Kindred

Octavia E. Butler's fourth novel, Kindred (1979), is a meditation on the impact of public education, popular media, and family lore upon our conceptions of shared legacies, future prospects, and present positions. Variously classified as realistic science fiction, grim fantasy, neo–slave narrative, and initiation novel, the book evades genre labeling. Using the fantastic convention of time travel to move Dana on repeated trips from twentieth-century southern California to antebellum Maryland, Butler narrates the coming of age of an African American woman during the social revolutions of the 1970s, explores the grim realities and legacies of antebellum slavery, and speculates upon future possibilities for human equality.

On her twenty-sixth birthday, Dana is abruptly and involuntarily transported to a Maryland riverbank in order to save a drowning child, Rufus, who will grow up to be a slaveowner and the father of Dana's grandmother, Hagar. Dana makes several trips between the centuries for she is jerked into the nineteenth century every time Rufus believes he is dying and Rufus's temper and lack of discipline often place him in mortal danger. She is returned to the twentieth century when she believes her own life is ending. During her travels into the past, Dana comes to understand slavery as a psychological as well as a physical danger, and she also learns how inadequate the average twentieth-century education is for knowing one's historical past or for surviving without technological aid. As she lives and becomes friends with other slaves, Dana develops a new understanding of heroism and perfidy, of human potential and human limitations. Dana betrays her great-grandmother Alice in order to save Alice's life. With her great-grandfather Rufus, she insists upon mutual respect despite or because of the differences that society affords to race, gender, and condition of servitude.

Butler's juxtapositioning of life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America deliberately suggests complicated comparisons. For example, Dana, a black unpublished writer, is married to Kevin, a white recently published writer, who she met when they were both working for a temporary labor pool nicknamed the “slave market.” Though she loves her husband, Dana recognizes disturbing similarities between their relationship and those of the antebellum period, while Kevin comes to regard Rufus as his rival for Dana's attention and affection.

Kindred was written, Butler says, during the black consciousness period of the early 1970s as her attempt to understand her own identity and the experiences that had shaped her ancestors. It was influenced also by her discovery of slave narratives by writers such as Frederick Douglass. Though the antebellum slave past marked a distinct subject and era change for Octavia Butler, Kindred does continue the explorations of individual heroism, human relations, and social patterns that mark her other writings.

With Kindred Octavia Butler was among the first of recent writers, including Virginia Hamilton, Belinda Hurmance, Charles R. Johnson, and Ishmael Reed, to employ techniques of speculative fiction and fantasy in meditations on slavery and the human condition.

Bibliography

• Jewelle Gomez, “Black Women Heroes: Here's Reality, Where's the Fiction?,” The Black Scholar 17.2 (Mar./Apr. 1986): 8–18.
• Robert Crossley, introduction to Kindred, 1988

Frances Smith Foster

Prior to the publication of her fourth novel, Kindred, Octavia Butler was primarily known only to fans of science fiction. While her first three novels — all part of the "Patternmaster" series — received favorable reviews, her work was marginalized as genre fiction. Since the 1979 publication of Kindred, however, Butler's work is known to a wider audience.

The novel focuses on many of the issues found in Butler's fiction: the abuse of power, the limits of traditional gender roles, and the repercussions of racial conflict. The science-fiction elements of the story are limited, however, to the unexplained mechanism that permits a twentieth-century Africa American woman to travel into the past. Each time Dana Franklin is drawn back into the early 1800s to save the life of her white ancestor, she learns more about the complex nature of slavery and the struggles of African Americans to survive it. The result is a powerful and accessible story that resembles a historical slave narrative — but one told from a modern perspective and in a modern voice.

Butler's exploration of this era has led many new readers to discover her work, from feminist critics to students of African American literature. These individuals have learned what fans of science fiction have long known: Butler crafts some of the most imaginative and thought-provoking fiction today. "In Kindred," Robert Crossley wrote in his introduction to the novel, "Octavia Butler has designed her own underground railroad between past and present whose terminus is the reawakened imagination of the reader."

Kindred

Author	Octavia Butler
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Novel
Publisher	Doubleday
Publication date	June 1979
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	264 pp (first edition, hardback)
ISBN	ISBN 0-385-15059-8 (first edition, hardback)

This article is about the 1976 novel. For other uses, see Kindred (disambiguation).

Kindred is a 1979 novel by Octavia Butler. While most of Butler's work is classified as science fiction, Kindred is often shelved in literature or African-American literature and Butler herself categorized it as "a kind of grim fantasy" [1].

Plot summary

The novel tells the story of Dana, an African American woman living in 1976 who is repeatedly thrown back in time to the ante-bellum South. She is unconsciously summoned (through means that are never explained) by her ancestor, Rufus, from the time he is a child through to adulthood. Rufus is white and from a slaveowning family. She also meets Alice, another ancestor, who is forced to become Rufus' mistress. Dana is placed in the difficult position of making certain that Rufus and Alice have a child, Hagar, who is Dana's direct ancestor (thus ensuring Dana's own survival). Dana is also forced to cope with an environment which forces her into slavery every time she enters it.

Each time she travels back in time, she stays longer, and comes back only when her life is in danger. She stops getting sent back in time after she kills Rufus.

"I was trying to get people to feel slavery," Butler said in a 2004 interview. "I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people." [2] In another interview, she said, "I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you." [3]

The book is set on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Butler said she chose the setting "because I wanted my character to have a legitimate hope of escape," and because two famous African-Americans, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, had been enslaved there. [4]

External links

• Kindred Reader's Guide: An Interview With Octavia Butler; part of a project that adopted Kindred as Rochester, New York's book of the year for 2003.
• "Interview: Octavia Butler", by John C. Snider, Scifidimensions, June 2004; an interview on Kindred's 25th anniversary.
• Book Review of Kindred

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