"A Grim Fantasy": Remaking American History in Octavia Butler's "Kindred"
Author(s): Lisa Yaszek
Source: Signs, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Summer, 2003), pp. 1053-1066
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Lisa Yaszek
"A Grim Fantasy": Remaking American History in Octavia
Butler's Kindredctavia Butler's novel Kindred ([1979] 1988) begins at the end of an
adventure that has left her protagonist, the aspiring young African-American writer Dana, trapped in a wall of her own house-not
boarded inside the wall, not even confined, really, but standing with herarm somehow fused into the actual studs and sheetrock of the wall. Toa certain extent, Dana's confusion with this situation parallels that of thereader who opens Kindred expecting to read a historical novel of slavelife only to find herself confronted with images that seem more appropriate
to science fiction: How did Dana get there? How is this even possible?These personal and seemingly impossible questions become those of everyclass of people who find themselves, as Dana does, not simply on thewrong side of history but trapped and maimed by a history stranger andcrueler than they have been taught to imagine.In this essay, I examine Butler's novel as a kind of memory machinethat answers these seemingly impossible questions by using science fictiondevices to re-present African-American women's histories. One of the fewprominent black authors in science fiction, Butler is often lauded for herdepictions of future worlds where advanced technologies quite literallymediate race and gender.' At the same time, her work is increasinglyrecognized as participating in African-American traditions of historicalfiction.2 In particular, scholars identify Kindred as an important precursorto the neo-slave narratives created by authors such as Toni Morrison andSherley Anne Williams in the 1980s and 1990s.3 Although these scholarsalways acknowledge Butler's primary allegiance to science fiction, theyrarely pursue the impact this might have on her historical fiction. Yet sucha discussion seems #p#分頁標(biāo)題#e#留學(xué)生dissertationfruitful. If one of the goals of African-American historicalfiction is to interrogate how "race," "gender," and even "history"See Sargent 1975; Friend 1982; and Armitt 1996.
2 See Govan 1986 and McKible 1994.
3 See esp. Beaulieu 1999 and Rushdy 1999.
[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2003, vol. 28, no. 4]
? 2003 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2003/2804-0002$10.00
1054 I Yaszekemerge through interlocking sets of representations, then it would seemimperative to examine how authors who work in multiple genres mightbring the representational strategies of those genres to bear on individualtexts. To this end, in the following pages I will show how Butler participatesin Afro-feminist projects to interrogate the relationship betweenhistorical memory and commercial culture by appropriating and adaptingthe commercial form of science fiction itself.Published in 1979, Kindred emerged at the end of two decades ofintense debate over the representation of African-American history.Spurred on by the grassroots work of civil rights, feminist, and new leftactivists in the 1960s, scholars in the U.S. academy "began to appreciatehow 'history' was made not solely by the imperial powers of a nation butalso by those without any discernable institutional power" (Rushdy 1999,
4). This led to certain changes in the production of scholarly and officialhistories as academics pursued research projects geared to acknowledge
"America" as the dynamic product of complex negotiations between peopleof diverse races, classes, and genders. In particular, with the establishmentof a black power intellectual presence in the academy, the studyof American history also became the study of African-American history,and new historical sources-especially slave testimonials and narratives-provided the foundation for more inclusive models of memory.Of course, official modes of memory were not the only-or even theprimary-ones under scrutiny at this cultural moment. The 1960s and1970s saw the dawn of a new commercial culture, marked especially bythe rapid proliferation of a national (and even global) mass media.4 AsAfrican Americans began entering media-related fields in significant numbers
(and as black market shares grew and black intellectuals turned theircritical gazes on the mass media), commercial institutions found themselves
scrambling to adjust. The complex results of this adjustment wereperhaps most evident in the newest and most rapidly spreading of these
institutions: television. While stereotypical black advertising figures such
as Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben continued to haunt the airwaves throughout
the 1970s, these stock characters were countered by a new kind of
commercial advertisement that drew on the language of civil rights and
black power movements. For instance, in its award-winning 1971 "Buy#p#分頁標(biāo)題#e#
the world a Coke" campaign, Coca-Cola offered the American public a
4 For general discussions of this proliferation and its impact on American culture, see
Leiss, Kline, and Jhally 1986 and Jameson 1991. For a more specific discussion of how the
new commercial culture affected people of color, see Hogue 1996.
S I G N S Summer 2003 I 1055
http://www.400190.com/dissertation_writing/linguistic/utopian vision of racial equality through its depiction of well-groomed,
racially diverse adolescents earnestly telling viewers that they'd "like to
buy the world a Coke / To keep it company" (Rutherford 1994, 48).
Meanwhile, McDonald's paid tribute to black women juggling work with
marriage and motherhood by encouraging them to "take a little break
today at McDonald's" with their families (Kern-Foxworth 1994, 163).
Such images offered the public very specific ways of understanding and
remembering American history. By emphasizing the egalitarian nature of
contemporary race relations, they implicitly placed the struggle for equality
in a past that seemed to bear little or no direct relation to the present.
Furthermore, by asking viewers to understand this seemingly clean break
with the past as a product of corporate benevolence, such images implicitly
equated social and political equality with equality in the realm of consumption
itself. Indeed, following cultural theorists extending back to
Theodor Adorno, we might better understand this mode of remembering
as a process of forgetting by which viewers elide their desires with those
of the corporation and, in doing so, alienate themselves from the historical
events that initially informed those desires.5
Elsewhere, however, television seemed to respond to emergent demands
for more nuanced representations of American history in diametrically
opposed ways. In particular, the 1977 premiere of Roots (the madefor-
television miniseries based on Alex Haley's novel [1976] by the same
name) marked a turning point in commercial culture. Watched by more
than 130 million viewers, Roots was perhaps the first truly public acknowledgment
that America was founded largely on the labor of enslaved
peoples (Beaulieu 1999, 145). Rather than simply replacing the bad old
past with a shiny new future in which all races are equal under the sign
of consumption, Roots insisted on remembering the American past as an
era in which those futures were created through the consumption of black
labor. As such, it appeared to perform the same kind of historical revision
in the mass media that new left and black power intellectuals were enacting
in the academy.
Although commercial modes of memory engaged with their official
counterparts in complex and seemingly contradictory ways, the two modes#p#分頁標(biāo)題#e#
remained bound together by their masculinist approaches to history. As
late as 1981, Angela Davis noted that "those of us who have anxiously
awaited a serious study of the Black woman during slavery remain, so far,
5 See esp. Adorno and Horkheimer (1947) 1994. Later theorists who follow up on these
insights in terms of raced and gendered histories include Greene 1996 and Hogue 1996.
1056 I Yaszek
disappointed" (quoted in Beaulieu 1999, 6).6 Other African-American
feminists expressed a similar disappointment with representations of black
women in the commercial realm. For instance, as Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu
notes in her analysis of Roots, Haley (and the TV producers responsible
for the miniseries) closely followed the patterns established in slave narratives
written by men such as Frederick Douglass; as such, Roots focuses
primarily on its protagonist, Kunta Kinte, as a rugged "loner . . . determined
to save himself, and willing to compromise with his fellow captives
only if it means securing his own freedom" (Beaulieu 1999, 146). Women,
when depicted at any length, are either reduced to their biological function
as child-bearers or presented in "the stock conventions of the suffering
enslaved woman" (1999, 147) who inspires the heroic black man to action
(Hogue 1996, 13; Rushdy 1999, 3). Similar if more truncated masculinist
impulses informed advertising as well. For instance, the young working
mother in the aforementioned McDonald's commercial is also reduced
to the role of the suffering woman, a victim of stress and overwork who,
like her counterparts in Roots, inspires others (here, the benevolent corporation)
to social action.
Perhaps not surprisingly, this time period marked the emergence of yet
another mode of memory-the African-Americanw oman's neo-slave narrative.
Authors including Gayl Jones, Sherley Anne Williams, and Toni Morrison
used this form-an updated interpretation of the nineteenth-century
slave narrative-to imaginatively re-present African-American history in a
form that privilegedf irsthandA frican-Americanp erspectiveso ver their white
counterparts. More specifically, these authors addressed African-American
women's histories by following nineteenth-century authors such as Harriet
Jacobs, shifting emphasis from the lone male hero to the female heroine
enmeshed in networks of communal ties, and from literacy and public identity
to family and personal self-worth (Foster 1994, xxx; Beaulieu 1999,
13-14). Writers also used the neo-slave narrative to comment on the historical
relationship between black women and commercial culture. As Susan
Willis argues, tragic characters such as Toni Morrison's Pecola from The
Bluest Eye and Hagar from Song of Solomon are "sublime manifestations"
of the contradiction between commercial representations of equality#p#分頁標(biāo)題#e#
through consumption and the "reality that translation into the dominant
white model is impossible for marginalized people" (1991, 114). By insisting
on and exploring the gaps between public fantasy and personal history
6 As Ann duCille (1996) notes, although writers such as Toni Cade Bambara and Jeanne
Noble published books on black women's history in the 1970s, the academy typically lauded
white scholars such as Gerda Lerner as the primary pioneers in this field.
S I G N S Summer 2003 I 1057
in their fiction, such authors participated in longstanding, time-honored
critical traditions of skepticism about (and even antagonism toward) the
culture industries as perpetrators of-as Adorno puts it-"enlightenment
as mass deception" (120).
Much like other Afro-feminist writers, Octavia Butler has expressed
explicit concern with masculinist narratives of African-American history.
In regard to Kindred, she comments:
When I got into college . .. the Black Power Movement was really
underway with the young people, and I heard some remarks from
a young man who was the same age I was but who had apparently
never made the connection with what his parents did to keep him
alive .... He said, "I'd like to kill all these old people who have
been holding us back for so long. But I can't because I'd have to
start with my own parents.". . . That was actually the germ of the
idea for Kindred ([1979] 1988). I've carried that comment with
me for thirty years. He felt so strongly ashamed of what the older
generation had to do, without really putting it into the context of
being necessary not only for their lives but his as well. (Rowell 1996,
51)
As Butler suggests here, one of the goals of Kindred is to re-present
historical memory in a way that acknowledges the impact of slavery not
just on isolated individuals but on entire families and networks of kin.
Indeed, she goes on to specifically critique the masculinist figure of the
heroic loner, noting that although she began the novel with a male protagonist
she had to switch his sex because "I couldn't realistically keep
him alive. So many things that he did would have been likely to get him
killed. He wouldn't even have time to learn the rules [of antebellum life]
. . . before he was killed for not knowing them" (Rowell 1996, 51). For
Butler, then, the fantasy of the ruggedly individualistic hero-especially
when that hero is black and subject to the laws of American slavery-is
an impossible one, even in the realm of speculative fiction.7
Butler begins to depart from other neo-slave narrative authors, however,
in her relationship to commercial culture; after all, her literary rep-
7 Although a full examination of this issue is beyond the scope of the present essay, it is
important to note that elsewhere in Kindred, Butler interrogates the raced implications of#p#分頁標(biāo)題#e#
figures such as the heroic, rugged loner through her depiction of Kevin, Dana's white
husband. Unlike the black male protagonist whom Butler initially intended to depict, Kevin
is, at least to a certain extent, able to assume this role and survive the antebellum South. In
doing so, however, he relegates himself to the position of a relatively minor player in history.
1058 I Yaszek
utation is derived primarily from her participation in one increasingly
prominent part of commercial culture: science fiction. While this seems
to set her apart from other neo-slave narrative authors in some ways, it
does align her with another African-American literary tradition. Sheree
Thomas notes that authors extending back to Ralph Ellison and W. E. B.
DuBois have long used science fiction tropes, including alternate worlds,
invisibility, and the "encounter with the alien other," to estrange readers
from dominant understandings of American history and to re-present "the
impact and influence of black life on society" (2000, xii). In the 1960s
and 1970s, black writers, including Samuel Delany and Butler, joined
their white feminist counterparts in publishing full-scale science fiction
stories and novels. For these authors, science fiction provided more than
just a way to re-present history; it allowed them to explore how such
revisions might lead to new and more egalitarian futures as well. As Sarah
Lefanu puts it, "unlike other forms of genre writing, such as detective
stories and romance, which demand the reinstatement of order and can
thus be described as 'closed' texts, science fiction is by its nature interrogative,
open. Feminism questions a given order in political terms, while
science fiction questions it in imaginative terms" (1988, 100).8 Taken
together, then, both the tropes and the form of science fiction provide
Butler with the tools to build the kind of memory machine adequate to
the needs of Afro-feminist historical revision.
And, indeed, Butler does just that with her self-described "grim fantasy,"
Kindred.9 The novel follows the story of Dana, a young black
woman struggling to make her name as an author in present-day California.
Mysteriously pulled through space and time to antebellum Maryland,
Dana comes face to face with her slave heritage on the Weylin
plantation and discovers that she must arrange the rape of a free black
woman by the slaveowner Rufus Weylin in order to ensure her own birth.
Taken as a slave herself, Dana seems torn between two equal-and equally
bleak-options: either she submits to Rufus's-and history's-demands
and thus preserves her family line or she resists these demands and runs
the risk of never being born herself. To resolve this temporal paradox,
Dana-and, by extension, Butler's readers-must learn to understand history#p#分頁標(biāo)題#e#
itself as a process of narrative production.
Throughout the first half of Kindred, Butler specifically uses the science
fiction device of time travel to problematize the production of historical
8 For similar arguments launched by feminist science fiction authors themselves, see
Sargent 1975.
9 Quoted in Crossley 1988.
S I G N S Summer 2003 1 1059
memory, especially in its commercialized form. As Damien Broderick
notes, such devices allow authors to show how "no element of our own
reality can be counted upon automatically to remain as a given, although
ideological analysis may readily locate, precisely here, representations of
those features rendered invisible by power and usage even as they dictate
our lives" (1995, 26). Such analysis clearly pervades the early sections of
Butler's novel. For instance, in her first trip to the past, Dana finds herself
suddenly transported to a river in the Maryland woods of 1819, where
she saves a young Rufus from drowning. When Rufus's gun-wielding
father appears, she returns to her own world in an equally sudden manner.
The whole encounter seems highly surreal to Dana, "like something I saw
on television . . . something I got second-hand" (17). By resorting to
the prosaic metaphor of watching television, Dana distances herself from
the disturbing possibility that the past might be something that quite
literally touches her. Almost immediately, then, Butler shows how commercial
modes of memory alienate individuals from history in potentially
dangerous ways.
Butler also uses time travel to expose the masculinist bias inherent in
commercial modes of memory. On her second trip to antebellum Maryland,
Dana stumbles upon a group of white patrollers beating a black
slave for sneaking off the plantation to visit his free wife and child:
I could literally smell his sweat, hear every ragged breath, every cry,
every cut of the whip. I could see his body jerking, convulsing,
straining against the rope as his screaming went on and on. My
stomach heaved, and I had to force myself to stay where I was and
keep quiet. Why didn't they stop! ... I had seen people beaten on
television and in the movies. I had seen the too-red blood substitute
streaked across their back and heard their well-rehearsed screams.
But I hadn't lain nearby and smelled their sweat or heard them
pleading and praying, shamed before their families and themselves.
I was probably less prepared for the reality than the child crying not
far from me. In fact, she and I were reacting very much alike. My
face too was wet with tears. (36)
This passage dramatizes precisely the kind of criticism other black women
writers of the 1970s and 1980s leveled at commercial television shows
like Roots and The Civil War. While such programs might prepare Dana#p#分頁標(biāo)題#e#
for certain aspects of history-the dramatic struggle of the runaway slave,
for instance-they do little or nothing to prepare her for the impact these
actions might have on the families of the heroic individual so often central
to those same programs.
1060 I Yaszek
Elsewhere, Butler extends her critique of the masculinist bias in commercial
modes of memory to their official or scholarly counterparts. Once
she realizes that she will continue to travel through time until she ensures
that Rufus grows up to initiate her family line, Dana vows to make the
best of her situation by teaching the slave children around her to read
and write-and to run for freedom as soon as they can (98). Thus, Dana
tries to make sense of her new world by adopting the "literacy-identityfreedom"
paradigm typically associated with the male-oriented slave narratives
produced by nineteenth-century authors such as Frederick Douglass
and reproduced later by twentieth-century writers such as Alex Haley.
Within this paradigm, the enslaved person's acquisition of language skills
is the first-and most significant-step toward the acquisition of both
psychological and physical freedom; other identifying characteristics are
usually downplayed or even erased.'?
Like other Afro-feminist critics, Butler suggests that while this paradigm
is an important part of African-American history, it cannot adequately
account for the gendered dimensions of that history. Again, she specifically
uses time travel to underscore this point. On catching Dana and one of
her pupils in the cookhouse with some books, Rufus's infuriated father
beats Dana mercilessly. As she falls unconscious and feels herself pulled
back to California, the shocked Dana can only protest that "this wasn't
supposed to happen .... No white had [ever] come into the cookhouse
before" (106). On returning to antebellum Maryland several weeks later,
Dana is further horrified when she learns that her disappearance prompted
the confused and enraged Weylin to punish her fellow slaves by selling
some of their family members away from the plantation. Here, then, the
partial nature of masculinist narrative structures leads Dana to misread
history and her relationship to it in two ways. First, of course, she fails
to anticipate Weylin's appearance in the cookhouse because she perceives
the master-slave relationship as simply raced rather than raced and gendered.
In other words, by forgetting that the cookhouse is a both black
and feminine space, Dana also forgets that it is subject to masculine surveillance
and penetration. Second, these narrative structures lead Dana to
understand herself as a lone individual battling the abstract forces of history
rather than as someone enmeshed in familial and communal networks.
Thus, she fails to anticipate that her actions might have consequences for#p#分頁標(biāo)題#e#
'0 For general discussions of the "literacy-identity-freedom" paradigm in nineteenthcentury
slave narratives, see Olney 1985; Gates 1987; and Foster 1994. For discussions of
how this paradigm was specifically central to male authors, see Twagilimana 1997; Beaulieu
1999; and Rushdy 1999.
S I G N S Summer 2003 I 1061
those around her-consequences that her travel through time underscores
with startling clarity.
The cookhouse scene marks a turning point in Kindred as Dana begins
to search for a mode of historical memory more appropriate to the experiences
of African-American women. Significantly, Butler's use of science
fiction devices also begins to shift at this point. As Marleen Barr notes,
in science fiction "the alien other" typically signifies a certain anxiety about
the raced and/or gendered other. However, women writers often appropriate
this device to address their own political concerns: "Womenespecially
black women-who are alien to patriarchal society, alter fiction's
depiction of the alien. ... In opposition to science fiction stereotypes
about vanquishing aliens, [these writers' characters] join with or are assisted
by the aliens they could be expected to view as epitomizing the
very opposite of humanness. These female characters, who are themselves
the Other, do not oppose the Other" (1993, 98-99). More specifically,
if feminist characters ally themselves with the alien other, it is precisely
because this other "struggles to declare and create the truth" of marginalized
people's lives outside those ordained by dominant modes of historical
memory (99).
The shift to new modes of memory and new relations to the alien other
begins almost immediately after the cookhouse scene. Upon her return
to California, Dana resolutely reads and then purges her home of "everything
. . . that was even distantly related to the subject [of slavery].
. . . [Their] versions of happy darkies in tender loving bondage were
more than I could stand" (116). Simultaneously, she immerses herself in
other, distinctly non-American stories of race relations and cultural power.
Poring through testimonials from Nazi concentration camp survivors,
Dana realizes that her experience of history is not unique, that "the Germans
had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had
worked at for nearly two hundred" (117). If Jewish Holocaust stories
begin to provide Dana with a new framework for understanding African-
American history, it is because they are, ultimately, alien to that experience.
Outside the constraints of dominant American modes of memory, they
can "declare and create the truth" of both past and present-day power
relations.
Elsewhere, Butler specifically uses the encounter with the alien other#p#分頁標(biāo)題#e#
to carry out the Afro-feminist project of debunking cultural stereotypes
of black women as happy mammies or long-suffering victims. Early in
Kindred Dana dismisses Sarah the house manager as the stereotypical
mammy who remains loyal to her white owners-even when they sell her
eldest children off the plantation-because these same owners have
1062 I Yaszek
deigned to give her a nominal position of power over the other slaves.
On her next trip to antebellum Maryland, however, Dana recognizes Sarah
as a "frightened powerless woman who had already lost all she could stand
to lose" (145), one who plays the part of the mammy out of love for her
remaining children and fear that, if she does not, they will be taken from
her. This insight forces Dana to reconsider her similarities to Sarah. Previously,
of course, Dana assumed that her mixed feelings about Rufus were
"something new, something that didn't even have a name" (29). Now,
however, she begins to see that this seemingly unique relationship parallels
that of all the blacks and whites on the Weylin plantation-in other words,
that her personal experience is not alien to, but instead part and parcel
of, the American social experience as whole.
Finally, Butler uses the revised encounter with the alien other to show
how contemporary black women like Dana might learn to reassess their
own relations to history. Initially, this is a difficult task for Dana because
there are few (if any) cultural narratives available to help her articulate
this. Indeed, she only does so with the help of Carrie, the young house
slave triply othered from American history by virtue of her race, gender,
and the fact that, as a mute, she seems to be left outside of language itself.
After Dana earns the scorn of the other plantation slaves for helping Rufus
rape Alice, she tries to make sense of the situation by positioning herself
as the long-suffering victim of fate, telling Carrie: "I can see why there
are those here who think I'm more white than black" (224). Carrie vehemently
negates this claim, wiping her fingers on Dana's face and then
showing Dana both sides of her hand-an action that Dana does not
understand until Carrie's husband explains that "she means it don't come
off, Dana ... the black. The devil with people who say you're anything
but what you are" (224). In this scene, Carrie silently but powerfully
insists on the importance of understanding oneself outside reductive
modes of historical memory. As a black woman trying to survive slavery,
Dana is more than a traitor to her race or a victim of fate. Instead, as
Carrie suggests, Dana's rich and complex identity as a black woman "don't
come off" just because she has had to make hard choices that are themselves
neither wholly black nor white; instead, that identity is informed#p#分頁標(biāo)題#e#
by those choices. Here, then, Carrie asks Dana to acknowledge that she,
too, is the alien other of history.
As Mae G. Henderson argues in her study of contemporary Afrofeminist
authors, black women's literature is "generated less by neurotic
anxiety or dis-ease than by an emancipatory impulse which engages both
hegemonic and ambiguously (non)hegemonic discourse" (1989, 37). For
Butler, truly emancipatory engagements with-and revisions of-racist
S I G N S Summer 2003 I 1063
and sexist discursive practices depend on black women recognizing themselves
as the alien other of those practices. And indeed, it is precisely after
Carrie's "lesson" that Dana finally gains control over herself and her
world(s). On her final trip to Maryland (which, significantly enough, occurs
on July 4, 1976) Dana learns that Alice has finally borne the daughter
who will initiate Dana's family line. Meanwhile, however, Alice has committed
suicide and Rufus is on the verge of doing the same. Dana prevents
Rufus from taking his own life, but the desperate man repays the favor
by trying to force her into one last hard compromise, promising to free
and protect his and Alice's children if Dana will stay with him as his lover.
The bargain seems perfectly reasonable to Rufus-after all, Dana and Alice
are nearly identical doubles of one another, and black women are supposed
to accede to the wishes of white men. Dana, however, refuses the role of
the victim and, for the first time, imposes her own conditions on their
already overdetermined relationship: "I could accept him as my ancestor,
my younger brother, my friend, but not as my master, and not as my lover"
(260; my italics). When Rufus refuses these conditions and attempts to
rape her, Dana kills him and returns to her own world for good. Thus
Dana's newfound sense of herself as the alien other leads to a quite literally
emancipatory revision of history.
Although Dana's recognition of black women like herself as the alien
others of American history seems to be an unproblematic triumph, the
closing pages of Kindred encourage readers to meditate on the complex
ways that this recognition might actually change women like Dana and
their relations to history. Most immediately, Butler suggests that Dana
does not escape her encounter with American history unscathed. In the
seconds before he dies and Dana returns to present-day California, Rufus
makes a final, desperate grab at Dana's arm. The result of this final action
on the part of Rufus is the scene that begins Kindred: Dana comes to
consciousness in the safety of her own home only to find that her arm
has somehow fused itself to the wall of her bedroom. Although the scene
is no less horrifying the second time around, the questions that it evokes
(how did Dana get here? how is this even possible?) can be at least partially#p#分頁標(biāo)題#e#
answered. By using science fiction devices such as time travel and the
encounter with the alien other to engage with and reconstruct African-
American women's history, Butler shows us that while Dana's literal situation
may indeed seem like something out of a fantastic sci-fi scenario,
metaphorically it makes perfect sense. As the alien other of American
history, Dana is indeed deeply marked by-but at the same time an undisputed
survivor of-that same history.
As such, Dana ultimately emerges as the author of a new mode of
1064 I Yaszek
historical memory-one that, perhaps not surprisingly, both engages with
and writes beyond the ending of its more conventional masculinist counterparts.
In the epilogue to Kindred, Dana decides to search for the remnants
of the Weylin plantation in present-day Maryland. However, when
she learns that the plantation has been destroyed, she realizes that she
must turn to the very first form of historical memory that her experiences
have taught her to distrust: commercial ones, including newspapers, magazines,
and advertisements. Here, Dana finds at least part of the proof
she needs in articles about a major plantation fire and advertisements for
the sale of the Weylin slaves. While an earlier Dana might have accepted
such narratives uncritically and despairingly, the older and wiser Dana of
Butler's epilogue grieves for those who have been lost but manages to
find hope in the midst of her grief:
All three of [their] sons were listed [in the auction advertisements],
but Nigel and Carrie were not. Sarah was listed, but Joe and Hagar
[Alice's children and Dana's ancestors] were not. ... I thought
about that, and put together as many pieces as I could. . . . [Rufus's
mother] might have taken both children. Perhaps with Alice dead
she had accepted them. They were her grandchildren, after all, the
son and daughter of her only child. She might have cared for them.
She might have held them as slaves. But even if she had, Hagar, at
least, lived long enough for the fourteenth Amendment to free her.
(263)
In this passage, Dana successfully pieces together an alternate family history
based on her newfound understanding of historical representation
itself as a kind of mutable structure informed by multiple sources: official
historical "fact," its commercially oriented counterpart, and, of course,
those personal and social experiences outside dominant modes of representation.
Indeed, when another character suggests that she will "probably
never know" exactly what happened to the Weylin plantation and its inhabitants,
Dana touches her empty arm sleeve and replies "I know" (264).
Dana's reply is appropriately ambiguous and overdetermined, both acknowledging
the impossibility of complete narrative certainty while affirming#p#分頁標(biāo)題#e#
her own relationship to history as an important source of cultural
and individual memory. Thus Dana begins to generate her own representation
of black women's experiences of America, one that is fueled by
fact and fancy, grief and hope, and loss and love.
School of Literature, Communication, and Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology
S I G N S Summer 2003 I 1065
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