Kindred | Octavia Butler
THE WRITER | Reading Octavia Butler in 2022 is like reading the Onion in 2022—it’s all too plausible to be seen as mere entertainment. Butler has become a favorite in recent years—the Parable books feel painfully relevant (make time for them), but the subject of this review is Kindred—a science fiction work that requires that you suspend belief in one major way (by accepting inexplicable time travel), but otherwise asks only that you accept the absurdity of the past on its face. The reality of time travel is often easier to stomach than that of the past.
Quite unintentionally, I am writing about my second woman author, second California born author, second woman in Science Fiction. Butler’s name belongs up there with the greats of the genre because she didn’t simply fit in—she elevated and enriched the genre by seamlessly adding in the elements of race and gender in ways that felt not only organic, but made clear those elements weren’t forced, but were actually missing.
THEMES | Kindred in particular deals with the themes of identity and freedom—big themes in a relatively small work.
Where identity is concerned, the phrase “I am my ancestors wildest dreams”, swirls around my mind while I read this book—it is a phrase I have always hated, because it is so incredibly self centered—whoever coined it is hopefully currently being haunted by a great great great aunt. With that said, Butler invites us with Kindred to consider our ancestors in a way that isn’t abstracted by time and space—she sets them before us and challenges the reader (particularly the Black reader) to afford our ancestors the full breadth of humanity they deserve—a humanity denied to many in life.
As Butler uses her work to give us a glimpse at our ancestors and their dreams, it is clear that the corporate and financial success of great great great grandchildren is perhaps, not front of mind for the enslaved. For so many of our ancestors, their wildest dream was freedom—what that may have entailed for them are mere details—freedom is the essence. And for all our our ancestors (so many)—those who didn’t live to set eyes on 1865—their dream would always be answered with a NO. I will not impose my will, my reality, myself, onto the dreams of my wronged and denied ancestors. Their dream was as stolen as their labor and they (and their descendants) deserve recompense for that theft.
An American slavery narrative is impossible to tell without race—many of our personal ancestry stories are complex. As Butler addresses identity, she inevitably comes to the fraught reality of looking back for Black Americans—the reality that you could be descended both from the enslaved and the slavers. What does that mean for our identities—do we get to pick and choose what is primary and what is peripheral? Do we get to pick and choose who we decide to associate ourselves with where our ancestors are concerned?
How does something as vile as rape echo across the ages in our blood? How do we as Black people reconcile identities that are not only multiracial—but violent and oppressive. What does it mean for your great great grandfather to be your mother’s owner, rapist, her nightmare? What does it make him to you—what does it make you? I don’t have an answer and Butler doesn’t proffer a direct one—that would be too easy. She does demonstrate the limits of blood—the impossibility of love or kinship where freedom is absent.
America’s one drop rule has largely made the answers to these questions simple in the current day—if you look Black, you are. Those definitions (socially constructed as they are) shift, but in general, you can not claim a piece of whiteness and so identifying with distant white folks in your family tree becomes besides the point of ones personal identity. It becomes a folktale, a point of macabre interest, perhaps an explanation for how grandma looked, but not a truly familial tie.
The other phrase I despise is the more disparaging “I am not my ancestors”—meant to imply that unlike our ancestors, we are more fearless, less compliant? Butler lays the absurdity of that phrase bare in her exploration of violence and force, and, ultimately, freedom. She uses time travel as a device of contrast—to show how perilous life as literal property was, how insightful and adept our ancestors had to be to navigate the simplest of interactions, how resilient they had to be as they recovered from brutality again and again and again—we are not our ancestors, indeed—and thanks largely to them, we don’t need to be.
THE REVIEW | As with all Octavia Butler works, you should read this. Read it because she is a beautiful writer, read it because she has a prophetic quality to her work that isn’t comforting but does feel wise. Kindred in particular for me helped ground some questions that felt more philosophical than they needed to. The abstract can be rendered concrete by a writer with the stomach for such endeavors. I am thankful for writers like Butler who are up to the task.
Quotes & Other Gems
“Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of wrong ideas.”
“See how easily slaves are made.”