Ray’s Reading Response
hy2873@nyu.edu
This week we still talk about historical trauma. Although I do not have more knowledge of slaves, reading “Kindred” and “Unpayable Debt” opened my mind.
In “Kindred”, Dana returns to her ancestor’s century to save her ancestor – Rufus. In that century white people governed the world and black people as slaves serving white people. Rufus as a white boy to a white man, Dana experienced his growth. She saved Rufus again and again. Dana’s experiences in the past and the scars — both mental and physical — that she carries back to the present are symbolic of the lasting impact of slavery on generations of African Americans. The traumas of slavery, as depicted in the novel, are not confined to a particular era but reverberate through time, affecting descendants long after the actual events have transpired. In the fiction, Butler illustrates the relationship between history and reality. The protagonist goes back to history to see what happened there and gives the audience some view of those scenes, letting the audience remember the traumatic history.
In “Unpayable Debt”, Silva talks about delves deep into the intricacies of historical debts that societies and entire races owe to each other, especially focusing on colonial and racial histories. Compared with Quijano and Wynter’s opinions “The difference is that for Quijano, racial classification establishes proper (white/European) labor, and for Wynter, it establishes the proper (white/European) human” (p. 92). Silva proposes a new way of understanding the triad of colonialism, race, and capital, suggesting that these concepts are deeply entangled rather than separate. This new perspective challenges the conventional understanding of these concepts as linear and distinct, emphasizing their interconnectedness. For instance, what I learned from my world history course in high school. There were some (white/Europeans) who went to Africa to find diamonds or coffee beans and used cheaper labor (Aborigin) to help them get the raw materials. It made a mess of the original areas in Africa. Then, brought all the processed materials and went back to Europe to sell to the public to get the maximum benefits. It was not fair for Aborigin. The emotional debt cannot pay back to them. “Unpayable Debt” also let me think about the debt of emotion such as family affection. The parents feed us, and we should refeed them when they turn older, especially in China. For me, my mother normally thinks that after I establish my own family, she will have liberation. I talked to her; ‘you have already supported me in finishing my academic career financially and you will not need to care about when I will build my own family and how I will do that.’ It also let me think about how I can pay back my emotional debt to my parents. It cannot be paid back obviously.
All in all, the historical trauma let me introspection deeply. I would like to use these theories to rethink the past and fulfill my mind to the future.
Reference
Silva, Denise. n.d. “Unpayable Debt: Reading Scenes of Value against the Arrow of Time.”
Butler, Kindred
Butler, Octavia. 1979. Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press,