"Do I look like someone you can come home to from where you may be going?": re-mapping interracial anxiety in Octavia Butler's Kindred

African American Review, Spring, 2007 by Guy Mark Foster

Although Octavia Butler's 1979 novel about slavery and time-travel, Kindred, occupies a privileged position within the African American literary tradition, at its center is what we would have to admit is a rather unconventional portrayal of a black female-white male sexual relationship. In fact, I suspect that such a portrayal would compromise any other literary text's canonical standing. In the case of Kindred, however, just the reverse occurs. Butler's portrayal of a black female-white male coupling is unconventional not only because the primary interracial relationship survives the novel's closure. It is unconventional also because the couple's mutual love for one another is not depicted, at least on the surface, as psychologically unhealthy--two things that do not generally occur in black literary works after the Second World War. (1) Just how is it that Butler is able to create such a portrayal while at the same time continuing to garner praise for what many in the African American literary community regard as her novel's invaluable contribution to the antiracist operation implicit throughout much of black letters? (2)

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This essay argues that Kindred manages to conceal the subversive nature of what initially appears to be a genuinely loving, healthy interracial relationship between a black female writer and her white husband by shrewdly masking the cultural and political implications of that relationship behind a rather sophisticated narrative ruse. That ruse happens to be, in this case, a graphic and harrowing portrayal of a historical scenario that would normally represent within African American literary and cultural discourse what Claudia Tate would call a "sanctioned social plot" of racial oppression--namely, the sexual degradation of enslaved black females by white slave masters and other white men (12). Because the latter narrative, to borrow another phrase from Tate, "safeguards readers' racial expectations" (14) by faithfully depicting a well-known black victimology narrative (albeit one that centers a black female rather than a black male), it successfully satisfies the group demand "that a black text explicitly represent [black readers'] lived experiences with racial oppression" (3). Put differently, the novel's "realistic" depiction of an enslaved woman's physical and sexual torture at the hands of her "owner" Rufus Weylin, and her eventual suicide, both of which are witnessed by the novel's modern-day narrator, distracts readers critical of literary and cultural narratives of interracial intimacy that deviate from conventional portrayals. These portrayals are often grounded in what scholars refer to as "surrogacy." In an invaluable essay titled "Representing Forbidden Desire: Interracial Unions, Surrogacy, and Performance," Diana Paulin defines surrogacy as "multiple levels of substitution in representations--white bodies standing in for black ones, romantic relationships standing in for social conflicts or even the past standing in for the present--that trouble the identities and subjects they depict as well as those they indirectly invoke" (417). I argue that by adopting this complex representational strategy for depicting consensual black/white desire (an approach Paulin ensures us yields "reconstructed models that revise and contextualize rather than replicate" that which they stand-in for), Butler's novel destabilizes and undermines key assumptions regarding the supposed causal relations between race, politics, and sexuality that have been a stubborn, if historically variable, feature of African American cultural discourse (417-18; added italics).

Even the most cursory reading of Kindred could not fail to recognize the deep anxiety that circulates in the novel around interracial sex and intimacy. Because of the narrative's unusual dual plot structure--with action taking place simultaneously in 20th-century Los Angeles and in 19th-century Maryland--this anxiety is both the same and different from what we might usually expect from a black-authored literary work of the late twentieth century. I contend that in Butler's novel, this anxiety, while linked historically to the forced sexual relations between enslaved women and white men in pre-Civil War America, actually has more to do with the experiences of the text's modern-day interracial couple and the difficulties they face as a result of oppositions to their relationship. In general, this opposition takes the form of remarks of anti-interracial bias that a handful of black and white peripheral characters direct towards Dana and Kevin Franklin, both separately and when they are together. The cumulative effect of these remarks introduces a palpable tension into the couple's relationship that they each hesitate to address. I argue further that the silence the couple exhibits around "race" when they are in their own time mirrors the silence around this subject that was characteristic of the entire nation following the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Scholars have since referred to the 1970s as the decade in which colorblindness first emerged as the dominant US philosophy around "race." (3) Hence, Dana's and Kevin's travels through time and space to the Weylin plantation open up an alternative cultural landscape where, covertly, the couple is able to confront issues having to do with the history of racial oppression and, in the process, tentatively begin the work of resolving the anxieties that are slowly undermining their marriage. Since Dana is not only the novel's protagonist but also its narrator, the anxiety that the novel inscribes around interracial sex may initially appear to be linked exclusively with her. However, closer scrutiny of the text reveals that as a contemporary white man, one whose wife is a black woman, Kevin is not totally immune to his own forms of anxiety on this matter. In fact, the quotation that serves as this paper's title is originally a question that Kevin cautiously poses to Dana just after she returns from her second journey into the past, and it gives readers a small hint of what his own concerns might be regarding his wife's repeated trips into an historical past where people whose complexions match his own regularly oppressed blacks with impunity. To explore such issues, I turn to the revisionist insights of contemporary marriage and family therapists and others who are trained in handling the identity concerns of interracially coupled men and women.

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"Do I look like someone you can come home to from where you may be going?": re-mapping interracial anxiety in Octavia Butler's Kindred

African American Review, Spring, 2007 by Guy Mark Foster

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