"Kindred" by Octavia Butler

This is the very first novel we read for this course, and it has quickly become a favorite.

Butler combines genres of science fiction, African-American literature, slave narratives, and romance to create a truly unique and pervasive work.

Within this genre combination there are several themes at work here, but one that I find particularly intriguing is the notion of an embodied relationship to history.

This has ties in spirituality, epigenetics, empathy, psychology, and complicates our ideas of the individual and the collective.

Dana experiences her own history in a way that she cannot forget. 

She loses an arm to that history, and that isn't something easily forgotten. The loss of a physical piece of your body is one that a person must learn to cope with psychologically as well as physically. 

One must relearn the physical movements that they've known their entire life, must become dependent upon someone else to help with certain actions, and even give up hobbies or certain ways of expressing oneself. 

Dana can never read a book the same way.

She can never grip a book with both hands, or hold the book with one hand and turn the page with the other.

Dana loves books.

The novel begins with her unpacking books, throughout the novel she searches for books to help her through her experiences, and at the end she and Kevin go through old records like newspapers to find answers to the past. 

In the Epilogue, Dana cannot just move on from what she has experienced; she must relearn how to live in the world, and is required to view every action with additional thought.

She must perpetually question her ability and restrictions for movement in a way that is really not so different from the restrictions of her movement during her time in the antebellum south.

She is restricted from reading, from carrying maps, from teaching others how to read, from leaving the plantation, from doing any action without the additional thought of her status as a slave.

Kevin can move on from the past in a way that Dana is literally handicapped from doing.

He didn't experience the same level of questioning his mobility as Dana, save for the point where he recalls helping to free slaves. In that instance, his mobility would be highly restricted, but not (necessarily) at the cost of his own body--instead, at the cost of the escaping slaves' bodies.

This difference in their opposing relationships to history divide Kevin and Dana's experience at the level of the body to the extent where even the empathetic or psychological bonds cannot quite bridge them together. 

The novel ends with a layering of loss that is complex and multifaceted, and leaves the reader simultaneously wanting more and wondering...what if?