Fabulism In Kindred

Kindred was penned by Octavia Butler in the late 1970’s, a time where there was limited written legal differences between races, but still much in the way of unrecognized social disparities. The fabulist nature of Octavia’s book gives it the space to speak to the many abuses and inequalities faced by African-American women in the 1800’ and 1976. The disease of power, victimization and sexualization of women, the power of norms—all play a powerful role in the novel. Most noteworthy, however, is Octavia Butler’s use of time travel to display the systems of power that steal the voices of black women—in both time periods—and how these systems create a dominant historical narrative that strives to erases these women from history. The time-traveling …show more content…
As Lisa Yaszek states, in the rare cases that women manage to appear in the historical dialogue, they are “reduced to their biological function as child-bearers or presented in “the stock conventions of the suffering enslaved woman” (Yaszek 1056). When Butler takes us into the past, she reconstructs the memories of these forgotten women. Even after society begins to let African-American tell their stories, we only see the black man’s side. We never hear about women, who have lost all but one of their children to slavery. We never see written accounts of the sexual abuse that women like Tess had to accept, or the pain that Alice and her mother felt as they watched a member of their family beaten and dragged away. We know it happened, but only in an abstract way, the same way we know that humans used to hunt mammoths. We may know more about these pre-historic events than many of the post-historic ones from only a few hundred years ago. The blink of an eye, compares to the history of mankind. Even within the book, Dana feels her memory slipping away. She describes it as “beginning to recede from me…like something I got second hand” (Butler 17). Even this power, controlled by her white ancestor, that steals her physical autonomy, is trying to steal her memories. Tries to remove her experiences from her mind, and not just from society’s narrative. At the end, despite Rufus’s death, Dana can’t bring herself to write about the traumas she experienced. She knows that what she sees as true memory would be invalidated as true memory. The systems of power that strive to remove thee black women’s experience from the history would just as brutally attack her