Kindred – Octavia Butler

Rating: 5 stars

When someone first suggested to me to read Kindred, she described it as a type of Science Fiction. I think, now after I’ve read it, that she wasn’t wrong, but she wasn’t right. It contains some elements of the genre, but it is so much more. Kindred is the story of an African American woman drawn through time repeatedly to her ancestor, a slave owner in Maryland who relishes to unleash the sins of his father on others. The fantastic elements of the story mostly serve as a way to frame the Historical Fiction side of the story.

I’m sure that many more educated and more interesting responses and essays on the book can be found, but I’ll try to contribute my two cents. As the historian Marc Bloc once said, “Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past. But a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past, if he is totally ignorant of the present…This faculty of understanding the living is, in very truth, the master quality of the historian.” It is a quote that came to me while I was reading Butler’s masterpiece. Edana, the protagonist, examines the history of her family and participates in the twists and turns of early 19th-century slaveholding Maryland. Her first trip back in time paints the picture of the whole future narrative of the book. She saves a drowning baby who turns out to be ancestor, and the reaction of the parents is hysteria, almost histrionics, from the mom and and anger from the dad. The portrait of the life of the African American slave is complete here.

The portrayal of the life in the antebellum South really strikes home when I read one of my favorite quotations from the book, “He could do anything he wanted to to me, and I had no enforceable rights. None at all.” The protagonist has saved the life of Rufus Weylin numerous times by this point, but she still feels trapped. It’s the danger of such a society — just as oppressive and fearful of ideas and the truth as Nazi Germany — that everyone, no matter who, becomes compliant to such a system and try to find a niche by abandoning ideals and embracing the pragmatism of saving themself.

Kindred struck me and had an impact that couldn’t be ignored. It’s a masterfully crafted book that involves the reader in the heart-wrenching tale of family and history.