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Slavery is doubtlessly a monstrous blight on the history of the United States. Even though the institution of slavery has been successfully destroyed, it is still echoing in the modern society, with the social problems such as racial discrimination and racial profiling still being in existence (Stepto 189). Therefore, deconstructing the phenomenon of slavery is an essential step on the way to understanding how it defines the contemporary attitudes toward African American people, how relationships within a diverse community are structured, what changes multicultural communication has undergone so far, etc. In her novel Kindred, Octavia E. Butler creates a fusion of history and science fiction, thus, creating a very grim and dark environment in which the societal effects of slavery are explored. While Kindred makes it abundantly clear that forgetting the grave mistakes made in the past would be wrong, it also insists that the specified memory should be used for remedying the evil that has been done to the African American community. Although the novel ends with a respectively positive ending, Dana having escaped from the clutches of the plantation owner, the final image of her hand being caught in the wall where he grabbed it symbolizes the dark legacy of slavery and the choice that the lad character makes between slavery and freedom.
Because of the problematic issues that it renders, Kindred remains one of the most influential novels of its time. Butler focuses on the changes that can be observed in the relationships between the oppressed population and the oppressors. The author creates a surreal environment in which the dynamics of the social strain is explored by shifting from the era of slavery to the realm of the 1970s. Thus, the author draws correlations between the contemporary environment and the specified time slot. However, it could also be argued that, by setting a futuristic and science-fiction-oriented tone to her novel, Butler also implies the dynamic between current and future relationships. Thus, the readers are able to locate the effects that the era of slavery and the following decades of segregation have had on the modern interactions between African Americans and White Americans.
Thus, the foundation for building a proper understanding of the challenges that need to be overcome in order to encourage future compromise can be built. Butlers novel sends a very powerful message about the weight of social injustice that was blown out of its proportions at a certain point in history. Forgetting that the specified situation has ever happened will mean denying decades of pain experienced by African American people, the trials and tribulations that they had to experience, and the challenges that they face nowadays due to their painful legacy (ONeil 59). Therefore, Kindred remains one of the few novels that allow understanding the emotional core of the relationships between African Americans and White Americans and specify the effects that the choice between slavery and freedom has had on the modern African American generation.
The phenomena of continuity and succession are explored brilliantly in the novel. The idea of combining two genres that seemingly have very little in common with each other, i.e., science fiction and historical fiction, might seem like an attempt to add evidently redundant plot points into the story, yet the subject matter that it addresses places the specified choice into perspective. As the character switches between the present day and the United States of the 1970s, the allusion to the relationships between African Americans and White Americans nowadays and in the future can be traced easily. Thus, the concept of succession, namely, the idea that the legacy of slavery is baked into every facet of intercultural interactions in the United States, is rendered (Popescu 188). While one might argue that the correlation between the specified themes is far too obvious to produce a massive impact on the readers, it, nevertheless, provides the platform for insightful and profound observations about the legacy of slavery and the effects that it has had and will have on the relationships between African Americans and White Americans. The time travel theme, therefore, echoes with the societal concern for the effects that the legacy of slavery has on the modern relationships between Americans and the way in which it will shape these relationships decades after.
Thus, another important issue that Kindred raises is whether the painful memories of slavery need to be forgotten for African American people to be relieved of the pressure of their hurtful history, and for the relationships between then and White Americans to be less complicated. In Kindred, the author states almost explicitly that, despite the pain that these memories bring, they must not be abandoned. The specified idea can be tracked down in Butlers observation regarding societal oppression and the attempts at forcing a particular opinion on people: Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of wrong ideas (Butler 141). Therefore, Butlers novel serves as a graphic example that the past should not define the future but, instead, inform the decisions that people will make and, thus, shape future interactions to avoid repeating the same mistake again. Thus, the novel stresses the effect of the choice between slavery and freedom, detailing the challenges that it entails and the opportunities that it opens.
However, when it comes to outlining the details that make the novel exceptionally outstanding, one must mention the ending. Due to the unusual metaphor that looks both emotionally gripping and terrifying, Butler creates the ending that lends its way to further contemplations about the future of interracial relationships and the effects that slavery has had on them. Whether the aftermath of the hideous phenomenon will become the force that holds the further development of the American society back is, however, up to members of the U.S. community, as the novel subtly states (Donawerth and Scally 3). The fact that Kindred does not end on the resolution of the sudden problem that the lead character faces, the final chapter of Kindred can be considered as the attempt at showing readers the range of opportunities that they will have even with the legacy as painful as slavery in their historical records.
The issues of guilt and blame as integral parts of the contemporary cultural legacy of the White population of the United States is also addressed in the novel with an impressive amount of subtlety. Thus, Butler indicates that with due care and proper understanding of the problem opportunities for unhindered communication will be opened to both sides of the controversy. The pressure of the social awkwardness that surrounds the subject matter and still echoes in the context of multicultural communication is stressed in the novel profusely: She was strange now, erratic, sometimes needing my friendship, trusting me with her dangerous longings for freedom, her wild plans to run away again; and sometimes hating me, blaming me for her trouble (Ladson-Billings and Tate 49). Thus, the novel delicately addressed the issue of the emotional strain that has been in existence since the era of slavery ended, and that has been defining the interactions between African American and White American communities. The events in the novel render the confusion and emotional uneasiness that can be seen in the environment of a multicultural dialogue when addressing some of the controversial aspects of American history and modern U.S. society.
The fact that even having been written in 1976, Kindred remains relevant in the 21st century shows that Butlers experiment at combining historical fiction and science fiction to produce a profound social commentary was astonishingly successful. The nature of the characters and the allusions made in the novel to the struggle for freedom during the era of slavery and in the 1950s make Kindred relevant even in the context of modern relationships between African Americans and White Americans. The unique experiment made by Butler when combining two entirely different genres turned out to be completely successful since it not only manages to retain its relevance nowadays but also seems to be applicable to building future dialogue between the specified communities. The ripple in reality that Butler describes echoes with the rift in the relationships between African American and White Americans; moreover, it mirrors the challenges that the former were facing in the U.S. society at the time. in addition, because of the focus on the emotional weight of the trials and tribulations through which African American people had to go, the novel is likely to retain its impact on the subject matter even in the future.
Therefore, Butler shows that remembering the events and choosing freedom and not slavery that has led to current social tensions is critical to building the strategy for managing these conflicts and negotiating successfully. By purposefully avoiding addressing the specified events, one would dismiss the suffering and pain of a huge number of people that have experienced the hardships of segregation or are still affected by the legacy of slavery. Therefore, the novel can be seen as a cautionary tale about the threat of forgetting as the pathway to encouraging further discrimination and falling into the same trap of alienating the African American community from the rest of the American society.
Kindred explores the issue of slavery and freedom and the effects that the choice in favor of the latter has had on the modern intercultural relationships. The novel emphasizes the drastic effects that slavery has had on the contemporary relationships between African Americans and White Americans, which is stressed by combining two genres into a single entity (i.e., historical and science fiction). Thus, the author manages to convey a very subtle message about the need to remember the specified part of American history to build a better future. At the same time, the writer does not shy away from alluding to some of the most disturbing pages of American history, thus, sending a warning to the generations to come. Incorporating the elements that are truly terrifying with the ones that are hopeful and uplifting, Butler identified the issues that would define the relationships between African Americans and White Americans in the future. Thus, Kindred becomes a fusion of a cautionary tale about prejudice and inequality, which is cemented in the final, dark and grim image, at the same time indicating that the choice between slavery and freedom was worth the painful experiences.
Works Cited
Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Headline Publishing Group, 2014.
Donawerth, Jane, and Kate Scally. Youve Found No Records Slavery in Maryland and the Writing of Octavia Butlers Kindred. Extrapolation, vol. 58, no.1, 2017, pp. 1-19.
Ladson-Billings, Gloria, and William F. Tate IV. Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education. Critical Race Theory in Education, Routledge, 2016, pp. 21-41.
ONeill, Caitlin. The Shape of Mystery: The Visionary Resonance of Harriet Jacobss Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The Journal of American Culture, vol. 41, no. 1, 2018, pp. 56-67.
Popescu, Irina. Empathetic trappings: Revisiting the nineteenth century in Octavia Butlers Kindred. Journal of Human Rights, vol. 17, no. 2, 2018, pp. 184-198.
Stepto, Robert B. Storytelling in early Afro-American Fiction: Frederick Douglasss The Heroic Slave. Black Literature and Literary Theory, Routledge, 2016, pp. 187-198.
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