Slave Of Time: Kindred By Octavia Butler

Slave of Time “Kindred” is a novel of time travel trauma and slavery. The protagonist Edana is a smart black woman who fights against everyday racism of her time. She is married to a white man called Kevin, a marriage that was not accepted by their relatives. One day Dana travels from her life in L.A. 1976 to antebellum south; a plantation in Maryland 1815. She travels back in time several times to ensure the survival on Rufus Weylin a white child that throughout the book becomes a explosive slave holder and one of her ancestors. Across the novel she has no choice but to help his relative, because without his existence she and her family would never come to be. Dana takes both the psychological and physical burden of helping Rufus. She tries to prevent him from accepting and practicing his role as salve …show more content…
In “Kindred”, Octavia Butler represents the ongoing struggle of slavery through time travel.
Dana travels many times through time, but Butler never gives a real explanation to how it happens. She only focuses on what happens thanks to Dana’s fantastical trips. Butler argues that Dana slowly and partially accepts slavery as she accepted her journeys through time and space. This can be seen throughout the book. At first when Dana realizes that she is traveling in time she can’t believe it. She even sais that she doesn’t have a name for it (p.17), not even believing that she is actually traveling in time. Time travel is something fantastical, something that only appears in movies and science fiction. Even for her time it’s something completely impossible, something unthinkable. After some repetitions of time travel Dana becomes to get used to both time travel and being to another time that it stops being surprising. Dana sais “I wasn’t as surprised as I could have been…. I had moved through time” (p.27). Here she shows how she is accepting something that at the beginning of the book seemed impossible; something