Inverting history in Octavia Butler's postmodern slave narrative

African American Review, Fall, 2004 by Marc Steinberg

Dana's trips back into time force her to use, perhaps not totally successfully, the tools of her modern-day knowledge so as to fill the perceived gaps of history. Karla F. C. Holloway writes that for Dana,

   the collision of the past and present is
   a shuffling between what is the objectivity
   of her essentially unrecovered
   past and the subjectivity of her contemporary
   life. The novel retrieves the
   past through a collision between the
   two dimensions. What Dana had read
   in family histories or had been told
   about her ancestry becomes mostly
   unusable when, in 1976, she is pulled
   back into her past, an 1813 plantation
   where her grandmother had been
   born. At this point she is faced with an
   immediate need to subjectify the experiences
   she had known only academically.
   (114)

The present has taught her enough to be equipped to survive the past, but she does not emerge unscathed. (6)

Early in the novel, Dana brings her pain to the present, returning with an ache in her back where Rufus's mother had hit her. Dana is unable to return unimpaired, for Butler's point is to make both her characters and her readers aware of how Americans, inevitably, live the slave past in the ostensibly free present. The author has said, "I couldn't really let [Dana] come all the way back. I couldn't let her return to what she was, I couldn't let her come back whole and that, I think, really symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn't leave people quite whole" (Kenan 498). Butler intends her statement to be read on several levels. Slavery is a physical condition--it affects the body on a base level; therefore it changes, subtly or corporeally, one's body (as well as one's perception of his or her body). Dana's loss of an arm is only one manifestation of a loss of wholeness. Psychically, Dana has been damaged. Her psychic damage reminds us that former slave authors, for all the rhetorical integrity of their narratives, must assuredly have suffered psychologically, as well. Initially, Dana is confused by her trips back. She feels less like a participant in history than a spectator of it, and describes herself and Kevin as being "observers watching a show ... actors" (98). But she soon recognizes herself as a genuine participant literally unable to distance herself or to discount her investment in the antebellum events that will determine her 20th-century corporeality. She exclaims, upon watching young black boys enact a game of slave bartering, "It's nineteen seventy-six shielding and cushioning eighteen nineteen for me. But now and then, like with the kid's game, I can't maintain the distance" (101). So suddenly, Butler contends, the mask of historical distance, the illusion of distance, can peel away to disclose the cliched "horrors of history" as the present reality.

Therefore, Dana's time travels have given her a unique historical awareness, yet they have also indelibly corrupted her present. Once returned to contemporary Los Angeles "for good," she can no longer trust casual distinctions between the past and the present. For instance, an elderly, harmless, good-natured neighbor becomes, because of her interest in gardening, a reminder of the cruel Margaret Weylin (115). Kevin returns from the plantation South with a faint accent that reminds Dana of Rufus and Tom Weylin (190). Dana says, "I felt as though I were losing my place here in my own time. Rufus's time was a sharper, stronger reality.... That was a stark, powerful reality that the gentle conveniences and luxuries of this house, of now, could not touch" (191). Butler thus demonstrates that antebellum US history has grievously contaminated and altered the present, and that, for Dana, the past becomes even more real than the present. At the end of the novel, Dana suggests that her arm is lost in the wall where she returns. She "looked at the spot where flesh joined with plaster, stared at it uncomprehending. It was the exact spot Rufus's fingers had grasped" (261). Dana has lost her arm in history; the hold of the past on the present is evident as Dana becomes a physical presence in both the past and the present. How can she transcend an era to which she physically still belongs? Butler re-writes history to inform us of the potential emotional/psychological harm done to those who survived slavery. One should note that Butler's writing suggests that emancipation did not necessarily mean freedom. The bindings of slavery cannot simply be shed by their physical absence.