Kindred Written Today

I assumed Kindred’s plot point of traveling back in time involuntarily to follow their ancestor through their life was common at first, since I had read a book with the same plot about the Japanese internment camps in 1945. It turned out though that the Japanese internment camp book was a direct adaptation of Kindred, but it still worked well for the plot. Even though the distance of the time travelling was much shorter, the social differences were still meaningful and interesting. In the same way, Kindred could be rewritten now as an examination on racial and gender dynamics in the 1970s from a 21st century perspective. 

In Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Kevin and Dana used each other’s company to ground themselves in the 1970s, distancing themselves from the 1830s by going on walks or talking in the safety of Kevin’s room. These safe 1970s bubbles don’t necessarily feel safe for us in 2025, though. When we read the book, we got annoyed at things Kevin said about race and gender, and the dynamics between the two felt foreign. Written 55 years ago, Kindred illustrated a world whose bounds of accessibility were much narrower. At the time, it was more or less rare to see an interracial couple and the woman would still be expected to assume traditional domestic chores. Our current social structures have changed and, while we still relate to Dana, we are distant from her way of living. A book written in the present day could use the same storyline but instead go back to the 1970s and we would be just as shocked by the racism that still persisted and was much less acknowledged. 

Kevin’s actions in particular led to this discomfort. Kevin wasn’t meant to be ignorant, but his behavior from the 21st century perspective feels off. He passes off the severity of slavery and assumes that Dana’s experience is like his: only difficult because of the lack of modern hygiene and other things he is used to. When the two are alone, she automatically assumes the responsibility of cleaning and putting his room together (Octavia Butler, 131). She takes on these traditional domestic chores that, placed in the context of her being a slave in the 1830s, feel familiarly oppressive. Dana is still trapped inside a system that has roots in the world of slavery in the 1830s. This makes her shame from walking out of Kevin’s room and getting winked at make sense; her role in her relationship with Kevin is, to some extent, domestic (Butler, 160). The social structures that exist in 1970 are normalized but, when placed in parallel with the 1830s, have those same themes of superiority for the white man. The ‘safe’ 1970s world is still not free from any racial or gender structures and Butler is conscious of that. 

Kindred written today could easily explore a time switch to the 1970s. While Kevin and Dana seem more or less modern, they were a rare interracial couple and many others would have held much stricter domestic roles and experienced more racism, providing a more extreme situation to contrast with 2025. These changing social structures are apparent in any piece of literature and make it hard for anything to really be timeless. However, it does seem that in 50 years or so a book could be written going back to the racist and misogynist backwards times of the 2020s.

Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Beacon Press, 1979.