A review by halfextinguishedthoughts
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

Dana is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported through time to the antebellum Maryland. She finds Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, drowning, and Dana feels as though she’s been summoned to save him. She’s drawn repeatedly back through time to the plantation. Each time her stay grows longer and more dangerous.Dana is uncertain whether she will make it back to her time and if she will make it unscathed.

First published in 1979, Butler began the story in response to a statement from an acquaintance. The man in question felt like the older generations were holding back African Americans from progressing in society because they were focused on the past. Butler felt that although he knew a lot of “facts and figures”, he didn’t “really understand or feel the realities of history.” She said she wanted “to write something that would, um, enable people… to feel this particular bit of history.”

Kindred is Butler’s third novel in an extensive and acclaimed oeuvre. Although many people view Butler as a science fiction novelist, she says she would not categorize Kindred as science fiction or not solely under the label. Even now, many people don’t and can’t cement Kindred down into one genre or the other. Instead, thinking of the book as something that transcends genre.

I recommend listening to this NPR interview with Butler on the 25th anniversary of Kindred! It really revealed a lot into the motivations and history involved, and it was really interesting to put a voice to this awe-inspiring author. (Also, her thoughts on the jobs she’s had in her life were hilarious and right where I am in life.)

The New York Times wrote an article called “The Essential Octavia Butler” which said that Kindred is “controlled and precise.” This statement sums up the deceivingly simple writing style. There is a control in the writing and precision throughout the story that makes every segment, every paragraph, feel purposeful. The matter-of-fact tone Dana uses shows the reader a clear picture of life on an antebellum plantation. Using the faithfulness to the historical events makes the tone emphasize the atrocities being committed and makes the acts more heinous.  When Rufus, a white enslaver and Dana’s ancestor, calls Dana back into time, Dana’s straightforward observations and dialogue create a contrast to his racist ones. These differences, Dana’s modern thoughts paired with the Antebellum United States, highlight how truly terrible it was and how it still affects us today. 

In the Lit Hub article I read before reading Kindred, it said “Sometimes we educate best by unsettling, by pulling back the curtain of a world and saying, look, scream, and never forget.” The terror is in the unsettling truth Butler portrays. 

We see the events through Dana’s eyes. She narrates in a straightforward tone. This tone often seems at odds with the events of the novel because of their detachment, but I felt like they worked together to create an unsettling effect that does pull “back the curtain of a world.” The other dualities in Kindred also combine to contrast and highlight its messages. The past and present, Dana and Alice, Rufus and his father, and Rufus and Kevin (Dana’s husband). All of these characters are foils of each other and are an entanglement of past and present. 

As Dana befriends Alice, an ancestor of hers, she sees what she might have been like if she was also born during this time. The two women are compared to each other many times in the novel. At one point, Rufus comes across them and says “You really are one woman.” This statement haunts them, connects them.

Both Alice and Dana are born free, but they both also experience what it feels like to have that freedom stripped away. Alice is enslaved and her freedom is taken away. Dana has to choose whether to do nothing and be complicit in Alice’s rape and enslavement or choose to help Alice - change the past - and risk not being born. Alice has no agency as a free woman, and Dana doesn't utilize her own, limited agency to alter history.

It felt surreal how fast Dana came to accept instances of cruelty. Dana is conflicted but ultimately doesn’t make certain decisions to help the people enslaved on the plantation. Rufus says he is in love but it doesn’t matter. The cruelty and truth in that cruelty is still present. Though Dana does not change the past, she realizes her past, their shared past, will always include slavery and her decisions. The complicitness stays with her forever.

Kindred refutes the opinion that the past is left in the past, that America and its peoples’ violence toward people who were enslaved does not affect us today. This is false and there is no hesitancy with that fact in this book. Dana loses her time, her safety, her agency, her autonomy, and even in the end, her arm. No one in the story is left untouched.

Lastly, I want to add a quote from Butler in an interview she did with Joshunda Sanders. She said “[With Kindred] I chose the time I was living in. I thought it was interesting to start at the bicentennial and the country's 200 years old and the country's still dealing with racial problems, and here's my character having to deal with slavery all of a sudden. If I had written the book now, it probably wouldn't be very different. What I was trying to do is make the time real, I wanted to take them back into it. The idea was always to make that time emotionally real to people. And that's still what it's about. The nice thing is that it is read in schools. Every now and then I hear about younger kids reading it and I wonder how they relate to it. All too often, especially young men, will feel, "Oh, if it was me, I would just..." and they have some simple solution that wouldn't work at all and would probably get them killed. Because they don't really understand how serious it is when the whole society is literally arrayed against you and arrayed to really keep you in your place. If you get seriously out of line, they will kill you because they fear you.”

Kindred is a difficult read. It is filled with trauma, hurt, and history. But that’s what makes it important.