From the Root to the Strange Fruit - A Review of Kindred, written by Octavia E. Butler, adapted by Damian Duffy and John Jennings
/Written by O’Brian Gunn
Cover for Kindred adaptation.
One of my least favorite tropes is time travel, and one of my least favorite narratives is the slave narrative. Surely putting the two together would make me seize with cringing, right? In Octavia E. Butler’s case, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Originally published in 1979, Butler’s sci-fi novel Kindred is the story of Dana, a woman from 1976 who’s dragged back in time to a plantation in pre-Civil War Maryland. Finding herself labeled a slave, Dana has little choice but to accept being someone else’s property while figuring out how to get back to her time and navigating how to stay alive.
Because I haven’t (yet) read the original novel, I can’t say how good of a job Damian Duffy and John Jennings did in adapting Butler’s work. That said, I have read Butler’s Wild Seed, and the graphic novel adaptation of Kindred most certainly carries Butler’s storytelling style. What makes the adaptation so engrossing is that while it has the commonly used/abused time travel plot device, it centrally focuses on a black woman traveling back in time, which is rare. While there are plenty of slave stories available for public consumption/exploitation, few of them bring modern characters into the narrative.
Misadventures in time travel.
When Dana first time-travels, she saves a young boy named Rufus from drowning before rubberbanding back to her time. When it happens again, she stays in the past longer, and Rufus is a bit older. It becomes apparent to the both of them that Rufus being in danger pulls Dana into the past, and Dana fearing for her life pushes her back into her time. Between trips back and forth, Dana has to pretend (although the lines eventually blur between “pretend” and “actuality”) to be a slave and put the pieces together about Rufus’ identity and the reason they’re linked.
It’s quite a painful and humiliating adjustment for Dana to fit in on a slave plantation. Besides being perceived as little more than chattel and a domestic beast of burden, Dana also has no choice but to endure the psychological trauma of acting as a slave. Besides casually and incessantly being called the n-word, Dana is subjected to casual physical violence for the smallest of “slights.” There’s also the ever-looming threat of sexual violence, which adds another serrated facet of psychological trauma for slave women. While Dana’s husband (Kevin) joins her for some of her trips back to Maryland, he has no choice but to act as her owner rather than her husband. As much as Kevin wants to protect his wife from the brutality of slavery, the best thing he can do is play his part as a white slave owner.
History brought to brutal life.
One of the greatest strengths of Kindred is the precarious balance it finds between the influence Dana represents to Rufus (he depends on her to nurse him back to health and convince a slave woman to submit to his “charms”), and the authority Rufus lords over Dana (she depends on him to send letters to Kevin and keep her from being sold and physically beat...or worse). They both need each other if either of them is to survive, and yet they both harbor a deep animosity for the other. It’s a sick symbiotic relationship not often witnessed in slave narratives. As for the graphic novel’s shortcomings, the only one I had was that in some places, I felt the story was told out of sequence; things would happen without an explanation as to what led to a specific point in the narrative. Most of the time, I could (mostly...I think) fill in the blanks on my own, but it was still a bit jarring.
Jenning’s illustrations do a great job of capturing the terror, strength, occasional tenderness and sorrow woven within Butler’s story. Rather than drawing Dana’s present in color and the past in black and white, Jenning’s instead reverses that, allowing us to see how from Dana’s perspective, the past is more vivid than her present. Jenning’s attention to detail regarding Dana’s appearance at the beginning of the story compared to the end demonstrates just how harrowing the ordeal is.
History within history
The graphic adaptation of Kindred isn’t an easy read, but it’s one that makes it easy to understand why Butler’s novel is a celebrated classic. Even though I know the major beats of the story, I’ll still check out the book. I’m still not a fan of time travel stories or slave narratives, nor am I more willing to read/watch content that blends the two. What I will say is that reading Kindred makes me look forward to checking out Duffy and Jenning’s adaptation of Butler’s Parable of the Sower. The three perfectly display the artistic beauty and nuance that can result when you carefully blend the past with the present.
Page length: 255 pgs.
Recommend Buy New, Used or Skip: Buy new (or, as always, check for an e-book version at your local library)
Movie poster for Brown Girl Begins.
Up Next: Brown Girl Begins, a sci-fi film directed by Sharon Lewis and inspired by author Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, is the story of a young girl named Ti-Jeanne wrestling with her fear of dying in the footsteps of her mother and tapping into the power of Caribbean spirits to save her people in 2049 post-apocalyptic Toronto.