Building up on the discussion we had in class regarding the similarities between the book and the author Octavia Butler’s life, I wanted to mention one other thing from the introduction section in my book. Butler’s mother was a housemaid and she accompanied her mother on her job at times when she couldn’t afford a babysitter. Witnessing her mother work as a servant was a scarring experience for Butler. On this, the author of the introduction, Robert Crossley, writes,
“Even then she observed the long arm of slavery; the degree to which her mother operated in white society as an invisible woman and, worse, the degree to which she accepted and internalized her status.”
This statement had helped me reason why Butler chose her protagonist from 1976 rather than the 1800’s. The purpose of the novel was not just to show the atrocities of slavery as it existed in early 1800’s but also to insinuate that it still lurks in our society.
Butler’s mother must have been a housemaid during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s and this reminded me of the recent movie ‘The Help.’ The movie was about black women working as housemaids in white communities in the 1960’s. These women were more than just maids- they were caregivers and second mothers to the children in the family. Yet, at the end of the day they were treated as lower beings. One of the focal points of the movie is The Home Health Sanitation Initiative that legally forbids the housemaids to use the toilet that the family members use.
The plot of the movie is centered on a fresh college graduate from a white family who decides to interview these women and voice their opinions. However, we see at the beginning of the movie that most of these women are reluctant to stand up against the injustice for the fear of being fired from their jobs, their only means of supporting their family. Similarly, in Kindred, the slaves of the Weylin family are afraid of escaping to freedom for the fear of ruthless physical abuse. The fear of the housemaids in The Help is not as severe as that of the slaves Kindred. Yet, in both situations, we can see how the weak members of the society were feared into accepting their positions in a system that had become comfortable in justifying superiority as human beings based on skin color. The submissive acceptance of their positions is what made the slaves in Kindred and the housemaids in The Help both internalized their statuses. Similarly, the “invisibility” of the slaves and that of the housemaids arises from the fact that they are both unresponsive to the kind of injustice that seems unacceptable to us.
I feel like this statement reflects my take on the novel. At some point in history, slavery was deeply embedded in the society; it was a comfortable part of the system, a part of the body. And even after slavery was uprooted, it’s shadow endured in the society. I felt that perhaps this is the reason Butler chose to leave Dana’s arm lingering in the antebellum South- to depict the painful extension of slavery’s arm from the 1800’s to the 1960’s.
It's easy to look at Rufus and Tom Weylin and call them products of their time. Tom Weylin had internalized the notion of slavery and his role as a slaveowner, and through brutal discipline and subjugation of his own son passed down that lifestyle of desperate control to Rufus. I am tempted to ask how much our time period has influence over our perspective of reality, whether we can separate the moral codes of human beings as individuals from their environment, but the real question is beyond that.
ReplyDeleteAfter all, subjugation is not just a product of Rufus's time. As you said, we have internalized our own forms of enforced servitude. The main thing that has changed is that the servitude of the past is now obvious to us. The oppression of the present is as subtle to us as the immorality of slavery was to many slaveowners.
It is through offering an outside perspective, bringing us outside of the limitations of our society and vision of reality, that we can possibly reimagine the injustice of the world. Believing that we are now at the objective point of time, able to see all of the moral failings of our predecessors without any blind spots ourselves, traps us.
It will be an eternal process, awakening ourselves to the flaws in our own vision and hence allowing ourselves to war against evil. Literature, like Kindred --the mode of examining ourselves -- is a powerful weapon in this battle.