“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.
The idea that Dana's acceptance of the past makes it more difficult to travel back to the future is very interesting, and makes sense. As she acts less and less like her 1976 self during the narrative, she provokes less and less violence from people in the 1800s, thus making her stays in the past longer and longer. It's as if the past is "keeping" her there by forcing her to stay complacent - a strong parallel to the slavery narratives present throughout the book. Nice post.
ReplyDeleteYou make a good point about how Dana's growing attachment to the enslaved people at the plantation causes her to genuinely engage in her life there. Another factor to consider is the unpredictability of the length of her stay at the plantation. From the start, Dana is unexpectedly thrown into the past without any information about how the time travel works and when/whether she can return to her home. This motivates her to start adapting to the life at the plantation (to find a more sustainable way of surviving there) and, as her stay at the plantation lengthens, she adopt a life that is more "normal" for that time period. It's important to note that, as pointed out in class, Dana's time travel experience is analogous to that of enslaved Africans during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. These people, facing a dismal reality and an uncertain prospect of escaping/returning home, were forced to adapt to the system of monstrous oppression. Dana's growing lack of distance from her past reflects this history.
ReplyDeleteI feel like ever since this "lack of distance" was brought up by Dana in the book, it's something that I havent been able to stop thinking about! The way that Butler writes in these slow gradual changes of Dana and the other characters makes me gloss over them at first and then want to preen for them over and over and over again. I especially loved when you brought up the way it got harder for her to jump back the more she tolerated and accepted the horrors of the past because you see details like the shotguns being pointed at her at different points in the story and the way she reacts to that. Good post!
ReplyDeleteHi Khuyen! I really loved your post! Because we had discussed and notebooked this in class, I had thought about this question before, but not to this length, so I thoroughly enjoyed this. I will say, though, I had never really thought about what you discussed in your last paragraph, and I think that that's a really interesting interpretation for why the lengths of Dana's trips keep getting longer and longer. I had basically just assumed that that was due to chance, or fate, or just something random, but I really like your idea that it's because Dana is slowly becoming used to what she seese in the
ReplyDeletewow that was silly. i do not know why that posted. that should end with "what she sees in the 1800s."
DeleteI think a big part of Dana no longer acting is just a factor of time; you can only spend so much time in a place before it truly begins to influence how you behave, even if you're trying to fight against it. Your point about Dana losing her leverage over Rufus and Tom Weylin is a good one, and is sort of mirrored in how Dana slowly runs out of the modern medicine she brings with her. As she becomes more removed from the present she begins to rely more on the resources of the past.
ReplyDeleteI do agree that her gradual decreasing distance made it harder for Dana to return to the present- I think another good example (although it is definitely less fleshed out) would be Kevin, who had a very obviously difficult time returning to the present after being in the past for 5 (?) years. I like how you talk about how she loses her power and authority- it goes to show how difficult it is to break free from the constraints of systemic racism and oppression, even with knowledge of the future(/ her present).
ReplyDeleteHi Khuyen!! I also wrote about this so it's cool to see how you thought of it. It's really interesting to think about how much Dana could really act before it becomes apart of herself. How much could she really control in that situation. I loved reading this!
ReplyDeleteAnother reason Dana starts to feel more acclimated in the past is because she and Kevin haven't even been living in their new house for long. In this new chapter of life, she has a blanker slate. But instead of being filled with memories in a new home, it's filled with month long trips to the past. I agree that the extended amounts of time she spends there is also making Dana more accustomed to life in the 1800s.
ReplyDeleteThe shift of Dana's perspective in the past is very interesting and I think also highlights how much soeone can be conditioned to their environment. Also it raises the question of how far is the present truly from the past? As Dana looses her sense of place between the two times.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that you note how Tom Weylin "fears" Dana, in part because of her seemingly "magic" power but also, I would say, because of all the ways she doesn't act like an enslaved person is "supposed to." In some ways, he fears her as an independent, educated Black woman--and we can read this, allegorically, as the slave-owner fearing a future where slavery has been abolished and he no longer wields power over these people. Among other things, we get some insight into why he feels so strongly that the enslaved children and adults on his plantation should NEVER be taught to read and write. He views Dana's intelligence and literacy as a destabilizing and dangerous threat, and he's not wrong about this--indeed, Dana *chooses* to destabilize his power by teaching Nigel's children to read.
ReplyDeleteWe tend to focus more on the Dana-Rufus relationship, because it's so messy and so central to the plot, but Tom's equally complicated fear and anxiety around Dana is also worth thinking about. Since Rufus is affected by Dana's presence throughout his life, he grows up under her influence to some extent and doesn't fear her in the same way. Weylin seems to perceive the "dangers" in a woman like her, from the white supremacist's point of view.
I might contend that while Dana says that the 'distance' between the Weylin plantation and her eventually disappeared, perhaps it was always there in a more existential matter. To this point, I'd mention that she never felt that the closeness between her and Rufus necessarily started from a point of bare aloofness that eventually disappeared as they spent more time together, no, for some reason (maybe because they are related and because of their paranormal codependence) they seemed bound
ReplyDeletetogether. If we then expand and push Rufus into this archetype of being a product of his system and thus representative of one, we can maybe see how the history of slavery, exploitation, and the plantation have always been there with Dana.