While reading Kindred, I was deeply disturbed by the
violence in the novel. From the first time Dana was transported to the past, I
knew it was not going to be pretty. While Dana attempted to resuscitate Rufus,
Rufus' mother was so quick to start beating her. As soon as Tom Weylin came over,
he immediately pointed his rifle to Dana's head. Is this an accurate representation
of people in the South??? Maybe I give people more credit than they deserve,
but I like to think that Southerners in this time period were a little nicer to
strangers.
Of
course, then the fact that Dana was an African American came into the picture.
But I still found it hard to believe Rufus' parents had such an ingrained
hatred of Africans that they wanted to harm the first African they saw. This
made it even more shocking when Dana witnessed the attack at Alice's house.
White men just came to Alice's house and threw her parents out, humiliating and
physically abusing them.
After
reading this I NEEDED to know if Butler was writing the truth and had done
research on the time period. Butler was going too far with her depictions of white Southerners and I would not become invested in a book that was a lie. But I found that she actually went to Maryland to
research slavery and her goal in writing this book was:
"The idea
really was to make people feel the book. That’s the point of taking a modern
day black person and making her experience slavery, not as just a matter of
one-on-one but going back and being part of the whole system."
Suddenly the gruesome writing made
sense. Even though I was disturbed with what I was reading, Butler did her job-
I felt what it was like to be a slave. And just like in The Things They Carried, as if we keep going in circles, it didn't
matter if her descriptions of events were true because all that mattered were
the emotions the reader came out with. So her stories may not be accurate, but does it matter if I come out with an understanding of what it was like to be a slave?
The circulatory nature of our readings is pretty insane. Just the other day in class, Pippa was discussing her hypothetical thesis for The Man in the High Castle when she touched, without saying the phrase, on the concept of dynamic tension. It's pretty cool to see these texts that are so disparate in style, tone, and subject to thematically connect in such a strong manner.
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