I’d been foolish to hope to influence him” (122).ĭana tends to Rufus, and “after four days of freedom together. Dana counters, “Do you mean her husband?” and in her interior thoughts, admits that “Kevin had been right. She got so she’d rather have a buck nigger than me!” (122). Dana asks if he managed to rape Alice, and Rufus “looked away guiltily.” She asks him, “why would you do such a thing? She used to be your friend,” and he responds, “When we were little, we were friends. Now what are you going to do to repay us for saving your life?” (122). He would have if Alice and I hadn’t talked him out of it.

Rufus vehemently retorts, “What in hell are you talking about? You know Isaac Jackson did this to me!” Dana reminds him that “You raped a woman-or tried to-and her husband beat you up. Rufus threatens, “He’s going to pay!,” to which Dana responds by attempting to persuade Rufus to blame his injuries on a fight between drunken men. Learning that Isaac is enslaved, Dana advises them to run while she tends to Rufus, to mitigate the chance that they will be killed once Rufus regains consciousness.Īfter Alice and Isaac leave, Rufus awakens and asks Dana where they’ve gone. He tried to get Judge Holman to sell Isaac South to keep me from marrying him” (119). did he just grow out of the friendship or what?” Alice responds “Got to where he wanted to be more friendly than I did. Dana asks Alice, “wasn’t Rufus a friend of yours? I mean. But somehow, I had hoped for better from Rufus” (119).

In her private thoughts, Dana expresses that she “should have been used to white men preying on black women. Rufus was beaten by Alice’s husband, Isaac, after having assaulted Alice. His face was a lumpy mess, and he would be looking out of a couple of black eyes for a while” (121). In the chapter titled “The Fight,” Dana is once again transported to Rufus’s era. On the contrary, Rufus develops into an entitled, immature, and violent man. As Rufus ages, he does, in fact, assume more authority however, as Kevin suggests, he does not grow into a helpful person. After all, his environment will be influencing him every day you’re gone” (89). Kevin counters, “It still might not work. He’ll probably be old enough to have some authority when I come again. I’ll have a better chance of surviving if I stay here now and work on the insurance we talked about. After being transported with Dana to the Weylin plantation, Kevin asserts that he will not leave Dana alone to be harmed. In Kindred, Dana’s relationship with Rufus is inherently non-consensual because she is unable to consent to being summoned to Rufus’s era and is only transported back to her own era when faced with the threat of death. In “Saying ‘Yes’: Textual Traumas in Octavia Butler’s Kindred,” Marisa Parham asserts that “Butler immediately concretizes the uncanny sensation, as she makes the briefly unfamiliar domestic present double as the site of an unfamiliar domestic past, a slippery traversion made possible by the convergence of race, gender, and history-a convergence which, once revealed, resituates Dana’s home as a place of danger and vulnerability” (1321). In “Bloodchild”, Gan’s relationships with his mother Lien and T’Gatoi highlight how oppressive infrastructures limit marginalized peoples’ ability to consensually engage in relationships that respect their bodily agency. Dana, who is an interracially wed African American woman, is transported from her middle-class California life into enslavement in antebellum Maryland. In Kindred, Dana’s relationships with Rufus, her enslaver ancestor Alice, her enslaved ancestress and Kevin, her Caucasian husband illustrate the long-reaching impact of chattel slavery on African American people’s bodily agency and ability to safely engage in consensual, equitable, and loving relationships. Butler’s works convey the persevering implications and infrastructures of capitalistic cisheteropatriarchy that contribute to the commodification, erasure and subjugation of, and violence against, marginalized individuals and communities. Through the characters in Kindred and “Bloodchild,” alongside her manipulation of time and setting, Butler contextualizes moral dilemmas in multi-dimensional perspectives. In “Bloodchild,” Butler depicts the complex dynamics and intergenerational implications of colonial hegemony for the Tlic and Terran people. Kindred illustrates the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual impact that descendants of enslaved Africans experience, inherit, embody, and transcend. Butler’s characterizations and use of time travel permits readers to examine the implications of their own intersections of identity within existing and imagined societal infrastructures.

Transcendence: Facing Intergenerational Trauma through Octavia E.

Octavia e. butler transgender