Revis[it]ing the Slave Narrative: The Past and Future of Octavia Butler’s Kindred

Octavia Butler’s groundbreaking 1979 novel Kindred follows the main character Dana, a contemporary Black writer in Los Angeles, as she is pulled across time and space to the Maryland slave plantation where her ancestors lived. Through Dana’s story, Butler uses the science fiction trope of time travel to confront brutal realities of the Antebellum South. An enduring work, the novel embodies the innovative voice that made Butler the first sci-fi author to receive the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. Across speculative visions of humanity’s past and future, Butler wrangles with existential questions of free will and survival. In Kindred, Dana must protect her family tree and ensure the conditions for her own birth by protecting Rufus Weylin—the son of the plantation owner and, as the novel notes, her “several times great grandfather.” Entangled in her own family history, she is forced to learn from excruciating experience how to survive in the cruel world of the plantation. “My ancestors had to put up with more than I ever could,” Dana reflects to her husband, Kevin, after being attacked by a patroller early on in the novel. “Much more.” During several life-and-death encounters that follow, Dana’s researched understanding of the Antebellum South is supplanted by her lived experience of it, and by the consequences her actions have on the course of history. This plot arc illustrates not only Butler’s cutting-edge perspective on the sci-fi genre, but very real gaps in the written history of chattel slavery in the United States.

In her 1987 interview “The Site of Memory,” Toni Morrison traces her “literary heritage” back to the autobiographies of authors like Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, and Harriet Jacobs, whose accounts of their own enslavement represent the first published works of Black literature in the United States. “No slave society in the history of the world wrote more—or more thoughtfully—about its own enslavement,” she notes. But the oppressive context under which these autobiographies were produced limited their authors’ abilities to share the whole of their experiences, she adds. Slave narratives were often published for the purpose of creating sympathy for the plight of enslaved people among a northern white audience and were heavily censored so as not to overwhelm the delicate sensibilities of potential benefactors. “In shaping the experience to make it palatable to those who were in a position to alleviate it,” Morrison writes, “they were silent about many things, and they ‘forgot’ many other things.”

“The act of imagination is bound up with memory,” Morrison writes; Butler’s novel—in the imagery that echoes across the complex, intertwined lives of Dana and her ancestors—peers into the historical gaps of the slave narrative, working with this same insight that Morrison would later articulate.

Parsing through the autobiographies more than a hundred years later, she stresses the importance of these omissions to understanding both her identity as a Black woman and her craft as a writer. “[I am] deadly serious about fidelity to the milieu out of which I write and in which my ancestors actually lived,” she says. “Infidelity to that milieu—the absence of the interior life, the deliberate excising of it from the records that the slaves themselves told—is precisely the problem in the discourse that proceeded without us.” Morrison seeks to “fill in the blanks” where this interior life has been revised out of the slave narrative. “The crucial distinction for me is not the difference between fact and fiction, but the distinction between fact and truth,” Morrison argues, escaping the dichotomy of fiction and nonfiction in order to “explore two worlds—the actual and the possible”. In the world of the “possible,” Morrison connects the autobiographical writing of her literary forebears and her own fictional work through the images that they share. Where the autobiographies often compartmentalized painful personal narratives into figurative language, Morrison works backwards, redrafting the same metaphors into the interior lives of her fictional characters. “The act of imagination is bound up with memory,” Morrison writes; Butler’s novel—in the imagery that echoes across the complex, intertwined lives of Dana and her ancestors—peers into the historical gaps of the slave narrative, working with this same insight that Morrison would later articulate.

Kindred explores the interior lives of slaves on the Weylin plantation in unflinching detail. Dana’s experience of the everyday violence her ancestors lived through leads her to understand the limits of her historical knowledge. When she witnesses the whipping of one of the slaves on the plantation, Dana recalls reenactments of beatings from movies and TV. “I had seen the too-red blood substitute streaked across their backs and heard their well-rehearsed screams,” she reflects, “but I hadn’t lain nearby and smelled their sweat or heard them pleading and praying, shamed before their families and themselves. I was probably less prepared for the reality than the child crying not far from me.” In this scene, Butler performs what Morrison would call the “recollection that moves from the image to the text”—literally going from an audiovisual representation of the beating to Dana’s shocked experience of the reality in order to recreate the sort of scene that, while not uncommon in the lives of slaves, is largely glossed over in their autobiographies.

However, Butler’s protagonist must do more than explore the “archeological site” of the past that preoccupied Morrison; Dana must do whatever possible to return to the present intact. When Dana returns to the past later in the text, she finds Rufus receiving a savage beating from Isaac as retribution for the rape of Alice—a free woman, and Dana’s other ancestor on the plantation—whom Isaac has just married. Dana, with help from Alice, convinces Isaac to spare Rufus’ life and instructs Isaac and Alice to run away. As Dana bandages Rufus’s wounds, he attempts to justify himself, and she realizes he has feelings for Alice that he cannot express through the violent relationship between master and slave. “There was no shame in raping a black woman,” Dana ponders, “but there could be shame in loving one.” The many painful realizations of Dana’s time on the Weylin plantation offer a contemporary viewpoint into the precarious state of Black life in the Antebellum South, one that earlier slave narratives only implied. Throughout the novel, Dana explores and eventually participates in the complex and dangerous relationships at the root of her family tree, as her journeys into the past become increasingly relevant to her present.

Butler wanted to illustrate the severity of the conditions under which slaves actually lived, so that others could sympathize with the impossible choices people were forced to make to ensure their survival and grasp at their freedom.

“I lost an arm on my last trip home.” This declaration, the opening line of Kindred, lays bare the ultimate cost of Dana’s journeys to the past. In this image, Butler superimposes the violence of the past onto the present, making it clear there will be no clean resolution to Dana’s time on the Weylin plantation. Like the interior lives self-censored in the slave narrative, Dana’s dismemberment represents a fractured relationship with the past that persists even after she secures the continuation of her bloodline. It also calls attention to the ongoing consequences of slavery’s unfinished history for contemporary African Americans. When discussing the inspiration for Kindred, Butler often cited the attitude she witnessed among young Black people around her who believed that previous generations were complicit in their oppression during slavery—an attitude that persists to this day. Butler wanted to illustrate the severity of the conditions under which slaves actually lived, so that others could sympathize with the impossible choices people were forced to make to ensure their survival and grasp at their freedom.

In the novel, these impossibilities manifest through the decision Dana presents to Alice after Alice and Isaac are caught by slave catchers. Isaac is mutilated and sold in Mississippi, while Alice returns traumatized and badly injured by the slave catchers’ dogs. Dana slowly nurses Alice back to health, but Rufus is already demanding she convince Alice to return to him as a concubine. With no other choice, Dana lays out Alice’s options for her: “You can go to him as he orders; you can refuse, be whipped, and then have him take you by force; or you can run away again.” Fearing further retribution from Rufus or the slave catchers, Alice submits, and Hagar is born, ensuring the survival of Dana’s family tree. But the cruelty of plantation life remains and continues to haunt both Alice and Dana in the novel’s final chapters. Dana’s failure to return intact from her journey “home” symbolizes the generational trauma from slavery that remains unresolved, in large part because of the failure to reconcile with the peculiar institution’s foundational role in our country’s history. The absent interiority in the sparse few first-person accounts has allowed for countless waves of revisionist history that presents slaves as willing participants in their own violent submission, a mistruth that continues to propagate in our present day.

“Kindred makes the old new,” writes fellow sci-fi author Nnedi Okorafor in the introduction to the graphic novel edition of the book by comic artists Damian Duffy and John Jennings. “If you’ve read Kindred before, the graphic-novel format will renew the story.” Okorafor connects the speculative work of Butler’s narrative to the visual possibilities of the graphic novel, and the vibrant artwork of Duffy and Jennings makes a compelling argument toward her conclusion. Duffy and Jennings’s adaptation of Kindred enriches the image-based recollection of the text, introducing dynamic visual cues to navigate the shifting space-time of the novel. Though published in 2017, the graphic novel remains faithful to the original text and setting; the transitions between the 1970s—and the 1800s are marked by a switch from a reddish-beige palette to rich, vibrant color. This pattern makes the everyday violence and resistance of life on the Weylin plantation that much more vivid and urgent compared to the drab, faded waiting room of the “present,” further stressing the importance of this fictionalized but “possible” world. The centerpiece of this visual approach is the graphic novel’s cover, a haunting illustration of Dana’s arms reaching upward with manacles in the shape of the infinity sign wrapped around her wrists, the disembodied hand of Rufus gripping at the base of her left arm, against a black background spattered with blood. Throughout the graphic novel, Dana’s left arm becomes a visual motif of the hold her ancestral past still has upon her, and the cover plays a key role in illustrating the traumatic and self-circling (figure-eight) nature of her experience. Through these visual metaphors, Duffy and Jennings expand on Butler’s use of imagery in her speculative vision of the slave narrative.

Another recent adaptation of Butler’s novel, the 2022 Hulu miniseries created by playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, struggles to achieve the same results while adapting Butler’s novel for the small screen. The show takes great creative license with Butler’s original text, and seems more invested in manufacturing a relevant setting for a streaming audience than exploring meaningful connections between Kindred and our current moment. Unfortunately, this has major consequences for the framing and pacing of the story. Where both the novel and graphic novel begin immediately with Dana’s loss of her arm, the Hulu series instead occupies itself with self-contemporizing; Kevin—Dana’s husband in the novel—becomes her Tinder hookup, and in the absence of his money from publishing, Dana becomes an independently wealthy transplant from New York. Instead of making the past more urgent to the present, the present itself is the only thing reconstructed onscreen, and the show’s gags come at the expense of the vast possibilities our current image-driven society holds for Butler’s narrative. Despite its abrasiveness, the series nonetheless introduces Butler’s work to a new and contemporary format, adding to her legacy as a speculative thinker who brings together, as Okorafor notes succinctly, “America’s past, present, and future through mysterious time travel.”

Instead of making the past more urgent to the present, the present itself is the only thing reconstructed onscreen, and the show’s gags come at the expense of the vast possibilities our current image-driven society holds for Butler’s narrative.

The history of the slave narrative involves the vacancies of the past, the echoes of the present, as well as the unopened possibilities of the future. The forced labor of slaves built the foundation of this country, and the autobiographies of those who survived bondage to share their story represents a pivotal body of work in US literary history. Scholars, historians, poets, and fiction writers alike have returned to these accounts in order to understand the hostile world in which they were written and its role in shaping the world of today. Where the original authors self-censored to curry favor for the abolitionist cause, contemporary censorship campaigns happening in public schools and political offices across the country seek to eliminate the history of American slavery altogether, banning books that center their stories as if they never lived. We must continue to revisit the slave narrative, retelling and reconfiguring it in time and space until we can truly understand the lives our ancestors lived and their legacies handed down to us and future generations. Anything else, and we may be fated, like Dana, to learn from experience the suffering of our past