How Kindred Makes Slavery Feel Different
One of the biggest themes I took away from Kindred is how it tells a story that brings the past and ties it to the present. It led to the idea of how personal the experience must be for Dana. Every time she explained the context of her situation, the tone changed slightly, making me think about her perspective and how living in the past is changing her perspective, and in turn my perspective. She draws our attention to the tiny details, things that a history textbook wouldn’t be able to cover. While the textbook would make us look in disgust at slavery, Dana giving her take makes me as a reader understand the painful reality, and just how unfair society was at the time.
Fiction is, to my surprise, able to convey a feeling about history that can't be taught by just the facts. Slavery is something the American school curriculum discusses heavily. I have probably been learning about the system since 3rd or 4th grade. But every single time we are taught, I feel like I have been told to look at it from a historian’s point of view. At the time, I presumed it was to be more scholarly, reading Kindred made me realize part of it might have been to keep you distanced from the extent of cruelty slavery involved, by reducing it to a plethora of facts and dates.
Dana makes me as a reader feel the negative emotions and the psychological warfare slavery induced on many. Anything she does is measured, and only after calculated thinking, going through every possible situation her actions could lead to. The constant thoughts in her mind, “Fear … kept me still when I wanted to move” (Butler 37), and how they transform over time in this horrible setting, “You get used to it… you get trained” (Butler 101), gives me the nuance that only a personal account can communicate. History and its textbooks can give you the facts of slavery, but only a transformative novel like Kindred can show you what it means and how it feels to be trapped in the morally corrupt system that is slavery.
Hi Sri, I think something that Kindred does well is how it shows it's not always the big things such as whippings that matter, it's all of the small details of how they lose their humanity such as the names they're called or where they sleep. I also agree that Kindred was enlightening on how fiction can be used to tell history in a different way than a history class while still being equally valid.
ReplyDeleteHi Sri, I do agree that Kindred really makes you feel every detail within the system of slavery. Most novels about slavery touch on the slaves' point of view, and focus on the unfortunate events that we as students have repeatedly been taught over and over. Though in Kindred, Dana brings out the small details, such as smell, that she noticed, which really helps readers understand what exactlv is going on. Nice job!
ReplyDeleteHi Sri, I do think that it is interesting that Octavia Butler tells the story of slavery and how brutal it is through time travel, and through the lens of a modern person. I think it was especially impactful to actually describe the sensory feelings during brutal scenes as well as show just how cruel slavery really was. Good Job!
ReplyDeleteHi Sri, I really like how you explain the differences in perspectives between historical textbooks and a reader of Kindred. Through time travel we get a lot more emotion than we would from a textbook and I think it's important to understand the psychological abuse that came with slavery. Without it we will never truly understand. In some ways, textbooks water down the emotional aspects of slavery. Good Job!
ReplyDeleteIn terms of the whole postmodernism thing, all of these books have interpreted history in different ways. Ragtime declares that it's an unfeeling march, Mumbo Jumbo argues it's a way to subjugate and rebel, and Kindred, like you said, insists that it's only a fragment of a perspective. Kindred's "history" has a field of vision that is way too wide and therefore cuts out the individual experiences of certain events that are just as, if not more true.
ReplyDeleteHi Sri! What stood out to me in your post is how clearly you show the difference between learning about slavery as information and experiencing it through Dana’s eyes. The way you describe her shifting thoughts and reactions makes it obvious why fiction can reveal things that a list of dates and events never will. Your reflection captures how Kindred turns history into something felt rather than memorized. Good job!
ReplyDeleteHi Sri, there is something lost in the textbook version of slavery. We all (hopefully) understand that ownership of another person is bad and that physical harm hurts. But ironically in that a human element is lost. We forget many times that the slaves want families, the pain they feel when their children are sold, the fear of a lashing. The fiction element allows for the humanity that was lost in the textbook to shine.
ReplyDeleteI think you make an important point when you reflect on how the novel makes readers feel "trapped" in this time period, just as Dana is only able to exert sporadic control over her ability to return to the present. Because it's important to note that while this novel DOES serve as an extended contemplation of the psychological and physical and spiritual horrors of slavery, its main point is not to make an argument "against" slavery--I think Butler can assume that few pro-slavery readers will be reaching for this book. So unlike a polemical text like _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, this book doesn't need to persuade us that slavery is wrong--as you illustrate, it's more a matter of compelling readers to look long and hard at all of the ways that it is wrong, HOW it is wrong, and most importantly, how limited the power of any one individual is to make any significant change in the system. We get a critique of the *systemic* nature of slavery through a story about people who are shaped by the system.
ReplyDeleteHi Sri, great post! I agree with the notion that history, as taught in books, tends to hide or gloss over how *real* things are. Textbooks even hide entire events and battles, like the Haitian occupation! Kindred, in the spirit of the 1619 project, pushes back against this censorship, and, at a larger scale, the idea that the innocent white students might be hurt from a visceral and real telling of slavery. Using Dana, she sort of plants a modern perspective in the middle of everything and illustrates the importance of *why* we should learn about slavery in this way.
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