More than 35 years after its release, Kindred continues to draw in new readers with its deep exploration of the violence and loss of humanity caused by slavery in the United States, and its complex and lasting impact on the present day. Butler’s bestselling literary science-fiction masterpiece, Kindred, now in graphic novel format. Regardless, I’m definitely glad that I read this, and I’ll be thinking on it for awhile.Octavia E. I do think we probably lose a few things in the adaptation to graphic novel, which is what kept me from giving this four stars. when one has no experience of it? And how does one survive when one does? Is there any complexity to slaveholders, or are they all 100% evil? Does “product of their time” mean anything? Is it an excuse, or simply an explanation? How does a slave survive? How does a free Black person survive? How does anyone thrive? How does one survive in this time and place - Maryland, during the slavery era of the U.S. The main point is, as I see it, survival. And yes, there is a level of tension in terms of when will she get pulled back next, and can she return before she is hurt badly. We don’t know how the mechanic works, and we never find out (we do learn the why, sort of). Time passes in the past but when she returns, minutes or hours have passed in the present day. Yes, it’s about woman who gets pulled into the past without control, and then returned seemingly beyond her control. The science fiction is there for sure, but it isn’t the main focus. I believe I started one for a book club but didn’t connect. I’ve don’t believe I’ve finished any of Ms. She has to ‘remember her place’ and try to figure out how to help the slaves without putting their lives - or her own - at risk. But she still gets whipped, and has her life threated. She doesn’t speak like them, she can read and write, and she gets some preferential treatment that keeps her from the harder labor in the fields. Her relationship to the slaves on the plantation is also complicated. Dana has some sympathy for Rufus at time, and the reader can sometimes see that perhaps there is a grain of humanity in him, but then he refuses to embrace that grain and continues along the path his dead slave-owning father led him down. Yet if she kills him before he issues free papers for the slaves, all she does is risk those slaves being sold to yet another white person. Saving his life often means saving her own, but keeping him alive may mean other things, like the continued mistreatment of other humans. But with this graphic novel format, the images showing the whippings, the attempted rapes, the horror, are all quite real.īelow are spoilers, as they were hard to avoid in the areas I’m most interested in exploring.ĭana’s relationship with Rufus - the boy, then teen, then man who she is connected to - is complicated. And its possible what we imagine is more dramatic than, say, what might end up in a film adaptation. In a traditional novel, we imagine the scenes. Review: This was an intense read, possibly made more intense by the portrayal of the images associated with the it. Why I chose it: My husband received this as a gift this year and thought I would also enjoy it. Line that sticks with me: “I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.” (p 89) This cycle continues, and times including her husband. Without warning, she is then transported back to 1776. In a nutshell: Somehow Dana - a young Black woman living with her white husband in 1976 - ends up being transported back to the mid-1800s when a young son of a slave master fears death. I don’t think you need to be into graphic novels or science fiction to enjoy this work. As she time-travels between worlds, one in which she is a free woman and one where she is part of her own complicated familial history on a southern plantation, she becomes frighteningly entangled in the lives of Rufus, a conflicted white slaveholder and one of Dana’s own ancestors, and the many people who are enslaved by him.ĬN for entire review: Racism, Rape, Slaveryīest for: Really anyone. Adapted by celebrated academics and comics artists Damian Duffy and John Jennings, this graphic novel powerfully renders Butler’s mysterious and moving story, which spans racial and gender divides in the antebellum South through the 20th century.īutler’s most celebrated, critically acclaimed work tells the story of Dana, a young black woman who is suddenly and inexplicably transported from her home in 1970s California to the pre–Civil War South.
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