I think we all sort of accept the idea that the 19th century setting in Kindred is much worse than the 20th century setting. We (through Dana) witness an obscene amount of cruelty, physical and emotional brutality and oppression. However, I have qualms with comparing justices across time; today in class I couldn't help but resist the idea that the antebellum south was all that different than modern times, especially when compared to the 1970's when social equality was regarded with even less importance than it is today. I don't mean at all to undermine the horrible practices of slave owners, but the fact is that similar behavior goes on to this day, not only around the world but even in our country, where we have supposedly evolved from our disturbing past.
Migrant workers, for example, are often worked past the point of exhaustion, paid nearly nothing, and given no legal rights- they work to survive, and though we don't hear about it in the news, are often beaten by their bosses (I was tempted to call them "owners"). A quick Google search will yield numerous accounts of literal modern slavery, right here in the U.S. Stories of workers being recruited from homeless shelters, promised pay, then given nothing (or close to it, definitely not enough to survive on) and locked into trailers with 10 or 15 other people at night. It's infuriating and frankly not much worse than what we read about in Kindred, at least on the Weylin plantation. This brutality, paired with the constant racism still directed towards Mexicans (and by default of our own ignorance, anyone with dark skin and a Spanish accent) hardly paints a pretty picture of race relations in the US, even when juxtaposed with the unsettling history of slavery that we are all uncomfortably aware of.
I honestly have a really hard time thinking that things have improved so much since the 19th century- maybe all that has changed is that we hear less about, or have just gotten really good at ignoring, the cruelty we exhibit. I think that was actually one of Octavia Butler's goals in writing Kindred- by the end of the novel, Dana and Kevin have both been given reminders of their time spent in the past (physical and emotional reminders in Dana's lost arm and Kevin's incapability to re-adapt to modern times) and as such will never be able to see their world as one of equality. They will constantly be reminded of racial and general social injustice that they experienced first hand, and that will change how the act in modern times. Butler is trying to make us realize as readers that we should not and, really, cannot turn our backs on suffering, but rather must try to understand and accept it. Ignorance may be bliss, but it's also the greatest sin I can think of. Food for thought.
Very good--and sobering--points. And I think this view is closely connected to Butler's own purposes in the novel. Dana's ironic labeling of the temp agency where she is assigned work as a "slave market" is only one way the novel encourages us to see connections and closeness rather than difference and distance between the 19th and 20th centuries--or to see that all kinds of superficial facts of daily life have changed, but that slavery has made an indelible mark on contemporary culture, and that the logic of work and disposable labor hasn't changed all that much (and you provide a range of sobering examples). As some of the panel presentations pointed out, the novel was written in response to the general tendency to view (to WANT to view) slavery as "ancient history"--by connecting the plot directly to Dana's bloodline, the novel insists that this seemingly distant era is all of our "kin" in that it sets the groundwork for the world we inhabit. (I mentioned it in class, but the Trayvon Martin case emerging right around the time we were reading about wandering armed self-appointed "patrols" of white men who accost suspicious-looking black men who are walking in public where they're not supposed to be made the parallel especially uncomfortable to contemplate.)
ReplyDeleteYeah, I was thinking about the slave market reference too. The Trayvon Martin comparison is so perfect.. it's incredibly disheartening to realize just how many of these comparisons we can make. It was hard not to turn this blog post into an angsty rant about modern society. I just read an article about American sex slaves and in particular one teenage girl who developed a strange relationship with her pimp that reminded me a lot of what was going on between Dana and Rufus. Sad coincidence.
Delete