Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/CUNY, LaGuardia Community College/The Research Paper: Kindred (Spring)/sandbox team 3

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Backgrounds

In several interviews, Octavia Butler has acknowledged that a series of family and life experiences influenced her novel Kindred. Butler’s grandmother was a slave who chopped sugar cane, and did the laundry of her family as well as the white family whom she worked for. Butler spent a great deal of her childhood feeling ashamed that her mother was a housemaid. She also resented her mother for allowing her employers to treat her like dirt, talking to her like she was less than a human being. As she grew older, Butler realized that her mother endured all that disrespect in order to provide for her. This, in turn, inspired her to write a series of female characters--Alice, Sarah, and Dana--whose capacity of endurance and sacrifice in the face of exploitation is heroic. Butler’s work experiences also helped her develop the protagonist of the novel, Dana. Just like Butler, Dana works at a number of jobs--”from blue collar to low grade white collar, clerk typist”-- while struggling to become a published writer. Like Dana, when work is hard to come by, Butler goes home, bakes a solitary potato for her daily meal and keeps on writing.

Most importantly, Butler wrote Kindred as a reaction to an impassioned statement from a young man involved in black consciousness rising, who, ashamed of the humility and subservience older generations of African Americans, considered them traitors to their people and wished he could kill them all. Butler disagreed with this view. From her personal experience, what older generations of African Americans had endured had to be put into historical context to be fully understood as the silent, courageous resistance that it was. She then decided to create a present-day character and send her (originally it was a him) back to slavery to explore how hard it would be for a modern person to survive in such harsh conditions. As she explains in a 2004 interview with Allison Keyes, she “set out to make people feel history.”

Butler’s field research in Maryland also influenced her writing of Kindred. She traveled to the Eastern Shore to Talbot County where she wandered a bit with little money and spent some time at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore and the Maryland Historical Society. She also went on a tour of Mount Vernon, the home of America's first president, George Washington. This was the closest she could get to a plantation. On this tour, guides referred to the slaves as “servants” and avoided referring to the fact that the visitors were touring an old slave plantation. Butler also spent time reading emancipatory narratives, one of them being the slave narrative of Fredrick Douglass. Some of the facts she learned from these narratives were so grim that she realized that, in order to get people to read Kindred, she could not come close to presenting slavery as it was but had to clean it up.

Maxamillion412 (talk) 18:18, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

Dr. X's feedback: Nicely done. The items in bold need to be wiki-linked. Once that is done, this section will be ready to move to the live article. Please let me know before you move it!!

Realistic depiction of slavery and slave communities

Kindred was written for readers to feel what a modern black woman would experience in a world where blacks were considered not people, but property, and treated as objects with no rights and no choices; a world where “all of society was arrayed against you.”

During an interview, Butler admitted that while reading the sickening facts of slavery as depicted in slave narratives she realized that if she wanted people to read her book, she would have to do a somewhat sanitized version of slavery. Still, scholars of Kindred consider the novel a non-romanticized fiction of the slave experience. Concluding that "there probably is no more vivid depiction of life on an Eastern Shore plantation than that found in Kindred," Sandra Y. Govan traces how Butler's book follows the classic patterns of the memoirs of former slaves: loss of innocence, harsh punishment, strategies of resistance, life in the slave quarters, struggle for education, experience of sexual abuse, realization of the masters' religious hypocrisy, and attempts to run away which culminate in success. Robert Crossley notes how Butler's intense first-person narration deliberately echoes the re-tellings of ex-slaves, thereby giving the story "a degree of authenticity and seriousness." Lisa Yaszek sees Dana's visceral first-hand account as a deliberate criticism of commercialized productions of slavery such as the film Gone with the Wind and the television miniseries Roots.

In Kindred, Butler also represents individual slaves as people rather than non-humans, giving each his or her own story. Robert Crossley argues that Butler treats the blackness of her characters as "a matter of course" to resist the tendency of white writers to incorporate African-Americans into their narratives just to illustrate a problem or to divorce themselves from charges of racism. Thus, in Kindred the slave community is depicted as a "rich human society": the proud yet victimized freewoman-turned-slave Alice; Sam the field slave who hopes Dana will teach his brother; the traitorous sewing woman Liza who frustrates Dana's escape; the bright and resourceful Nigel, Rufus' childhood friend who learns to read from a stolen primer; most importantly, Sarah the cook, who Butler transforms from an image of the submissive, happy "mammie" of white fiction to a deeply angry yet caring woman subdued only by the threat of losing her last child, the mute Carrie.

Watoflifej23 (talk) 18:41, 12 May 2014 (UTC) Goga1994 (talk) 19:21, 12 May 2014 (UTC)