Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler

by Susana M. Morris

Kindred is fundamentally speculative in that it creates an impossible scenario to invite readers to consider their own assumptions, beliefs, and behavior about slavery and its legacy. That is, what would you do if you were transported back to the antebellum era? Octavia’s response is stark and pragmatic. She believed that most contemporary Black people, like their ancestors, would endure for the sake of their own survival and of those they loved. They would commit smaller yet still dangerous acts of rebellion, such as shirking work and destroying tools, as well as larger ones, like committing infanticide and suicide, but few would burn down plantations or murder slave owners outright. They would develop curious, complicated relationships with the people who owned them, and they would hold fast to the community of enslaved people, kith and kin, who comprised their support system. And although they would be worn down by slavery, what Dana calls in the novel “a long slow process of dulling,” they would never lose sight of their humanity or the fact that what they were experiencing was terrible and wrong.