nh923@nyu.edu

While there are many entry points into discussing the Kindred by Octavia Butler, the one that I want to begin with is time, namely the way that it functions differently as Dana and Kevin travel between antebellum Maryland and their present-day California. In the introduction Robert Crossley writes “These trips, like convulsive memories dislocating her in time, occupy, only a few minutes or hours of her life in 1976, but her stay in the alternative time is stretched as she lives out an imposed remembrance of things past.” (p. X). Eight days in the present is five years in the past, three hours becomes two months. These different experiences of time are important in how they relate to trauma, memory, and traumatic memory.

 

In addition to being described as fragmented traumatic memory can also invoke a different experience of temporality (van der Kolk, 7). Minutes in the present, which we can call a less traumatic time (though not devoid of it when we consider Dana’s history and greater historical memory) becomes days, weeks, months, and years in the traumatic life of slavery. In this way, Butler writes an experience of time that in some ways performs the time of traumatic memory. Once could also think of these moments as connected to the notion of a flashback, a reliving of the past in the present.

 

Time as a constant structure also shifts (warps, stretches, condenses, flips) when it becomes clear that Dana is not just being drawn back into the past, but pulled back in order to save the man that will guarantee her eventual birth. That Dana must work to ensure her future by interfering in a past she does not yet exist within, breaks the idea of linear time. That she must do this by first keeping alive her oppressor/relative and later by severing that bond by killing him, also introduces a complicated notion of agency and what that means.

 

Dana is a free black woman living in a time in which slavery is legally abolished, though there are many ways of maintaining racial hierarchy, who travels back into a time and place in which slavery is legal. Though free blacks exist in that time, freedom is tenuous at best, and without papers Dana walks a fine line between freedom and enslavement. Additionally, Dana’s life (literally) depends on the birth of a child that is the direct result of the master/slave relationship, that would not willingly have occurred. Given the powers at play, how can we, or better yet, can we locate Dana’s agency throughout this novel? Does she have the power to make choices?

 

Temporality and agency also serve as key elements in the way that Denise Ferreira da Silva thinks about capital in “Unpayable Debt: Reading Scenes of Value against the Arrow of Time.” In framing capital da Silva argues for a move away from linear time, which situates racism and colonialism “anterior to global capital itself” and towards a “fractural figuring of the colonial, racial, and capital triad, which, violating separability, collapses its effects…and instead of describing it as a relationship, exposes an entanglement” (92). This move to a fractural thinking, which mirrors Butler’s narrative, also highlights the way history does not simply move in one direction or outside of structures. Dana’s present and future or entangled within the structure of slavery, and her past effected by her experience of race and racism in her present.

 

Agency also becomes important in thinking about the idea of “unpayable debt” which da Silva defines as “an obligation that one owns but is not one’s to pay” (87). In this sense an unpayable debt is something that one is implicated in, not something one has full control or agency over, something one is required to take responsibility for but is not responsible for. Dana must keep Rufus alive to ensure her familial line, this is her obligation, however, securing her futurity through actions in a distant past, is a debt not hers to pay.

 

 

Butler, Octavia. Kindred. Boston; Beacon Press, 1979.

da Silva, Denise Ferreira. Unpayable Debt: Reading Scenes of Value against the Arrow of Time. London: Sternberg Press, 2022.

van der Kolk, Bessel. “Running For Your Life: The Anatomy of Survival.” The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, 51-73. New York: Penguin Books, 2014.