I just watched 12 Years a Slave and it really changed my perspective on Kindred. In many ways, Butler glosses over the most horrifying aspects of slavery by creating this complicated relationship between the main character and the slave master. In order for slavery to work, slaves had to be very dehumanized, but Butler mainly focusses on the relationship between Dana and Rufus in which Rufus cares about her underneath all of his selfishness and cruelty. The other relationship that Butler focusses on a lot is the one between Rufus and Alice, in which Rufus also deeply cares about her even if he is really terrible to her. Most slave masters had to have thought of their slaves as animals to continue living the way they did, and Kindred really doesn't capture this. In 12 Years a Slave, the relationship between Edwin Epps, the slavemaster, and Pattsie, a slave girl, is interesting to contrast to the relationship between Rufus and Alice. Whereas Alice is at least awknowledged as a human and often says her opinions to Rufus's face, Pattsie never seems to be allowed to speak with Epps and he is so possessive of her that when she goes to another plantation to get some soap (because his wife has been depriving her of basic goods), he whips her senseless.
I also just finished reading
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry which is a really long and depressing and eloquent and probably one of the best books I've ever read. It follows the lives of four different people and it's mostly set in the Emergency in India in the 70's when the prime minister of India declared a state of emergency after it was discovered that she'd rigged the elections. This was a a way for her to buy time so she could stay in office. What happened as a result was a series of projects such as clearing out the slums which meant throwing very poor people out of their homes and reclaiming the property for the government, and then "city beautification" which meant essentially kidnapping beggars off the street (many of them freshly beggared after being kicked out of the slums) and "employing" (really enslaving) them to do hard labor in exchange for minimal food and very poor living conditions (with many people forced to live in one small badly built tin house without running water or electricity). I learned so much history from reading this book, and it was especially powerful growing to love these characters that were undergoing such horrors. The previous example of people being forced to do slave labor is an example of very recent slavery, and there was nothing personal about it unlike the way
Kindred depicts Dana's relationship with Rufus. These people were considered next to animals because of their low caste and were treated as such which allowed the higher powers to guiltlessly subject them to horrible conditions. In many ways, I feel like
Kindred glosses over the harsher aspects of slavery by creating these very complicated relationships with Rufus that many slaves probably did not experience. Slaves usually have to give up so much human dignity, and by making Rufus care about Dana and Alice, Butler erases the most horrifying aspect of slavery.
There must have been some instances of slave masters having very complicated personal relationships with their slaves, but they were probably exceptions, and I worry that focussing too much on these kinds of stories like
Kindred does, glosses over the more realistic kinds of slavery that are extremely brutalizing and require a complete denial of the humanity of the slaves in order for people to accept that these people can be treated so horribly.
Yeah I sort of have mixed feelings about the Rufus/Dana relationship. On one hand, I agree, this isn't the most brutal, or perhaps realistic, depiction of slavery ever, and there is something very important about us even attempting to wrap our heads around the brutality of slavery. I also think it would have been interesting to see Dana *needing* to save this boy, Rufus, who is just really awful, but part of her past, and necessary to her life. That could be interesting just as a further exploration of the whole "how do we interact with our past questions."
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand though, I think there is something powerful about Rufus being so clearly human. By presenting him as something other than a monster, we're forced to identify with him. And since this book is so much about our connection with the past, and how our morality may be situational, I think it's important not to be able to say "oh he's a terrible person, we would never be like him."
And on that note, I don't remember if you were in African-American lit or not...But while we were reading Beloved, a book with a "relatively humane" family of slave holders, we talked a lot about the horror of just not knowing how constant that humane-ness is. We see Dana dealing with this too, every time she contemplates whether or not she can trust Rufus, and each time she has to wonder who he is going to grow up to be.
Nice blog post Izzy, definitely got me thinking. Also I really need to see 12 years a Slave.
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ReplyDeleteOne effect of this novel, and 12 Years a Slave, and other slave narratives (historical and fictional) is the reminder that slavery was not just one thing. It was a social order that led to a range of conditions that differed from place to place (with a number of significant common denominators). Sierra's right--_Beloved_ goes even further toward representing a relatively "good" version of slavery (the plantation is called, perversely, "Sweet Home," and the former slaves, once escaped, look back on it with a complicated kind of nostalgia), but in some ways the less obviously "dehumanizing" versions can be more effective at making us confront the truly intimate psychological/emotional horrors of the system. What strikes me about Butler's portrayal is that this idea that slave-owners viewed their slaves as other than human is exploded: the way Tom sells off all Sarah's children but one--just enough to let her know how unfree she is, but to also ensure that she retains a strong tie to his plantation--actively and deliberately exploits her *human* qualities of maternal affection. It's one human being manipulating and wielding unthinkable power over another. He treats her and her children as livestock, but his motives reflect a more nuanced (and much more cruel) understanding of the very human psychology and family affections at work.
ReplyDeleteButler keeps making us realize, and contemplate, how closely all these people had to live to one another. It's a functioning social system, which existed for as much of this country's history as it didn't exist--generations lived and died under it. It wasn't necessarily a horror-show every single day; there was business as usual, a certain resignation. But underlying it all is the perpetual threat of the whip, or the slave-trader who will disrupt the family. As Dana tells Kevin, not all brutality is violent or visible on the surface.
But the novel is also about confronting the fact that Dana's own personal history is bound to Rufus (and the social order he represents) every bit as much as to Alice. They are *equally* her kin, and she needs to look both of them hard in the eye, so to speak, and try to make sense of it all.