Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Why have I never come across this book before? Why had I never heard of this author? Octavia E Butler, who died in 2006, is best known for her science fiction novels, but for 'Kindred' alone her name should be on everyone's lips!
This story feels so modern and relevant that it's difficult to believe it was published back in 1979. A young African American woman, Dana, living with her husband in California, suddenly develops a strange and terrifying ability to travel back in time to mid 19th Century Maryland where her great-grandfather, a slave owner named Rufus Weylin, is struggling to deal with his physical and mental wellbeing in the years preceding the Civil War. As a black woman in the ante-bellum South, Dana is not only in constant physical danger, but also has to find a way to adjust temporarily to the life she's expected to lead on the Weylin plantation as she struggles to understand how and why she's constantly being called upon to help this complex man, both vulnerable and brutal, on whose life her own existence depends.
Rufus Weylin is a man of his time, and even though he comes to accept Dana's explanation for her sudden appearances and disappearances, and to grasp that she comes from 'another time', he's incapable of treating her as an equal. On one trip Dana's (white) husband Kevin is yanked out of 20th century California with her, and his parallel but different process of adjustment to life on the Weylin estate is described with remarkable psychological insight.
Butler pulls no punches in describing the physical and mental torment of enslaved life, and the psychological screens erected in order to survive and cope. At one stage Dana laments, 'I never realised how easily people could be trained to accept slavery!' - and she's talking about both blacks and whites.
Dana's complex and fragile relationship with her white ancestor is terrifying to watch as it unfolds towards a brutal climax, as is his relationship with the black woman who is destined to become her great-grandmother. It's really visceral stuff, and the reader, like Dana herself, can only reach for the comfort of foreknowledge, with the heroism of Harriet Tubman, the upheaval of the Civil War and the eventual abolition of slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 just three decades away as the story ends.
A sensitive and harrowing exploration of a period of history that's undeniably shameful, but also far from straightforward.



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