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Fate And Destiny In Kindred By Octavia E. Butler

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Fate or Destiny? Fate is decided by forces out of our control, while destiny involves choices. Could you choose to love someone that takes your freedom? Could choose to stay with someone that takes your children away and sell them to demonstrate you are powerless? Those are some things that Alice must have asked herself in the novel Kindred, written by Octavia E. Butler. In this novel, we learn about a black woman called Dana and her “time travels” into an 1800s Maryland plantation, where she saves young Rufus, and learns that he is one of her ancestors. The other one is Alice; her fate is to have a child with Rufus that will be named Hagar and will be Dana’s grandmother. Although Alice had no control over her fate, ultimately, she took control …show more content…

Over the years, Alice starts to grow impatient with Rufus, she tells Dana one day: “The more you give him, the more he wants (…) I got to go while I still can – before I turn into just what people call me” (234). I think she starts to realize over time that Rufus would never let her go, he would never free her kids and her hate for him is not as it was before because of the things they had gone through together. She feels like losing her identity, not being able to recognize herself. Alice tells Dana “I got to go before I turn into what you are” (235). She refers to Dana as acting “white” turning against her own people. I think that over the course of time, the memory of Isaac was fading, and she felt guilty about it. Dana also noticed: “I got the feeling that Alice was keeping him happy- and maybe finally enjoying herself a little in the process. I guessed from what she had told me that this was what was frightening her.” (236). Alice was conflicted, life with Rufus and the kids were getting more comfortable, and she was getting used to being a slave, there is a passage in the book where Dana states that and I think that scared her. When Rufus took the kids away from her, I think that it was the last straw for Alice. The fact that she started to feel for Rufus, bothered her because she felt losing her

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The novel Kindred, written by the author Octavia E. Butler, was about a black woman named Dana Franklin traveling through time to save her ancestors to ensure her birth. Dana travels back to the 1800s, to the era known as the “Antebellum South.” The novel opens with a horrific scene of Dana having her arm crushed in the wall of her house and being taken to the hospital. The police question her about what happened, as they accuse her husband Kevin. Eventually Kevin is cleared as a suspect and is allowed to see his wife Dana.

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She planned everything out thoroughly and made it happen even though she got caught not even 10 minutes after she left (Butler, 170-174). Looking back in the book there are many instances where anyone can see the similarities between Alice and Dana, even in the most simplest ways it’s

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The novel Kindred by Octavia Butler examines issues of racism and slavery throughout America by depicting an African American woman named Dana who, through forced time travel, finds herself in the antebellum south. This story focuses on the violence, exploitation, and abuse of black people in the past. However, through Dana and Kevin's relationship, the novel speculates on the systemic impact racism has systemically on contemporary society. This is highlighted through the struggles present within their interracial marriage and how their dynamics parallel the racism present throughout the book. Kindred explores the ways in which systemic racism has affected and continues to impact society.

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In Kindred, Dana’s narrative entirely revolves around the slaveholding American narrative of Rufus which illustrates the second fiddle notion of Dana’s identities. The fact that she can only time travel when white man, Rufus, mortally needs her demonstrates that her entire story regardless of time is dictated by the White Man (Butler 12). Furthermore regarding time fragmentation, the imagery of Dana’s body being in a constant state of scars, bruises, and general crisis in 1976 and 1819 while Rufus’ body and life continues in a progressive linear state depicts how the white historical narrative continues to strut along time whereas the black, female, American narrative continues to be an unhealed wound discarded alongside white-American-male chronology. This notion is expressed when Dana puts her bodily pain to the side in order to sexually usher love and welcoming to Kevin’s five year journey in Antebellum south (Butler 190). Essentially Dana’s body politics do not exist in a state of paradox because through Butler’s textual portrayal of embodiment, she was and still remains as an

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