Review Of Octavia Butler's 'Antebellum Slavery'

Professor Coleman
English 0802
1 May 2012
Oppression and Resistance Through Kindred’s Story
Kindred tells the story of a 1970s African American woman traveling through time to an 1815 slave plantation. The author, Octavia Butler, portrays how the main character, Dana, uses resistance to survive in both time periods. She uses Dana to address the social and cultural issues of the Antebellum South and post-Civil Rights Movement. As African American woman, Butler was subjected to racism and oppression in her life, and translated her experiences into Dana’s character. The setting switches back and forth between both times as Dana narrates, painting a picture of slavery through her eyes better than any factual essay or lecture about the topic
In referring to slavery, Weinberg recalls that John Hope Franklin stated, “We should never forget slavery. We should talk about it every morning and every day of the year to remind this country” (Weinberg 3). Society cannot forget because abolishing slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment translated into Jim Crow laws, racism, and lynching (Weinberg 3). Despite the Civil Rights Movement, racism still existed in Dana’s time in the novel and even today. The aftermath of slavery requires African Americans, to resist its effects daily which the novel represented through Dana’s narration. She and Kevin go through a daily struggle of how their families’ view their interracial relationship. Kevin describes his sister’s reaction as, “She didn’t want to meet you, wouldn’t have you in her house – or me either if I married you.” (Butler 110). These views of African Americans stem from the negative way plantation owning whites abused blacks as slaves and viewed them as inferior. Dana also experiences the origins of the racism in her time when she exists in the Antebellum South through her time traveling. She becomes a slave herself and experiences the whippings slaves received (Butler 106-107). She has to resist this and her negative feelings until her job is done of preserving her family ties. As Franklin stated,
Octavia Butler’s background of being in the oppressed group gave her the ability to deal with the problems of oppression through her writing. She uses science fiction to create a time traveling plot where Dana experiences oppression in modern times and slave-owning times. Dana is able to describe her beatings and harsh experiences through firsthand encounters that truly hit home. Whether cruel treatment exists through racism of today, segregation of the sixties, or slavery of the 1800’s, resistance can take many forms and evolves as oppression changes. This problem will not go away in African American culture because the slave owning past has created a negative image that lives on through racism, but with powerful resistance novels like Kindred, it gives society