Inverting history in Octavia Butler's postmodern slave narrative

African American Review, Fall, 2004 by Marc Steinberg

Dana finally cannot escape or free herself from the past. She even, at the very end of the novel, returns to Maryland to symbolically stomp on the graves of the oppressor. The actual remnants of the past are gone as slaves had set fire to the Weylin house, for Dana's protection. Dana achieves a painful yet symbiotic, mutually beneficent relationship with the past. She helps those in the past survive through her enlightened knowledge (for instance, she teaches her ancestors how to survive malaria), while they help her survive by allowing her to be born and providing her with a more complex historical perspective.

While Dana has experienced the reality of history, she also learns about its instability. Although many slave narrators argue for literacy as the vital means of escape from physical and mental bondage, Dana's literacy becomes both an asset and a liability. Whereas book knowledge and writing skills allow Dana to forge papers and instruct Rufus, these abilities greatly antagonize Tom Weylin, his father. According to Beverly Friend, Dana's "knowledge of history is no help and only stands her in good stead by preventing her from killing Rufus until he has raped her black great-grandmother, assuring the inception of Dana's family tree" (55). Dana's knowledge of history and literacy may be necessary for her survival in antebellum Maryland, but it is not necessarily an absolute good. The narrators of antebellum slave narratives, of course, did not suggest forgetting or denying their experiences as bondpeople, but they often presented an ideal scenario wherein the ex-slave becomes literate and transcends his or her experiences in bondage. Early in the novel Kevin offers Dana stereotypically flawed advice about her trips back in time; he advises her condescendingly to "pull away from it.... That sounds like the best thing you can do, whether it was real or not. Let go of it" (17). Butler thus condemns the naive admonitions of the historically privileged.

Letting go of the past becomes an implausible option for Dana, who must not only confront the past but also assume responsibility for potentially altering what has already taken place. We see this most vividly when Rufus finds her 20th-century book on slavery. Dana is tenuously positioned; with the slave book she could do great damage, hampering the later efforts of such historically significant figures as Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and Nat Turner. Understanding the precariousness of history, she tears the book into pieces and throws it onto a fire, all the while thinking of "Repressive societies" and "Nazi book burnings" (141). History and recollection may, we learn from the novel, greatly differ for people, individually and collectively, according to our respective cultural experiences and social locations. When Dana explains that a few hours in 1976 equals years in the 1800s, Weylin claims, "who in hell said you were an educated nigger? You can't even tell a decent lie. Six years for me is six years for you!" (200). For the unburdened oppressor, history can be a simple, linear concept. But for Dana, "history" has been forever complicated by the instability of the past, by the integration of past with present, and by the inability of the past fully to alter what takes place in the present.