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Gregory Hampton Gregory Hampton Kindred: History, Revision, and (Re)memory of Bodies The figuration of bodies in Octavia Butler’s texts is largely depen- dent upon a narrative history and the memories that constitute the past and present. Octavia Butler’s narrative allows us to imagine how the past can exist in the present and how the present can be manifested into the past by way of time travel. This is demonstrated most clearly in the narrative of Kindred (1979), which tells of a twentieth-century black woman who must (re)live certain aspects of the lives of her ancestors in order to insure her present existence. In this novel, slavery determines the value of black and white bodies in nineteenth-century ante-bellum America and continues to influence their value in the twentieth century. The historical fact around which Kindred revolves is the American institution of slavery and its practice of treating African (black) bodies as chattel. To read of such a peculiar institution in a history book is far from experiencing its horrific reality. Even to remember slavery first-hand as a participant cannot compare to reliving the actual experience. Fortunately, the boundaries of time separate our present world from that of the past. In Kindred, however, Butler disrupts laws of time and physics. By taking the protagonist, Dana, back to ante-bellum Maryland, Butler bridges the past and present and blurs boundaries of physics and history. The story distorts the historical time-line of Dana’s past and present so that it is non-linear. In the novel, this disruption happens in order that we and Dana might do the impossible and undesirable: travel to a time in American his- tory where black bodies were not recognized in law or general custom as possessed of value other than as goods to be bought and sold. In Butler’s “time machine,” history is transformed, by way of the reader’s imagina- tion, into a present reality so that we might see, through Dana’s eyes, Vol. 6, No. 2/Vol. 7, No. 1 Fall/Winter 2005–Spring/Summer 2006 Page 105 Gregory Hampton exactly how humans were magically turned into beasts. Such an experience exceeds memory obtained from or produced by the reading of history books or second-hand slave narratives (second-hand because the ex-slaves them- selves have written their stories from memory formulated after their bond- age). Dana’s mode of re-experiencing is, in the phenomenological sense, even more radical than such a narrative because she is made to live an experience that happened before she existed. By positioning Dana’s story as lived experience, Butler reformu- lates the laws of the written narrative. The narrative of Kindred is elevated to more than a tale told to an audience by a narrator. It becomes an expe- rience shared by Dana and the reader who, like Dana, becomes a passenger gaining access to a portal through time, beyond the formation of Dana’s family history. The fact that written history is not necessarily equivalent to univer- sal truth is far from controversial. Historians are constantly revising text- books that were thought for decades to be accurate. Depending on count- less variants, the personal experience of one can seemingly become “the way it was” for many. Ultimately, the person or people with the resources to write and publish historical texts are the caretakers, or griots, of recorded memories. According to the historical text Negro Thought in America 1880- 1915 by August Meier, if we consider the attributes of the oral tradition, unwritten memories are often the location of the most accurate account of individual histories. It is what Dana does not remember about her past (and America’s past) that fuels her adventure. Thus, Dana’s unrecorded or un- remembered memories set in motion the making of her history and the construction of her body. History of a Slave Narrative The tradition of the slave narrative is one concerned with the iden- tity of the black person as human, intelligent and deserving of freedom. The Narrative of Frederick Douglass (1845) begins with the words, “I was born.” By stating this obvious fact the ex-slave/narrator writes him or her- self into humanity. The ex-slave also moves a step closer to establishing the grounds of communication with sympathetic whites, especially abolitionists. Dana’s experience, on the other hand, is much less concerned with the notion of sympathy than the slave narrative. It is largely invested in the process of reliving the experience and understanding the institution of sla- very. Through Dana’s lived experience of slavery in the past, she can better understand the legacy of slavery in the present. Other thematic moments in slave narratives—Douglass’s, for ex- Page 106 Obsidian III Literature in the African Diaspora Gregory Hampton ample—such as the description of the physical brutality of slavery, the ac- quiring of literacy, the plot to escape, and the experience of freedom, all acted as the foundation of a literary recipe for the telling of the personal history/histories of the ex-slave. Many later writers, with intent to expose the injustice of slavery and the humanity of the African America, took up Douglass’s recipe. Unfortunately, the narratives produced using this rubric often constructed poor images of women and their varying experiences in slavery. Characters such as Harriet Jacobs’ Linda Brent, Frances Harper’s Iola LeRoy, and Pauline Hopkins’ Sappho serve as the best examples of uneasy portrayals of women in slavery. These three characters are so pious and chaste that they seem unreal and unbelievable in their lack of flaws that would make them seem like flesh and blood women. Deborah McDowell says that such characters are “all trapped in an ideological schema that predetermined their characters” (McDowell 98). Morally perfect and asexual characters such as Iola in Iola Leroy (1892), Linda in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and Sappho from Contending Forces (1900) were lim- ited in their character development because of genre and the function of the narratives. Fortunately, Octavia Butler does not have to negotiate Victorian standards in order to construct her conception of an American black woman. Thus, Kindred is a narrative primarily concerned with Dana’s experience within American slavery. In other words, Dana, not the injustices of Ameri- can slavery, is the center of the narrative. There are no political incentives to convince readers of the narrative to end slavery. There is also no attempt to prove Dana’s humanity because both of these points have been accepted as fact in Dana’s life long before the narrative begins. In this way Kindred disrupts both the premise of traditional masculine slave narratives and Vic- torian notions of women. Butler makes a departure from Douglass’s masculine rubric by adding powerful female images to her already untraditional narrative. The feminine elements, such as the heroine at the center of the text and the familial relationships, are all analogous to those found in feminine slave narratives written by black women writers. Likewise, the familial relation- ships shared by Dana and her ancestors were equally crucial not only for her freedom but for the existence of her entire family. This similarity is one of several that mark Kindred as a revised, if not proto-modernist, feminine slave narrative. Just as Linda Brent used the threat on her children’s lives as incentive to escape slavery, Dana uses a similar threat to motivate herself to continually (re)enter slavery and negotiate for both her own life and the lives of her ancestors. Vol. 6, No. 2/Vol. 7, No. 1 Fall/Winter 2005–Spring/Summer 2006 Page 107 Gregory Hampton Ultimately, through Dana’s familial relations she is allowed to travel through time and space and from freedom to slavery. Crossing boundaries is at the core of the whole historical or narrative structure of the novel. And although in many ways Dana is dependent on her ancestors, the lives of her grandparents and parents will be determined by Dana’s success or failure in a past that she helps to mold. The conceit of Kindred is that Dana sees how the bonds of the past become the very means to freedom from her legacy in the present; not only is the past necessary to the present/future, but the present/future becomes the very way or means by which the past acquires its meaning in Dana’s life. Narrative Architecture Kindred begins with a prologue that immediately addresses the issue of the body. Dana’s first words are, “I lost an arm on my trip home” (Butler 9). Before the narrative even begins, the question of the deconstruction and dismantling of a body has been established. The next sentence in the prologue situates another crucial issue at the center of the narrative. When Dana tells us, “And I lost about a year of my life and much of the comfort and security I had not valued until it was gone”(9), she does two very important things. First she informs the reader that her tale will unfold around the notion of the displacement of the present as simply present, or as the only feature of time, a concept that is far from traditional and even further away from a feminine slave narrative written in the late 1800s. Sec- ond, with this simple sentence she places a discussion of the loss of security in a position that is inextricable from issues of the body. A loss of security implies a loss of control over the environment surrounding an individual.
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