Scan barcode
A review by emtees
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
5.0
Kindred is not a sci-fi or fantasy story. I don’t say that because it is brilliantly written or has serious themes; fantasy and sci-fi can do that. And it is definitely speculative fiction. But I think in its aims it is closer to historical fiction than anything else. Some kind of possibly-scientific, possibly-fantastical thing does happen to the main characters. But Butler uses this spec-fic plot to explore the historical realities of American slavery and the ways that modern people engage with the past.
Dana Franklin is a modern Black woman (as of the time of the book’s writing, so 1970’s) who is inexplicably transported away from her home by some mysterious force to come to the rescue of a young boy whose life is in danger. Shortly after she saves him, Dana is threatened with a shotgun by his father, and in that moment she is returned home, only seconds after she left. This establishes the pattern: when the boy is in danger, Dana is summoned to his rescue, and once he is safe, she remains with him until her own life is threatened and the same inexplicable force sends her back home. The length of each journey, and the amount of time between them, varies, but Dana’s time away passes much more quickly than her time at home, with months converting to mere hours. On her second trip, Dana realizes that she is being transported into the past, to Maryland in the early 19th century, and that the boy she saves again and again is Rufus Weylin, a name she knows because he is her distant ancestor. But what Dana didn’t know when she read Rufus’s name at the top of a list in the family bible was that Rufus was white, the son of a slaveowner and destined to be a plantation master himself.
This is the extent to which Kindred deals with the sci-fi elements of its premise. Dana presumes that the connection between herself and Rufus is based on their genetic tie and that seems to be true; her goal becomes to keep him alive long enough for his daughter, Hagar, to be born. The factors that drive the time travel appear to be emotional rather than scientific or magical - Rufus’s fear for his life calls her to him, and her own fear sends her home. Beyond that, the mechanics of time travel don’t matter; Dana never worries that she is changing the past by being there, even after her visits become so frequent and inexplicable that half the people on the Weylin plantation know her as the visitor from the future. The story is ultimately not about what impact Dana may or may not have on the timeline; it is about the impact the past has on Dana.
The psychological treatment of Dana is brilliant. At the start of the story, Dana is very much a modern person. She is certainly well-versed in racism - her white husband’s family rejected them when they married - and she understands the horrors of slavery from an academic and historical perspective. As she says, she’s read the books, she’s seen the movies, she knows it was bad. But she is detached from the realities of slavery. When she travels into the past, some elements of it sicken her, like her first encounter with a whipping, but other aspects are less terrible than she expected, even quaint, like the cookhouse on the Weylin plantation where the enslaved people gather out of white sight and develop their own culture and family-like environment. As she sees the compromises the enslaved people around her make to survive, moral compromises like accepting sexual advances from the white masters, Dana, a child of the Civil Rights era, cannot help but feel superior. But as her journeys to the past continue, Dana slowly loses her status as “an observer.” Forced to play the role of a slave, Dana finds herself broken down by the months she spends in the past and her own experiences of punishment, casual cruelty and degradation. She comes more and more to understand her enslaved ancestors as she is forced to live their lives. Her experience is one of total immersion into a history that books and movies cannot help but sanitize, and Dana experiences it viscerally. And nowhere is this more obvious than in her relationship with Rufus, her white ancestor. A young boy when she meets him, prone to casual racism but not cruel or dismissive of her, Rufus grows throughout the story into an adult, with Dana desperately hoping to have some influence on him. Dana and Rufus come to love each other, in their odd way, but it is a love that cannot exist separately from the world Rufus comes from, one in which any relationship between a white man and a Black woman is ultimately one of ownership.
Like Dana, the reader is lulled into the world of Kindred, drawn to the characters and their complex relationships only to be slapped in the face by the horrors of the era. According to an essay at the back of the book, Butler was inspired to write this story after hearing a friend make a comment that made her realize he knew about slavery but didn’t “feel it in his gut.” Kindred brings that history home in all it’s horrifying detail.
Dana Franklin is a modern Black woman (as of the time of the book’s writing, so 1970’s) who is inexplicably transported away from her home by some mysterious force to come to the rescue of a young boy whose life is in danger. Shortly after she saves him, Dana is threatened with a shotgun by his father, and in that moment she is returned home, only seconds after she left. This establishes the pattern: when the boy is in danger, Dana is summoned to his rescue, and once he is safe, she remains with him until her own life is threatened and the same inexplicable force sends her back home. The length of each journey, and the amount of time between them, varies, but Dana’s time away passes much more quickly than her time at home, with months converting to mere hours. On her second trip, Dana realizes that she is being transported into the past, to Maryland in the early 19th century, and that the boy she saves again and again is Rufus Weylin, a name she knows because he is her distant ancestor. But what Dana didn’t know when she read Rufus’s name at the top of a list in the family bible was that Rufus was white, the son of a slaveowner and destined to be a plantation master himself.
This is the extent to which Kindred deals with the sci-fi elements of its premise. Dana presumes that the connection between herself and Rufus is based on their genetic tie and that seems to be true; her goal becomes to keep him alive long enough for his daughter, Hagar, to be born. The factors that drive the time travel appear to be emotional rather than scientific or magical - Rufus’s fear for his life calls her to him, and her own fear sends her home. Beyond that, the mechanics of time travel don’t matter; Dana never worries that she is changing the past by being there, even after her visits become so frequent and inexplicable that half the people on the Weylin plantation know her as the visitor from the future. The story is ultimately not about what impact Dana may or may not have on the timeline; it is about the impact the past has on Dana.
The psychological treatment of Dana is brilliant. At the start of the story, Dana is very much a modern person. She is certainly well-versed in racism - her white husband’s family rejected them when they married - and she understands the horrors of slavery from an academic and historical perspective. As she says, she’s read the books, she’s seen the movies, she knows it was bad. But she is detached from the realities of slavery. When she travels into the past, some elements of it sicken her, like her first encounter with a whipping, but other aspects are less terrible than she expected, even quaint, like the cookhouse on the Weylin plantation where the enslaved people gather out of white sight and develop their own culture and family-like environment. As she sees the compromises the enslaved people around her make to survive, moral compromises like accepting sexual advances from the white masters, Dana, a child of the Civil Rights era, cannot help but feel superior. But as her journeys to the past continue, Dana slowly loses her status as “an observer.” Forced to play the role of a slave, Dana finds herself broken down by the months she spends in the past and her own experiences of punishment, casual cruelty and degradation. She comes more and more to understand her enslaved ancestors as she is forced to live their lives. Her experience is one of total immersion into a history that books and movies cannot help but sanitize, and Dana experiences it viscerally. And nowhere is this more obvious than in her relationship with Rufus, her white ancestor. A young boy when she meets him, prone to casual racism but not cruel or dismissive of her, Rufus grows throughout the story into an adult, with Dana desperately hoping to have some influence on him. Dana and Rufus come to love each other, in their odd way, but it is a love that cannot exist separately from the world Rufus comes from, one in which any relationship between a white man and a Black woman is ultimately one of ownership.
Like Dana, the reader is lulled into the world of Kindred, drawn to the characters and their complex relationships only to be slapped in the face by the horrors of the era. According to an essay at the back of the book, Butler was inspired to write this story after hearing a friend make a comment that made her realize he knew about slavery but didn’t “feel it in his gut.” Kindred brings that history home in all it’s horrifying detail.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Physical abuse, Racial slurs, Racism, Slavery, and Torture
Moderate: Domestic abuse and Rape
Minor: Injury/Injury detail
This book deals in extreme detail with the realities of slavery, including the rape and abuse of slaves, break up of families, and racism.