When Loss Becomes You

This is part of a roundtable on the work of Octavia Butler. The index to the roundtable is here.
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When I got into college, Pasadena City College,…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 was still blaming them for their humility and their acceptance of disgusting behavior on the part of employers and other people. 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.” When he said us he meant black people, and when he said old people he meant older black people. That was actually the germ of the idea for Kindred (1979)

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 for not only their lives but his as well. I wanted to take a character, when I did Kindred, back in time to some of the things that our ancestors had to go through, and see if that character survived so very well with the knowledge of the present in her head. – Octavia Butler

First, a spoiler-free refresher on Kindred if you haven’t read it, or if you can’t remember it: On July 9, 1976 (which was contemporary when it was written), Dana feels dizzy, and then collapses, while unpacking in her new house. She comes to on the banks of a river she has never seen before. Luckily, space and time travel have a short jet-lag period in this world, because almost immediately after she arrives 161 years in the past, she saves the life of a little red-haired boy drowning in the river beside her. We later learn that the boy is Rufus, her great-grandfather. Rufus will grow up to have several children by one of his future slaves, Dana’s great-grandmother Alice. But for now, he is a boy who needs saving, and so she saves him. Dana continues to save him over the course of the story, because consanguinity has bestowed upon Rufus the ability to call Dana into his time when his life is in danger.

Now, a spoiler free plot point: Dana loses her left arm on her way back from the last of these travels. It has to be amputated in the present-day, as a result of an injury she sustains while coming back. She also sustains a permanent scar on her face from being kicked by a slave-owner after falling down.

Amputation and scarring are permanent, and should not be the metaphor to represent the injuries that slavery has caused to those racialised-as-Black in this day. This isn’t to say that there are people racialised-as-Black living outside of structural racism, or that if you ignore reality, injustice goes away. Rather, what I want to hold up for scrutiny is the notion that injury and impairment are necessarily and perhaps even inevitably, a part of identity for descendants of slaves and those who look like them in contemporary America.

If you’ve read Wendy Brown, you’re probably familiar with what I’m getting at. If not she’s a political science professor at University of California, Berkeley, and my question is related to the one Brown poses in States of Injury. That is, “how does a sense of woundedness become the basis for a sense of identity?”, but my response is different. Brown argues that its the capitalistic superstructure that we need to jettison in order to bring about liberation. You see, by getting mad that the path to your piece of the pie is unjust, you maintain that the pie really is the thing you value. “The reviled subject becomes the object of desire,”she warns.

The horrors of the slave trade seem to lend its support for her proposition. What were the slaves doing? They were making things for people to buy while keeping the cost of production minimal. They were working on sugar plantations so the land owners could have cookies, and cakes, and boiled sweets. They were working on cotton plantations so the land owners could look fashionable. They were building Georgian colonial homes to shelter the plantation owners from the brutal southern heat and the back-breaking work of beating people within inches of their lives. Though slavery is not capitalism proper, it has the capitalist’s existential project at its core: that the making and buying of things for profit, determined by membership in stratified social classes, should be the primary preoccupation of state and society. All the while, the slaves wanted what the slave owners had- the spoils of the American Dream, despite the fact that it was the Dream that justified their enslavement. We still do this in various forms today.Many groups and movements criticise the state as a monolithic site of oppression qua unjust dominance, but then seek its protection under the logic that state dominance is only unjust if its dominating the wrong demographic.

I’m not convinced that capitalism is the problem though, or that anarchy or communism are potential solutions. Perhaps domination is inextricable from capitalism, but domination doesn’t belong to any particular political economy any more than religion has monopoly on morality. Yes, her experience of enslavement permanently impairs Dana. But let’s not elide over the fact that her impairment would not be a disability if her society did not make safety and self-actualisation a two-handed commodity.

So that’s why I loved Kindred, but am also a little wary of it. I loved that it shows so vividly the kinds of things that happen when you put ego and profit above universal human dignity and justice. But it also seems to suggest that injustice is primarily a problem of unjust commodity distribution, rather than a problem of us valuing a questionable set of social goods. It also reifies various forms of injustice by suggesting that we need to expand the class of people who can afford freedom, rather than question why freedom is so closely tied to desert and not something else. Do we really want to say that freedom is a cookie given only to those who have worked hard enough at the right things? Perhaps so, but then we’d need an account that can explain why freedom’s metaphysics only kick in after you’ve joined the right social club. If you’re really free, you need to be free from the start, not after conquering (or being born having conquered) a set of social ordeals.

“I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery,”Dana thinks to herself, after a few travels back into the past. I now think to myself, “You can make a person accept nearly anything, if you tie acceptance to their livelihood”. The characters in Kindred that question slavery either attempt to run away, or hope to one day get their free papers. I sympathize with the characters who tried to run away, but I’m sympathetic of the stance of waiting and hoping. It’s just that, waiting for your free papers suggests that you really are property (as many slaves had been convinced), and continues to hold the plantation owner as the ultimate arbiter of freedom. If we untie our livelihood from needing to dominate others, we can start to live differently, and oppression becomes a social condition, rather than a permanent personal injury.

No, oppression is not an amputation, but a sign that you want to use that two-handed tool too. Whether or not that’s a bad thing is perhaps another conversation. What’s important though, is that we distinguish between “I want to be free”and “I want what those who deem themselves free have”. Pursuing the latter has the unfortunate and pernicious effect of stopping the conversation about whether self-professed free people are really any freer than those they dominate. There’s no need clamouring over one another for pie when what you really want is chocolate cake anyway. The metaphor might be trite, but you’d miss it if you took the injustice-as-amputation metaphor at face value.

 

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6 thoughts on “When Loss Becomes You

  1. I think this is a central issue or question about identity politics; marginalized identities tend to be formed in reaction to oppression, or at least in reaction to the mainstream. I think frequently you can argue that they’re actually formed by the oppressors initially; blackness in the U.S. context was used as a way to zero in on people to police and control. The folks being policed and controlled can then use the identity as a rallying point, and change its meaning substantially, but I guess as you say here how substantially exactly is something of a question at least.

    Is Butler saying in Kindred that slavery remains a wound or an injury? Or is she thinking about what happens when you make slavery the basis of identity?

  2. It’s exciting to see the ideas in Kindred being challenged in this way. I’ve always found the reading of Dana’s amputation to be more compelling on a personal level, where her body retains the material effects of the traumatic experience in a way that will be with her for the rest of her life – even if she finds a way to regain or surpass the ability she had before. But this reading doesn’t sit as well with me when applied to an entire culture or race of people trying to cope with trauma and I don’t get the impression that Butler would be okay with such a sweeping pronouncement either. So this passage definitely resonates: “Yes, her experience of enslavement permanently impairs Dana. But let’s not elide over the fact that her impairment would not be a disability if her society did not make safety and self-actualisation a two-handed commodity.” Really nice.

    Is there a way, I wonder, if we rethink what disability means here…. that the amputation could be seen as a painful way that Dana has expunged the horrors from herself, rather than as a loss of something. A reconsideration of what being whole can mean? A person can still function without an arm.

  3. The end of Kindred is pretty downbeat, though, isn’t it? I remember it being fairly bitter, rather than hopeful…though I may not be remembering correctly….

  4. Qiana- oh gosh, I’m so glad you brought that up! I wanted to go more deeply into the question of amputation as being rid of something that isn’t working metaphor vs. amputation as loss metaphor.

    When I first read it, I struggled with how to to extrapolate the things that were happening to Dana. In the end, I thought that exploring that Dana was meant to represent about “blackness!” beyond just her personal experience made sense. I think the amputation as removal of trauma reading is particularly plausible when I think back to how, we don’t really her much about Dana’s amputation in the epilogue. She explores her past, but it does not get mentioned at all really, beyond saying that it healed. In fact, maybe we can read into that a sense that she wasn’t disabled by the impairment? That by losing her arm, the part of her that Rufus held on to, and that trapped her in the structure of the house, she was letting go of that part of her past and the pain? I don’t know how to word this without suggesting that amputation is a wonderful thing, and being harmful towards real people who really to live with disability and amputation each day. But you’ve taught Butler’s cannon, so I’m sure you have something much more insightful to say than I could, in a way that much more elegant!

    Noah- wow, there’s a lot to get into there. First, a little background: I’m actually Nigerian-Canadian. I was raised in Lagos, but have lived in Canada for half my life, and spent a few years in the U.S. In regards to black as an identity, I’d actually prefer to identify as Yoruba, and not black, because that makes so much more sense to me. However, the deep divides between the tribes in West Africa is actually a recent thing. There were differences, in language, culture, etc. and Yorubaland did not become one of the largest empires of pre-colonial Africa though peace-negotiation and marriages. But before I was black, I was something else, and I still have knowledge and access and a (literal) passport to what that something else was. So, I also see wearing my blackness as a political stance, one that comes with its own set of problems, and responsibilities, when I’m outside the continent of Africa.

    Blackness was an identity imposed upon me, but now I see it as a tool for forging myself too. It allows me to relate to other people who have been racialized like me, because the shared experience of racialisation hurt absolutely everyone, on all sides. But I wear the cloak knowing full well that I did not experience colonialism like blacks in the U.S. did, the ones whose families have been living there for generations longer than anyone can remember any longer. I’ve walked my ancestral lands, cause it was the village my mother grew up in, her mother grew up in, and her mother’s mother grew up in, and I know that we didn’t leave until we wanted to. I sometimes (ok, often) wonder how my identifying as black while living in Canada unfairly takes from the experiences of the descendants of slaves, when none of that suffering or knowledge is in my blood.

    Maybe what Butler could be saying, is that slavery is the root of blackness, as it was also the root of whiteness? (I’m thinking of Rufus’s ending here.)

  5. This is such a thought-provoking reading of Dana’s *loss* and of the symbiotic relationship that exists as Blackness and Whiteness. As someone who has always read Dana’s severed arm as [her] loss and her scar, I appreciate the encouragement to think about the wounds of leaving as necessary (and sometimes voluntary). What I am left thinking, as a result of this piece, is whether Butler uses Kindred to actually challenge the very possibility of freedom—or whether we, as readers, teachers, philosophers, theologians, etc., can/should use the text to problematize freedom as a limited imaginary. I am also interested in whether you, A.Y. Daring (or others), think Butler’s full rendering of Dana functions as cautionary commentary (which is something that she repeatedly asserts about her Parables) about how we inhabit history itself, which is [I think] connected to our desire(s) for, and performances of, freedom.

  6. Yeah, I don’t know that I would call the ending downbeat or bitter, more like “it was him or me, and I’m glad it was him.” Dana returns to Maryland and doesn’t find much to tell her what happened after she left, although it isn’t too hard to argue that *she* is her own evidence in that regard. I don’t know…after reading this post, I’m really intrigued by the idea of the loss not being an impairment (in the conventional understanding of the term). But this doesn’t have to mean it leaves everything settled and optimistic either. I’m sure disabilities studies would provide some clarity and insight here.

    Then again, some Googling brought up this comment from Butler in an interview: “I couldn’t really let her come all the way back. I couldn’t let her return to what she was, I couldn’t let her come back whole and that, I think, really symbolizes her not really coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn’t leave people quite whole.” So, hmm. Does “people” = those physically enslaved or all of us descended from generations of slaves/slaveowners? Not that the author’s intent precludes an alternative reading. I’m more of the mind that none of us are ever “whole” really. :)

    A.Y., I hope you’ll write for HU again! Have you read any of Nnedi Okorafor’s work?

    Hey, just seeing Emerson’s comment pop up as I’m writing this….

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