Splintered Family Trees: Broken Genealogies and Inheritance of Loss in Octavia Butler's Kindred

Passage: 
                "'Doctor-n-gger,' she said with contempt. 'Think you know so much. Reading-n-gger. White-n-gger! Why didn't you know enough to let me die?'
                I said nothing. She was getting angrier and angrier, shouting at me. I turned away from her sadly, telling myself it was better, safer for her to vent her feelings on me than on anyone else.
               Along with her shouting now, I could hear the thin faint cries of a baby" (Butler 160).

Critical Questions: 
          What is the relevance of Alice's string of slurs at Dana and her passivity in response? What is the importance of her constant positioning of Dana as a "race-traitor"? What is the importance of their familial kinship vs. their racial kinship as unfree bodies? How does the juxtaposition of the birth of Carrie and Nigel's baby function in this passage? How does sound/aggressive/liveliness work against silence/passivity/death (even at a soul level) in this text?

Analysis:
        There are a number of connections of kinship explored in Octavia Butler's Kindred, and with the temporal framing of time travel families and relationships exist outside the boundaries of physics. This gives Dana the pain and responsibility to create her line, and as a result to betray her Black ancestors even by saving their lives. This is illustrated in the passage when Alice says "[w]hy didn't you know enough to let me die?" This is an important contradiction that Dana cannot rectify in the action of the novel, as she actually literally knows enough to save her. Her knowledge of her own family history forces her hand in multiple situations including this one, and in the moment she is punished emotionally in a sense, by her great-great grandmother.
     The juxtaposition of this multi-generational trauma is highlighted in the moment through the final line of the chapter notifying the audience of the birth of Carrie and Nigel's child. It explores the loss and disinheritance passed down through family in the novel, physically and mentally. The cries of a newborn in concert with Dana's painful silence and Alice's angry shouts illustrate the ways that trauma lives on and continues in every person under the oppression of histories of slavery. This is shown again when we learn that Nigel and Carrie's children have most assuredly been sold at the end of the novel with Rufus'. There is no true way to rectify the wrongs of slavery, and except for the physical moments that Dana has in the time jump, no true record. Instead, there is a record through silences in families, a lack of written truth, and the holes in genealogies.
   My paper will focus on these moments in Kindred, to explore how a history of loss is illustrated through the physical marks left on Dana's body, and the other slaves and mixed race children of rape and power. The contrast between the written record, and the physical and non-physical trauma of the action of the novel illustrates the ways that loss continues into the present for Dana, and does not end with a paper trail, but with wounds.