In Kindred, Octavia Butler writes a world constructed of loose, yet interconnected threads. You tug on one and several more bounce back with the reverberation of it, echoes of time and presence and the understanding of matter, of how we fit into a universe, how we call it home when it doesn’t owe us anything.
The world in Kindred feels real, palpable like you could step through the threshold into that world and find nothing out of the normal. It is easy to fall into wondering what plans these characters have, the lives they’ve lived, hopes and dreams and futures. As they talk, integrating themselves into their interwoven timelines, into both before and after, even within the first chapter and prologue, it is easy to wonder how many years there are between you and them, where the connections lie, things like those same hopes and dreams – if they even exist, in the same way. If they ever had a chance to.
This world they are in reads like it is no place for beginnings. Like it has always been like this, even if it started right here, at the first word. It feels like it is a place where you are meant to step light, as to not disturb, to not leave ripples of existence, a place like a fading dream, close to shattering. This feels like a world that waits, even for the seemingly nonreturnable, that leaves its inhabitants grasping for some other horizon at the center of some other world.
Both worlds, every world, apart but together, crisscrossed histories falling into place like puzzle pieces of some far-off fairytale. Like with one cursory glance you could say, it’s almost home, right? With a grin, because you don’t know that it isn’t, and maybe that is the point. It leads back to the question of comparison, world against world against word: are they more alive than we are, like this? Amidst the interchangeability of time? Even without a semblance of control, at this moment, even still, is it more than what we have here, now? Is this a form of knowledge we don’t have a name for, but exists even here?
The start of each chapter feels as though they are made of nothing but memories. Things that have already happened but are being recalled, forwards and backward at the same moment. Time has its own presence, here, in Butler’s work. Where even here, at home, you are surrounded by your history, your time, and how it now demands something from you. An agency, a past, that isn’t a light that goes out once the moment ends, but continues, a hearth that never dies, a candle in the window, guiding, saying: you can always come back. Can’t you? Are we even ever sure, and if our main character is able to come home, is she coming home missing something? Has something changed, in a way that rattles her so much that she is advised to pull away from it? To let it pass her by?
Butler does something with time we don’t usually see, even within the realm of science fiction and time travel: she paints time as a constant, something we carry with us, within us, but not something we can impact our control over, something wild. How time is not a domesticated thing in her stories. It is untamed, unpredictable. Time becomes a ghost story with a name, with a body, half-stolen. Time becomes a character every time the past turns present, becomes the circumstance, the environment, the main narrator. All soothsayer, diviner, time-traveler.
There is an interlude between being alive and becoming a story that the characters, as well as the reader themselves, don’t quite know how to hold. When they travel through time, they are past/present/future, all at once. There is no settling, there is only the rabbit-quick instinct to react, to live, for every moment you have there, because you do not know the second it will end, before everything suddenly changes. This is the world Butler writes, builds, and in this, she asks us: are you afraid of this? Of blinking in and out of an existence that you are used to? Comfortable in? Of rules broken, or ones that were never correct in the first place? That you – eased and relaxed into your own form of existence – could be wrong? That even you could be taken? That even you – could disappear by morning?
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