Weekly Response
Delicia Alarcon
October 23, 2023
Class 9 Response
Butler Kindred
Denise Ferrera da Silva, Unpayable Debt
“What’s the cost of a limb for freedom?”
The very first thought that came to mind when reading these texts is the esoteric spiritual world that Denise Ferreira da Silva theorizes and creates a new frame of reference in conjunction with Octavia Butler’s text of Kindred. She proposes “the fractal figuring of the colonial, racial, and capital triad, which, violating separability, collapses its effects (anteriority and exteriority), and instead of describing it as a relationship, exposes an entanglement: retaining their difference, thy remain deeply implicated in/as/with each other. What follows is a composition (and, as such, a decomposition and recomposition) that explicates the figure of unpayable debt” (92). The themes that resonated with me the most from the texts was that I understood that we exist all at the same time and da Silva explicates this through the story of Dana and Rufus. The experiences across temporalities and da Silva problematices what sustains linear temporality. For her Dana has an “Unpayable debt” which she defines as – an obligation that one owns but it’s not one’s to pay” (87). I would also propose how these texts in conversation can offer us healing modalities and practices as it relates to regressions, past lives, and across lives while unpacking trauma. Though Dana pays her debt in the text da Silva argues that it was not hers to pay in the first place. Of course, these concepts of colonialism, racism, and capitalism as macro themes operate on the individual character of Dana which experiences these notions in the antebellum South in Maryland and southern california in the 1970s across her individual life and her travels back and forth time and space. As I read I kept thinking; does da Silva propose that we experience all these time frames at once? Similar to Leda and spiral times? And within these time frames do we clear karma and debt by accessing the ability to travel across time and space in the dream space or in our imagination? Or even in deep meditation practices? Even if we travel across time, is it even our debt to pay? Or can we even pay for it?
da Silva writes, “reading the book does not offer a modern-day Black person enough for her to decide whether Butler accomplishes her objective, that is, of conveying what it is like to experience ‘the whole system’ of slavery. Holding their unpayable debt, however, today’s black persons–like those who lived and died in antebellum Maryland– do understand the cost of (paying with a limb for) liberty” (111). The feeling of losing a limb and going back and forth across time shares the feeling that these individuals did lose not only ownership of their body parts during this time period but also in the aftermath of slavery in the “modern” “free” world there is still opportunity for these bodies to be owned by the state projects of capitalism. What da Silva and Butler do in these texts is move through these dense terms using the body as a site for understanding. Even though Dana had no written promise or written debt to pay, is there this unspoken debt due to previous ownership? At the cost of one’s body part for freedom?