The Mark of the Past on the Present
Throughout Kindred, Dana is thrown into an insane situation that she must quickly adapt to in order to survive. An insane situation which is the reality of slavery in America. I believe that the marks left on Dana and Kevin during their time in the past symbolize the impact slavery has on the modern world.
When Dana first finds herself in the 1800s, she understandably carries a lot of 19th-century influence with her. She’s appalled and disgusted when she sees the way slaves are treated. She also physically feels sick when she witnesses the scene of Alice’s family being dragged out of their house and whipped. However, she slowly becomes numb or, in some way, used to the horrid treatment because that’s what’s expected of the time. She’s even ridiculed by Alice for being at the beck and call of Margaret later in the book. Due to the extended periods of time Dana and Kevin spend back in the 1800s, they also find themselves considering the Weylin plantation as “home”. There are also immediate effects that show on Dana, such as her mistaking Kevin for Tom Weylin.
Dana and Kevin also have a hard time adjusting to their previous life in 1976, even though they spend comparatively less time in the past than they have in the 19th century. Dana is constantly on edge as she might return to a more than hostile environment at any moment, and is left with the trauma of whatever horrid injustice and the terrible beatings she’s endured in the past. But even though Dana is the one who is “directly” affected by slavery, she also realizes that the past had an impact on Kevin, mentioning “His white skin had saved him from much of the trouble I had faced, but still, he couldn’t have had an easy time” (191). He is in an almost trance-like state when he returns and says that he “can’t feel anything” (194).
Besides the countless psychological challenges, Dana and Kevin are both left physically scarred by slavery. Dana is whipped, and I think it’s symbolic that the wounds don’t have time to heal before she’s thrown right back to the Weylins. Kevin comes back with a scar on his forehead, and we can’t forget what happens to Dana’s arm at the end of the book.
I believe that Dana’s and Kevin’s experiences are physical embodiments to parallel how the slavery era shapes our world today. Such a brutal time doesn’t just disappear into nothing, and the prevalency of the wounds and experiences brought on by the time-traveling aspect of the book shows that the impacts of slavery are a lot more prominent than we realize.
I love your last paragraph of this blog post. In class, we talked a lot about the symbolism of Dana losing her arm. I think this interpretation definitely came up, that it is a physical representation of all the emotional trauma she faced from being placed in slavery. An ever-lasting reminder that her experiences were real. Connecting that back to things like the 1619 project and what this means in terms of the scars of slavery on the entire nation is very smart.
ReplyDeleteThis whole scenario seems like a really scary one to go through, and Butler definitely invokes that emotion in the readers. I like the idea that Dana's permanent physical and mental trauma from the past represents the trauma of slavery. It is also interesting to see that Dana lost an arm from this fiasco, but she never did anything to cause the time travel. This represents the sad truth that most slaves do not do anything that leads them to become slaves - they are forced into it by outside factors. Great post!
ReplyDeleteI think you are right. A scar on your back you may feel but I don't know that Dana would be thinking about it always. However, a missing limb is a permanent reminder of this trauma all day, every day. I think it is particularly important to note that with missing limbs, Butler opens the idea of phantom limbs, the hold that slavery has on her that only she can feel.
ReplyDeleteAnd if we follow the idea that Dana as time-traveler is also a figure for the historian or historical novelist, we can also observe that merely immersing oneself in this history, truly confrontng it, contemplating it in all its traumatic aspects, also will not "leave us whole." There is trauma in the work of the historian, in other words--and there are indeed cases where historians and artists/writers who engage the past through topics like genocide and slavery suffer present-day psychological trauma from the effort. Dana's trauma is more physical and visible, matching the physical nature of her encounter with the past. But she maybe also reflects the emotional wounds that the author herself suffered, doing the research and imaginative work to produce this novel.
ReplyDeleteHi, I agree with you that Dana's own scars and the affect that her time in Maryland had on her is also very indicative of how America has been scared by slavery. Firstly, America's entire economy and the prosperity we enjoy today was built on the exploitation of free labor that occurred during slavery. There's also essentially a caste system today, that still punishes black and brown and poor people, something that is rooted in slavery. Even if slavery was abolished over a century ago, America still has these scars that it's not been able to heal from. Nice job!
ReplyDeleteThese are great examples of how slavery continues to shape not only our world, despite being abolished over a century ago. We talked a lot about Dana's arm in class, and how it symbolized her having to leave a piece of herself in the past. On the flip side, she comes home with this brutal injury (and a lot of trauma), which is the mark that the slavery era has left on her after she'd spent so much time in the past.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree that the physical symbolism Butler used to show the effects of slavery on Dana and Kevin is very impactful. I do wish that she had given a bit more time to explain Kevin's changes after his five years. I think it could have been a strong message to show more detail of how Dana and Kevin struggled to adapt back to their time after spending so much in Rufus'. Nice post!
ReplyDeleteThis is a really insightful post! I like the parallel you draw between the lasting trauma, both physical and psychological, that Dana endures, and the larger-scale impacts of slavery on society as we know it today. Despite the supernatural element of Dana's travels back and forth through time, I think you could argue they echo the dynamics of slavery in other ways as well--in particular, with the idea that she's being "kidnapped" from her home into an alien world that she must quickly adjust to to survive, and that she's yanked back basically at the whims of Rufus.
ReplyDeleteI love your analysis on the impact the time travel had on Dana and Kevin, especially the last paragraph. Dana and Kevin both spent most of their lives in the 20th century and grew up in the influence of the culture of their time period, but their time travelling has such a major impact on the way they see life. It goes to show how much slavery was able to affect two individuals in such a short period of time, even as they were allowed to escape and go back to a safer time. On a large scale, slavery completely shaped the power dynamics in America and has majorly contributed to the lasting effects of systemic racism that continue to this day. Great post!
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