Analysis Of Kindred By Octavia Butler

Abolutionist, Fredrick Douglass once stated, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will”(). Kindred by Octavia Butler is an incredible book that leaves the reader hypnotized. This story educates people on the first hand abuse of slavery. Butler took a woman of the modern era and transferred her back into a period

Octavia Butler depicts how trauma not only affects the slave 's, but the slaveholders. Butler also brings attention to adaptation in her work by using a key literary devices such as foreshadowing to expose the trauma and the cause of that trauma. The book is a first person point of view about slavery on a plantation in the antebellum south. The author gives detailed and vividly explains the beatings, attempted rape, and constant verbal abuse. “Instead he stopped me with one hand, while he held me with the other. He spoke very softly. ‘You got no manners nigger, I’ll teach you some.’”(Butler, Kindred 41). The cause of the trauma originates from the brutality of slavery. The site of the trauma is adaptation. The audience sees a dynamic change in having to adapt not only in Dana, but also Rufus and Kevin. While traveling back in time, Dana begins to discover her roots and the origins of her ansestors. Before time traveling back to 1815 Dana takes her freedom for granted. Traviling back in time she has to adapt and find her identity in a foreign place. Marie Varsam argues that the “past should be, even must be, retained and manipulated in order to formulate a cohesive identity in the present” (Varsam). Every time Danan returns to

It leaves the readers in an awe of silence as they deliberate and take in the powerful message of Kindred. Octavia Butler extablishes the site of trauma as adaptation and the cause as the inhumane act of slavery. Butler leads her audience to question the equality not only in the past, but also in the present. Developing and Critically thinking about the world around us is the message that Butler is wanted to convey. Are black people really free? Have blacks gained all the right that blacks are reserved to by constitutional law? The answers are up to the individual, but in the words of Jesse Williams, “the burdened of the is not to comfort the bystander. If you have no intrest in the equal rights for black people, then do not make suggestion for those who do. Sit down.”