Time Travel in Kindred
When I first heard from other people in class that Kindred had a lot of time traveling, I was preparing myself for a somewhat futuristic sci-fi novel. I was obviously wrong, but I also wondered why Octavia Butler would use a device like time travel to begin with if she didn’t intend on emphasizing it. I wondered if there was any other less obvious purpose. Most importantly, time travel forces slavery to be treated as a reality. When reading retellings of slavery, it doesn’t feel that immersive. Most readers today haven’t gone through or witnessed anything comparable to the atrocities committed during slavery which creates a bit of a disconnect. The reader is still able to comprehend the weight of what happened, but it doesn’t feel real. By placing Dana as a person from the modern era directly into the time, it feels like the reader is navigating with Dana. We hear her thoughts as someone not from the time, and all we know is what she knows. By positioning Dana and the reader in the...