Not Enough of the Past Feminist Revisions of Slavery in Octavia E.Butler’s Kindred

Haile Gerima's 1993 film Sankofa confronts the legacies of slavery, highlighting the ways the past constructs the present, by cinematically transporting its viewers to that era of human bondage. Indeed, the word sankofa is an Akan word that means "one must return to the past in order to move forward." The film opens with the protagonist, a contemporary African American fashion model named Mona, on a high fashion shoot at Ghana's Cape Coast Castle, formerly a holding site for kidnapped Africans before their one way departure through the "door of no return" to transatlantic slavery. It is obvious that Mona has forgotten her history as she happily poses for the photographer, seemingly detached from and oblivious to the implication of the historical context of her surroundings. Inside the castle, the spirits of the ancestors appear before her admonishing her to remember. Mona, along with the film's viewers, is then transported through time and space to a site of North American chattel slavery. This journey affords Mona, and the viewers, the opportunity to remember and to reclaim what she, and perhaps they, have forgotten or are in danger of forgetting: their "ancient properties" (Morrison 305). (1) The film's primary themes are the critical need for recovering and righting history, as well as the necessity of understanding the powerful connections between the past, present, and future. (2) While Gerima's film inaugurated a cinematic trend in the 1990s of presenting the history of slavery from the perspective of the enslaved, most notably the movies Amistad (1997) and Beloved (1998), a number of contemporary African American women writers had already done so in their novels. (3) In particular, science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler creates in her fourth novel, Kindred (1979), a dialectic between two specific historical moments in American history: the period of chattel slavery and the richly symbolic bicentennial year of 1976. When Mona, Gerima's protagonist, travels to the past in order to learn about the history she has forgotten or never knew, the audience does so as well. Likewise, when Butler's twentieth-century protagonist travels to antebellum Maryland, she learns how the past shaped and continues to shape the present. Butler's readers also learn the same lesson. Employing the device of time travel, like filmmaker Gerima, Butler offers, from a feminist perspective, a meditation on the nature of American freedom by creating a metaphoric Middle Passage between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Kindred, a novel which has not yet received a great deal of critical attention, Butler offers a bridge between the past and the present through the time travels of her heroine, Edana (Dana) Franklin, a twentieth-century African American woman. Dana's return to the past brings to mind the African's voyage of no return. "In her experience of being kidnapped in time and space," Robert Crossley writes, "Dana recapitulates the dreadful, disorienting, involuntary voyage of her ancestors" (xi). Butler certainly signifies on the nineteenth-century female emancipatory narrative, specifically Harriet A. Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). (4) Examining the generic affinities between Butler's narrative and the emancipatory narratives, Sandra Y. Govan observes, "Kindred is so closely related to the experience disclosed in slave narratives that its plot structure follows the classic patterns with only the requisite changes to flesh out character, story, and action" (89). While Govan is accurate in her observation, it seems to me that Butler does more than signify on the substance and structure of the emancipatory narrative in her revision. (5) In what follows, I explain how Butler engages and revises the dominant themes of the nineteenth-century female emancipatory narrative--specifically, female sexuality, motherhood, individualism, and community--as she interrogates the construction and nature of freedom for a contemporary audience. …