Kindred
Octavia E. Butler, 1979
Beacon Press
264 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780807083109
Summary
Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband, when she is abruptly snatched from her home in present California and transported back to the antebellum South.
Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning; and Dana has been summoned across the years to save him. After this first summons, Dana is drawn back again and again to the plantation to protect Rufus and ensure that he will grow to manhood and father the daughter who is to become her ancestor. Each time, however, the stays grow longer and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has even begun. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 22, 1947
• Where—Pasadena, California, USA
• Death—February 24, 2006
• Where—Lake Forest Park, Washington (State)
• Education—A.A., Pasadena Community College; attended University of California, Los Angeles
• Awards—Hugo Awards, Nebula Awards (more below)
Octavia Estelle Butler was an American science fiction writer. A multiple recipient of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, Butler was one of the best-known women in the field. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Fellowship, nicknamed the Genius Grant.
Life and education
Butler was born and raised in a struggling, racially mixed neighborhood of Pasadena, California. Her father Laurice, a shoeshiner, died when she was a baby, and she was raised by her grandmother and mother (Octavia M. Butler) who worked as a maid.
According to the Norton Anthology of African American Literature Butler was "an introspective only child in a strict Baptist household" who was "drawn early to [science fiction] magazines such as Amazing Fantasy and Science Fiction and Galaxy. She soon began reading all the science fiction classics."
Nicknamed Junie, Octavia was paralytically shy and a daydreamer; she was later diagnosed as dyslexic. She began writing at the age of ten "to escape loneliness and boredom" and by twelve began her lifelong interest in science fiction. As she later told the journal Black Scholar,
I was writing my own little stories when I was 12. I was watching a bad science fiction movie called Devil Girl from Mars and decided that I could write a better story than that. And I turned off the TV and proceeded to try, and I've been writing science fiction ever since.
After getting her Associate of Arts degree in 1968 from Pasadena City College, she next enrolled at California State University, Los Angeles. She eventually left UCLA and took writing classes through an extension program.
Butler credited two writing workshops for giving her "the most valuable help" she had received with her writing:
- The Open Door Workshop of the Screenwriters' Guild of America, West, a program designed to mentor Latino and African American writers. It was Through Open Door that she met the noted science fiction writer Harlan Ellison.
- The Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop, (introduced to her by Ellison), where she first met Samuel R. Delany.
Throughout her career, she remained a self-identified science fiction fan, an insider who rose from within the ranks of the field.
In November, 1999, Butler moved to Seattle, Washington, describing herself at that stage in life as
Comfortably asocial—a hermit in the middle of Seattle—a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.
Themes of both racial and sexual ambiguity are apparent throughout her work. Her writing has influenced a number of prominent authors. When asked if he could be any author in the world, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz replied that he would be Octavia Butler, who he claimed has written 9 perfect novels.
Death
Butler died outside of her home in Lake Forest Park, Washington, on February 24, 2006, at the age of 58. Contemporary news accounts were inconsistent as to the cause of her death, whether it was from a fatal stroke or from head injuries caused by a fall during the stroke.
Awards
2012: Solstice Award
2010: Induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame
2005: Langston Hughes Medal of The City College
2000: Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing from the PEN American Center
1999: Nebula Award for Best Novel for Parable of the Talents
1995: MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant
1985: Hugo Award for Best Novelette for Bloodchild
1985: Science Fiction Awards Database for Bloodchild
1985: Science Fiction Chronicle Award for Best Novelette for Bloodchild
1984: Nebula Award for Best Novelette for Bloodchild
984: Hugo Award for Best Short Story forSpeech Sounds
980: Creative Arts Award, L.A. YWCA
Scholarship fund
The Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship was established in Butler's memory in 2006 by the Carl Brandon Society. Its goal is to provide an annual scholarship to enable writers of color to attend the Clarion West Writers Workshop and Clarion Writers' Workshop, descendants of the original Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop in Clarion, Pennsylvania, where Butler got her start. The first scholarships were awarded in 2007. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/12/2014.)
Book Reviews
Butler's literary craftsmanship is superb.
Washington Post Book World
A celebrated mainstay of college courses in women's studies and black literature and culture; some colleges require it as mandatory freshman reading.
Linell Smith - Baltimore Sun
One of the most original, thought-provoking works examining race and identity.
Lynell George - Los Angeles Times
Butler's characters are so vivid and the racist milieu in which they struggle to survive so realistically depicted that one cannot finish Kindred without feeling changed. It is a shattering work of art with much to say about love, hate, slavery, and racial dilemmas, then and now.
Sam Frank - Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
No other work of fantasy or science fiction writings brings the intimate environment of the antebellum South to life better than Octavia E. Butler's Kindred.
Kevin Weston - San Francisco Chronicle
This powerful novel about a modern black woman transported back in time to a slave plantation in the antebellum South is the perfect introduction to Butler's work and perspectives for those not usually enamored of science fiction.... A harrowing, haunting story.
John Marshall - Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Kindred is as much a novel of psychological horror as it is a novel of science fiction. . .a work of art whose individual accomplishment defies categorization.
Barbara Strickland - Austin Chronicle
Like emotion that uplifts and enriches, like exquisite music or the taste of some special candy remembered from childhood, I never wanted Kindred to end. It overwhelmed me, dominated me, drew me on page after page. To express my total admiration and wonder for the originality of this surpassingly compelling novel, I am driven to a despised cliche: I could not put it down! It is a book that simply will not be denied; its power is hypnotic. Kindred is a story that hurts: I take that to be the surest indicator of genuine Art. It is an important novel, filled with powerful human insight and the shocking impact of the most commonplace experiences viewed in a new way, and it demands that once begun, the reader continue till it has done its work on the heart and mind and soul. Octavia Butler is a writer who will be with us for a long, long time, and Kindred is that rare, magical artifact...the novel one returns to, again and again, through the years, to learn, to be humbled, and to be renewed. Do not, I beg you, deny yourself this singular experience.
Harlan Ellison
Truly terrifying.... A book you'll find hard to put down.
Essence
Butler's books are exceptional.... She is a realist, writing the most detailed social criticism and creating some of the most fascinating female characters in the genre...real women caught in impossible situations.
Dorothy Allison - Village Voice
A startling and engrossing commentary on the complex actuality and continuing heritage of American slavery.
Sherley Anne Williams - Ms Magazine
Her books are disturbing, unsettling… In a field dominated by white male authors, Butler's African-American feminist perspective is unique, and uniquely suited to reshape the boundaries of the sci-fi genre.
Bill Glass - L. A. Style
Discussion Questions
1. Both Kevin and Dana know that they can't change history: "We're in the middle of history. We surely can't change it." (page100); and "It's over.... There's nothing you can do to change any of it now." (page 264). What, then, are the purposes of Dana' s travels back to the antebellum South? Why must you, the reader, experience this journey with Dana?
2. How would the story have been different with a third person narrator?
3. Many of the characters within Kindred resist classification. In what ways does Dana explode the slave stereotypes of the "house-nigger, the handerkchief-head, and the female Uncle Tom" (page 145). In what ways does she transcend them?
4. Despite Dana's conscious effort to refuse the 'mammy' role in the Weylin household, she finds herself caught within it: "I felt like Sarah, cautioning." (page 156), and others see her as the mammy: "You sound just like Sarah" (page 159). How, if at all, does Dana reconcile this behavior? How would you reconcile it?
5. "The ease. Us, the children.... I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery." This is said by Dana to Kevin when they have returned to the present and are discussing their experience in the antebellum South. To what extent, if any, do you believe racial oppression exists today?
6. How do you think Butler confronts us with issues of difference in Kindred? How does she challenge us to consider boundaries of black/white, master/slave, husband/wife, past/present? What other differences does she convolute? Do you think such dichotomies are flexible? Artificial? Useful?
7. Compare Tom Weylin and Rufus Weylin. Is Rufus an improvement or simply an alteration of his father? Where, if any, is there evidence of Dana's influence on the young Rufus in his adult character?
8. Of the slaves' attitude toward Rufus, Dana observes "Strangely, they seemed to like him, hold him in contempt, and fear him at the same time." (page 229) How is it they can feel these contradictory emotions? How would you feel toward Rufus if you were in their situation?
9. Compare Dana's 'professional' life (i.e. her work as temporary help) in the present with her life as a slave.
10. When Dana and Kevin return from the past together, she thinks to herself: "I felt as though I were losing my place here in my own time. Rufus's time was a sharper, stronger reality." (page 191) Why would the twentieth century seem less vivid to Dana than the past?
11. Dana loses her left arm as she emerges—for the last time in the novel—from the past. Why is this significant?
12. Kevin is stranded in the past five years, while Dana is there for almost one. Is there a reason why Butler felt Kevin needed to stay in the past so much longer? How have their experiences affected their relationship to each other and to the world around them?
13. A common trend in the time-travels of science fiction assumes that one should not tamper with the past, lest s/he disrupt the present. Butler's characters obviously ignore this theory and continue to invade each other's lives. How does this influence the movement of the narrative? How does this convolute the idea of "cause and effect"?
14. Dana finds herself caught in the middle of the relationship between Rufus and Alice? Why does Rufus use Dana to get to Alice? Does Alice use Dana?
15. The needs and well-being of other residents of the plantation create a web of obligation that is difficult to navigate. Choose a specific incident; and determine who holds power over whom and assess how it affects that situation.
16. Dana states: "It was that destructive single-minded love of his. He loved me. Not the way he loved Alice, thank God. He didn't seem to want to sleep with me. But he wanted me around—someone to talk to, someone who would listen to him and care about what he said, care about it." (page 180) How does the relationship between Dana and Rufus develop? How does it change? What are the different levels of love portrayed in Kindred?
17. Discuss the ways in which the title encapsulates the relationships within the novel. Is it ironic? Literal? Metaphorical? What emphasis do we place on our own kinship? How does it compare with that of the novel?
18. Do you believe that Dana and Kevin's story actually happened to them, or that they simply got caught up in the nostalgia of moving old papers and books?
20. Butler opens the novel with the conclusion of Dana's time travels. The final pages of the book, however, make up an epilogue demonstrating a, once again, linearly progressive movement of time. How does the epilogue serve to disrupt the rhythm of the narrative?
21. After returning from his years in the nineteenth-century, Kevin had attained "a slight accent" (page 190). Is this "slight" alteration symbolic of greater changes to come? How do you imagine Kevin and Dana's relationship will progress following their re-emergence into life in 1976?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)