In the introduction of Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred,  Robert Crossley brilliantly and beautifully captures the essence of the novel through his examination of the concept of a “modern descendant of slavery” bearing witness to a historical event and life of an ancestor. He writes in the introduction that the “only way a new slave memoir could be written is if someone were able to travel to the past.” This reminded me of an extremely common phrase we have in the Greek culture and Orthodox religion; when speaking of someone who has passed away, even generations prior to us, we say: “as eínai aionía i mními tous” or “May their memory be eternal.” The phrase is meant to convey that long after an ancestor’s death, or the death of their children, grandchildren, and so forth, their specific imprint, memory, and personhood remains eternal on this earth. It is the first statement said in our funeral services as well. This could be seen as a very tall order to expect memories of our ancestors to be eternal, but this theme stretches into Kindred poignantly. In Kindred, Dana’s first transportation into 1815 is the scene of saving Rufus from drowning in the river. When she returns to her present day life, she is literally soaking wet and shivering from the cold. I thought this was a brilliant literary choice– to make her embody the physical presence of these transportations even when she returns to her current state. She does not just hallucinate or transport metaphysically, she literally is at the scene of her ancestral history. She “smells the sweat” of those who beat her, rather than reading about it or watching it on film.

This ties into Ferreira da Silva’s essay focusing on “unpayable debt” in which people are faced with the reckoning of what is theirs to own versus what is theirs to repay. It brought up so many questions for me but one stood out especially: If we are given pain by someone else, shame or terror projected onto us through an act of violence, how do we take ownership of it and how do we heal from it?

 

REFERENCES

Butler, Octavia E. 1979. Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press.

Silva, Denise F. da. Unpayable Debt: Reading Scenes of Value against the Arrow of Time.