Review Of Octavia Butler's 'Antebellum Slavery'
Professor Coleman
English 0802
1 May 2012
Oppression and Resistance Through Kindred’s Story
Kindred tells the story of a 1970s African American woman traveling through time to an 1815 slave plantation. The author, Octavia Butler, portrays how the main character, Dana, uses resistance to survive in both time periods. She uses Dana to address the social and cultural issues of the Antebellum South and post-Civil Rights Movement. As African American woman, Butler was subjected to racism and oppression in her life, and translated her experiences into Dana’s character. The setting switches back and forth between both times as Dana narrates, painting a picture of slavery through her eyes better than any factual essay or lecture about the topic …show more content…
can. The novel uses the conventions of science fiction to shape Kindred, telling a story of slavery and oppression. Although forms of resistance changed between the two periods, resistance remained a powerful force that overcame boundaries, even that of time. Slavery’s effects did not end with emancipation; oppression translated into Jim Crow laws, beatings, lynchings and racism. People will always deal with oppression and resistance in life, and Kindred is an effective example of overcoming oppression as a historically and culturally contextualized act.
One reason Kindred addressed social and cultural issues effectively comes from the background of its author, Octavia Butler. According to Elisabeth Anne Leonard, the oppressed group views oppression differently than the majority, “It is easier to be hopeful about an end to oppression if one is not part of the oppressed group.” As an African American, society subjected Butler to the effects racism can have, and allowed her to effectively portray Dana as oppressed in both time periods. Butler grew up in the fifties and sixties where it was difficult for African Americans to become successful science fiction writers (Leonard 1). Resistance filled her life as society held oppressing views on African Americans as authors. She heard many negative comments about her dreams of writing, “Honey, Negroes can’t be writers” (JBHE Foundation). The resistance required of her to write, along with her abilities as a writer, translates into Kindred. Dana can be viewed as a reflection of Butler’s own resistance in life. Dana’s fight of racism and slavery to save her family and her relationship with her husband is a parallel to Butler’s fights becoming an African American science fiction author (“Race and Ethnicity in Science Fiction” 7). Another reason that the novel portrays an effective way to deal with oppression is because of its time traveling plot. Dana travels back and forth from the slave plantation to 1976 many times in the novel. American history tells about the time of slavery, but the novel allows its readers to connect with slavery through first hand encounters of a modern woman. Dana’s experiences do more than tell a story; they change how the audience views slavery. Dana describes oppression and pain as only a person subjected to slavery could. “Hanging by the neck. A woman. Alice. I stared at her not believing, not wanting to believe, I touched her and her flesh was cold and hard. The dead gray face was ugly in death as it had never been in life. The mouth was open. The eyes were open and staring” (Butler 248). Alice committed suicide because Rufus claimed to have sold her children away as slaves. Rufus broke Alice’s heart and drove her to suicide. (Butler 249-251). The picture painted of Alice is breathtaking and conveys an image of the psychological issues slavery caused. Children, relatives and friends could be taken away from a slave at the owner’s discretion. When people hear about this in history books, they realize losing family members had to hurt psychologically, but Butler gives the reader the ability to feel the slave’s emotions and pain with her descriptions through Dana.
Butler used science fiction to tell the story of oppression that Dana encounters in both aspects of time. Farah Mendlesohn defines science fiction as “a mode of writing which has seemed to exist at a variance from the standards and demands of both the literary establishment and the mass market,” and as a story that does not follow the predictable outlines that romance and mysteries do (“Reading Science Fiction” 1-2). Science fiction allows Kindred to deal with the problems of oppression and resistance by breaking away from popular slave and history narratives. Butler had to break down racial barriers that exist in the genre to do this. Critics consider science fiction written by African Americans, partly as African American Literature because science fiction as a genre usually ignores racial issues (Leonard 1). Butler in turn used science fiction to tell a story about racial and slavery issues presenting Dana with turns in time that the reader cannot predict. Butler uses time travel as her “variance from the standards,” and her way to connect Dana’s family’s past with the present (Mendlesohn 1-2). Science fiction and time traveling prove oppression and resistance everlasting in Dana’s family as she struggles to keep Rufus and Alice safe in 1815, and she struggles with her family’s views on her interracial marriage to Kevin in 1976. Cognitive estrangement is another key part of science fiction Mendlesohn describes as “the sense that something in the fictive world is dissonant with the reader’s experienced world” (“Reading Science Fiction” 5). Butler does this with the metaphor of Dana losing her arm during her last transfer from past to present (Butler 9, 261). Many interpretations can be read from this. Sarah Eden Schiff describes the loss of an arm as the symbol of a wounded soldier of the Civil War losing their arm (Schiff 121). This metaphor eludes the costs it took to end slavery for Dana and America (Schiff 121).
Oppression has changed throughout history, which caused people to adopt different approaches of resistance. Dana experiences this firsthand as she goes back and forth between times. Her original home exists in 1976, a short time after the Civil Rights Movement (Butler 12). African Americans of the fifties and sixties challenged Jim Crow laws and segregation through marching, protesting and public speaking (Litwack). This helped end segregation, but still left many inequalities between the races. In Dana’s time, African Americans still faced inferiority when it came to income and living conditions as the White Flight movement into the suburbs occurred, and whites left the cities’ rundown schools and homes to the African Americans (Litwack). Dana references the effects of White Flight with her job cleaning toilets, washing dishes and sweeping floors as she says, “I was working out of a casual labor agency – we regulars called it a slave market… Getting sent out meant the minimum wage – minus Uncle Sam’s share – for as many hours as you were needed.” (Butler 52-53). She worked doing tedious jobs for a very small pay that most whites had left when they left the cities. She had to resist this and make her small salary to live. Transitioning to the past forced Dana to literally enter the slave market as she and Kevin were forced to assume roles of owner and slave (Butler 65). Each time she switches time periods, Dana must situate herself and the resistance required of her in each time period in order to survive. When she entered her own time, she and Kevin dealt with their family’s oppressing views of their marriage, and when she entered 1815, she assumed the role of Kevin’s or Rufus’s slave. Each setting caused Dana to use different forms of resistance to fight oppression as a modern black woman and a slave in order to survive.
Octavia Butler proved resistance to be a powerful force that can overcome almost anything, including time. Although the time calls for different forms of resistance, the novel proves that the past and present are interrelated through resistance. Oppression of African Americans came long before the Civil Rights Movement and White Flight as Litwack states, “The civil rights movement began with the presence of enslaved blacks in the New World, with the first slave mutiny on the ships bringing them here” (Litwack). Whether oppression occurred with Dana’s interracial marriage of 1976 or her role in slave society on the Wyelin plantation, resistance was necessary for her. When Rufus brought Dana to the past, she shows a connection with Alice, proving oppression and resistance have changed throughout time, but remain interrelated. Their connection went as far as Rufus claiming, “You really are one woman” (Butler 228). They look alike to him, and he even treats them the same, as Alice references that when Dana is around, he does not beat either of them and he likes Dana out of bed and Alice in bed (Butler 228). The oppression Alice faces under Rufus becomes eased by Dana’s use of modern resistance to Rufus in the past. With all Dana does to save Rufus’s life, it seems as if she traveled there to help him, but she is there to connect modern resistance with slave resistance to save Alice and allow for Hagar to be born. Dana moves to the past through the power of resistance, using modern resistance to help Alice oppose Rufus’s raping and whippings, and eventually free Hagar from slavery.
In “Antebellum Slavery,” Carl Weinberg explains that resisting slavery is something African Americans will always have to deal with, and the novel correctly portrays this.
In referring to slavery, Weinberg recalls that John Hope Franklin stated, “We should never forget slavery. We should talk about it every morning and every day of the year to remind this country” (Weinberg 3). Society cannot forget because abolishing slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment translated into Jim Crow laws, racism, and lynching (Weinberg 3). Despite the Civil Rights Movement, racism still existed in Dana’s time in the novel and even today. The aftermath of slavery requires African Americans, to resist its effects daily which the novel represented through Dana’s narration. She and Kevin go through a daily struggle of how their families’ view their interracial relationship. Kevin describes his sister’s reaction as, “She didn’t want to meet you, wouldn’t have you in her house – or me either if I married you.” (Butler 110). These views of African Americans stem from the negative way plantation owning whites abused blacks as slaves and viewed them as inferior. Dana also experiences the origins of the racism in her time when she exists in the Antebellum South through her time traveling. She becomes a slave herself and experiences the whippings slaves received (Butler 106-107). She has to resist this and her negative feelings until her job is done of preserving her family ties. As Franklin stated, …show more content…
society cannot forget slavery because its oppression lives on through racism. Some claim that fiction can trivialize history because it does not tell the true story. They argue that fiction is something made up and it minimalizes the oppression that really happened throughout slave times and what African Americans had to deal with. Fiction may be created and told in a story, but Kindred is far from something made up. Butler’s ability to paint pictures of Dana’s thoughts on the beatings gives the reader a perspective on the treatment of slaves that can only come through firsthand accounts, even if fictional. History can only tell the story that slave owners beat their slaves, but Dana tells the story of her feelings, pain and suffering only a slave can. After being beaten from running away, Dana explains her pain, “I awoke tied hand and foot, my side throbbing rhythmically, my jaw not throbbing at all. The pain there was a steady scream. I probed with my tongue and found that two teeth on the right side were gone” (174). Fiction in Kindred cannot be interpreted as make-believe, because the novel tells a story of resistance in a powerful way through its fictional encounters. Resistance exists as a force all people must use in life.
Octavia Butler’s background of being in the oppressed group gave her the ability to deal with the problems of oppression through her writing. She uses science fiction to create a time traveling plot where Dana experiences oppression in modern times and slave-owning times. Dana is able to describe her beatings and harsh experiences through firsthand encounters that truly hit home. Whether cruel treatment exists through racism of today, segregation of the sixties, or slavery of the 1800’s, resistance can take many forms and evolves as oppression changes. This problem will not go away in African American culture because the slave owning past has created a negative image that lives on through racism, but with powerful resistance novels like Kindred, it gives society
hope.
Works Cited
Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979. Print.
JBHE Foundation. “Octavia Butler, 1947-2006.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 51. Page 13. Spring 2006. Web. 21 April 2012.
Leonard, Elisabeth Anne. “Race and ethnicity in science fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Cambridge University Press 1996. Print.
Litwack, Leon F. “ ‘Fight the Power!’ The legacy of the civil rights movement.” Journal of Southern History. 75.1 (Feb. 2009): p. 3. Web. 21 April 2012.
Mendlesohn, Farah. “Introduction: reading science fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Cambridge University Press. Print.
Schiff, Sarah Eden. “Recovering (from) the Double: Fiction as Historical Revision in Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred.” Arizona Quarterly 65.1. Spring 2009. Print.
Weinberg, Carl R. “Antebellum Slavery.” OAH Magazine of History. April 2009. Web. 21 April 2012.
English 0802
1 May 2012
Oppression and Resistance Through Kindred’s Story
Kindred tells the story of a 1970s African American woman traveling through time to an 1815 slave plantation. The author, Octavia Butler, portrays how the main character, Dana, uses resistance to survive in both time periods. She uses Dana to address the social and cultural issues of the Antebellum South and post-Civil Rights Movement. As African American woman, Butler was subjected to racism and oppression in her life, and translated her experiences into Dana’s character. The setting switches back and forth between both times as Dana narrates, painting a picture of slavery through her eyes better than any factual essay or lecture about the topic …show more content…
can. The novel uses the conventions of science fiction to shape Kindred, telling a story of slavery and oppression. Although forms of resistance changed between the two periods, resistance remained a powerful force that overcame boundaries, even that of time. Slavery’s effects did not end with emancipation; oppression translated into Jim Crow laws, beatings, lynchings and racism. People will always deal with oppression and resistance in life, and Kindred is an effective example of overcoming oppression as a historically and culturally contextualized act.
One reason Kindred addressed social and cultural issues effectively comes from the background of its author, Octavia Butler. According to Elisabeth Anne Leonard, the oppressed group views oppression differently than the majority, “It is easier to be hopeful about an end to oppression if one is not part of the oppressed group.” As an African American, society subjected Butler to the effects racism can have, and allowed her to effectively portray Dana as oppressed in both time periods. Butler grew up in the fifties and sixties where it was difficult for African Americans to become successful science fiction writers (Leonard 1). Resistance filled her life as society held oppressing views on African Americans as authors. She heard many negative comments about her dreams of writing, “Honey, Negroes can’t be writers” (JBHE Foundation). The resistance required of her to write, along with her abilities as a writer, translates into Kindred. Dana can be viewed as a reflection of Butler’s own resistance in life. Dana’s fight of racism and slavery to save her family and her relationship with her husband is a parallel to Butler’s fights becoming an African American science fiction author (“Race and Ethnicity in Science Fiction” 7). Another reason that the novel portrays an effective way to deal with oppression is because of its time traveling plot. Dana travels back and forth from the slave plantation to 1976 many times in the novel. American history tells about the time of slavery, but the novel allows its readers to connect with slavery through first hand encounters of a modern woman. Dana’s experiences do more than tell a story; they change how the audience views slavery. Dana describes oppression and pain as only a person subjected to slavery could. “Hanging by the neck. A woman. Alice. I stared at her not believing, not wanting to believe, I touched her and her flesh was cold and hard. The dead gray face was ugly in death as it had never been in life. The mouth was open. The eyes were open and staring” (Butler 248). Alice committed suicide because Rufus claimed to have sold her children away as slaves. Rufus broke Alice’s heart and drove her to suicide. (Butler 249-251). The picture painted of Alice is breathtaking and conveys an image of the psychological issues slavery caused. Children, relatives and friends could be taken away from a slave at the owner’s discretion. When people hear about this in history books, they realize losing family members had to hurt psychologically, but Butler gives the reader the ability to feel the slave’s emotions and pain with her descriptions through Dana.
Butler used science fiction to tell the story of oppression that Dana encounters in both aspects of time. Farah Mendlesohn defines science fiction as “a mode of writing which has seemed to exist at a variance from the standards and demands of both the literary establishment and the mass market,” and as a story that does not follow the predictable outlines that romance and mysteries do (“Reading Science Fiction” 1-2). Science fiction allows Kindred to deal with the problems of oppression and resistance by breaking away from popular slave and history narratives. Butler had to break down racial barriers that exist in the genre to do this. Critics consider science fiction written by African Americans, partly as African American Literature because science fiction as a genre usually ignores racial issues (Leonard 1). Butler in turn used science fiction to tell a story about racial and slavery issues presenting Dana with turns in time that the reader cannot predict. Butler uses time travel as her “variance from the standards,” and her way to connect Dana’s family’s past with the present (Mendlesohn 1-2). Science fiction and time traveling prove oppression and resistance everlasting in Dana’s family as she struggles to keep Rufus and Alice safe in 1815, and she struggles with her family’s views on her interracial marriage to Kevin in 1976. Cognitive estrangement is another key part of science fiction Mendlesohn describes as “the sense that something in the fictive world is dissonant with the reader’s experienced world” (“Reading Science Fiction” 5). Butler does this with the metaphor of Dana losing her arm during her last transfer from past to present (Butler 9, 261). Many interpretations can be read from this. Sarah Eden Schiff describes the loss of an arm as the symbol of a wounded soldier of the Civil War losing their arm (Schiff 121). This metaphor eludes the costs it took to end slavery for Dana and America (Schiff 121).
Oppression has changed throughout history, which caused people to adopt different approaches of resistance. Dana experiences this firsthand as she goes back and forth between times. Her original home exists in 1976, a short time after the Civil Rights Movement (Butler 12). African Americans of the fifties and sixties challenged Jim Crow laws and segregation through marching, protesting and public speaking (Litwack). This helped end segregation, but still left many inequalities between the races. In Dana’s time, African Americans still faced inferiority when it came to income and living conditions as the White Flight movement into the suburbs occurred, and whites left the cities’ rundown schools and homes to the African Americans (Litwack). Dana references the effects of White Flight with her job cleaning toilets, washing dishes and sweeping floors as she says, “I was working out of a casual labor agency – we regulars called it a slave market… Getting sent out meant the minimum wage – minus Uncle Sam’s share – for as many hours as you were needed.” (Butler 52-53). She worked doing tedious jobs for a very small pay that most whites had left when they left the cities. She had to resist this and make her small salary to live. Transitioning to the past forced Dana to literally enter the slave market as she and Kevin were forced to assume roles of owner and slave (Butler 65). Each time she switches time periods, Dana must situate herself and the resistance required of her in each time period in order to survive. When she entered her own time, she and Kevin dealt with their family’s oppressing views of their marriage, and when she entered 1815, she assumed the role of Kevin’s or Rufus’s slave. Each setting caused Dana to use different forms of resistance to fight oppression as a modern black woman and a slave in order to survive.
Octavia Butler proved resistance to be a powerful force that can overcome almost anything, including time. Although the time calls for different forms of resistance, the novel proves that the past and present are interrelated through resistance. Oppression of African Americans came long before the Civil Rights Movement and White Flight as Litwack states, “The civil rights movement began with the presence of enslaved blacks in the New World, with the first slave mutiny on the ships bringing them here” (Litwack). Whether oppression occurred with Dana’s interracial marriage of 1976 or her role in slave society on the Wyelin plantation, resistance was necessary for her. When Rufus brought Dana to the past, she shows a connection with Alice, proving oppression and resistance have changed throughout time, but remain interrelated. Their connection went as far as Rufus claiming, “You really are one woman” (Butler 228). They look alike to him, and he even treats them the same, as Alice references that when Dana is around, he does not beat either of them and he likes Dana out of bed and Alice in bed (Butler 228). The oppression Alice faces under Rufus becomes eased by Dana’s use of modern resistance to Rufus in the past. With all Dana does to save Rufus’s life, it seems as if she traveled there to help him, but she is there to connect modern resistance with slave resistance to save Alice and allow for Hagar to be born. Dana moves to the past through the power of resistance, using modern resistance to help Alice oppose Rufus’s raping and whippings, and eventually free Hagar from slavery.
In “Antebellum Slavery,” Carl Weinberg explains that resisting slavery is something African Americans will always have to deal with, and the novel correctly portrays this.
In referring to slavery, Weinberg recalls that John Hope Franklin stated, “We should never forget slavery. We should talk about it every morning and every day of the year to remind this country” (Weinberg 3). Society cannot forget because abolishing slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment translated into Jim Crow laws, racism, and lynching (Weinberg 3). Despite the Civil Rights Movement, racism still existed in Dana’s time in the novel and even today. The aftermath of slavery requires African Americans, to resist its effects daily which the novel represented through Dana’s narration. She and Kevin go through a daily struggle of how their families’ view their interracial relationship. Kevin describes his sister’s reaction as, “She didn’t want to meet you, wouldn’t have you in her house – or me either if I married you.” (Butler 110). These views of African Americans stem from the negative way plantation owning whites abused blacks as slaves and viewed them as inferior. Dana also experiences the origins of the racism in her time when she exists in the Antebellum South through her time traveling. She becomes a slave herself and experiences the whippings slaves received (Butler 106-107). She has to resist this and her negative feelings until her job is done of preserving her family ties. As Franklin stated, …show more content…
society cannot forget slavery because its oppression lives on through racism. Some claim that fiction can trivialize history because it does not tell the true story. They argue that fiction is something made up and it minimalizes the oppression that really happened throughout slave times and what African Americans had to deal with. Fiction may be created and told in a story, but Kindred is far from something made up. Butler’s ability to paint pictures of Dana’s thoughts on the beatings gives the reader a perspective on the treatment of slaves that can only come through firsthand accounts, even if fictional. History can only tell the story that slave owners beat their slaves, but Dana tells the story of her feelings, pain and suffering only a slave can. After being beaten from running away, Dana explains her pain, “I awoke tied hand and foot, my side throbbing rhythmically, my jaw not throbbing at all. The pain there was a steady scream. I probed with my tongue and found that two teeth on the right side were gone” (174). Fiction in Kindred cannot be interpreted as make-believe, because the novel tells a story of resistance in a powerful way through its fictional encounters. Resistance exists as a force all people must use in life.
Octavia Butler’s background of being in the oppressed group gave her the ability to deal with the problems of oppression through her writing. She uses science fiction to create a time traveling plot where Dana experiences oppression in modern times and slave-owning times. Dana is able to describe her beatings and harsh experiences through firsthand encounters that truly hit home. Whether cruel treatment exists through racism of today, segregation of the sixties, or slavery of the 1800’s, resistance can take many forms and evolves as oppression changes. This problem will not go away in African American culture because the slave owning past has created a negative image that lives on through racism, but with powerful resistance novels like Kindred, it gives society
hope.
Works Cited
Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979. Print.
JBHE Foundation. “Octavia Butler, 1947-2006.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 51. Page 13. Spring 2006. Web. 21 April 2012.
Leonard, Elisabeth Anne. “Race and ethnicity in science fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Cambridge University Press 1996. Print.
Litwack, Leon F. “ ‘Fight the Power!’ The legacy of the civil rights movement.” Journal of Southern History. 75.1 (Feb. 2009): p. 3. Web. 21 April 2012.
Mendlesohn, Farah. “Introduction: reading science fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Cambridge University Press. Print.
Schiff, Sarah Eden. “Recovering (from) the Double: Fiction as Historical Revision in Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred.” Arizona Quarterly 65.1. Spring 2009. Print.
Weinberg, Carl R. “Antebellum Slavery.” OAH Magazine of History. April 2009. Web. 21 April 2012.