How Time Travel Changes People

    What would you do if you were sent back in time? Whether you were sent back to experience the jazz era, cultural revolution and prohibition-fueled violence of the 1920s, or the medieval feudal era of the 1300s to fight in the Hundred Years War, what would you actually do? And how would the people in that era react to you? How would these experiences in the past change a modern individual? These questions are answered by Octavia Butler in Kindred, in which a black woman, Dana, and a white male, Kevin, from 1976 are sent back to the 19th century.

    When Dana and Kevin time travel together, they quickly take up their new roles in this alien society. Although we have recently learned that Kevin helped slaves escape, in the earlier parts of the book Butler dropped some hints at Kevin becoming racist. On page 109, the reader sees how Kevin wants Dana to essentially become his secretary and type his manuscripts for him. He repeatedly asks Dana to do this for him, even though it clearly makes her uncomfortable, showing Kevin’s ignorance. Another example of Kevin’s ignorance is when he was living on the Weylin plantation, where he says that slavery is not that bad and how he would love to experience the building of the American West. He is not aware of the brutal whippings, beatings, and punishments slaves get because he is a white man so nobody is telling him to come outside and see what happens to slaves. Fortunately, Kevin does not turn racist, but it does make the reader wonder about the possibility of somebody turning into a far worse person. As we discussed in class, at what point do roles turn into reality? 

    Dana was not a violent person, rather she was squeamish about violence, but when the patroller attacked her, she realized that her squeamishness was for another age. She could have jabbed out the patroller’s eyes but could not bring herself to, which is when she realizes that was a fatal mistake. She goes back to the past but tries to jab out Kevin’s eyes, as she mistakes him for the patroller. This shows how quickly one can change when thrust into the circumstances of the past. Dana now had no hesitation trying to jab one’s eyes out in self-defense. This comes full circle at the end of the book, when Dana kills Rufus. She was in the same exact circumstance as she was in the beginning of the book but now the person who committed this horrible act was somebody related to her, somebody who Dana had been ambivalent towards the entire book. She kills Rufus in self-defense, and this leads to another example of how she changed: losing her arm. This is mentioned in the first few pages and Butler spends the entire book explaining everything that happened for that to occur. Obviously, Dana losing her arm is a physical and permanent representation of her experiences in the 1800s. She had gotten scars from whippings in the past but losing an entire arm for the rest of her life serves to show how a part of Dana will forever be stuck in the 1800s.