#robert crossley

...Butler does not attempt to explain what she describes so graphically at the end of the sixth chapter: How could Dana’s arm, from the elbow down, be physically joined to the plaster of her living room wall? The author is silent on the process by which Dana’s arm is severed in the twilight zone between past and present. Kindred, one could say, is no more rational, no more comfortably explicable than the history of slavery itself. But that is a little too easy. The fiction has a ruthless logic to its design, and in an interview Butler has stated that the meaning of the amputation is clear enough: “I couldn’t really let her come all the way back. I couldn’t let her return to what she was, I couldn’t let her come back whole and that, I think, really symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn’t leave people quite whole.”

Perhaps most impressive is Sarah the cook, the stereotypical “mammy” of books and films, whose apparent acceptance of humiliation, Dana comes to understand, masks a deep anger over the master’s sale of nearly all her children: “She was the kind of woman who would be held in contempt during the militant nineteen sixties. The house-nigger, the handkerchief-head, the female Uncle Tom—the frightened powerless woman who had already lost all she could stand to lose, and who knew as little about the freedom of the North as she knew about the hereafter” (p. 145). Here we see literary fantasy in the service of the recovery of historical and psychological realities. As fictional memoir, Kindred is Butler’s contribution to the literature of memory every bit as much as it is an exercise in the fantastic imagination.

But if Kindred has some surface differences from the rest of Butler’s fiction, at its deepest levels it is a central text in her exploration of the webs of power and affection in human relationships, of the ethical imperative and the emotional price of empathy, of the difficult struggle to move beyond alienation to connection. In all her fiction she has produced parables that speak to issues of cultural difference, whether sexual, racial, political, economic, or psychological, and to issues of mastery and self-mastery.

In Kindred Octavia Butler has designed her own underground railroad between past and present whose terminus is the reawakened imagination of the reader.

In centering her fiction on women who lack power, suffer abuse, and are committed to claiming power over their own lives and to exercising that power harshly when necessary, Butler has not merely used science fiction as a 'feminist didactic'... but she has generated her fiction out of a black feminist aesthetic.

The term 'science fiction' is, however, notoriously resistant to definition and is popularly used to designate a wide range of imaginative literature inspired and patterned by the natural sciences (chemistry, physics, geology, astronomy, biology), by such social sciences as anthropology, sociology, and psychology, and by pseudo-sciences like parapsychology and scientology.

In all her science fiction she has produced fables that speak directly or indirectly to issues of cultural difference, whether sexual, racial, political, economic, or psychological.

In many ways Kindred departs from Octavia Butler's characteristic kind of fiction.