Inverting history in Octavia Butler's postmodern slave narrative

African American Review, Fall, 2004 by Marc Steinberg

Perhaps Dana's allegiance to Margaret is but one of many examples of masking in the novel. As can be seen in many slave narratives, duplicitousness was a necessary tool of usurping or undermining power for many slaves. Role-playing takes many raced and gendered forms in the novel, even to Dana's donning drag for one escape scheme. Most insidiously, Dana plays the role of Kevin's slave, but risks becoming accustomed to that role. Green notes that "Dana is ... horrified to learn that, treated as an enslaved black woman, she will act like one" (183). Dana reflects on the relative ease with which the mask molds to the face when she perceives that "Kevin and I became more a part of the household, familiar, accepted, accepting. That disturbed me too when I thought about it. How easily we seemed to acclimatize" (97). She later notes that she "never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery" (101). While Dana must play the role of the slave, she also acts as a double for Alice, who doesn't have the "luxury" of extricating herself from her predicament. Butler constructs the enslaved woman and her descendant, Alice and Dana, as "two halves of the same woman" (229). Alice points out other people's awareness of their similarities; however, she also contends that Dana seems to impersonate whites--an accusation apparently based on Dana's speech and education. Twice in the novel--once by Sarah, once by Alice--Dana is labeled a "white nigger" (160, 165). Such accusations point to the difficulty of maintaining a false identity in any era. It also suggests the potential racialized betrayal--the antithesis of the essentialist assumption of a racialized community--that remains a political issue many generations since the end of slavery.

Possibly Butler's most significant deployment of role-playing concerns the doubling of Kevin and the oppressor. Butler usually mirrors Kevin in the image of Rufus. (4) Perhaps it is this conflation of identities that leads Dana nearly to forgive Rufus, even when he is on the verge of raping her. Throughout Kindred, Dana too strongly connects her husband with her enslavers. Crossley notes that throughout "the novel Butler ingeniously suggests parallels between Rufus Weylin and Kevin Franklin: their facial expressions, their language, even after a time their accents merge in Dana's mind so that at times she mistakes one for the other" (xix). And Salvaggio points out that "Dana's new perspective reminds her that simply by virtue of his color and sex, Kevin is automatically aligned with that oppressive society" (33-34). It takes Dana a lifetime as a black woman and a trip back into bondage to realize fully the intractable persistence of a white, male-dominated hegemony; of course, at the crucial moment, Dana is lucid enough to distinguish Kevin from Rufus, and she kills Rufus with a knife.

The acquisition of literacy and writing skills--direly important to so many ex-slaves and in the slave narratives--becomes another mask to wear in the novel and again connects Butler's text to this foundational genre. In the antebellum South, Kevin plays the role of a writer who has purchased Dana; he masks, then, a role of great power. In "real life" Los Angeles, Dana herself is a part-time writer. Shortly after meeting Kevin, Dana informs him of her morning writing activities with heavy-handed irony, "what would a writer be doing working out of a slave market?" (53). Whatever pleasures and freedom she might associate with everyday writing are certainly fore-stalled into the stuff of survival when she finds herself enslaved, for she might have to forge papers to pass as a free black woman. In one act of subterfuge, she keeps a journal in shorthand, ironically utilizing a kind of conventional female writing that she had learned in secretarial school. This "secret" writing provides an outlet for her to write without discovery. She also masters another form of secret writing--a writing that is for herself alone and thus for her peace of mind. She covertly writes while in the master's library, then always destroys what she has composed, refusing to allow her words to be manipulated by others, even by Kevin, her "writer" husband-cure-master.