"... lies like the truth"

My version of the book Kindred actually has an introduction section by Robert Crossley. One of the things he mentions in the first paragraph of the narrative is that time travel became necessary in the book because Octavia Butler wanted to recreate a first person slave memoir. The paragraph ends with the sentence, “Like all good works of fiction, [Kindred] lies like the truth” (pg. I). The book was essentially written to reveal the truth about slavery as experienced by an individual in the present world. Setting the book within the premise of time travel does add to it an element of intrigue. But time travel, being a physical phenomenon that has not yet been proved, also gives it an air of untruth to begin with. However, I feel that the emotional truth conveyed by a first person narrative is powerful enough to dismiss the skepticism elicited by scientific fantasy. Perhaps this is why Butler was willing to give up physical truths for the sake of emotional truth.

In the macro scale, Kindred lies like the truth because it narrates to us the first person account of slavery through an individual who isn’t actually a slave, but it’s the credibility of a first person account that makes our “stomach believe” the savagery of slavery.

Kindred also lies like the truth on several micro scales. We see several instances in the book where the protagonists have been thrust into their unnatural roles. For instance, the familial tie between Rufus and Dana gets blurred because Dana chooses “weak lies” in favor of the truth that would make Rufus “question [her] sanity” (28). However, we can immediately sense the kinship between the two. We can even sense a kinship between Tom Weylin and Dana when he tries to protect her from Mr. Franklin (Kevin). Even in their untruthful relationships, we sense the underlying truth.

As another example of unnatural roles, the husband and wife relationship between Kevin and Dana gets molded into that of a master and slave in antebellum South. We sense Dana’s insecurity in their unconventional relationship as an interracial couple when she is scared that “some part of this place would rub off on him” and “mark him somehow” (77, 78). She does not worry the same for herself, which implies that she thinks the environment will impact the two of them differently. She thinks that the once thrust into the world where the difference between whites and blacks is overstated, the differences between them, as individuals belonging to different races, would follow suit. Their unnatural roles reveal the truth about their hidden differences.