Kindred (novel)
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| Kindred | |
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| Author | Octavia Butler |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Doubleday |
| Publication date | June 1979 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 264 pp (first edition, hardback) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-385-15059-8 (first edition, hardback) |
Kindred is a 1979 novel by Octavia Butler. While most of Butler's work is classified as science fiction, Kindred is often shelved in literature or African-American literature and Butler herself categorized it as "a kind of grim fantasy" [1].
[edit] Plot summary
The novel tells the story of Dana, an African American woman living in 1976 who is repeatedly thrown back in time to the antebellum South. She is unconsciously summoned (through means that are never explained) by her ancestor, Rufus, from the time he is a child through to adulthood. Rufus is white and from a slave-owning family. She also meets Alice, another ancestor, who is forced to become Rufus's mistress. Dana is placed in the difficult position of making certain that Rufus and Alice have a child, Hagar, who is Dana's direct ancestor (thus ensuring Dana's own survival). Dana is also forced to cope with an environment which forces her into slavery every time she enters it.
Each time she travels back in time, she stays longer (Although time in antebellum south is "shorter" than real time. She only goes back in time when Rufus would have killed himself otherwise. Dana only returns to the present when she is extremely scared. She stops getting sent back in time after she kills Rufus, for Rufus will no longer endanger his life.
"I was trying to get people to feel slavery," Butler said in a 2004 interview. "I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people." [2] In another interview, she said, "I think people really need to think what it's like to have all of society arrayed against you." [3]
The book is set on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Butler said she chose the setting "because I wanted my character to have a legitimate hope of escape," and because two famous African-Americans, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, had been enslaved there. [4]
[edit] External links
- Kindred Reader's Guide: An Interview With Octavia Butler; part of a project that adopted Kindred as Rochester, New York's book of the year for 2003.
- "Interview: Octavia Butler", by John C. Snider, Scifidimensions, June 2004; an interview on Kindred's 25th anniversary.
- Book Review of Kindred
