Review: Kindred

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

All the Stars.

It's taken me a full day to collect my thoughts about Kindred.

Talk about my getting to the game late, Kindred was published in 1979, still relatively early in Octavia Butler's lauded career. This is, shockingly, the first Butler novel I've read.

This is a genre-bending book that is simply stunning in its psychological complexity and is probably the best use of time travel in a novel that I've ever read. Kindred employs the concept of time slip (the first really successful example of this subgenre of time travel was Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court). Time slip is a plot device in which a person travels to another time (and place, in many instances) and has no control over the travel. Additionally, the mechanism of time slip is often ultimately unexplained- neither the person enduring it nor the reader fully understands the process leading to the time slip(s). This lack of control over barreling back in time is the perfect foil for the protagonist Edana Franklin's experience in antebellum Maryland, in which she experiences the lack of control over one's life, family, and destiny that was slavery. It is a brilliant use of the plot device.

When we meet Dana, the year is 1976 and she lives in California with her new (and white) husband, Kevin Franklin. Both the Franklins are writers. As she is moving into their new apartment she undergoes the first of a series of progressively more disastrous time slips which take her back in time to antebellum Maryland and the plantation of her ancestors, the Weylins. Over the course of a year in modern time but two decades in Weylin-era time, as she struggles to deal with her own lack of power over her time slippage, Dana slowly comes to see the courageous battle fought for survival by slaves (and sometimes even free black people) that all too often is insultingly called weakness or complicity by those who have never experienced systematic subjugation. (You can also apply it to blaming Jewish people for not fighting back more during the Holocaust.) Butler challenges your imagination to walk a mile in their shoes. Her depiction of their trauma, the indignities, and inhumanity suffered culminates in their, and Dana's, will to survive.

This isn't the stuff of fun time machines, time-traveling husbands or going back to brutal times but being rewarded with lusty highlanders. This is a revelatory view of a brutal period in African-American history as (re-)lived by a woman from the post-Civil Rights Movement era.

Kindred makes me want to read more Octavia Butler. I have great respect for the depth of her work here. If you've never read her work, you should.

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