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The figuration of bodies in Octavia Butler's texts is largely dependent upon a narrative history and the memories that constitute the past and present. Octavia Butler's narrative allows us to imagine how the past can exist in the present and how the present can be manifested into the past by way of time travel. This is demonstrated most clearly in the narrative of Kindred (1979), which tells of a twentieth-century black woman who must (re)live certain aspects of the lives of her ancestors in order to insure her present existence. In this novel, slavery determines the value of black and white bodies in nineteenth-century ante-bellum America and continues to influence their value in the twentieth century.
The historical fact around which Kindred revolves is the American institution of slavery and its practice of treating African (black) bodies as chattel. To read of such a peculiar institution in a history book is far from experiencing its horrific reality. Even to remember slavery first-hand as a participant cannot compare to reliving the actual experience. Fortunately, the boundaries of time separate our present world from that of the past. In Kindred, however, Butler disrupts laws of time and physics. By taking the protagonist, Dana, back to ante-bellum Maryland, Butler bridges the past and present and blurs boundaries of physics and history. The story distorts the historical time-line of Dana's past and present so that it is non-linear.
In the novel, this disruption happens in order that we and Dana might do the impossible and undesirable: travel to a time in American history where black bodies were not recognized in law or general custom as possessed of value other than as goods to be bought and sold. In Butler's "time machine," history is transformed, by way of the reader's imagination, into a present reality so that we might see, through Dana's eyes, exactly how humans were magically turned into beasts. Such an experience exceeds memory obtained from or produced by the reading of history books or second-hand slave narratives (second-hand because the ex-slaves themselves have written their stories from memory formulated after their bondage). Dana's mode of re-experiencing is, in the phenomenological sense, even more radical than such a narrative because she is made to live an experience that...