Kindred
This week, I had a beach day planned, so I decided to (FINALLY) finish a book that I (FINALLY) started in September of 2023—Kindred, by Octavia E. Butler.
First published in 1979, Kindred tells the story of an African American writer named Dana, who discovers that she is inexplicably and unpredictably transported from 1970’s Los Angeles to 1830’s Maryland—specifically, to the plantation where her ancestors were enslaved.
In 2023, I took this book along on a long train ride (8 hours), because I’d wanted to read it for years, and always felt a bit guilty that I hadn’t.
I was hoping to eventually teach a course that incorporated the work of Octavia Butler, but since I never got a chance to do that before I retired, Kindred has languished on my bookshelf for nearly 2 years now
With a bookmark less than 50 pages from the end. (I have no excuse. I’m simply describing a fact.)
The thing is, I loved the novel. And on some level, I may have put off finishing it for precisely that reason.
I don’t know if others experience this phenomenon, but when I find and read a novel I love, I always feel a bit of paradoxical sadness.
On the one hand, yes, I’m thrilled to be enjoying a novel, but on the other hand… it will end. That’s sad.
Sometimes, I will actively put off reading a novel that I suspect I will enjoy, particularly if I’ve just read a novel that I actually did enjoy.
I suspect there’s a psychological explanation for this behavior, but I don’t know what it is—I just know that it’s a thing that I do, like talking to myself when I garden.
(I also suspect that these are things that may eventually make me a particularly… interesting… member of a retirement community.)
In the case of Kindred, I marveled at how clever Butler was to think of time travel as a way of representing the complexities of slavery as a historical trauma.
At the outset of the novel, readers “know” what the ending will be—both in terms of what physically happens to the protagonist, and in terms of what happens historically to the descendants of African American slaves in the United States.
What we don’t really know, though, is exactly how we (both the novel’s readers and its protagonists) got to this point.
There are always gaps in the story, and this is what Butler imaginatively fills in, in part through her use of slave narratives.
Ultimately, Kindred imaginatively capitalizes on the narrative dilemma that exists in the aftermath of slavery.
We have a story of “what happened,” but the story is always potentially suspect because it was shaped by the trauma of the legalized, systemic dehumanization of one group of people by another.
For people of color, there are always gaps in US history—accounts that weren’t included, that can only be filled in by speculating about what might have happened, in light of what we know.
Butler’s genius is that she recognized that the literary genre we now call “speculative fiction” could offer an opportunity to imaginatively consider those gaps, and that this consideration could compel readers to think about their own anachronistic assumptions about what slavery “was” or “did” or what it “meant.”
If you haven’t read Kindred yet, I highly recommend it.
I came to the novel late, but it’s one that I’ll now be returning to again and again.
Do you have a novel that you’ve been meaning to read, or that you started and then set aside (for whatever reason)? If so, drop it in the comments.
