Reading: Kindred
Aug. 3rd, 2017 07:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartOctavia E. Butler's Kindred is a classic time-slip fantasy with a twist. The narrator, Dana, is a black woman from 1970s California, who, in the space of a month of her own life, is transported back to a Maryland plantation a number of times across a period from about 1815 to 1830; a time and a place where, without papers to prove that she is a free woman, she is automatically assumed to be a slave, and treated as one.
As you might expect from that, it's a pretty harrowing read*, but I also found it utterly compelling reading, and an interesting and thought-provoking examination of slavery in the US and how the experience of being a slave might affect a person. I felt that it helped me to understand the emotional landscape underlying the current debates on race in the US in a way that just knowing the facts doesn't, and I couldn't help reading the physical and mental scars Dana's experience leaves both as literal scars and as a metaphor for the scars the experience of slavery has left on America. I was reminded several times of Granny Weatherwax's assertion that "evil is when you treat people as things"; Butler tries, and I think succeeds, at showing us just how evil a society which treated thousands of people as possessions was.
*although, having failed to get through Butler's Parable of the Sower a few years ago because it was so very dark, I found it easier to get through Kindred, possibly because it's easier to read about horrors in the past than horrors in the imagined near future.
As you might expect from that, it's a pretty harrowing read*, but I also found it utterly compelling reading, and an interesting and thought-provoking examination of slavery in the US and how the experience of being a slave might affect a person. I felt that it helped me to understand the emotional landscape underlying the current debates on race in the US in a way that just knowing the facts doesn't, and I couldn't help reading the physical and mental scars Dana's experience leaves both as literal scars and as a metaphor for the scars the experience of slavery has left on America. I was reminded several times of Granny Weatherwax's assertion that "evil is when you treat people as things"; Butler tries, and I think succeeds, at showing us just how evil a society which treated thousands of people as possessions was.
*although, having failed to get through Butler's Parable of the Sower a few years ago because it was so very dark, I found it easier to get through Kindred, possibly because it's easier to read about horrors in the past than horrors in the imagined near future.
