own survival and the survival of those around her. Kevin is also not serving as a hero- he does good things, but he is also paying a heavy price. He too is merely surviving and trying his best. Choosing to go on and survive in this world is a very brave act in and of itself. We don't get a grand resolution or a complete overhaul of history, life simply goes on.

    While this is a work of fiction, it's a strikingly realistic and honest depiction of this time period and the people who lived in it. Through Dana, we are connected both to the people of the past as well as an understanding of the lasting consequences of slavery. Intergenerational trauma, poverty, the racist and patriarchal societal structure, oppressive religious and moral codes that connect back to this time. And in 1976, Jim Crow laws are still a very recent memory. In the present, Dana's interracial marriage is still a controversial aspect of her life too.

The older I get, the more I enjoy a book that defies the constraints of established genre. Kindred is more magical realism, fantasy, horror and historical fiction than sci-fi (at least, not hard SF). Time travel is something we understand a little bit in how it functions- what summons Dana into the past and returns her to the present, but we never learn the how and why of its possibility. There is no machine, no explanation, only an event with some rote mechanics for the characters to guess at. There is a strength in the ambiguity, in the mystery, with the reader as much at a loss for the *why* as the characters are. I'm more interested in story and characters than I am in why a spaceship flies or how time travel work. That's a strength of books like Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, which also deals with an inexplicable timeslip that has a character moving to different times in his own life, in part to illustrate the cruelty and senselessness of WWII.

Kindred is also extremely well-researched. Butler illustrates the past in exquisite detail and creates an immersive environment with rich and fully realized characters populating it. We see how people lived, what they ate, what medicine looked like, what worked looked like, what tools people used, and how society functioned in the Antebellum South. It's interesting too to see the contrast between the characters' expectations of the past vs the way life is and can be. I'm surprised that we're not reading Kindred in American schools (though I also can guess exactly why that's not a popular choice, especially these day).

    Again, it's a harrowing book, but it's one I had a hard time putting down.