Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities

Volume 4 Issue 1 Threats to the American Dream Article 23

2015

Butler’s Kindred: Non-linear Genealogies and the Transformative Possibility of Breaking Genre Conventions

Hannah Rehak Macalester College, [email protected]

Keywords: kindred, butler, octavia, race, racism, genealogies, genealogy, legacy, literature, literary, analysis

Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/tapestries

Recommended Citation Rehak, Hannah (2015) "Butler’s Kindred: Non-linear Genealogies and the Transformative Possibility of Breaking Genre Conventions," Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities: Vol. 4 : Iss. 1 , Article 23. Available at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/tapestries/vol4/iss1/23

This Non-linear legacies: Confronting Ghosts of the National Imagination is brought to you for free and open access by the American Studies Department at DigitalCommons@Macalester College. It has been accepted for inclusion in Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities by an authorized editor of DigitalCommons@Macalester College. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Butler’s Kindred: Non-Linear Genealogies and the Transformative Possibility of Breaking Genre Conventions Hannah Rehak

As Harriet Jacobs wrote, “what tangled energy derives from its deployment, combination, skeins are the genealogies of slavery!” Kindred, by and modification of the conventions of slave Octavia Butler, argues that the past cannot be narratives and speculative fiction” (217). Thus, disentangled from the present, particularly when instead of subjecting Butler’s novel to one genre, that past is as traumatic and long lasting as slavery. Flagel finds that “it is precisely the terms of one Butler’s novel demands young readers and genre that allow Butler to interrogate the scholars, alike, to confront the legacy of slavery assumptions and expectations held by the other” through form, content, and the radical possibilities (217). Thus, it is how Butler subverts generic they both engender. Through a “métissage” of conventions that make her work so important. genres and a non-linear storyline, Butler’s novel Given that Butler wrote her novel over 100 preserves its space in many literary canons, but years after the Emancipation Proclamation, it is no also, I argue, offers the world outside of literature wonder her work cannot fully be considered a and academia the foundation for progressive slave narrative. But aside from the temporal possibilities in transformed language around differentiation, it is crucial to note that other trauma and healing (Flagel 217). elements of Kindred remove it from this canon. Like the world of main character Dana, According to Vint, “A key difference between Butler’s novel cannot be situated within a singular Kindred and slave narratives is its far more explicit era and cannot be understood through one genre. descriptions of violence” (249). Vint argues that In fact, since the 1979 publication of the book, this is partially due to differing audiences. Whereas many scholars have dedicated time to the slave narratives were published in the 18th and discussion of Kindred’s genre. Academics and 19th century to propel the abolitionist movement, students have worked to determine in which canon Vint argues that Butler’s novel is for a Kindred belongs, considering it fantasy and contemporary audience “who may have become science fiction, slave narrative and speculative contemptuous of ‘insufficiently radical’ black fiction, and many other unique combinations. ancestors’” (249). In other words, Butler is not concerned with alienating a White audience, but Though Butler considered her book fantasy, scholars like Sherryl Vint consider Kindred “a key rather focuses her work on a Black readership that example of the neo-slave narrative, an African- is perhaps intellectually removed from the history American genre that investigates the history of of slavery. slavery and reworks the nineteenth-century slave Beyond that, however, Vint emphasizes narrative tradition” (241). However, Bernard W. Butler’s “concern with embodied experience” Bell coined the term ‘neo-slave narrative,’ nearly (249). For Vint, this embodied experience leads to ten years after Kindred’s release, and thus scholars a more accurate depiction of violence on have long investigated other genres that mark plantations. Indeed, written as a first-person Butler’s text. In fact, most agree that the fluidity of narrative, Butler’s protagonist Dana allows the genre is exactly the political making of Butler’s reader access to unrelenting trauma and atrocity. book that continually puts Kindred “under Alongside Dana, the reader bears witness to investigation” in academic circles (Flagel 218). In lashings, sexual assault, and suicide. According to her essay, “It’s Almost like Being There”: Vint, this violence is a necessary difference from Speculative Fiction, Slave Narrative, and the Crisis slave narratives because of Representation in Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Nadine Flagel writes, “As one of the early the audience for neo-slave narratives generation of neo-slave narratives, the novel’s includes contemporary black readers who Non-linear Genealogies and the Transformative Possibility of Breaking Genre Conventions Hannah Rehak

must come to terms with their own contemporary. And by presenting racism as personal, familial histories of slavery. an insanity that burned itself out, or as the Butler… draw[s] on the slave narrative obvious folly of the ignorant and tradition, but… revise[s] it to serve the impoverished who would be left behind by needs of a new community of readers who the genre's brave new futures, sf avoids can see that emancipation was not confronting the structures of racism and its sufficient to change the experience of own complicity in them. (180) African Americans but constituted only the first step in the journey to full personhood. In other words, Bould suggests that in much (245) science fiction, allegories for racism remove the author and the present day audience away from their own hand in the historical genealogy of race Vint’s emphasis on embodiment is Butler’s radical focus to which this paper will ultimately return. and racism. Flagel, too, agrees in regards to the Yet, it is not just the genre of slave narrative speculative-fiction component of Kindred and writes, that fails to encapsulate the work Butler’s novel does, but generic attribution of science-fiction and speculative fiction also seem to fall short. For speculative fiction perpetuates assumptions many scholars, calling Kindred ‘science-fiction’ about slavery as a state of exception, reduces the implications of its politically charged without reference to its particular historical use of generic conventions. That is not to say that incidence. While much of the genre—and Kindred is not science fiction, but rather “the criticism of the genre—is heavily invested in dominant conventions of sf are insufficient for this master-slave dynamic, by the 1970s, representing an African American vision of the very little of it referred to the most obvious future” (Vint 246). Dana’s historical example of slavery in western civilization: the enslavement of Africans and “concern is not with grandfather paradoxes, their descendants in the New World. (224) with securing the past, but rather with ensuring that the past is actually heard. Her Many pieces of science-fiction use racial struggle time travel is used not to change the past to highlight a changing world, new conflict, or a (and thereby the future) but to change our brutal past, whereas Butler’s combination of slave understanding of it, which changes the narrative and science-fiction intentionally locates present and opens up fresh possible the reader and the novel’s characters in the literal outcomes for our future” (Vint 255) struggle for racial equity through the facts of the past and the reality of the present. This breaks the common conventions of time- travel, while maintaining the science-fiction trope Ultimately, it is the combination of genres of affecting the past, present, and future. that allows for the most comprehensive reading of Mark Bould echoes Vint in his essay, The Kindred, one that recognizes Butler’s subversions Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF, of conventions and the symbiotic nature of slave when he writes that much science fiction enables narratives and science fiction in her work. Through her original take on a slave narrative, Butler creates discussions of race and prejudice on a level a fantastical and non-linear storyline that re-centers of abstraction while stifling a more an authentic history, comments on a traumatized important discussion about real, material present, and provides material for a better future. conditions, both historical and In Kindred, 2 Tapestries | Spring 2015 Non-linear Genealogies and the Transformative Possibility of Breaking Genre Conventions Hannah Rehak

highlighted by the work of scholar Benjamin Time travel enables Butler to fuse the Robertson. Robertson writes, Dana fantastical with realist conventions, creating a work that is partly historical novel, partly inherits an internally incoherent, paradoxical slave narrative, and partly the story of how history. More important… she experiences a twentieth-century black woman comes to this history and the political power inherent terms with slavery as her own and her in it not as something she reads, not as a nation's past. (Vint 242-43) conventional story, but rather as an embodied experience. (370)

Further, “the neo-slave narrative is liberated from This biopolitical reading of Butler’s novel offers a the rigid forms of the nineteenth century through criticism of conventional historical narratives that its meeting on common ground with speculative distance the contemporary reader from slavery’s fiction” (Flagel 218). legacy. As Robertson writes, “History, for Butler, is Butler’s original, non-linear storyline is both immanent in and inseparable from the bodies of geographic and temporal. Both nonlinearities those who experience it. Bodies forge and maintain manifest in Dana’s life caught between two homes. - in fact are - connections with the past” (363). As she is ripped from one home, she gets thrown Robertson’s reading also “offers a vocabulary for into another and must bear the burden of both. describing Butler’s intersection of a science fiction Indeed, Dana brings objects from 1976 to the past, of the body with American history,” bridging the just as she brings both mental and physical wounds gap between allegorical fictions and historical from the past to 1976. When Dana returns after trauma (363). her first trip to Maryland, her back and shoulders As Robertson suggests, over the course of ache where Margaret Weylin, Rufus’ mother, beat the novel, Dana increasingly embodies her history. her. Her bruises and cuts only get worse as she She is called back to the plantation, repeatedly endures hard labor and lashings on the Weylin injured, and she eventually falls into habits of plantation. Upon her third return to 1976, Dana submission, so much so that she is criticized by says other slaves, particularly Alice, (the woman who must ultimately bear Dana’s great-grandmother, my back was cut up pretty badly too from Hagar), for her willingness to obey Rufus. In one what I could feel. I had seen old example, Alice, overwhelmed by her desire to kill photographs of the backs of people who Rufus, says to Dana “‘Do your job! Go tell him! had been slaves. I could remember the That’s what you for- to help white folks keep scars, thick and ugly. (Butler 113) niggers down...They be calling you mammy in a few years’” (Butler 167). As Alice can see the This is not the first time Dana returns to the transformation, Dana feels it, and in a line that present with markings from her time away, but it is echoes Frederick Douglass’ famous chiasmus, the first time she draws a connection between her Dana asks herself “see how easily slaves are bodily harm and the depiction of slavery in the made?” (Butler 177). As Dana becomes more contemporary books that surround her. In this comfortable with her place in the Weylin instance, though Dana’s wounds are produced household, the gap between the possibilities of the from her experiences in the past, they reflect what past and possibilities of the future is closed, almost she understands of slavery in the present. Here eliminated entirely. In little time, Dana, a self- begins the most evident focus on embodiment sufficient writer who dresses in gender-neutral clothing (a blatant anachronism in the antebellum 3 Tapestries | Spring 2015 Non-linear Genealogies and the Transformative Possibility of Breaking Genre Conventions Hannah Rehak

South), is ‘made into a slave.’ This characterization Dana. This too suggests the recurring of Dana as a submissive slave dismantles the idea entanglement of past and present as products and that people of the present are unaffected by the reflections of one another. rules of the past. Further, like Rufus, Kevin is an authoritative Eventually, Dana starts to feel at home on and stubborn character who often makes demands the plantation. After her return with Kevin to the of Dana. When Dana recounts her marriage to present, Dana reflects on the Weylin grounds, “I Kevin at the start of the section aptly titled “The could recall feeling relief at seeing the house, Fight,” the reader finds that Kevin at one time feeling that I had come home… I could recall asked her to type his manuscripts, “I’d done it the being surprised that I would come to think of such first time, grudgingly, not telling him how much I a place as home” (Butler 190). But it is not just that hated typing… The second time he asked, though, the past mirrors the present, but that the present I told him, and I refused. He was annoyed. The mirrors the past, for Dana also muses on the third time when I refused again, he was angry. He unfamiliarity of her 1976 house, “I felt as though I said if I couldn’t do him a little favor when he were losing my place here in my own time… asked, I could leave. So I went home” (Butler 109). Rufus’s time was a sharper, stronger reality” In a parallel, or rather, reflected scene, Rufus asks (Butler 191). Both she and Kevin cannot adjust Dana to write his letters for him. After they trade back to their 1976 reality and along with the threats back and forth, Dana has no choice but to wounds on her back and face, Dana brings agree, but not before Butler alludes to Dana’s memories of the Weylin house to the present, conversation with Kevin. Dana says, “You’ll never “both our offices were ex-bedrooms in the solidly know how hard I worked in my own time to avoid built old frame house we had bought. They were doing jobs like this” (Butler 226). In 1976, Dana has big comfortable rooms that reminded me a little of the skills to opt out of transcribing and the agency the rooms in the Weylin house” (Butler 193). Thus, to refuse Kevin, two liberties she is not allowed on Butler does not allow a separation of the two the plantation. Regardless, in both scenes her worlds and, though mere minutes in the present literacy, something so sought after among slaves may be months in the past, the repercussion of in the antebellum South, is demanded by Kevin and Dana’s travels in time is the melding of two worlds, Rufus, respectively, and in both the past and the each affected by the other. present her resistance is met with hostility and Perhaps the most symbolic instances of this entitlement. Though Kevin may fight his racial essential melding are the moments of Dana’s prejudice and male superiority complex, he dizzying jumps between the two times. Though expects Dana to give much of herself to him and instantaneous, Butler includes that Rufus can see gets bothered when she practices her agency. Dana moments before he calls her to him. After Thus, here we see a moment of unlearned she introduces Kevin to Rufus, Rufus says “‘I saw oppressive tendencies. Scholar, teacher, and social you… You were fighting with Dana just before you worker Joy DeGruy addresses these tendencies came here’” (Butler 64). It is not just significant that directly in her book Post Traumatic Slave in this moment Dana lives fully in the present and Syndrome: America's legacy of enduring injury and the past. I would argue the significance is that what healing, published in 2005. In this book, Dr. DeGruy is presumably Kevin and Dana having sex, Rufus writes about behavioral norms in contemporary interprets as violence against Dana. However Black communities that perhaps arise from seriously one takes the interpretation that Kevin centuries of oppression. She also considers what and Dana have an abusive relationship, it is the effects of slavery are on White folks, citing important to note that in this scene, as in much of unlearned oppressive habits. According to Dr. the text, Kevin reflects Rufus’ behavior towards DeGruy, the symptoms of Post Traumatic Slave 4 Tapestries | Spring 2015 Non-linear Genealogies and the Transformative Possibility of Breaking Genre Conventions Hannah Rehak

Syndrome, or PTSS, include “transgenerational Here again DeGruy’s research on the effects of adaptations associated with the past traumas of 400 years of a master-slave relationship further slavery and on-going oppression” (70). Though as illuminates Kevin’s actions. a White man Kevin is not suffering from PTSS, he is Upon second reading, there is another affected by the legacy slavery and persistent moment of foreshadow when Kevin gives Dana a racism, and clearly has yet to unlearn his wooden ruler and demands she practice on him. “I expectation of Dana to perform labor at his untied the cord of the canvas bag and got up, command. Through DeGruy’s psychological lens, discovering sore muscles as I moved. I limped over the reader can understand Kevin’s behavior to him… and in a sudden slashing motion, drew the beyond Butler’s sub textual critique of ruler across his abdomen” (Butler 47). Though it is heteronormativity and sexism, encountering it as an intimate moment, it is tainted by foreshadow an extension of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, as for in the climactic scene of the story Dana sinks well. Yet, even before Dana’s first trip to the the knife “into [Rufus’s] side” and brings “it down past, Kevin’s reflection of Rufus in the novel is again into his back” (Butler 260). foreshadowed as Kevin and Dana sort books in Another similarity between Dana’s their new shared home. Without any provocation, relationships with Kevin and Rufus is the trust she other than a comment about his tendency to get puts in both of them. For the majority of the text, ideas while busy, Kevin gives Dana a look that Dana is assured that she and Rufus have a mutual “wasn’t as malevolent as it seemed,” for according agreement regarding one another’s boundaries. As to Dana, “he had the kind of pale, almost colorless Rufus repeatedly breaches that trust, Dana finds eyes that made him seem distant and angry ways to understand his actions, and towards the whether he was or not” (13). Nearly two-thirds of end of the novel tells Carrie that “somehow, I the book later, Dana describes Kevin upon his always seem to forgive him for what he does to return to the present and says me” (Butler 224). Though not as extreme, the physical relationship between Dana and Kevin is the expression on his face was like akin to Dana’s physical relationship with Rufus, for something I’d seen, something I was used as she must reassert rules with Rufus, she must do to seeing on Tom Weylin. Something closed the same with Kevin. For example, in the opening and ugly… He gave me what almost chapter, after Dana has returned from her seemed to be a look of hatred. (Butler 194- momentary visit to the river, Kevin 95) characteristically demands to know what happened. When Dana cannot express it in words, In this moment Dana’s initial worry is partially (another echo of Douglass and a trope of slave realized, for when he first accompanies her to the narratives), Kevin grabs her by the shoulders and past she says “a place like this would endanger him does not let her go until she explicitly states he is in a way I didn’t want to talk to him about. If he was hurting her. Almost immediately afterwards Dana stranded here for years, some part of this place says “I folded forward, hugging myself, trying to would rub off on him” and after Kevin’s return she be still. The threat was gone, but it was all I could states that “he had changed - in five years he do to keep my teeth from chattering” (Butler 15). couldn’t help changing” (Butler 77, 196). In this Though Dana seems to refer to her experience example, the similarities between Kevin and the with Rufus, I would argue the ambiguity is hardly Weylin genealogy is there to begin with in the pale unintentional. Though Kevin was not trying to hurt eyes and cold stares, but the influence of the Dana, he did, much the same way Rufus repeatedly antebellum South on Kevin is undeniable and he is does over the course of his life. not just a reflection, but also a product of the past. 5 Tapestries | Spring 2015 Non-linear Genealogies and the Transformative Possibility of Breaking Genre Conventions Hannah Rehak

It is also not without consequence that able to accept what I knew was so” (Butler 10). In those in the antebellum South assume Dana and other words, Dana had to see what was not there, Rufus sleep together, just as in the modern-day to understand any kind of truth about her “slave-market,” the temp-agency, where Dana and experiences in the past and her injured body in the Kevin meet, Buz insinuates a covert love affair present. The site of amputation is a site of long before anything physical happens between vacancy, and yet it is the most solid piece of them. In fact, in the middle of the novel, Alice asks evidence Dana has. She can feel her arm, but she Dana if she would go to Rufus if he asked for her. cannot see it; it has become a phantom. Further, in When Dana replies “no,” Alice asks, “even though the epilogue as she and Kevin search through he’s just like your husband?” (Butler 168). Dana newspapers and legal records, Dana is far less refuses to fully acknowledge their similarities but in assured of what she knows. Dana questions why the present day Dana’s cousin suggests that Kevin she seeks these artifacts and though Kevin has been abusive, and again the Rufus’s abuse is suggests she wants “to touch solid evidence that misunderstood as Kevin’s. those people existed,” the evidence falls short and By the end of the novel, Dana embodies the the book ends without resolution (Butler 264). melding of the past and the present. Though Dana However, I would argue the true resolution of the kills Rufus before he is able to penetrate her, his novel comes by reading the prologue after the attack does end in a kind of rape, as his grip seizes epilogue, for it is in the prologue that the evidence her unwilling arm into the past. As Dana puts it, of her arm’s absence allows Dana to both acknowledge what she “knew was so” and to admit something harder and stronger than Rufus’s what she does not. In the final paragraph of the hand clamped down on my arm, squeezing prologue Kevin says the cops wanted to know how it, stiffening it, pressing into it- painlessly, at such a thing could happen and his response is that first- melting into it, meshing with it as he does not know. If the prologue is treated as the though somehow my arm were being resolution of the novel Dana’s final words are then absorbed into something. (Butler 260-261) “neither do I” (Butler 11). I have no trouble reading the prologue as the intended resolution to this This is the most literal moment of the past novel, as it further supports my interpretation that absorbing Dana. She recalls the entire book is ripe with literal and allegorical representations of the past producing and I was back at home - in my own house, in reflecting the present and the present producing my own time. But I was still caught and reflecting the past. This is further supported by somehow, joined to the wall as though my Dana’s description of her arm growing into and yet arm were growing out of it -or growing into also out of the wall. There is no beginning and it… my left arm had become a part of the there is no end. Thus, in a book that repeatedly wall. (Butler 261) dismantles the notion of a linear story, it makes complete sense that the book starts with resolution The significance of this amputation is perhaps best and ends with a question. understood through the lens of Avery Gordon’s Albeit paradoxically, Butler’s novel Ghostly Matters, in which she writes “the ghost or continually calls into question the validity of written the apparition is one form by which something is history to accurately get to truth. Dana’s literacy lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our offers her little help in the 1800s and her supposedly well-trained eyes” (Gordon 8). Indeed, knowledge of the Antebellum South from history in the prologue Dana explains “I felt as though I books does not protect her. As Robertson had another hand… Somehow, I had to see to be suggests, Dana’s increasing embodiment of her 6 Tapestries | Spring 2015 Non-linear Genealogies and the Transformative Possibility of Breaking Genre Conventions Hannah Rehak family history via “time travel suggests that it is Dana’s phantom arm. By the end of the novel, only through bodily experience that Dana can (whether one reads the epilogue as the end or the come to truly know slavery” (244). In the final prologue as the end as I suggested), Dana is scene when she tries to “touch solid evidence,” but haunted. In the words of Gordon, “haunting is a can only know it all happened by the absence of very particular way of knowing what has happened her phantom arm, Sherryl Vint responds that Butler or is happening. Being haunted draws us “reminds us that there is more to truth and sanity affectively, sometimes against our will and always that what survives in the official historical record” a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a (251). Similarly, DeGruy writes that “Where facts reality we come to experience, not as cold are pieces of information, truth is the whole story. knowledge, but as a transformative recognition” Facts can be used to mislead as well as to (Gordon 8). enlighten” (24). Thus, the facts of Dana’s story may I believe, and I think Butler would agree, not seem believable, but the reader has come to that Dana’s transformative recognition is the goal understand the logic of her time traveling and the of recovering amputated genealogies (genealogies figurative and literal trauma she incurs while away that exist but have been hidden from view). In and upon return. Further, Dana’s mode of knowing other words, before the story begins Dana is relies on generic disruption that offers its own haunted by the past in the politics of her commentary on the limitations of form. For relationship with Kevin, in her family’s bible and the example, Flagel argues that Butler uses the unfamiliar names of her ancestors, and the existing rhetorical tropes of speculative fiction and slave racism in a present-day 1976 society comfortable narratives to critique genre conventions, ultimately with the white liberal fantasy of a post-racial “introducing a significant ambivalence toward society (as alluded to in the novel on page 150 literary representation” (228). Dana must embody when Alice says that Kevin “couldn’t tell the her history by ultimately acknowledging the difference ‘tween black and white”). However, embodied absence of her amputated arm. these hauntings draw Dana into the past where she Butler’s enterprise in Kindred is one that comes to recognize slavery, though she cannot requires the reader to acknowledge that, given the ever truly know it. The closest Dana can get to trauma of slavery, the past and the present are knowing this past is through embodiment of the inextricably linked. As Dana’s effort to ensure violence and trauma of chattel slavery that lingers Hagar’s birth produces the past, Dana’s in the present day. Through the scholarship of experiences as a slave and Kevin’s experience as folks like Bould, DeGruy, Flagel, Gordon, slave-master (to his own wife) produce the Robertson, and Vint, Kindred readers can come to present. But even without the preservation of name the healing powers of Butler’s convention- Dana’s genealogy and the material changes in her breaking text through its focus on embodied and Kevin’s characters, the past and present still history, recognized trauma, and the continual reflect one another. This production and reflection effort to recover what has been amputated from is evident in the rules of Dana’s time travel that written histories. allow the sharing of material objects and physical wounds across time and space. It is evident in the glaring similarities between Rufus and Kevin and their relationships with Dana. And it is evident in

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Works Cited

Bould, Mark. "The Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black Sf.(afrofuturism)(critical Essay)." Science Fiction Studies. 34.2 (2007): 177-186. Print.

Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. Print.

DeGruy, Joy. Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing. Milwaukie, Oregon: Uptone Press, 2005. Print.

Flagel, Nadine. "It's Almost Like Being There": Speculative Fiction, Slave Narrative, and the Crisis of Representation in Octavia Butler's kindred." Canadian Review of American Studies. 42.2 (2012): 216-245. Print.

Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Print.

Robertson, Benjamin. "Some Matching Strangeness": Biology, Politics, and the Embrace of History in Octavia Butler's "kindred"." Science Fiction Studies. 37.3 (2010): 362-381. Print.

Sherryl, Vint. "Only by Experience": Embodiment and the Limitations of Realism in Neo-Slave Narratives." Science Fiction Studies. 34.2 (2007): 241-261. Print.

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