American History (The Deleted Scenes)
Book Review: Kindred by Octavia Butler
“That’s history. It happened whether it offends you or not. Quite a bit of it offends me, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Kindred
Genre: Science Fiction/Historical Fiction/Time Travel
My Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
This is my second book by this amazing author. My first was Parable of the Sower, which was gritty and dark, but because it’s set in the future, it’s easy enough to distance yourself from it. You think, “This could never happen.” But with Kindred, it did happen. And that’s what makes it so powerful.
Dana is an African-American woman who just moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Out of nowhere, Dana gets pulled back to the antebellum South in 1815 where she finds a young white boy drowning in a river and saves him. We learn a little later that the boy, Rufus, is her ancestor and every time his life gets threatened, which happens a lot to this accident prone child, she is transported back in time to bail him out, thus securing her own existence. Just how that happens is never explained.
In order to return back to the present in 1976, her life has to be threatened, or at least, she has to think it is. It takes her a couple of trips to figure this out. But it isn’t long, minutes sometimes, before she gets cast back in time to the plantation where years have passed. She spends months (years maybe?) at a time on the plantation where she has to adapt to the inhumanity of being treated as a slave.
She quickly learns to diminish herself before whites, who do not tolerate insubordination. These lessons sometimes play out in disturbing, violent scenes. (Please heed the trigger warning—it gets rough.) While her main mission is securing her family line, she is also compelled to influence Rufus, a slave owner in the making, to stand against his own barbaric and brutal heritage. Sometimes she seems to get through to him, but at other times it feels like a losing battle.
This is a brilliant novel. Like Dana, we too, are inextricably connected, kindred if you will, to a shameful past. America was built on a heritage of hate and bigotry, which has not been extinguished, and in some ways, fights to persist. In these moments, we are reminded of our shared inheritance of racism. It’s baked into our national identity and if there is ever any hope of healing from it, the first thing we have to do is remember.
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