Butler’s Kindred begins with an introduction that bares striking similarity to concepts introduced in Introduction to Performance Studies; the idea of the record of history being a performance of the truth rather than an objective account of the truth:
“The American slave narrative is a literary form whose historical boundaries are firmly marked. […] The only way in which a new slave-memoir could be written is if someone were able to travel into the past, become a slave, and return to tell the story. Because the laws of physics, such as we know them, preclude traveling backwards in time, such a book would have to be a hybrid of autobiographical narrative and scientific fantasy. That is exactly the sort of book Octavia Butler imagined when she wrote Kindred, first published in 1979. Like all good works of fiction, it lies like the truth.”
It also relates to themes discussed in Frued, like the act of remembering and how autobiographical memory can be unreliable. We see this theme emerge later with the confusion of her narrating how she got wet. Caruth also talks about flashbacks — we see this when they get submerged in an alternate reality, time traveling to a different century. Through the work, we get a window to a past within a past.
“Free blacks can have schools. My mother talked the way I do. She taught me.” (Butler 1979, 74)
The idea of suffering for the sake of progressing a society — the text speaks a lot to the sacrifices women are expected to make.
Human psyche:
““You filthy black whore!” she shouted. “This is a Christian house!”
I said nothing.
“I’ll see you sent to the quarter where you belong!”
Still I said nothing. I looked at her.
“I won’t have you in my house!” She took a step back from me.
“You stop looking at me that way!” She took another step back.” (Butler 1979, 93)
Dana’s power and how the people around her realized it, especially with her clothes making her look like she’s dressed “like a man” and her speech making her sound like she’d been “close to white folk for a long time”.
Men & authority
Dana remains trauma-bonded with Rufus: “You keep trying to get yourself killed. I keep coming back.” (Butler 1979,121)
Unpayable Debt
Silva’s “Unpayable Debt” reminds me of the idea of restoring black space time, ideas of black quantum futurism — especially with Butler being mentioned as a science fiction writer and with the mention of traversing linear time in order to understand and restore something. The use of fiction in order to quite literally grasp the concepts applied in slavery, with the protagonist acting as a modern-day woman who remains almost contractually obligated to return to help Rufus (even though there is no actual contract) is very effective in the way it sets up the entire novel for the reader to understand the experience of slavery.
“Indeed, why could she be continually sum- moned back to save the slave owner Rufus’s life? Why did she have to give a limb as a final payment? There was no contract. She had never made a verbal or written promise. She just happened to be alive, to move into a house, her house (the right to only live there when she wills), which cost her an arm. […] 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.” (Silva 2017, 99)
Rasheeda Phillips — Time Zone Protocols: https://timezoneprotocols.space
– A proposal for new protocols for the temporal experience of space-time for colonized people.
Time Zone Protocols Accessed 30 Oct 2023. https://timezoneprotocols.space. da Silva, Denise Ferreira. 2017. "Unpayable Debt: Reading Scenes of Value against the Arrow of Time" The documenta 14 Reader. Edited by Quinn Latimer, and Adam Szymczyk. 81-113. Kassel, Munich: documenta and Museum Fridericianum, Prestel Verlag, Butler, Octavia. 1979. Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press,