Bridging the Past and Present with "Kindred," by Octavia Butler

 Picture credit: http://www.tuohitori.net/index.php/writer/20643/

When I was in 9th grade, I read Kindred by Octavia Butler. I found it in the library and chose it as a part of an independent reading project (naturally, it was not assigned to the whole class, though it absolutely should have been) and once I began reading it I couldn’t put it down. Before this book, I had never encountered anything like it- it was painful, beautiful, expansive, heart wrenching, and hopeful all at the same time.


The plot is a bit hard to put into words, so here is a summary I found online that gives a taste of what Kindred holds in its pages; shoutout to Wikipedia:

The book is the first-person account of a young African-American woman writer, Dana, who finds herself being shunted in time between her Los Angeles, California home in 1976 and a pre-Civil War Maryland plantation.
There she meets her ancestors: a proud black freewoman and a white planter who has forced her into slavery and concubinage. As Dana's stays in the past become longer, the young woman becomes intimately entangled with the plantation community. She makes hard choices to survive slavery and to ensure her return to her own time.
Kindred explores the dynamics and dilemmas of antebellum slavery from the sensibility of a late 20th-century black woman, who is aware of its legacy in contemporary American society. Through the two interracial couples who form the emotional core of the story, the novel also explores the intersection of power, gender, and race issues, and speculates on the prospects of future egalitarianism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindred_(novel)

Years later, through an African American Literature class during my senior year of college and just months after the 2016 election, Kindred reentered my life. I felt like I was reading the book for the first time, because of the political significance of that moment. After Trump was elected, even the people who had previously been under the impression that America was post-racial or had somehow moved on from the ills of its past could no longer believe so. That message, of being confonted with how little time has moved us forward directly mirrors the message of Kindred. The “modern” moment that Kindred takes place in is actually the bicentennial year, 1976, which marked 200 years since the formal abolishment of slavery. The novel is then showing us that despite the time that has passed, the America we know now is simply the legacy of the people, decisions, and systems that existed and were passed down from the past.

Kindred forces readers to confront the false sense of security that society achieves by equating the mere passing of time to an actual, physical distance from what has happened in the past. In the text, the characters leap across hundreds of years in a single moment as they are taken from the “modern” day and tossed into the depths of the time of slavery. The reader takes that journey with them; that is why Kindred immediately came to mind after reading bell hooks’ article. She says, “[Critical fictions] require that the reader shift her paradigms and practice empathy as a conscious gesture of solidarity with the work” (57). One doesn’t have a choice but to practice empathy while reading Kindred, and witnessing the violence of slavery through the eyes of a modern black woman.

I wish that every high schooler (also, every person in general!) has the opportunity to read this book, and to follow through on that wish I intend to bring it into my classroom in whatever ways I can. Hopefully, that means I can have my students experience it in its entirety, but even if I can only bring in excerpts, this story is as relevant now as it was when it was first published (it has, in fact, always been relevant). Not only can students learn about history in a humanizing, raw way, but Kindred has the power to bridge the past and present in a way that I haven’t seen in other texts, so it can play a key role in helping students understand how and why America exists in the way it does. And possibly, how understanding and embracing the past can help us heal and truly move forward.