Who Is Octavia E. Butler's Kindred?

Throughout the novel Kindred, Butler compared and contrasted modern African Americans with African Americans that were slaves in the novel. Some of the many ways she compares them are through education, work ethic, and their personal feelings about and/or how they handle their own slavery.

Imagine being woken up by the yelling of your loved one being whipped "He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush," (Douglass, chapter 1, paragraph8).In Narrative of the life of Fredrick Douglass. Fredrick Douglass wants to change his readers beliefs about what it means to be dedicated to the American idea that "All men are created equal" by telling about physical abuse of slavery and lack of education.

This turns out to be an ironic contrast to life at the Weylin plantation, where a slave who visits his wife without his master's permission is brutally whipped. Perhaps a more painful realization for Dana is how this cruel treatment oppresses the mind. "Slavery of any kind fostered strange relationships," she notes, for all the slaves feel the same strange combination of fear,

Character’s relationships with power change a lot over the course of Octavia Butler’s Kindred. One of the most important character changes in the book is Kevin Franklin and Dana’s relationship, and how is changed after living in the 1800’s. Kevin is introduced in the book as Dana’s middle aged husband who she met while working in a “slave market”. Both of them are inspiring writers looking to make a life out of their passion. Before both Kevin and Dana are sent back into slavery time their relationship is very normal. Their marriage is very stable, although they go through different problems surrounding power. Kevin is very dominant towards Dana and at times believes he is better than her. Kevin constantly asks Dana to type out drafts of his

Next, Butler moves on to portray a close-up view of Dana’s laceration, “My blouse was stuck to my back. It was cut to pieces, really, but the pieces were stuck to me … The skin of my back stretched agonizingly, and the water got pinker” (Butler 113). The vivid visual of Dana’s injury and the unbelievable harm of the whips are so realistic to readers with the use of connotative diction such as “pieces,” “agonizingly,” and “blood.” The readers’ sympathy towards Dana and the slaves intensifies as the magnitude of pain and the disturbing level of the cut elevate.

Tom Weylin’s sexual assaults on his female slave Tess and selling out her children reflects the miseries of the helpless blacks at the hands of the white population. Though Tess has lost her children, yet she has to comply with the orders and wishes of her white master. (The Fight, X) In addition, Weylin’s consistent whipping on Dana, Tess and Alice also reveals the existence of butchery and domestic violence by the whites. Particularly stripping of the Black women and beating them brutally serve as the black mar on the very face of the white community. (The Fight, XIII) History is also replete with the examples of butchery and cruelties inflicted upon the Black slaves in the USA, northern and central Europe, Russia, Turkey (the Ottoman Empire) and other parts of the world, where sexual exploitations, whipping and torture were the orders of the day. Hence, Butler has portrayed the exact picture of the situation prevailed in the olden past in her novel.

Only the best tactics and the quickest decisions can insure a win in a fight for survival. Dana Franklin, the main character in the novel Kindred, has what it takes to take on the cruel South and use those qualities to ensure survival. Due to a mysterious and confusing power she acquires, Dana can miraculously travel through time and reach her ancestors during the slavery period. With that power alone, she has to work hard to survive against the strongest, meanest, and craziest people she’s ever dreamed of to ensure the safety of herself and whom she cares. In addition to working hard, Dana has to witness and carry out what horrors fighting and struggling in the antebellum South was like. In Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Dana is seen fighting,

To continue his persuasion, Douglass uses selection of detail and different tones to make his view known. When describing some aspects of slavery, Douglass’ use of detail opens society’s eyes to injustice. In one case, when describing the whipping of his Aunt Hester, he includes details that encompass sight- “the warm, red blood… came dripping to the floor,” sound- “amid heart-rending shrieks,” and emotion- “I was so horror-stricken… I hid myself in a closet” (Douglass, 24). By including facts covering many senses, he provides the reader a chance to piece together the scene, giving them perspective. If society has all the details, it becomes easier for them to pass an accurate judgment of slavery. His detail, or lack thereof,

For any small act of disobedience, there was an unimaginably larger punishment. In Kindred, the impact of these violence acts were accurately represented through Dana’s thoughts on them. She said “the whipping served its purpose as far as I was concerned. It scared me, made me wonder how long it would be before I made a mistake that would give someone a reason to whip me” (Butler 92). Through this quote from Dana, it is evident how Butler used the torturous beatings to showcase the harsh mental effects it had on the victims. Similarly, the whippings are a symbol of a slave’s life. Like a whipping session, a slave’s life was hard and stretched out, and with everyday they would break down more and more. Sometimes, the fear of getting whipped was a more powerful tool in preventing rebellions than the actual physical pain they caused. Because whippings were essential in controlling the slaves, it was vital for Butler to include them in the novel.

Have you ever been told that you and a friend are practically the same person? Something similar to this happens to Dana and Alice in Octavia Butler’s novel, Kindred. In Butler’s novel, Dana is a young black woman living in 1976. Next thing she knows, she time travels back to the antebellum South. Dana is given the task of saving her several times great grandfather, Rufus Weylin, from multiple life threatening situations. Along the way she meets her several times great grandmother, Alice, who is a young free black woman. In her novel, Kindred, Octavia Butler compares and contrasts Dana and Alice to show the theme that people will do anything in order to survive. Both Dana and Alice have to become slaves on a plantation, run away for a life of freedom, and tolerate the treatment of Rufus.

When Douglass was a young boy, he witnessed for the first time a slave getting whipped, Douglass's first encounter was of extreme cruelty that slaveholders can have. The slave receiving the whipping is Douglass' Aunt Hester. By witnessing this Douglass sees that slaves are treated no better than animals, they lived in continuous fear of being beaten if they did not behave. The issue of freedom is here as well. Do these animals have more freedom then themselves, it seems so. The slave owners dehumanized the slaves with the power of the whip, showing the horrors of traditional slavery and property they have over slaves.

White explores the master’s sexual exploitation of their female slaves, and proves this method of oppression to be the defining factor of what sets the female slaves apart from their male counterparts. Citing former slaves White writes, “Christopher Nichols, an escaped slave living in Canada, remembered how his master laid a woman on a bench, threw her clothes over her head, and whipped her. The whipping of a thirteen-year-old Georgia slave girl also had sexual overtones. The girl was put on all fours ‘sometimes her head down, and sometimes up’ and beaten until froth ran from her mouth (33).” The girl’s forced bodily position as well as her total helplessness to stop her master’s torture blatantly reveals the forced sexual trauma many African females endured.

Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred is categorized as science fiction because of the existence of time travel. However, the novel does not center on the schematics of this type of journey. Instead, the novel deals with the relationships forged between a Los Angeles woman from the 20th century, and slaves from the 19th century. Therefore, the mechanism of time travel allows the author a sort of freedom when writing this "slavery narrative" apart from her counterparts. Butler is able to judge the slavery from the point of view of a truly "free" black woman, as opposed to an enslaved one describing memories.

First published in 1979, Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred is a unique novel, which can be categorized both as a modern-day slave narrative, and as a science fiction time-travel tale. In the novel, Butler uses time-travel as a way to convey W.E.B. Du Bois’ theory of double-consciousness. Dubois’ theory is based on the idea that people of color have two identities, both struggling to reconcile in one being. His theory about the complex nature of the African-American experience directly relates to Butler’s use of Kindred’s protagonist, Dana, and her experience time travelling as a modern-day African-American woman, and her experience of a pre-abolition, nineteenth-century slave.

The distribution of power between two different groups can drastically affect the relationship between the two. The more unbalanced the power, the less control the weaker group has over the relationship, the other group, and even their own actions. The relationship between between slave owners and a slave was one of the most unbalanced power dynamics. Slave owners controlled slaves in almost every way. Slave owners manipulated slaves with religion and deprived slaves of any education beyond that needed for labor.