“Once—God knows how long ago—I had worried that I was keeping too much distance between myself and this alien time. Now, there was no distance at all. When had I stopped acting? Why had I stopped?" (Butler 220). A question we explored in class and via a notebook prompt: when had Dana stopped acting as she kept returning to the past? At what point does she stop fulfilling a role and lose her distance? In Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Butler reexamines the history of slavery in America through the personal lens of Dana, an author from 1976 who continues to be drawn back in time to save the life of her ancestor Rufus.
In the beginning of the novel, Dana is insistent on keeping her distance from the horrors she experiences in the 1800s. She tries to remain as detached from it as possible, insisting that she is merely playing a role and that it’s not something that pertains directly towards her. She explains this to Kevin during their first trip together:
“And I began to realize why Kevin and I had fitted so easily into this time. We weren’t really in. We were observers watching a show. We were watching history happen around us. And we were actors. While we waited to go home, we humored the people around us by pretending to be like them. But we were poor actors. We never really got into our roles. We never forgot that we were acting” (Butler 98).
At first, Dana views this surreal situation as something separate from her, almost as if she was watching a play unfold on a set. However, as the novel progresses and her journeys back in time go from a few minutes to months on end, it becomes more difficult for her to maintain the distance between herself and the life of slavery.
Due to Dana’s knowledge of the future (present?), she wields a power that causes Tom Weylin to fear her and Rufus to respect her more—she acknowledges how she is special and how Rufus treats her differently than the other slaves. However, as she spends more time in the past and lives her day-to-day life there, she loses her power and authority. This is made even more true by the fact that Rufus grows up to be even more cruel and exercises his power: “He hit me. It was a first, and so unexpected that I stumbled backward and fell…It was the breaking of an unspoken agreement between us—a very basic agreement—and he knew it” (Butler 239). Dana lives life on the Weylin plantation everyday for months until it becomes her actual life—it no longer is an act. With how she acts with Rufus, Margaret, and the other slaves in the latter half of the book, Dana realizes how she is not exempt from the way society is structured in the 1800s and it causes her to subconsciously shift her thoughts and actions to adjust to this new reality of hers: they become her immediate thoughts on how to act since she is so accustomed to this time period now. Before, she was more of an outside observer—swooping in for short periods of time to just save Rufus—but it is harder to stay detached when she is so actively involved with the lives of other people there and spends more time there. We see this impact her life in 1976: “The time, the year, was right, but the house just wasn’t familiar enough. I felt as though I were losing my place here in my own time.” (Butler 191). Her notion of what “home” is shifts throughout the novel, even considering the Weylin plantation as more familiar.
This lack of distance is also made clear with how much harder it is for Dana to return home. She is able to return to her own time when she is fearful of her own life. However, her tolerance shifts the longer she bears witness to the horrors of the 1800s. For example, when she is whipped after working in the fields, she wakes up to Rufus rather than returning home to Kevin. She becomes acclimated with these sights that were only recognizable to her through history textbooks before.
