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6 / Octavia Butler’s Kindred: “My Face Too Was Wet with Tears” Octavia Butler is arguably best known for her novel Kindred, published in 1979. She was the first African American woman to make a name for herself writing science fiction and remains one of the few African American writers—along with Samuel R. Delany—to have achieved success in the field. After developing a love of reading and an interest in science fiction as a child, Butler was inspired to try her hand at writing after watching a bad science fiction movie on television and deciding that she could write something better herself. Over the course of her career, she published eleven novels as well as numerous short stories and nonfiction pieces. Although Butler, who died in 2006, achieved a successful career in science fiction, winning some of the most prestigious awards in the field, including multiple Hugo and Nebula awards as well as a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, she always resisted being pigeonholed as a genre writer. Not only did she complicate the science fiction genre by consistently including African American women as empowered characters whose social position challenges American racial stereotypes, but the themes of her novels and stories also frequently deal with issues of bondage and freedom. Butler’s work often drew from her experiences growing up in a working-class African American community during the civil rights period and is frequently rooted in African American history and literature. In an interview with Charles Rowell, Butler describes the origin of her idea for Kindred, relating an anecdote in which, during the Black Power movement of the 1960s, she heard a young man giving remarks 128 / octavia butler’s kindred at Pasadena City College. The speaker said, “I’d like to kill all these old people who have been holding us back for so long. But I can’t because I’d have to start with my own parents” (79). Butler was so struck by his statement that she “carried that comment . . . for thirty years,” believing that the young man “was still blaming [older generations of black people] for their humility and their acceptance of disgusting behavior on the part of employers and other people. . . . He felt so strongly ashamed of what the older generation had to do, without really putting it into the context of being necessary for not only their lives but his as well.” Butler’s goal, in Kindred, was to work against this shame and anger by teaching readers to feel sympathy for enslaved African Americans and their descendants. Butler’s intention was not to create pity for previous generations’ suffering but to demonstrate the ways in which their suffering and their survival required strength, enabling the survival of their descendants. Kindred uses a time-travel plot device to bring the protagonist, Dana, in close contact with her literal past—both by forcing her to interact with her ancestors and by placing her, as a modern-day African American woman, in the conditions of antebellum slavery. Science fiction thus becomes a sentimental vehicle for confronting the legacy of slavery in the United States and pushing at the limits of sympathy. By collapsing the boundaries between past and present, Butler awakens Dana—and the modern reader—to the experiences of her enslaved ancestors. Whereas nineteenth-century sentimental novels drew metaphors of equation to show that unlike groups suffer in similar or parallel ways (i.e., white women understand enslaved women because the death of a child is like the loss of a child to a slave sale), Butler’s Kindred shows that Dana suffers in the same way as her ancestors given like conditions. She moves Dana from being an observer of suffering to a suffering subject. This breaking of boundaries enables Butler to collapse history and show the close linkage between past and present attitudes toward race and gender. Butler long maintained that Kindred is actually fantasy, rather than science fiction, because no science is involved in the time travel that occurs in the novel. Kindred is also a neo-slave narrative because it tells the story of a young African American woman who is trapped in bondage to a Maryland planter. The twist, however, is that Butler centers her story around a contemporary woman, Dana, who lives in California in the year 1976 but is called back in time, repeatedly, to the early 1800s to save the life of a white ancestor and slave owner. Dana, who is a writer and is...

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