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Denisse Ferreira da Silva opens her analysis with the beginning of Kindred (1979): “The trouble began long before June 9, 1976, when I became aware of it”, hinting that Dana’s particular time-travel situation could not solve the real issue, since it started way before Rufus and way before Dana’s “extended and expanded, timeless life” (Ferreira, 2017, 83). The three onto-epistemological pillars of linear time, separability, determinacy, and sequentiality also start to crack, or maybe they never were as solid as the same onto-epistemology proposes they are; in order to understand debt (both ethical and economical) and its unpayability we ought to recognize that linear time and the conclusions we extract from this perception only work in holding responsible individuals, when in fact, in a bigger picture, it is a system that works acting in the present and the past simultaneously and through everyone. When Octavia Butler writes that Rufus can not only think of Dana but actually hear and see her world (Butler, 1979, 22, 31) that implies that her whole world and not just her is implicated, that her world hasn’t changed (in my reading that’s also why Dana’s husband Kevin can end up traveling himself), however, she (and everybody) has to endure the consequences individually. Is this intent to dehistorize (a critique to History) implicit in the destabilization of the pillars a critique of the idea that what happens in the past, stays in the past, i.e., violence and its product, trauma. This way, and taking into consideration Ferreira’s inclusion of quantum physics, we can say that, same as “Dana didn’t move” (Ferreira, 2022, 300), since in quantum theory the elemental energy/matter that compose the world don’t have a trajectory, they just simply are everywhere and manifest in certain places which can happen simultaneously, trauma doesn’t need to move, it has always been there. Moreover, trauma manifests physically in the bodies of the peoples who have to endure it, when Dana reappears bruised and muddy inside of her house, when she loses her arm, it is just a manifestation of what was always there and that she has to pay in order to not give something bigger, her life.
Ferreira’s way of putting together the violence of slavery described in the novel along with the violence of social insecurity and prolonged racism lived in the present by Black and Latinx communities speaks to this alive systemic perspective, she states that her essay “is not a description of events and existents but an engagement with the classic historical materialist account of the production of value” (2017, 87) where the racialized economics is a manifestation of power. The total violence derived from this extractions of value from racialized bodies –and lands– is correspondent to the total material value acquired by white settler power; that’s why when Rufus is about to finally extract all possible values from Dana (rape her and kill her) she has to kill him instead in order to preserve her life in a paradoxical act that continues her debt. I would also say that, thinking with Ferreira’s reading, Butler criticizes the American health system by making Dana refuse to go the hospital (Butler, 44) until she actually loses a limb and is forced to go (9); otherwise, why would the supposed space designated for special care be seen as an extension of a hostile environment for the protagonist. Social care is also a dead-ended indebting institution.
Ferreira brings Anibal Quijano and Sylvia Wynter into play: “like Quijano, I [she] find[s] that the racial refigures the colonial at the political-symbolic level; like Wynter, I find that it does so in combination with the notion of the human” (2017, 90). In other words, the racialization of some peoples is a constitutive dimension of the colonial world which inevitably derives in the progressive dehumanization of those racialized. However, she also states that “For this reason neither thinker provides a satisfactory account of the colonial, racial, and capital triad, precisely because linear temporality forces us to confront the starting point, which is that the racial, as a colonial mechanism, remains anterior to global capital itself” (ibid., 92). In that sense, breaking with the three pillars created by linear temporality is urgent, because the moment of primordial accumulation which entails both lands and resources and human lives does not have clear spatial-temporal limits but it surely was manifested in the beginning of the colonial logics of race. I doubt that Ferreira, as Ann Stoler proposes, would even align her thinking to the “post”colonial currents just since they hint a clear temporal ending of the colonial world and state that we are living in a completely different epoch, even if “post”colonialism is more of a political stand and not just a periodization (Ann Stoler, 2016, ix).
Stoler, Ann L.. 2016. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Durham and London: Duke University Press, Ferreira da Silva, Denisse. 2022. Unpayable Debt. London: Sternberg Press, 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,