Inverting history in Octavia Butler's postmodern slave narrative

African American Review, Fall, 2004 by Marc Steinberg

Nineteen-seventy-six--the storyline backdrop--provides for Butler an appropriate temporal context for the novel. The bicentennial was a celebratory time of reflection wherein many in the nation looked proudly upon its history and valiantly toward a prosperous future. The bicentennial setting, Kubitschek claims, "broadens the theme [of the novel], implying that the country itself must re-examine its history in order to have any hope of resolving contemporary racial conflicts" (28). Butler suggests that Dana will re-examine and re-live not only her experiences, but also the larger national implications of the past and contemporary forms of violence and oppression. Salvaggio notes that "what Dana comes to realize at the end of her journey is that her past will always be a part of her present--not that she is doomed to suffer its horrors, but that she will always bear the mark of her kindred" (33). While Dana's time traveling has apparently come to an end, the reader senses that her journey into the meaning of her raced ancestry is endless, that her life is now so inextricably wound with the slave past that the journey is an inborn part of her daily existence. Through a time travel mechanism, Butler creates an historical possibility of the perception of self (and how it might be affected by matters of possession and ownership). As in other neoslave narratives, we see a fictive universe where the weight of one's personal history of chattel slavery yields a persistent reflection upon the African American present. These novels force us to reconsider the limited yet compelling capacity of the slave narrative to tell, in temporal terms, the whole story of slavery.

Notes

(1.) The issue of whether Butler's novel can viably be called science fiction is of academic interest, but does not directly pertain to my study. Forms of the fantastic appear in many of the works of contemporary African-American novelists (Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison, for example). For further salient information on science fiction writers and, specifically, female science fiction writers, see Thelma J. Shinn, Michelle Erica Green, Butler's interview with Francis H. Beal (in which Butler claims not to write utopian science fiction), Scott Sanders, Welch D. Everman (who looks specifically at postmodern science fiction writers), and George McKay, who contends that science fiction is less "about science or the future than about fiction" (52).

(2.) For more on the ways in which Butler's text is reminiscent of the slave narrative in strategy and technique, see Robert Crossley's introduction to the novel. Crossley concentrates on the ways in which Kindred incorporates slave narrative strategies. See also Ruth Salvaggio, who explicitly calls Butler's novel "an American slave narrative" (36).

(3.) Adam McKible suggests that this is a control over language (233). He states that "the prefix E-denotes absence, negation, or exteriority, and the shortening of 'Edana' contradicts this negation" (233).

(4.) Yet early in the novel Dana compares Kevin and Tom Weylin, noting the similarity of their eyes.