Kindred by Octavia Butler Essay

Throughout American literary history, nearly every form of literature has covered the topic of slavery and black oppression in America. From William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist papers to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s controversial Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, the exploration of the black position in America has been a theme that engrossed generations. In the past century, as science fiction has established its place in the literary genre, authors such as Octavia Butler have become increasingly popular. In her short story "Bloodchild", Butler extends the discussion of oppression in America into the science fiction genre. In this manner her story, "…like almost all science

The Science Fiction/African American Literature Kindred by Octavia Butler is telling the story about Dana, a black woman, who was recently married and somehow gets transported to the antebellum South. Dana does get transported back in time to the slave quarters and each time the stays grow longer. With traveling to the past and coming back to the present there are issues that appear throughout the book. One issue that has been present throughout the book is how traveling back to the 19th century causes Kevin to lose touch with himself. Kindred starts with a very short prologue that leaves us with many questions about Kevin’s identity and actions.

Science fiction is a genre in which the story is fiction but the topic is what could be.

Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred travels through time, alternating from present to past enabling one to obtain an understanding of what life was like for African Americans in the antebellum south and present day California. Butler incorporates personal events and challenges into the characters and the events that occur within her writing. She was born in Pasadena, California where she resided for the greater part of her life (Octavia). Butler’s parents gave birth to five children; she being the only one to survive infancy. Her father died shortly after these devastations, leaving Butler and her mother to support themselves by working on a plantation. Butler’s mother was a domestic which contributed to the understanding Butler showed towards the

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.

Octavia Butler, author of Kindred, is a renowned African American science fiction and contemporary writer. In her novel Kindred, Butler integrates the social stigmas of gender, power, and race not only in a modern day time period but also in 1800s. The beginning of the novel, Butler depicts a modern day African American woman named Dana. However, as the novel progresses, the readers learn that Dana has the ability to time travel to a slave plantation in Maryland in 1815. The primary reason Butler includes her main character to go against the laws of time is to illustrate both her juxtaposing feelings and experiences in the two different time periods and also to show how her experiences in the 1800s affect her in present-day and vis versa.

Dana knew that she could always go home, only if she was in danger. If Dana wanted to go home for good, she would have to kill Rufus. “Then he brought up the fist of his free hand to punch me once, and again as the patroller had done so long ago. I pulled the knife free of him somehow, raised it, and brought it down again into his back.” (Butler 260). No matter what happens if she goes home, Rufus will always call her back to 1819. Dana was always free, but she was “free” limitedly her work wasn’t like other slaves. When she found out her purpose in

Rufus simply wanted Dana to return to him and tried this as a way to bring her to him. He values Dana more than he cares for Alice, stating that she should look after Joe and Hagar now that their mother is dead. Rufus sees Danas actions towards him though tainted glass, she has been the most influential person in his life besides his father and now faced with the fact that she might not come back after this time he feels as if he has run out of choices. He wants her to be his new lover and possibly even a wife in a sense, but most of all he wants her loyalty to be to him and him alone. Having her disappear again would destroy him.

By characterizing Sarah as powerless, Butler shows how women in the past were mistreated. Weylin likes to push his women slaves when he is angry to make them persist through life and make them have something to live for: “Weylin for instance had known just how far to push Sarah he had sold only 3 children left one to live for and protect” (Butler 169). Weylin had to “push Sarah” so that she would do more work for him. He did this by selling what was most precious to her. He left her “one” child to strive in life, so she could persist through her life in the plantation. With the burden of being far from her children, Sarah manages to become a strong woman. Rufus just like his father makes women slaves persist through hardships: “ Sent me to the field had me beaten made me spend nearly eight months sleeping on the floor” (Butler 245). Rufus has Dana beaten and sent to the field, so he can somebody making Dana persists through his anger and the

“I reacted to the child in trouble. Later I could ask questions, try to find out where I was, what had happened. Now I went to help the child” (Butler, p.13). From the day Dana first saved Rufus, their relationship and dependency on one another has grown stronger. Soon, Rufus returns the favor and becomes Dana’s protector.

Octavia Butler’s Kindred is initially set in the middle of the 1970’s - a time where the Civil Rights movement is coming to a close, and black and white people are starting to learn how to coexist with each other. A black woman named Dana is the main protagonist in this story, and she was just an ordinary, opinionated person married to a white man who shared her love for writing. That is, until she is literally transported into the past by a cruel twist of fate. The Antebellum South, in the early 19th century, is where Dana finds herself thrusted into: dirty, alone most of the time, and scared out of her wits. Not only does she not have the faintest idea of what has happened to her, she quickly comes to realize this is not a one-time trip.

Technological advancement has often outperformed scientific knowledge associated with the causes that determine health. Increasing complications in social organization increase the possibilities by which multiple agents can disturb health, including factors such as those that risk physical health like venomous chemicals or radiation, restricted access to sanitary and pure natural resources, and the infinite amalgamation of them all. Decisions taken in areas apparently detached from health frequently have the prospect to have an impact on people’s health in either positive or negative manner due to a large number of links and connections in modern life. Health is an area comprised of highly intricate systems, which can be accidentally

For instance Rufus showed that he was not all bad or all good by how he treats Alice. “Rufe, did you manage to rape that girl (122).” In this quote Dana is asking Rufus if he really did just rape Alice after he was just in a fight with Alice’s husband. Also it show how ugly Rufus got when something did not go his way. “And I’m sure not going to bother her while she’s hurt like this (149).” This quote is taken from Kindred after Rufus buys Alice and has Dana clean her wounds for her. It also is showing that Rufus actually cares for Alice and is really a good person at some points. “I can’t stop you from raping a woman, Rufe, but I’m not going to help you do it either (163). Dana is yelling at Rufus after he told her to go and tell Alice to come to him that night and if she does not he will beat her. This is one of the biggest things in the book that show how much of a bad person he can be even with the nice things he

Much of the appeal surrounding science fiction is the fact that a lot of the genre exists far from what we experience in our own world, and far from what exists within our own imagination. The phrase, “cognitive estrangement” has been used to describe the way that a lot of science fiction makes us feel. In his essay, “Estrangement and Cognition,” Darko Suvin describes cognitive estrangement and its relationship with Science fiction as a genre. He writes, “Thus it is not only the basic human and humanizing curiosity that gives birth to SF. Beyond an indirect inquisitiveness, which makes for a semantic game without clear referent, this genre has always been wedded to a hope of finding in the unknown the ideal environment, tribe, state, intelligence, or other aspect of the Supreme Good (or to a fear of and revulsion from its contrary). At all events, the possibility of other strange, covariant coordinate systems and semantic fields is assumed,” which explains that the strange is what drives interest in Science Fiction. He emphasizes that it’s the weird that sets science fiction apart from other genres, including fantasy. This sentiment has been echoed by many other writers. In the same essay, Suvin writes, “The effect of such factual reporting of fictions is one of confronting a set normative system—a Ptolemaic-type closed world picture—with a point of view or look implying a new set of norms; in literary theory this is known as the attitude of estrangement.” This statement

Literature sounds too stuffy and high-browed an descriptor for Science Fiction as a genre. Science fiction is meant to be fantasy, something that is not real and does not strive to meet the literary aspirations of those who would write meaningful prose. Not to say that science fiction writers do not want to something meaningful, but even though the genre may be filled with writers who are degraded by "real" authors as a breed, does not mean that there are not classics that have been recognized as achieving a literary mark. It can be argued, because of the use of literary devices, that there are those science fiction novels that definitely reach the level anyone would consider literature, and among these is a book from Phillip K. Dick called The Man in the High Castle. This paper examines what literary devices were used in this book to make it both a work of science fiction and a work of literature.