Inverting history in Octavia Butler's postmodern slave narrative.

Beyond of the historical slave narrative, Octavia Butler's 1988 Kindred may also be deemed a contemporary science fiction novel, though the author herself claims that "Kindred is fantasy.... There is no science in Kindred" (Kenan 495). (1) Butler's vision in the novel is certainly not utopic. Whatever its narrative context, Butler's novel looks to the antebellum slave narrative form as a background for exploring issues of literacy in opposition to the reality of possession, oppression, and violence. Content and form intersect in the novel as the veiling of temporal boundaries blurs the notion of slavery transcended. By zigzagging the time frame of the novel from past to present, Butler points to ways in which past and present become interchangeable. She also writes of plausible historical actions and relationships, "filling in" possible gaps that may be evident in classic slave narratives. Butler assumes a non-Western conceptualization of history--one in which history is cyclical, not linear--in order to demonstrate ways in which certain forms of race and gender oppression continue late into the twentieth century and beyond. She incorporates postmodern fiction literary techniques to critique the notion that historical and psychological slavery can be overcome.

Unlike other contemporary revisions of the traditional slave narrative--most famously, Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose, and Toni Morrison's Beloved--Butler's neo-slave narrative, at least in part, takes place in the relative present. As such, it more clearly blurs history and the present (though the neo-slavery novel by convention imposes the past onto the present). The novel liberally borrows from very modern and postmodern ideas concerning time and continuity. Like John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor or E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, Butler attempts a contemporary re-write of an historical or plausibly historical event. Thus, she reclaims control over text and ideas, significant postmodern concepts. This drive to contain and to define one's personal or communal history can be seen in many contemporary novels. Ultimately, Butler's novel remains part contemporary postmodern text, part historical slave narrative.

One might label Kindred a sort of inverse slave narrative. Born into freedom herself in 1950, its protagonist Dana becomes enslaved on her twenty-sixth birthday in 1976, the bicentennial year of US independence, and, as many actual slave rebels reported, she must prepare for a dangerous, consequential escape. Dana's escape, with its trials, pitfalls, and obstacles--including capture by her white owner-ancestor Rufus and his slave overseer Weylin--parallels numerous slave narrators' accounts of flight from bondage. It is not simply Butler's account of Dana's enslavement and escape that resemble antebellum slavery narratives', but also her novel's concentration on rhetorical strategies of subterfuge, its record of resistance and oppression, and its concentration on the separation of families. Underscoring the novel's slave narrative conventions, Sandra Y. Govan claims that "Butler treats the recurring themes of casual brutality, forcible separation of families, the quest for knowledge, the desire to escape, the tremendous work loads expected of slaves as efficiently as any of the narrators or documentary histories discussing the slavery experience ("Homage" 91). (2) By assuming the form of the slave narrative and by shifting its focus from past to present to past, Butler's novel stresses the ways in which present-day African Americans might suffer from the markings of the past. Adapting genres is, of course, a very postmodern concept. Both John Barth and Thomas Pynchon have taken the form of the 18th-century novel to write contemporary updates of their own. Butler's agenda, however, is much less playful than theirs--and much more political.

Of course, to be reminiscent of a slave narrative, Kindred must present a world of intense and implacable oppression, possession, and violence. In the novel oppressor and oppressed are tightly bound one to another. It is a cruel irony that Dana needs her oppressor in order to guarantee her own birth and life in the future. Having been transported to the past, Dana wonders, "Was that why I was here? Not only to insure the survival of one accident-prone small boy, but to insure my family's survival, my own birth" (29). Or, perhaps, was she also transported because she has been "chosen" to receive a history lesson? And, as it turns out, part of her lesson is that history bleeds itself into a supposedly enlightened present. For example, after witnessing the beating of her enslaved foremother Alice, Dana flees not only from the horrific images of the antebellum past but also from a patroller who both beats and attempts to rape her. In the past the patroller had collapsed across Dana's body; in the present Dana finds herself beneath her white husband Kevin (43). In this way, Butler connects two oppressors' bodies; both men are powerful white figures, and, although Dana's marriage to Kevin appears to be secure, Butler suggests that, for black women, interracial heterosexual marriage too might be a form of oppression not unlike chattel slavery. In her disconcerted state, Dana confuses her husband with her historical oppressor, and scratches Kevin's eye. While Kevin appears to be a loving and giving husband, their interracial marriage still is not fully sanctioned in a large, progressive, and cosmopolitan city in late twentieth-century America. The couple must endure such comments as "Chocolate and Vanilla porn" (50), uttered by Dana's co-worker. This intolerance of criminalized interracial romance was expected in the antebellum South--where the slave mistress Margaret slaps Dana for sleeping in Kevin's room in "a Christian house!" (93)--but Butler's reader is morally appalled if not surprised by such racialized bigotry in contemporary Los Angeles. Butler thus insinuates how the wrongs of the past can survive, have survived in the present.

But Butler's point is not a vilification or denunciation of the institution of marriage, even as she portrays Western marriage as a commitment based on ownership and possession, as thereby reflecting some of the insidious elements of slavery. Oppression strongly contains a rebellious spirit such as Dana; forms of psychological and physical oppression are means of control. Dana struggles valiantly for her survival upon her several returns to the past, but near the novel's end, she wonders whether or not she is becoming acclimated to submissiveness. She begins to understand, as many slaves probably did, the difficulty of resistance. Although Thelma J.

Shinn contends that "Dana is not a victim" (211), Butler illustrates that Dana's repeated victimizations indeed render her victimized. Similarly, while Missy Dehn Kubitschek claims that "Dana has experienced victimization without becoming a victim" (44), perhaps one might view Dana as a victim who, at least on the level of survival, is able to overcome her historical subjugation based on race and gender. The novel, like many slave narratives, can be interpreted as a power struggle, an attempt on Dana's part to wrest control of her body and her psyche. One example of such command is her control over her name--her desire to be called Dana instead of Edana. (3) Govan claims that "the implicit struggle for power revolves around explicit conflicts of will and contests of survival a heroine endures" ("Connections" 83). Part of Dana's power struggle with slavery is coming to an awareness of the ways in which she might be considered an object of possession both in the past and in the present.

Dana's psychological dispossession is mirrored by the actual loss of a body part--an arm--that is relegated forever to another, irretrievable era. While Shinn claims that Dana "never becomes an object [but] maintains control of her life" (211), one might recognize a decided loss of control while she is transmogrified back to the past. What physical and psychological control could she really have? Even for Kevin there is a tacit understanding that as his wife, Dana somehow belongs to him, exists as his possession in both the past and the present. When he is transported back in time with Dana, Kevin must confront the direct query of a slaveholder: "Does Dana belong to you now?" (60) His response equates matrimony with possession: "In a way.... She's my wife" (60). Thus, Butler uses Kevin to extend into the present a classic type of human ownership in western civilization--the marital exchange. Even Kevin's proposal to Dana smacks of a kind of servitude when he remarks, "I'd let you type all of my manuscripts" (109). Whether spoken in jest or seriousness, Kevin essentially assures Dana that in marriage she could work for him, that he might even expect that she would work for him.

Kevin is not, however, a villainous character. Butler implies, nonetheless, that Kevin, along with many men, is quietly guilty of a kind of contemporary enslavement that mirrors the notions of servitude apparent in the antebellum South. The line between slavery and marriage is further blurred in the present when Dana's friends and family, oblivious to her time travel, confuse the markings from her beating by Rufus, her white slave owner with marks she suffers from spousal abuse in her marriage to Kevin. Dana's cousin says, "I never thought you'd be fool enough to let a man beat you" (116). Butler goes so far as to suggest an ideological connection between the supporter Kevin and the oppressor Rufus. In one conversation with Rufus, Dana claims, "The words echoed strangely in my head. Kevin had said something like that to me once. I opened my eyes again to be sure it was Rufus" (213-14). The western marital contract posits woman as possession in terms largely of a man's notion that his wife's body is an extension of his own. Control of one's own or another's body consists, of course, not simply of sexual authority; it consists also of an exertion of psychological power over one or more of a variety of aspects of, for, or over someone else's life. Antebellum slavery was, for bondpeople, by definition the threat if not total loss of personal integrity; Alice, after all, claims that her body is not her own, but Rufus's--"He paid for it, didn't he?" (167). And what he pays for is not only an object for his sexual gratification, but also an outlet for his violence and a living vessel over which he theoretically holds psychic dominance.

The universe presented in Butler's novel is a decidedly violent one where we witness the frequent scarring of characters. According to Hoda M. Zaki, "Butler believes that human nature is fundamentally violent and therefore flawed" (241). Zaki also contends that, for Butler, "men are intrinsically more violent than women" (241). Furthermore, she claims that "the relationship between ruler and ruled is never egalitarian for Butler, but is always a matter of dominance and submission consistent with her essentialist view of human nature" (242). In Butler's fiction, while men might be more intrinsically inclined toward violent behavior, women can also kill, especially when, like Dana, they know the power of their own integrity, and feel threatened with the loss of self-possession. With the figurations of Dana and her slaveholding ancestors, Butler both alleges a vast difference between willful violence and murderous self defense or self perpetuation--and collapses that theoretical difference.

The examples of violence in Kindred range from the relatively tame to the disturbingly extreme. Violence is, of course, a generic staple of antebellum slave narratives, and Butler complicates the representation of violence as an implicit part of the narrative by demonstrating that escaping bondage and the violence integral to it is not simply a matter of overcoming physical strictures. Instead, Kindred depicts the domino-effect of cascading violent acts: Margaret Weylin responds to the brutality of spousal abuse by throwing a pot of coffee on Dana; Rufus, her husband, not only whips Margaret, but also rapes and beats Dana's ancestor Alice, and attempts to rape Dana herself. Moreover, Rufus had himself been battered as a child; he shows Dana the welts and scars that resulted from beatings by his father. Dana escapes rape by Rufus, but ends the novel without two of her teeth and one of her forearms, and she has slit her own wrists at one point as well. Unlike Alice, Dana resists the actual impulse toward suicide, but the entrenched violence of their slaveholding society affects virtually every character in the novel.

Dana finds few emotional escapes from the ubiquitous sense of physical and psychological marking. One conceivable option for her is to turn, as Harriet Jacobs's eponymous heroine does in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861), to other women and/or slaves in her community. Robert Crossley claims that "despite the severe stresses under which they live, the slaves constitute a rich human society" (xviii). He notes that this "community always patches itself back together, drawing from its common suffering and common anger a common strength. It is the white characters in the novel who seem odd, isolated, pathetic, alien, problematic" (xviii-xix). The cohesive slave community is represented in many slave narratives. But Butler depicts no sense of a transcendent female community in Kindred. As Missy Kubitschek claims, "Kindred does not romanticize the solidarity of the slave community" (31). She notes that "to see the necessity of identity within a community, Dana must experience individual helplessness; to define and maintain the self, Dana must relearn to insist on absolute individual needs even when they do not serve the community" (32). While the narrative does often concentrate on the traditional domestic space of women, especially on the plantation--Dana and Alice making meals, peeling potatoes, Carrie preparing to give birth, Tess aiding the other women--female domestic space is not an absolute refuge. One of Dana's main foes on the plantation is another woman, Margaret, who enacts the archetypical figure of the jealous slave mistress by treating Dana with especial cruelty. Yet Dana hardly rebels, and instead fulfills her domestic duties with and for Margaret. Her close working relationship with Margaret prompts Alice to say, "You run around fetching and carrying for that woman like you love her" (220). Perhaps a strong, yet ultimately ambiguous, example of the lack of sisterhood centers on Liza, who reveals Dana's running away, but is also later "punished" for this action when attacked by Alice, Tess, and Carrie.

Perhaps Dana's allegiance to Margaret is but one of many examples of masking in the novel. As can be seen in many slave narratives, duplicitousness was a necessary tool of usurping or undermining power for many slaves. Role-playing takes many raced and gendered forms in the novel, even to Dana's donning drag for one escape scheme. Most insidiously, Dana plays the role of Kevin's slave, but risks becoming accustomed to that role. Green notes that "Dana is ... horrified to learn that, treated as an enslaved black woman, she will act like one" (183). Dana reflects on the relative ease with which the mask molds to the face when she perceives that "Kevin and I became more a part of the household, familiar, accepted, accepting. That disturbed me too when I thought about it. How easily we seemed to acclimatize" (97). She later notes that she "never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery" (101). While Dana must play the role of the slave, she also acts as a double for Alice, who doesn't have the "luxury" of extricating herself from her predicament. Butler constructs the enslaved woman and her descendant, Alice and Dana, as "two halves of the same woman" (229). Alice points out other people's awareness of their similarities; however, she also contends that Dana seems to impersonate whites--an accusation apparently based on Dana's speech and education. Twice in the novel--once by Sarah, once by Alice--Dana is labeled a "white nigger" (160, 165). Such accusations point to the difficulty of maintaining a false identity in any era. It also suggests the potential racialized betrayal--the antithesis of the essentialist assumption of a racialized community--that remains a political issue many generations since the end of slavery.

Possibly Butler's most significant deployment of role-playing concerns the doubling of Kevin and the oppressor. Butler usually mirrors Kevin in the image of Rufus. (4) Perhaps it is this conflation of identities that leads Dana nearly to forgive Rufus, even when he is on the verge of raping her. Throughout Kindred, Dana too strongly connects her husband with her enslavers. Crossley notes that throughout "the novel Butler ingeniously suggests parallels between Rufus Weylin and Kevin Franklin: their facial expressions, their language, even after a time their accents merge in Dana's mind so that at times she mistakes one for the other" (xix). And Salvaggio points out that "Dana's new perspective reminds her that simply by virtue of his color and sex, Kevin is automatically aligned with that oppressive society" (33-34). It takes Dana a lifetime as a black woman and a trip back into bondage to realize fully the intractable persistence of a white, male-dominated hegemony; of course, at the crucial moment, Dana is lucid enough to distinguish Kevin from Rufus, and she kills Rufus with a knife.

The acquisition of literacy and writing skills--direly important to so many ex-slaves and in the slave narratives--becomes another mask to wear in the novel and again connects Butler's text to this foundational genre. In the antebellum South, Kevin plays the role of a writer who has purchased Dana; he masks, then, a role of great power. In "real life" Los Angeles, Dana herself is a part-time writer. Shortly after meeting Kevin, Dana informs him of her morning writing activities with heavy-handed irony, "what would a writer be doing working out of a slave market?" (53). Whatever pleasures and freedom she might associate with everyday writing are certainly fore-stalled into the stuff of survival when she finds herself enslaved, for she might have to forge papers to pass as a free black woman. In one act of subterfuge, she keeps a journal in shorthand, ironically utilizing a kind of conventional female writing that she had learned in secretarial school. This "secret" writing provides an outlet for her to write without discovery. She also masters another form of secret writing--a writing that is for herself alone and thus for her peace of mind. She covertly writes while in the master's library, then always destroys what she has composed, refusing to allow her words to be manipulated by others, even by Kevin, her "writer" husband-cure-master.

Despite her careful exercise of it, Dana's literacy undoes her: it becomes a means of manipulating her. She becomes a willing teacher to Rufus, introducing him, not surprisingly, to classic "escapist" literature featuring canonical heroes unmoored from their home ports, including Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim's Progress, and Gulliver's Travels. Rufus makes good use of Dana's writing ability; he has her write letters to try to clear the elder Weylin's debts, something she is able to do by using the prose style of the time. Rufus's burgeoning literacy leads to a problem, however, when he finds a book on slavery that Dana has brought to the plantation. While staring at a picture of Sojourner Truth, he, by necessity, confronts matters of temporal as well as race and gender liberation. Thus, Butler adapts a common convention of science fiction--namely, the time traveler's risk of altering future human history--to underscore a matter of historical significance: books and writing can be double-edged swords. Dana cannot allow slave-holding individuals in particular to read "future" accounts about still enslaved heroic people like Truth (and Nat Turner), whose intrepid sense of divine authorization posed serious threat to the slaveocracy and white supremacy).

Butler's presentation of time disjunction is somewhat reminiscent of Ishmael Reed's notion of hoodooist time (see, for instance, his neoslave satire, Flight to Canada), wherein characters such as Dana and Kevin accept, and don't really question, their temporal displacement. In a postmodern gesture, the time element of the novel becomes confused as well; Kindred begins where it ends, with Dana losing her arm. The structure of the novel parallels its vision of history; like Toni Morrison's later neoslave novel Beloved, the novel is a circle, not a linear progression or Freitagian triangle. This cyclical, non-linear view of history is also a non-Western vision. However, "circular" does not easily or precisely describe the structure of Kindred, for it also very much resembles a zigzag, a movement from present to slavery days, and also a movement from Dana and Kevin's marriage to their separation in the antebellum south, and to the origins of their relationship.

Time becomes a confused jumble that Dana somehow traverses. For Penny Florence, this "ability to deal with the transference between time-zones grows out of [Dana's] insistence on the reality of events and her practical actions to deal with them" (70). Dana must deal with fractured time by making sense of a history she is familiar with. Florence notes that as Dana "negotiates the 'other' world, her reference points are her grasp of historical fact, and it is the nature/s of Black historical realities in relation to the present and its white reality--constructs that are the thematic and structural signified of the book" (70). Butler meta-admonishes a due sense of a black past through Dana's intellectual knowledge of US and African American history: that knowledge allows her to survive her "transgressions" into the past, but as the novel proceeds she also counsels the relative meaninglessness of "past" and "present," which she renders interchangeable. In the course of the novel, Dana, after all, spends more time in the past, and she can't control her navigations through time. Butler points to the perpetual re-enactment of the past, which she associates with literacy. Green argues that "Butler literally engraves the past onto the present by engraving Dana's body as a readable text" (184). Butler also, notes Green, "engraves the past onto the memory of the future through the act of writing" (184). Crossley claims that in "fore-shortening the distance between now and then, Butler focuses our attention on the continuity between past and present; the fantasy of traveling back-wards in time becomes a lesson in historical realities. We may also be reminded that historical progress is never a sure thing (xxiii). (5) The fantasy also allows Dana not only the ability to experience history, but the ability to become a part of the history she will reflect upon and learn from.

Dana's trips back into time force her to use, perhaps not totally successfully, the tools of her modern-day knowledge so as to fill the perceived gaps of history. Karla F. C. Holloway writes that for Dana,

   the collision of the past and present is
   a shuffling between what is the objectivity
   of her essentially unrecovered
   past and the subjectivity of her contemporary
   life. The novel retrieves the
   past through a collision between the
   two dimensions. What Dana had read
   in family histories or had been told
   about her ancestry becomes mostly
   unusable when, in 1976, she is pulled
   back into her past, an 1813 plantation
   where her grandmother had been
   born. At this point she is faced with an
   immediate need to subjectify the experiences
   she had known only academically.
   (114)

The present has taught her enough to be equipped to survive the past, but she does not emerge unscathed. (6)

Early in the novel, Dana brings her pain to the present, returning with an ache in her back where Rufus's mother had hit her. Dana is unable to return unimpaired, for Butler's point is to make both her characters and her readers aware of how Americans, inevitably, live the slave past in the ostensibly free present. The author has said, "I couldn't really let [Dana] come all the way back. I couldn't let her return to what she was, I couldn't let her come back whole and that, I think, really symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn't leave people quite whole" (Kenan 498). Butler intends her statement to be read on several levels. Slavery is a physical condition--it affects the body on a base level; therefore it changes, subtly or corporeally, one's body (as well as one's perception of his or her body). Dana's loss of an arm is only one manifestation of a loss of wholeness. Psychically, Dana has been damaged. Her psychic damage reminds us that former slave authors, for all the rhetorical integrity of their narratives, must assuredly have suffered psychologically, as well. Initially, Dana is confused by her trips back. She feels less like a participant in history than a spectator of it, and describes herself and Kevin as being "observers watching a show ... actors" (98). But she soon recognizes herself as a genuine participant literally unable to distance herself or to discount her investment in the antebellum events that will determine her 20th-century corporeality. She exclaims, upon watching young black boys enact a game of slave bartering, "It's nineteen seventy-six shielding and cushioning eighteen nineteen for me. But now and then, like with the kid's game, I can't maintain the distance" (101). So suddenly, Butler contends, the mask of historical distance, the illusion of distance, can peel away to disclose the cliched "horrors of history" as the present reality.

Therefore, Dana's time travels have given her a unique historical awareness, yet they have also indelibly corrupted her present. Once returned to contemporary Los Angeles "for good," she can no longer trust casual distinctions between the past and the present. For instance, an elderly, harmless, good-natured neighbor becomes, because of her interest in gardening, a reminder of the cruel Margaret Weylin (115). Kevin returns from the plantation South with a faint accent that reminds Dana of Rufus and Tom Weylin (190). Dana says, "I felt as though I were losing my place here in my own time. Rufus's time was a sharper, stronger reality.... That was a stark, powerful reality that the gentle conveniences and luxuries of this house, of now, could not touch" (191). Butler thus demonstrates that antebellum US history has grievously contaminated and altered the present, and that, for Dana, the past becomes even more real than the present. At the end of the novel, Dana suggests that her arm is lost in the wall where she returns. She "looked at the spot where flesh joined with plaster, stared at it uncomprehending. It was the exact spot Rufus's fingers had grasped" (261). Dana has lost her arm in history; the hold of the past on the present is evident as Dana becomes a physical presence in both the past and the present. How can she transcend an era to which she physically still belongs? Butler re-writes history to inform us of the potential emotional/psychological harm done to those who survived slavery. One should note that Butler's writing suggests that emancipation did not necessarily mean freedom. The bindings of slavery cannot simply be shed by their physical absence.

Dana finally cannot escape or free herself from the past. She even, at the very end of the novel, returns to Maryland to symbolically stomp on the graves of the oppressor. The actual remnants of the past are gone as slaves had set fire to the Weylin house, for Dana's protection. Dana achieves a painful yet symbiotic, mutually beneficent relationship with the past. She helps those in the past survive through her enlightened knowledge (for instance, she teaches her ancestors how to survive malaria), while they help her survive by allowing her to be born and providing her with a more complex historical perspective.

While Dana has experienced the reality of history, she also learns about its instability. Although many slave narrators argue for literacy as the vital means of escape from physical and mental bondage, Dana's literacy becomes both an asset and a liability. Whereas book knowledge and writing skills allow Dana to forge papers and instruct Rufus, these abilities greatly antagonize Tom Weylin, his father. According to Beverly Friend, Dana's "knowledge of history is no help and only stands her in good stead by preventing her from killing Rufus until he has raped her black great-grandmother, assuring the inception of Dana's family tree" (55). Dana's knowledge of history and literacy may be necessary for her survival in antebellum Maryland, but it is not necessarily an absolute good. The narrators of antebellum slave narratives, of course, did not suggest forgetting or denying their experiences as bondpeople, but they often presented an ideal scenario wherein the ex-slave becomes literate and transcends his or her experiences in bondage. Early in the novel Kevin offers Dana stereotypically flawed advice about her trips back in time; he advises her condescendingly to "pull away from it.... That sounds like the best thing you can do, whether it was real or not. Let go of it" (17). Butler thus condemns the naive admonitions of the historically privileged.

Letting go of the past becomes an implausible option for Dana, who must not only confront the past but also assume responsibility for potentially altering what has already taken place. We see this most vividly when Rufus finds her 20th-century book on slavery. Dana is tenuously positioned; with the slave book she could do great damage, hampering the later efforts of such historically significant figures as Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Nat Turner. Understanding the precariousness of history, she tears the book into pieces and throws it onto a fire, all the while thinking of "Repressive societies" and "Nazi book burnings" (141). History and recollection may, we learn from the novel, greatly differ for people, individually and collectively, according to our respective cultural experiences and social locations. When Dana explains that a few hours in 1976 equals years in the 1800s, Weylin claims, "who in hell said you were an educated nigger? You can't even tell a decent lie. Six years for me is six years for you!" (200). For the unburdened oppressor, history can be a simple, linear concept. But for Dana, "history" has been forever complicated by the instability of the past, by the integration of past with present, and by the inability of the past fully to alter what takes place in the present.

Nineteen-seventy-six--the storyline backdrop--provides for Butler an appropriate temporal context for the novel. The bicentennial was a celebratory time of reflection wherein many in the nation looked proudly upon its history and valiantly toward a prosperous future. The bicentennial setting, Kubitschek claims, "broadens the theme [of the novel], implying that the country itself must re-examine its history in order to have any hope of resolving contemporary racial conflicts" (28). Butler suggests that Dana will re-examine and re-live not only her experiences, but also the larger national implications of the past and contemporary forms of violence and oppression. Salvaggio notes that "what Dana comes to realize at the end of her journey is that her past will always be a part of her present--not that she is doomed to suffer its horrors, but that she will always bear the mark of her kindred" (33). While Dana's time traveling has apparently come to an end, the reader senses that her journey into the meaning of her raced ancestry is endless, that her life is now so inextricably wound with the slave past that the journey is an inborn part of her daily existence. Through a time travel mechanism, Butler creates an historical possibility of the perception of self (and how it might be affected by matters of possession and ownership). As in other neoslave narratives, we see a fictive universe where the weight of one's personal history of chattel slavery yields a persistent reflection upon the African American present. These novels force us to reconsider the limited yet compelling capacity of the slave narrative to tell, in temporal terms, the whole story of slavery.

Notes

(1.) The issue of whether Butler's novel can viably be called science fiction is of academic interest, but does not directly pertain to my study. Forms of the fantastic appear in many of the works of contemporary African-American novelists (Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison, for example). For further salient information on science fiction writers and, specifically, female science fiction writers, see Thelma J. Shinn, Michelle Erica Green, Butler's interview with Francis H. Beal (in which Butler claims not to write utopian science fiction), Scott Sanders, Welch D. Everman (who looks specifically at postmodern science fiction writers), and George McKay, who contends that science fiction is less "about science or the future than about fiction" (52).

(2.) For more on the ways in which Butler's text is reminiscent of the slave narrative in strategy and technique, see Robert Crossley's introduction to the novel. Crossley concentrates on the ways in which Kindred incorporates slave narrative strategies. See also Ruth Salvaggio, who explicitly calls Butler's novel "an American slave narrative" (36).

(3.) Adam McKible suggests that this is a control over language (233). He states that "the prefix E-denotes absence, negation, or exteriority, and the shortening of 'Edana' contradicts this negation" (233).

(4.) Yet early in the novel Dana compares Kevin and Tom Weylin, noting the similarity of their eyes.

(5.) Crossley also makes some interesting connections between time passage and the slave narrative, claiming that "the only time machine in Kindred is present by implication: it is the vehicle that looms behind every American slave narrative, the grim death-ship of the Middle Passage from Africa to the slave markets of the New World. In her experience of being kidnapped in time and space, Dana recapitulates the dreadful, disorienting, involuntary voyage of her ancestors, just as her employment in 1976 through a temporary job agency ... operates as a benign ghostly version of institutional slavery's auction block" (xi).

(6.) Several critics have addressed the manner in which Butler connects the present and the past. For more on this, see Missy Dehn Kubitschek and Ruth Salvaggio. Kubitschek speculates that Dana and Kevin's relationship has a clear chance of survival because of their deep understanding of "their mutual tribal histories" (45).

Works Cited

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--. "Homage to Tradition: Octavia Butler Renovates the Historical Novel." MELUS 13 (1986): 79-96.

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McKible, Adam. "'These Are the Facts of the Darky's History': Thinking History and Reading Names in Four African American Texts." African American Review 28 (1994): 223-35.

Salvaggio, Ruth. "Octavia Butler." Suzy McKee Chamas, Octavia Butler, and Joan D. Vinge. Eds.

Marleen S. Barr, Ruth Salvaggio, and Richard Law. Mercer Island: Starmount House, 1986.1-44.

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Shinn, Thelma J. "The Wise Witches: Black Women Mentors in the Fiction of Octavia E. Butler." Conjunng: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Eds. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. 203-15.

Zaki, Hoda M. "Utopia, Dystopia, and Ideology in the Science Fiction of Octavia Butler." Science Fiction Studies 17 (1990): 239-51.

Marc Steinberg is Assistant Professor of English at Abraham Baldwin College in Tifton, GA. His articles have appeared in Studies in Short Fiction and MAWA Review. His main research interests are contemporary African-American literature and pop culture studies.