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language: English
country: USA
year: 1979
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
dates read: 24.4.24
I decided on a whim yesterday to bring Kindred back with me to read on the plane, and — feeling like I’m emerging from a fugue state — I’ve just finished it. I’ve been apprehensive about picking it up, firstly and more pressingly because I have historically not loved Butler’s books and secondly because I worried (irrationally) that it might be overhyped.
well. for starters, it is not overhyped. and, more to the point, this contrasts favorably with all of her other books that I’ve read. it is, obviously, a book about slavery: the main character is a Black woman married to a white man in 1976 who finds herself over a period of about a month repeatedly drawn backwards in time (for periods ranging from a few minutes to eight months) into the early nineteenth century and the life of one of her ancestors, a white man (boy when they first meet) named Rufus Weylin. it is, like Butler’s other books, a powerful meditation on complicity, abuse, and the possibility of action in circumstances where all choices are ethically compromised in some way.
in contrast to books like Patternmaster or Dawn (to say nothing of “Bloodchild”), or even her “fun” book, Fledgling, however, rather than presenting a speculative scenario analogous to or allegorically representing slavery and racism, wherein there is an objective and absolute biological difference between the group at the top of the hierarchy and the group at the bottom of the hierarchy that makes slavery or a slavery-like situation not only inevitable but in some cases (notably the Patternist books) ostensibly preferable to freedom, here we are faced simply with the realities of historical chattel slavery and its effects on the people in a slave society (a plantation on the eastern shore of Maryland).
while both approaches allow Butler to ask the same kinds of questions about agency, complicity, and abuse, Kindred doesn’t leave me with the same kind of unsettled feeling that her other work does — though it has absolutely unsettled me, as it is very clearly intended to, it’s done so for other reasons. where so many of her other books seem to me to be asking “what if everything were fucked up and awful and that was just how it had to be?”, Kindred says: what if everything were fucked up and awful and it didn’t have to be that way? what if you could only survive even though you knew that the system that made your life this way was not an inevitability but something human-made, something you yourself were being forced into upholding? how do the societies and social worlds we inhabit force us into compliance, such that even the oppressed uphold these systems?
and, in contrast to her other books, Kindred admits the possibility of change, though it is sharply curtailed within the novel: I still think my tentative assessment of the difference between Delany and Butler — that the former believes in the possibility of a revolution and the latter doesn’t — is accurate, and to some extent it’s borne out in Kindred’s skipping past the Civil War and all the transformations that have created Dana’s life in 1976. and yet there is that difference; change — and not simply adapting to a new system of oppression — is possible, or the novel wouldn’t be possible.
haunting and harrowing.
moods: dark, reflective, tense