Kindred

by Octavia E. Butler

Selected by The Atlantic as one of THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS.  ("You have to read them.")

From the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Nebula, and Hugo award winner

The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now.

“I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.”

Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present.

Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction’s oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present. “Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise” (New York Times).

“Reading Octavia Butler taught me to dream big, and I think it’s absolutely necessary that everybody have that freedom and that willingness to dream.” 
—N. K. Jemisin 

Developed for television by writer/executive producer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Watchmen), executive producers also include Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields (The Americans, The Patient), and Darren Aronofsky (The Whale). Janicza Bravo (Zola) is director and an executive producer of the pilot. Kindred stars Mallori Johnson, Micah Stock, Ryan Kwanten, and Gayle Rankin.

• ISBN10: 0807083690
• ISBN13: 9780807083697
• Publish Date: 1 February 2004 (first published 1 February 1981)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Beacon Press
• Edition: 25th Anniversary ed.
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 288
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780807083697

Reviews

[inlibrisveritas]

#readathon book 2!
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Kindred was chosen for the Litsy Feminist Book Club for the end of October and beginning of November, as it’s a part of a thing called the Lemonade Syllabus. The LS is a list of books, music, and visual media that focus on feminism and history of black women and is based off of Beyonce’s Lemonade.

Kindred takes the “what would you do if you were transported the past angle” and really makes you think about the stark realities of the past and your own life in the present. Dana is taken from the present day in California (which is late 70’s US) on several occasions and is transported back to a time where slavery still has a firm hold on the country. There she saves the life of a young slave owner, who is her own great-grandfather. In this she is faced with indescribable choices. For me the book begins with hope, that even despite being ripped out of time and forced into a time period wholly unfriendly to her she still tries to instill a sort of positive voice for the young man. She hopes to be a source of growing empathy. But as the book progresses that hope becomes more and more stark, and the lessons Dana is forced to learn are hard to swallow.

The thing that stood out the most to me, is the look at personal identity. Dana knows who she is and where she comes from…but she is forced to see herself as others view her both in the past and in the present. Her view of herself encompasses all that she is, as she is forced to live under the views of others we see her have to fight against all of these single stories. It shows the racial divide of “us vs them” mentality that still exists today, even among our own racial demographic. It shows how your identity to others can come from one factor only like who you marry, where you work, and what you look like…and how those views can work to stifle that person and at the very worst keep them subjugated. In fact for such a short book I’m completely impressed with the sheer weight of the conversation that can come from it.

This book was written in the 70’s and it’s still incredibly powerful today. I hated parts of this book, not because they were bad but because they hurt to read. I can relate to some of the issues on display as a woman, a light skinned minority, and as the daughter of a interracial relationship. Kindred is a hauntingly beautiful book that I wholly recommend to everyone.