Lyn's Reviews > Kindred

Octavia Butler is an amazing writer. If you enjoy reading SF/F, or even an interest in speculative fiction, you would like her work.

Kindred, first published in 1979, would become her most best-selling novel.

This is also a painful book to read because of its graphic depiction of slavery and Butler wastes no time in demonizing what was demonic. Describing the slave life from the perspective of a time-travelling modern woman, Butler’s strong narrative prose is in high form for a low burden – to illustrate to contemporary readers the horrors of slavery and in this context to draw a comparison with life of our time, making the transition to the early 1800s all the more stark and evil in contrast.

Kindred is also an allegory for our modern times, still burdened by the wounds of slavery and a racial consciousness in our society that has scars that won’t heal. Butler shows us, though, that we as a nation and a people are bound, as kindred, between races and with a shared history.

Back in the 90s I was working in Washington DC and I had the opportunity to meet a group of folks from Africa. Multi-lingual (with French predominant among the diplomats) I found the people I met worldly, intelligent, generous and interesting to talk to – and they were singularly not American. I think this was the first time I had met a large group of people from another continent and the idea struck me how much closer I was to my black neighbors than I was to these people I had just met.

Butler adeptly reveals in Kindred, in multiple ways, the many degrees of our shared humanity. But more narrowly, Butler is pointing out our kinship as Americans, dates like 1976 and July 4th must be intentional, how the shared history of slavery – between black Americans and white Americans – has bound us together.

Butler also, once again, has created a strong female protagonist in Dana whose endurance and courage are remarkable, made more evident by the fact that she has a unique viewpoint. Dana, in some respects, becomes a symbol of a present-day African-American woman, both made stronger from her heritage, but also still bearing the wounds of past wrongs.

Kindred also displays Butler’s amazing talents in storytelling, using dramatic irony expertly. A reader may notice a subtle, though strangely twisted reference to a scene in Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

Introspective and somber, with many questions that remain unanswered, Kindred is a powerful work told by an artist of genius ability.