Facing the past: A closer list at Kindred
Octavia Butler's Kindred is a novel that refuses to let readers stay comfortable with their perceptions. Through Dana's terrifying time-travel into the antebellum South, Butler collapses the distance between past and present, forcing us to confront a history that many would rather soften or ignore. Early in the novel, Dana admits, "I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery," a moment that sets the tone for the book's central struggle. Butler uses Dana's shock to critique how modern readers often underestimate the psychological power of oppression. One of the most striking elements of Kindred is how Dana must protect Rufus, the white ancestors whose survival ensures her own. This relationship becomes a brutal reminder of how history ties its victims and oppressors together. Dana captures the cramped moral tensions she finds herself in when she muses, " I felt almost as bound to him as he was to me." Butler uses this connec...