As a writer I tend to like books that have realistic characters and settings. That’s why Octavia Butler’s Kindred is so appealing to me. I find the main character, Dana, very realistic in both her actions and thoughts. Though the novel’s plot is science fiction, it is still grounded in reality and the reader has no trouble relating to the book and its themes.
One reason I find Dana such an appealing character is because her feelings towards Rufus are very similar to mine. Oftentimes I find it hard to relate to characters in books as their opinions, lifestyles, and experiences are very different from mine. Dana is not an exception to this, but I found it interesting that we share similar opinions. Like a lot of people in our class, I hated Rufus for the obvious reasons, but I still find it hard, despite all he’s done, to truly hate him. I think this is the same way Dana feels about him. It was a strange mixture of pity, disgust, love, and hate. Rufus has a lot of despicable qualities, but it’s really hard to determine if his actions are his fault or a result of the time period and his upbringing. It’s difficult to truly hate someone when you know they were taught to behave that way and that in their society their actions are acceptable. The definition of “normal” is conforming to a standard. Rufus is just conforming to the standards of his time. I think that even though she might not have said it, this is a concept Dana understands and struggles to accept throughout the novel. Any modern day person would have a hard time accepting those standards, but that just adds to the realism of her character.
Regarding the standards of a particular time period, Rufus’ interactions with Alice must be taken into consideration. I think Rufus truly has genuine feelings for Alice, though his concept of love is deeply flawed, and he had never been taught how to show his feelings. In his society there is no proper way to express love for or establish a relationship with a person of a different race. Believing this, I find it even more difficult to despise his character, especially if I consider the time period he was raised in. Something else about Rufus that makes it hard for both Dana and I to truly hate him is the fact that for half of our experience with him, Rufus is a child. When Rufus was a child, it was easy to see his neglect and I had more pity for him. Even when he grew up it was hard to shake the image of him as a child. I don’t think Dana ever really says it, but I’m sure these are some of the reasons she too finds it difficult to completely hate Rufus.
Along with our feelings towards Rufus, Dana and I had very similar reactions to and feelings about the situation of slavery. Last semester I took a class called Civil War and Reconstruction and we spent some time reading slave narratives and studying slave life on plantations. Dana’s reactions to the Weylin plantation are very much the same as mine were going into my Civil War class. Dana expressed surprise at not seeing some of the common images of a southern plantation: “I looked around for a white overseer and was surprised not to see one. The Weylin house surprised me too when I saw it in the daylight. It wasn’t white. It had no columns, no porch to speak of” (Butler 67). I also made assumptions about plantation life; I imagined that slaves worked all day in the field under the watch of a cruel slave owner who would whip them every five seconds if they didn’t do exactly as they were told. After the class, however, I walked away with a new view of what life on a plantation could have been like. By the end of the novel, I think that Dana also saw slavery and plantation life in a new way, though this new way is probably different from mine.
Besides the realistic and relatable protagonist, this novel appeals to me because I find it more realistic than other Civil War era movies or books. Dana mentions that the slaves on Weylin’s plantation are treated much better than she thought. This was one of my initial reactions as well. The fact is that most people have these horror stories about slavery stuck into their heads. Just like I had before, most people believe slave masters were outrageously cruel and sadistic. In reality, most slave masters were neither excessively cruel nor overwhelmingly compassionate. The majority fell somewhere in between these two. Generally, if the slave behaved, they were able to go about their work without constantly looking over their shoulder in fear. However, if they ever tried to turn against their masters in any way, they would be sure to get punishment. This is basically the Weylins in a nutshell. As I mentioned in my blog, “[It] makes sense. Slave and plantation owners are businessmen in the simplest sense. You don’t want to destroy your “merchandise” (it sounds awful using that word, but I’m sure that’s how slave owners saw it), but you certainly don’t want it to destroy you.”
What I also admire about this novel is how flawlessly Butler incorporates science fiction elements into a historical novel. I love both of these genres and enjoy writing them as well. The fact that Butler was able to blend them so well into a well-wrought and believable novel inspires me as a writer. In fact, before I even read this book I was working on a novel idea that was a combination of science fiction and history, and, strange enough, involved the Civil War. As a student working towards my English and writing degree, it’s especially important for me to find novels that inspire me. I find it impressive that despite the fact that this novel is written about a time period Butler never experienced and contains science fiction elements, it is still extremely realistic. I think it takes great talent to accomplish that.
Like other Civil War works, Kindred deals with the underlying theme of oppression. This novel stands out because the protagonist, Dana, is a modern woman who goes back to a time of slavery to face this oppression. Though she does not necessarily have the skills other slaves have, her modern-day knowledge allows her to endure her time on the plantation. While Dana doubtlessly faces oppression in her normal life, her trip to the early eighteen hundreds shows her how this type of racial oppression can take over. The birth of slavery can be seen through bell hook’s statement: “…racism is oppressive not because white folks have prejudicial feelings about blacks (they could have such feelings and leave us alone) but because it is a system that promotes domination and subjugation” (hooks 15). It is true that by acting out on these feelings, racism truly takes form. Kindred depicts an instance in our world’s history where this racist system has worked its way into the minds of so many people and caused an unbelievable amount of damage. The racist feelings would be bad enough, but it is the need to control the object of the prejudice that leads to the events in this novel. Without the desire to dominate, slavery would not exist.
Stereotypes are the first step in oppression. During the Civil War era Africans and African Americans were presented as ignorant, savage, and inferior to whites. Because of this, whites needed to “help” them, and to do so blacks needed to be made into slaves. bell hooks explains how stereotypes aided whites in making blacks into slaves: “Stereotypes, however, inaccurate, are one form of representation. Like fictions, they are created to serve as substitutions, standing in for what is real. They are there not to tell it like it is but to invite and encourage pretense. They are a fantasy, a projection onto the Other that makes them less threatening” (hooks 170). Dana transports back in time to this world of stereotypes, and because of her race she is subject to a lot of prejudice. In her interaction with a doctor, Dana is treated like she’s incompetent: “…the doctor asked his questions. Was I sure Rufus had had a fever? How did I know? Had he been delirious? Did I know what delirious meant? Smart nigger, wasn’t I?” (Butler 137). The doctor automatically assumes that Dana does not know anything about medicine, and when he finds out she does, he thinks it’s amusing. In fact, Dana does not fit most of the stereotypes that the whites have set up. She’s educated, dresses differently (like a man, most characters note), speaks with more eloquence, and is married to a white man. The Weylins have a difficult time placing her into a category, and because of this they feel threatened by her. Rufus admits to Dana that his father “might even be a little afraid of you” (Butler 126). This is the way that Dana stands out as the protagonist; she is “unique” in the fact that she defines the projection of Otherness that the slave-owning society created.
Because of their need to control the Other, whites use methods of dehumanization, such as trying to turn the slave from a person to an object. “Black slaves...could be brutally punished for looking, for appearing to observe the white they were serving, as only a subject can observe, or see. To be fully an object then was to lack the capacity to see or recognize reality. These looking relations were reinforced as white cultivated the practice of denying the subjectivity of blacks (the better to dehumanize and oppress)…” (hooks 168). As hooks mentioned, slaves were forced to act ignorant and obedient. Awareness was power, and this they weren’t allowed to have. In one part of the novel, Dana conforms to this idea: “After a moment, I realized Weylin was looking at me—staring hard at me…At first, I stared back. Then I looked away, remembering that I was supposed to be a slave. Slaves lowered their eyes respectfully. To stare back was insolent” (Butler 66). However, as Dana mentions later, she spends a lot of her time acting—not really living like the other slaves. She may comply with the slave owners’ expectations, but she never fully assimilates into the culture. What sets Dana apart from everyone else is that she manages to keep her subjectivity throughout most of the novel. Perhaps because she is a stranger in a strange land she is even more aware than most of what is going on around her and what the people around her are doing. Combined with her knowledge of her surroundings, Dana has an enormous sense of self. She knows who she is and what her values are. This is just one level of the knowledge she possesses and that gives her strength.
Regarding knowledge, hooks wrote, “The history of slavery in the United States shows that black people regarded education…as a political necessity. Struggle to resist white supremacy and racist attacks informed black attitudes towards education. Without the capacity to…think critically and analytically, the…slave would remain forever bound, dependent on the will of the oppressor” (hooks 98). Knowledge is power, especially during times of oppression. Former slaves like Frederick Douglass have shown us that knowledge can set you free, both figuratively and literally. Considering this, it is not surprising that slave owners would want to keep their slaves ignorant. Without knowledge, a slave would have to depend on his owner for work and livelihood. When Dana arrives on the Weylin plantation it is easy to see she’s more educated than the average slave. This immediately labels her as a threat to the Weylins because an educated slave is a dangerous one. Dana’s conversation with another slave, Nigel, sums up Weylin’s fear of an educated slave:
“You’ll get in trouble,” [Nigel] said. “Marse Tom already don’t like you. You talk too educated and you come from a free state.”
“Why should either of those things matter to him? I don’t belong to him.”
The boy smiled. “He don’t want no niggers ‘round her talking better than him, putting freedom ideas in our heads.” (74)
Dana’s knowledge is two-fold; not only does she know how to read and write (which is more than some white people knew), but she has historical knowledge as well. She knows what’s going on in the world outside of the plantation, and she has knowledge of what will happen in the future. Even if the Weylins were not aware than Dana knew these kinds of things, this “education” undoubtedly gives her a better understanding of her situation and a realization of the outcome. Dana knows that someday slaves will be free, and this allows her to rise above “the will of the oppressor.”
Both Kindred and Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic use a similar plotline to deal with the idea of oppression. Kindred follows a black woman, Dana, who gets transported back to the early eighteen hundreds in order to save a boy who will father one of her ancestors. Likewise, in The Devil’s Arithmetic, a twelve-year-old white Jewish girl, Hannah, is transported back to the Holocaust to save the life of her aunt. Despite the number of years between the events of these stories, both novels deal with the theme of oppression in regards to race. Dana faces racism against African Americans, and their enslavement by white people. Hannah faces prejudice against those of Jewish heritage and their genocide by the Nazi regime in Germany.
In light of each other, the two novels raise a question: is one’s capability to deal with oppression based on the environment or the individual? Despite the hardships she faces, Dana is able to maintain her sense of self and her subjectivity. Hannah, however, slowly loses the memory of her old life in modern day New York and struggles to find herself amongst the horrors of the Holocaust. A few reasons could explain the difference between these two young women. Hannah is much younger than Dana and probably less likely to be aware of her surroundings and challenge her oppressors. Concentration camps had a more rigid, dangerous atmosphere than most plantations. Though hooks mentioned that slaves were punished for their awareness, it would have been easier for them to get away with being observant. Slaves were part of the society of that time and thus had a purpose; the victims of the concentration camp did not. For them, there was less room for error. They would not be punished; they would be killed. The Devil’s Arithmetic questions Dana’s strength as a character. Was she an exceptionally strong individual who used her knowledge and common sense to endure and fight against a prejudiced system? Or was it her environment and the people around her (Rufus is a notable example) that allowed her more freedom than Hannah had? Certainly Dana had more freedom than many of the slaves of the Weylin plantation, but that could be due to the fact that Rufus favored her. As for Dana’s sense of self, she was much older than Hannah and would have had a stronger hold on her own identity, morals, and actions. As a child, Hannah could have been more susceptible to conforming to the norm. The two characters’ awareness of both their surroundings and selves could have been based on their environment, their own strength, or both.
The idea of environment versus the individual that I proposed comes into play again when considering hope in the face of oppression. Both Dana and Hannah were modern day women transported back in time, and both have knowledge about their respective time periods. Dana knows about slavery, the Civil War, and the slaves’ situation after the war. Hannah knows about the Nazis, concentration camps, and how many Jews die during the war. Though they are placed in similar situations, Dana and Hannah have different perspectives. While Hannah despairs about her situation in the camp, she uses what she knows about the future to inspire hope in her friends. After telling them the hard truth, that six million Jews will die in concentration camps, she provides hope by saying: “In the end, in the future, there will be Jews still. And there will be Israel, a Jewish state, where there will be a Jewish president and a Jewish senate. And in America, Jewish movie stars” (Yolen 156). She remembers the future and that gives her hope. Dana, on the other hand, knows the future does not necessarily bring happiness for the slaves on the Weylin plantation, or any of the slaves during this time. This knowledge upsets her: “Even knowing what’s going to happen doesn’t help. I know some of those kids will live to see freedom—after they’ve slaved away their best years. But by the time freedom comes to them, it will be too late. Maybe it’s already too late” (Butler 100). Dana knows that far into the future slavery is abolished and blacks have freedom, but in her heart she still knows that many slaves will suffer and die before that happens. Her knowledge of the future doesn’t so much inspire hope as it makes her face reality. Perhaps the reason for her lack of hope is because she “never forgot we were acting;” she and Kevin were never really part of the time or the situation (Butler 98). They were bystanders. This allowed Dana the opportunity to be more critical and to not need hope as much as Hannah, who was fully infused in her situation at the concentration camp. However, as with the idea of subjectivity, their reaction could depend on who they are as individuals. Hannah is a child and more likely to base her life on wishes and hopes. Dana as an adult would be more critical and analytical of the situation, more realistic of the outcomes. Either way, Kindred and The Devil’s Arithmetic show that despite similar circumstances, oppression can have very different effects on people.
Kindred is a fascinating novel because not only does it show the reader the consequences of slavery in the past, it hints at what slavery has done to our future. Dana’s situation at the end of the novel shows us this. After a final encounter with Rufus, Dana loses an arm. Butler explains this: “I couldn’t let her return to what she was, I couldn’t let her come back whole…” (Butler qtd. Crossley 267). What Dana’s missing arm also symbolizes is that even centuries later, people are still suffering the repercussions of slavery. The 2005 situation with Hurricane Katrina fits this exactly.
New Orleans’ position on the Gulf Coast made it a primary location for slaveholders to set up plantations. Thanks to a high sugar demand, New Orleans became a huge slave market. Even after slavery was abolished, “New Orleans whites aggressively furthered the notion of a distinct ‘third caste’ of people composed of free mixed-race people…[and] encouraged the color-class distinctions to maintain firm white dominance” (Lavelle, Feagin 2-3). Over the years this kind of oppression kept non-whites from advancing themselves and many ended up poverty-stricken. When Hurricane Katrina hit, these people did not have the resources or the support to evacuate the state, showing “race and class conditions linked to past racial oppression were major determining factors in whether people were able to evacuate” (Lavelle, Feagin 6). The situations and oppression Dana faces in Kindred never truly went away, and are the reason that some natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, have a lot more connections to economic and racial factors.
Many of the results of Hurricane Katrina mirror events Dana experiences in the eighteen hundreds. While on the plantation she finds out how easily slave families can be separated, not only from each other, but from their homes and their culture. The same separation was seen during Hurricane Katrina. “The loss of families, homes, and communities on such a large scale is reminiscent of the devastating effects that the antebellum New Orleans slave pens symbolized for African Americans” (Lavelle, Feagin 8). Many, if not most, of the Katrina victims will never be able to put back the pieces of their old lives, and the same goes for Dana and the slaves that she meets. The evacuation of many African Americans from their homes sets up another situation—one similar to the ethnic cleansing seen during the Holocaust. Because of the evacuation “local, mostly white, developers will likely gain former black land at very low prices and, in doing so, rid the city of many modest income neighborhoods, and thus modest income people, for many years to come” (Lavelle, Feagin 7). By turning those modest income houses into—most likely—condos or other expensive housing projects, the city is creating an environment that poor African Americans cannot survive in. They will have no choice but to leave. In the same way that in the eighteen hundreds it was illegal for whites to marry blacks, this is a subtle, but effective way of keeping blacks and whites separate.
Stereotypes established during the Civil War era have not disappeared. The media portrayed poor African American evacuees as uneducated and criminal, and “these images mask a long history of racial oppression and, disturbingly, mirror crazed white notions of black inferiority that have proliferated since Reconstruction” (Lavelle, Feagin 9). Centuries later, the prejudice Dana faces on the Weylin plantation are still present today. Together it all forms a vicious circle; it was the reason why many New Orleans’ African Americans were not able to receive the resources and support they needed to survive Katrina. The impact of the natural disaster left these people with fewer opportunities than they had originally. Their new situation opened them up to even more persecution.
What makes Kindred such a successful novel is that it takes a situation that Americans today have never experienced—being transported back in time to the eighteen hundreds—and presents it in such a way that readers can still understand and relate to its themes and messages. Oppression is one of the major themes found in the novel, and the effects of this oppression reverberate throughout history.
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