Kindred
CW: racism, slavery, minor spoilers
So the title is far from snappy or even witty, but it's certainly accurate. You may be wondering how science-fiction and slave narrative go together. If you're considering a set-up where aliens are keeping human slaves or something then you're on entirely the wrong track. As in so far off where you should be that if you were supposed to be following a path through a forest, you'd probably be hanging upside down from a tree several hundred yards from where you're meant to be. Also probably very high up the tree, it'd be a very tall tree.
Science-fiction can be difficult to nail down as a concept sometimes and there are definitely people who would denounce certain works typically shoved under the umbrella as being too "softcore" to be real science-fiction. Kindred holds an interesting position as it can be difficult to sort it into a specific genre. In fact, people will argue until the cows come home about where it belongs and in some circles it even transcends lowly genre fiction (I do not consider it low but in the Literature with a capital L community, genre fiction is often considered as such) to be classed as Literature. Well, Literature given that it's supposed to be a cut above the rest of fiction. As in, it's deemed as being a work that's good for everyone to read, stuff that should be read by the educated elite rather than the stupid working-class people who only consume trash... or something. Needless to say, I don't believe in the elitism of such classifications. Popular literature can be immensely valuable for any class of person and I'm more inclined to stick Kindred under popular literature. The fun thing about that is that I can stick it in as many categories as I think it can fit into and you can cry about it if you like. The bottom line is that you're entitled to your own opinion but this is most definitely my own and I'm sticking to my guns.
Slight digression aside, Kindred involves time travel so I view it as science-fiction. There's no time machine involved, no technological science but it does involve an unusual mechanism whereby the novel's protagonist travels back well over a century from her own time. How this is done is never explained or even investigated but it is central to the plot. Actually, there wouldn't be a plot without it. So if there's no scientific explanation, no technology, no rational investigation, why is it science-fiction, I hear you ask?
Well, imaginary audience speaking in my head (I should probably get that checked out), it is a work of fiction that involves a concept that is typically treated scientifically or an attempt is made to come up with a scientific explanation. You can class it as weird fiction if you prefer or call it time travel fiction if you want to be super precise but as I've already said, neat categorisation is not my aim here. Additionally, it's a neo-slave narrative. "Neo" of course means "new" but thank goodness, it doesn't mean that slavery has made a comeback. No, it simply means that someone is writing in the style of the old slave narratives but are producing it in a modern contemporary setting.
Slave narratives were written by former slaves before Abolition who escaped to the northern States in America. They told their life stories and they were published by those advocating for the abolition of slavery. One of the most famous stories was written by Frederick Douglass, a former slave who gave a number of inspirational talks and speeches about the plight of the slaves still trapped in the antebellum South.
I'm going to break down the book into nice neat sections so you can skim through them and see for yourself if it would interest you.
Well, imaginary audience speaking in my head (I should probably get that checked out), it is a work of fiction that involves a concept that is typically treated scientifically or an attempt is made to come up with a scientific explanation. You can class it as weird fiction if you prefer or call it time travel fiction if you want to be super precise but as I've already said, neat categorisation is not my aim here. Additionally, it's a neo-slave narrative. "Neo" of course means "new" but thank goodness, it doesn't mean that slavery has made a comeback. No, it simply means that someone is writing in the style of the old slave narratives but are producing it in a modern contemporary setting.
Slave narratives were written by former slaves before Abolition who escaped to the northern States in America. They told their life stories and they were published by those advocating for the abolition of slavery. One of the most famous stories was written by Frederick Douglass, a former slave who gave a number of inspirational talks and speeches about the plight of the slaves still trapped in the antebellum South.
I'm going to break down the book into nice neat sections so you can skim through them and see for yourself if it would interest you.
Author: Octavia E. Butler, one of the first African American women to break into the science fiction genre in a big way.
Published: 1979
Genre: Science-fiction, time-travel; African-American literature, neo-slave narrative
Premise: An African-American woman suddenly develops the ability to travel back to the antebellum South. This ability is totally outside of her control and is connected to a white ancestor of hers, who unknowingly calls her into the past when is life is in danger.
Setting: Brief insight into 1970s America but mainly takes place in the antebellum South over a number of decades after 1810 or so. The present for Dana, the main character, is California in 1976.
Background: Butler wrote the novel in response to certain sentiments that arose in connection to the Civil Rights movement. Certain African-American activists blamed previous generations of African-Americans for allowing themselves to be treated as second-class citizens. As far as these activists were concerned, if their parents and grandparents hadn't been so complacent then African-Americans would have achieved equal rights years earlier than they did.
Butler was enraged by this idea, explaining that previous generations had had to endure harsher treatment and that if a contemporary African-American person was transported back to the time of slavery, they would find it extremely difficult to cope with such conditions. Furthermore, she thought that these same activists would have become "complacent" in order to survive if they'd been in the same position as their ancestors. Butler sought to demonstrate the truth of such an idea and this is how she came up with the premise for Kindred
The developed the narrative of slavery by drawing on her own family history--her grandmother had worked on a plantation and her mother had been a house maid from the age of ten--and researching slave narratives written by former slaves like Frederick Douglass. Not wanting to alienate her audience, it was necessary to tone down the level of violence that would have been authentic to that time period. However, there are still many aspects in the novel that could upset an audience, either explained explicitly or inferred. These include rape, whipping, racist language/attitudes and dehumanisation of African-Americans.
Some of my general thoughts: The novel was critically acclaimed and I think that the praise for Kindred is definitely deserved. When Butler started getting published in 1971, she was one of the few active African-American science-fiction writers at that time. The only other prominent African-American writer of the same period (that I'm aware of at least) was Samuel R. Delany, who began publishing in 1962. Science-fiction was a firmly established white genre and it was also a very masculine genre that had historically painted minor ethnicities in negative or demeaning ways. As such, the notion of a black man writing in it, never mind a woman, was a pretty groundbreaking thing! There had been other black male sci-fi writers before Delany but they had been controversial figures--and believe me when I say that Delany did not escape controversy--within the African-American community.
The focus of African-American writing had been to foreground and prioritise black experience but namely realistic experience. Don't get me wrong, there were certainly fantastical elements in various speculative works, but the key thing was to convey true black experiences free from the prejudices and stereotypes of white American culture. Writers like Delany who wrote about outer space crews and didn't seem to write many black characters were seen as traitors to the community. I'm digressing a tad.
Anyway, as I was saying, science-fiction was both white and masculine and it was this hypermasculinity that led writers like Joanna Russ and Butler to the genre to try to provide fairer female representation. For Butler, there was the added allure of improving the representations of people of colour like herself. Unlike Delany, however, Butler received a more positive attitude from her community as her writing foregrounded the point of view of black women. Her narrative was praised for foregrounding black experience, for bringing the brutalities of slavery to light for a broader audience and for revealing the plights of black women in the antebellum period.
Some of the topics she included in her novel are quite sensitive ones and at the time of publication, some of them were still sore points in America at the time. Something that frequently appears in her work is the inclusion of interracial relationships and Kindred contains two of them, although they're very, very different. While her main focus is the past, she still manages to draw attention to the negative attitudes to interracial marriage in the 1970s. Butler was never someone to shy away from the flaws of human beings and this novel is an excellent showcase of her ability to paint striking portraits of the human character. She breathes life into her characters to such an extent that it is easy for a reader to empathise with and relate to them. Anybody who reads it has ample opportunity to understand the legacy that slavery has left behind and the repercussions that are felt to this day.
Butler certainly achieved what she set out to do and while the novel starts slowly, it is well worth a read and I would recommend it rather highly. Furthermore, if you haven't read any of Butler's work before or aren't a hardcore sci-fi fan then it's a good book to get into and a good introduction to Butler.
