Saving Ourselves

“Let yourself pull away from it. That sounds like the best thing you can do, whether it was real or not. Let it go” (Butler 17). Kevin’s advice to Dana that she let go of the past and her inexplicable connection to Rufus is well-meant, but impossible. Not just because history seems to have a hold on Dana, but because history is something that no person can ever entirely let go. As the character of Childan demonstrated in The Man in the High Castle, humans are drawn to that which has a trace of history because in it we see traces of ourselves. All that has happened in ‘the past’ has somehow contributed to our sense of the present, to the world in which we have a role. It is the frame that gives our lives context and helps us to establish ourselves, whether we are conscious of it or not. Whether that past is one of triumph and progress or cruelty and inhumanity is irrelevant so long as it’s ours.

In collapsing the distance between the reader and Dana and using genuine history as opposed to alternate history, Octavia E. Butler plays with this sense of history. In a way, we are experiencing exactly what Dana is experiencing. We, as readers, are powerless to stop the time jumps, and must remain helplessly ted to Dana. We are also powerless to resist the pull of involvement with history. It is ours, it has shaped us, just as Dana hopes her personal history as a modern black woman will help shape Rufus in his own time. There is a fascination that all people have with where we’ve come from; we’re as much involved with our sense of ancestry as Dana is with her actual ancestor, Rufus. She fears losing her ancestor will cause her to die, and we fear that losing that sense of historicity will cause us to not exist as the selves we know.

(So this is a bit of a non sequitur, but has anyone seen Biggles: Adventures in Time? It features the same basic concept of a man going back to save his ‘time twin’ whenever he gets in trouble. It’s not a very good movie, but amusing nonetheless!)