Exploring Time Travel and Slavery in Octavia Butler's Kindred

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(Surname) 1 “There had to be some reason for the link he and I seemed to have…What we had was something new that didn’t even have a name. Some matching strangeness in us that may or may not have come from our being related. Still, now I had a special reason for being glad I had been able to save him. After all … after all, what would have happened to me, to my mother’s family, if I hadn’t saved him?” (Butler 29). Here, the author uses science fiction to depict the provocative strangeness of time travel, the revival of reality, and the strange outcomes of time travel that surround the protagonist’s life. Therefore, the book’s science fiction genre allows people to observe the forgotten and endured past of slavery, learn its vitality, engage in a realistic representation of slavery, and change perceptions regarding its role in the thriving present (Tucker 251). Before Butler embraced science fiction to represent past slavery and present post-slavery societies, representation of American slavery from a realistic, objective, and linear approach was inadequate. Therefore, the meta-fictionality and fantasy appraised by Kindred’s science-fiction approach compels readers to contemplate, despite its discomfort, the extent to which modern American society and culture remain fixed in slavery. Science fiction suits the literature’s purpose since it does not focus much on the constructed world’s nature but on the character. Through fantasy and science fiction, Kindred’s representation of historical memories acknowledges the impact on slavery and blacks’ lives in the antebellum period through individuals and lineages (Yaszek 1058). The explication that Dana “must endure the legacy of slavery not only through her memories of her past experiences but also through its physical manifestations that persist even in her present life” reveals science fiction’s pivotal role in presenting the relationship between timelines and the unanticipated and emerging conflict (Butler 59). By positioning Dana as a conflicted person who traverses

(Surname) 2 timelines to determine the course of history, Kindred denaturalizes the status quo familiar to Dana, Kelvin, and the reader and presents an alternative while prompting questions that scrutinize social structure from a historical perspective. The reader uses the events that emerge from the hallucinations to simultaneously understand the wounds of slavery from a past and present perspective. The grim fantasy and time travel, congruent with the representativeness of science fiction, help the reader and Dana to experience slave heritage. Dana must have first-hand experience of rape on enslaved people, physical punishment, self-determination for freedom, and their role in determining her existence and shaping her identity. For instance, time travel moves Dana from California to the Weylin plantation in Maryland, the antebellum South, where, as an enslaved person, determines her existence (the present) by overseeing the rape of Alice by Rufus Weylin, convinces Alice to be Rufus’ lover and sleep with him. Dana informs Alice, “Yes. Rufus sent me to talk to you.” I hesitated. “He wants you tonight… and to tell you you’d be whipped this time if you resist.” (Butler 166). While Dana understands Rufus’ cruelty, Rufus’ rape and interaction with Alice determine her fate and existence in the 1970s. Dana later admits that “slavery of any kind fostered strange relationships” (230). Therefore, the teleportation presented by the grim fantasy helps in the problematization of historical memory production and helps Dana to ensure a run for freedom and identity within an oppressive historical paradigm (Yasnek 1060). Initially, Dana’s teleportation experiences seem surreal and unfathomable. However, continuous time travels helped her experience the role of past experiences, slavery, and racial struggles in the contemporary social and political place and identity of African Americans. Kindred embraces science fiction and grim fantasy, despite being antithetical to the slavery discourse, to acknowledge, identify, and define the relationship between a past bound in

(Surname) 3 slavery and slaves’ determinism and the contemporary social and political paradigms in American society. Dana’s experiences and time travel from 1970s California to the early 1800s antebellum South, stamped by losing her hand after battling and killing Rufus, are successful due to science fiction’s unique role. Dana understands and experiences the gruesome struggle, loss, and pain that her ancestors bore for her existence. Also, Dana’s teleportation and surreal experiences help the reader understand the innate connection between the history of black slavery and contemporary socio-political paradigms.

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(Surname) 4 Work Cited Butler, Octavia. Kindred . Beacon Press, 2022. Tucker, Jeffrey Allen. “Beyond the Borders of the Neo-Slave Narrative: Science Fiction and Fantasy.” The Cambridge Companion to Slavery in American Literature , 1st ed., Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 250–64. https://doi.org/10.1017/cco9781107270046.016. Yaszek, Lisa. “‘A Grim Fantasy’: Remaking American History in Octavia Butler’s Kindred .” Signs , vol. 28, no. 4, University of Chicago Press, June 2003, pp. 1053–66. https://doi.org/10.1086/368324.

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