Kindred: A timeless novel about human life and time

Butler’s choice to tell a story of slavery through the eyes and experience of a modern woman is not only powerful due to its relatability, but also in the way it brings up impossible moral dilemmas which couldn’t otherwise exist. Both Dana and the readers are forced to grapple with the effect of the past, how intrinsically connected history and modern events are. Throughout the novel you have to ask yourself if the present is worth the atrocities that happened in the past, and furthermore, is one life more valuable than another?

Dana is consistently forced to decide between her dignity or life and others. She has the knowledge that her life in the 1970s is considerably better than the life of anyone in the 1800s. Dana kills Rufus when he violates her, but she enables Rufus to repeatedly rape Alice. Her self preservation causes her to separate herself from the other people on the plantation: not in the sense that she is playing a role or from a different time, but in some underlying way she is more important than everyone else. Dana fights for her life, but Alice openly expresses at least a semblance of a desire to die throughout the majority of the novel. “You should have let me die”, Alice said to Dana after the dog attack. Later on, Alice’s suicide shakes Dana and Rufus. Rufus becomes erratic and self-destructive after he finds her, and Dana has at this point given up so much hope for her future. Rufus, Dana, and Alice are all “careless” with their life to some degree: Rufus comes from a place of ego after being saved by Dana again and again, he feels able to be reckless. Dana cannot stand to be reduced down so far below what she knows in her modern life and would rather die than be put in certain positions, a viewpoint she only has out of a sense of privilege: she knows that the future is better, which is more than any of the Weylin plantation residents can say. Alice has lost everything she held dear, from her freedom to her children. But does this somehow mean that Rufus, Alice, or Dana’s life is somehow less meaningful? Rufus commits awful acts in the latter sections of the novel, but living in the back of the reader’s mind is a young impressionable Rufus. Could he have been a good person in another time? I think in many ways the point of Kindred is that we can’t fully answer these questions, but we better understand the identity and personhood of everyone who has lived before us.

Kevin constantly reminds Dana that she is not a slave and that in many ways she is separate, different, or even more alive. The slaves from the Weylin plantation are “already dead”, as the events of the 1800s are, “obviously”, in the past. Even with the sense of separation she has at first, Dana begins to assimilate more and more into the life she lives in the past as the novel progresses, bringing up an inconceivable moral dilemma. How can the lives of so many people on the plantation mean so much less than Dana’s when they are all clearly one in the same. She constantly must save Rufus in order to save herself, all the while people are suffering and dying around her. At its core Kindred shows the value of human life. No life, past or present, black or white, slave or not, is more valuable.

The 1619 project handles very similar issues, which both validates Butler’s exploration of the past while simultaneously adding a nuance to Kindred.  As time goes on we still have not quite figured out what we will do with our knowledge of the past. So often we find ourselves in between acceptance, acknowledgment, progress, and ignorance. Ultimately, Kindred is a timeless read, and it’s unique and valuable interpretation of history and humanity will stick with our society for years to come.