Starting from Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred (1979), Denise Ferreira da Silva weaves a series of considerations about the racialization of black people in her book Unpayable Debt: Reading Scenes of Value against the Arrow of Time. The novel’s protagonist, Dana, discovers that she has the destiny to return to the antebellum period to save the life of Rufus, her grandfather and grandmother’s owner. Just like the Yoruba saying, “Exu killed a bird yesterday with a stone he only threw today,” Dana reverses the arrow of linear time to preserve her lineage and existence. In this way, it violates the principles of separability, determinability, and sequentiality of the Modern World that the author calls the Ordered World, making room for the Implicated World – of everything that has happened and is yet to come in the spatio-temporal existence of virtuality.

Silva says she will let imagination and intuition guide her to think about the idea of ​​sequentiality based on the gap in linear time created by the character Dana. With this, the author undertakes a decolonial analysis of historical materialism that advocates restoring the total value expropriated from slave labor and native lands due to the violence that founded capital. Dana would thus have an unpayable debt with Rufus: a moral obligation in the present due to ancestry – ethical debt -but reconfigured by slave relations in the past – economic debt that cannot be demanded. Thus, bringing this reasoning to our actuality, the author concludes that there is an unpayable debt whenever a person is used as a financial instrument and subjugated colonially and racially for profit. She also emphasizes that we should not consider racialization temporally before or economically external to capitalist production but implicated in it. Thus, the post-enslavement trajectory of black people is a trajectory of continuous expropriation – a “negative accumulation” that occurs due to the economic exclusion and legal alienation of these populations.

As for the novel, it gave me some comparisons with slavery in Brazil, where there was no interest in the procreation of enslaved people because, if the children survived, the master would only spend their first years. It was more profitable to buy a slave of working age, as their lifespan was short and trafficked labor was abundant. Although most of those portrayed in fiction do domestic work and not on plantations, which is more arduous work, I am also struck by the “tolerance” with which the masters treated enslaved people in the novel. It seems clear that the author’s primary objective is to tell the heroine’s story in a way that captivates the reader more than discuss slavery in-depth, despite its fascinating plot.

On the other hand, precisely because of the way the author approaches historical events, it is almost ironic that her description is very similar to that of Brazil today, where the vast majority of domestic workers are black, their labor rights are not respected, and many are victims of sexual abuse by employers. In this sense, it is not necessary to delve into imagination and intuition to perceive the simultaneity of historical time when free black women continue to perpetuate their position of social subalternity.

Dana has to return to the past to continue existing. In a country that does not value memory, like Brazil, and even in other parts of the world where stories from non-hegemonic narratives are erased, his act is inspiring. We, too, must return to the past to rescue our ancestry and recreate our stories.

REFERENCES

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

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