A familial bond often allows us to forgive more than we would from a friend or stranger. She talks about how she thinks of them as her siblings, and they are, in fact, her kin. What similarities do Dana and Rufus share, if any? How about Dana and Alice? Question 4ĭana forgives Rufus and Alice a great deal: Alice her verbal abuse towards Dana herself, Rufus his physical abuses towards others. Dana remarks on similarities between Rufus and Alice. “Kindred” and “kinship” can be used to denote similarity or a feeling of “like calls to like” (to steal a phrase from Leigh Bardugo). However, are there other types of relationships with power imbalances that we still consider just today or even sometimes positive? Question 3 Is this a “time travel book”? How would you characterize it for a potential reader? Question 2Ī master/slave relationship can never be anything other than an imbalance of power. Octavia Butler seems to blow right past these concerns, as does her main character. Time travel narratives often deal with trying to change the past significantly or not change the past at all (for fear of those dreaded paradoxes). Kindred is an excellent book that raises lots of interesting (and tough) questions about the delineation of power, our responsibility toward our kin, and the ways in which our modern worldview has altered our perspective on the historical realities of slavery.ĭiscussion questions below the cut! Question 1 While the book itself is far from an uplifting read, we were both glad to have read something from this wonderful author at last. We’d been meaning to try Octavia Butler’s writing for a long time, and finally made it in reading this book. Yet each time Dana’s sojourns become longer and more dangerous, until it is uncertain whether or not her life will end, long before it has even begun. After this first summons, Dana is drawn back, again and again, to the plantation to protect Rufus and ensure that he will grow to manhood and father the daughter who will become Dana’s ancestor. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned across the years to save him. Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South.
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