“The time, the year, was right, but the house just wasn’t familiar enough. I felt as though I were losing my place here in my own time, Rufus’s time was a sharper, stronger reality. The work was harder, the smells and tastes were stronger, the danger was greater, the pain was worse … Rufus’s time demanded things of me that had never been demanded before, and it could easily kill me if I did not meet its demands. That was a stark, powerful reality that the gentle conveniences and luxuries of this house, of now, could not touch.” (Butler 191)
The focus of my paper is the way in which Butler uses the character of Dana as a medium through which the reader is able to garner a deeper understanding of the intricacies of slavery in the context of a neoslave narrative. Dana serves as a modern day lens into the past and the reader is gaining knowledge through a secondary degree of exposure to the action. There is a repetitive focus in the text on the language of observation on behalf on Dana, particularly on her sensory abilities. In the passage above, Dana is reflecting on the seeming reality of the past in comparison to the seeming falseness of the present moment. She makes note of how the “smells and tastes were stronger” and how she felt more pain. These sensory details take centerstage within this moment of reflection. It is through her experience of the past that she is gaining a better understanding about her history, her life, and herself. However, the power of her observational abilities do not end there. Through her perceptions, Dana has a distinct impact on those characters in the past, particularly Rufus. In this way, she is a figuration of what Georg Simmel calls the “stranger” insomuch as she “imports qualities into it, which do not and cannot stem from the group itself”. Through her relationship with the past, Dana is both teaching and learning, shaping her identity and those of her ancestors.
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