Octavia E. Butler\u2019s Kindred<\/em> Adapted by Damian Duffy and John Jennings<\/p>\n This month I\u2019m reading the graphic novel version of Kindred <\/em>adapted by Damian Duffy and John Jennings.\u00a0 Originally a novel written by the African American science fiction author Octavia Butler, Kindred<\/em> tells the story of Edana, an African American protagonist who involuntarily time travels between the present and the plantation era and is forced to save her own life and intervene in the lives of her ancestors.\u00a0 In particular, Edana (or Dana) is catapulted to the past to save the life of her white plantation-owning ancestor Rufus Weylin and to shape the fates of her enslaved black progenitors Alice, Hagar, and Joe.<\/p>\n In this visual adaptation, Dana\u2019s story emerges out of the black and white print of fiction into the colored hues of the graphic.\u00a0 The life Dana shares with her white husband Kevin are colored in warm creams and ambers.\u00a0 The palette of plantation time is more variegated and intense and increasingly consumes their regular sepia-colored present as Dana\u2019s trips to the past last longer for days and weeks.\u00a0 Blues and greens evoke nature, greenery, crops, and the coolness of river water and the day sky. Evening purples and candle-light yellows color scenes of domesticity and fugitive flight.\u00a0 The color contrast between Edana and Kevin softened in the context of a domestic comfort (for which they also had to fight) are transferred into scenes that belie no ambiguity signaling the thickness of the color line that bracket white versus black experiences. All the myriad hues of the plantation scenery together attest to the multiple forms of violence and vulnerabilities of plantation life that were experienced by enslaved populations.\u00a0 The scenes of physical, sexual, verbal, and emotional abuse, of forced separations and the lived conditions of white supremacist terrorism experienced by Dana and the enslaved come off the pages via the frequent pace of their occurrence. They are many.\u00a0 They are undeniable, especially now because of their visuality.<\/p>\n Though Dana is a time traveler, her passage between a sepia present and a colored past, do not leave her unscathed. \u00a0Dana is not merely a witness to plantation violence.\u00a0 She intervenes in the lives of plantation residents\u2014the plantation-owning Weylins (and Rufus in particular) but most often in the lives of her black ancestors\u2014by advocating for the enslaved and trying to prevent acts of violence, providing medical assistance to the injured, by teaching young enslaved children to read, and even sustaining physical injuries for actions that are interpreted by plantation authorities as insolence.\u00a0 Edana is beaten and whipped.\u00a0 She returns with a swollen black eye after being beaten during an early journey in which she nearly escapes rape by a slave patroller.\u00a0 She carries the scars from a brutal beating by a plantation overseer on her back during another passage home.\u00a0 During her last voyage from the past, Dana kills Rufus Weylin after he attempts to rape her, but is so quickly transported that her arm\u2014lodged against a wall\u2014is left behind. As spoken by Edana in the Prologue scene that opens the novel, \u201cI lost an arm on my last trip home.\u201d Thus, Edana\u2019s body bears the literal marks of her confrontation with history, however supernaturally mediated.\u00a0 The traumas of a slave past\/present are indelibly imprinted on her form.\u00a0 But more than that, Edana\u2019s experiences with slavery dramatically changes her visage.\u00a0 Adeptly depicted in the visual novel, Dana\u2019s demeanor alters.\u00a0 The increasing occurrence of resident facial expressions\u2014stone cast face, down turned eyes, and suppressed rage\u2014tell their own tale of enslavement; a silent story of slavery as a process that can never truly be heritable, but must be experienced, witnessed, embodied, and broadcasted via the dimming of eye lights, the slumping of shoulders that broadcast resignation.<\/p>\n And yet for all of Edana\u2019s changes, somehow over the course of his coming of age, Rufus changes very little.\u00a0 The Weylin heir\u2019s childish demeanor and behavior both remain.\u00a0 The same petulant squinting of the eyes is matched by an enduring pattern of impetuous behavior.\u00a0 Rufus pursues his own desires and interests for power, sex, and money with almost no concern for the human costs borne by others that result from those choices.\u00a0 The reliance of him and his infirmed mother (who must eventually be carried) on the bondspeople they exploit illustrate the stunting infantilizations that accompanied planter privilege.\u00a0 The impetuously furrowed brow of Rufus, the repetition of one-dimensional scripts that evoke, dictate, and predict pseudo-familial care on the part of slaves remain.\u00a0 Here, James Baldwin\u2019s words in The Fire Next <\/em>Time hold relevance.<\/p>\n This past, the Negro\u2019s past; of rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone; doubt that he was worthy of life, since everyone denied it; sorrow for his women, for his kinfolk, for his children, who needed his protection, and whom he could not protect; rage, hatred, and murder, hatred for white men so deep that if often turned against him and his own, and made all love, all trust, all joy impossible\u2014this past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful.\u00a0 I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering\u2014enough is certainly as good as a feast\u2014but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n From Baldwin\u2019s purview, the underside of the struggle for humanity engendered in African Americans\u2019 resistance to the abjection of blackness is the stasis of white supremacist privilege, missed opportunities for humanistic engagement, communion, and growth.\u00a0 For all of interventions Edana made, sometimes hurtling unwittingly across time-space continuums, to save Rufus\u2019 life over the years, Rufus cannot manage to see Edana as kin, her labor as love, her body as her own.\u00a0 And because of this, this refusal of humanity, Rufus cannot be saved.\u00a0 Edana is a time traveler, a prophet, a healer, a teacher, even a heroine, but ultimately, Edana is not a savior.\u00a0 Not for lack of capacity, but because white supremacist plantocracy, for all of its imprints on slave bodies also indelible scars the characters of white beneficiaries, it is irredeemable.\u00a0 Neither grace nor forgiveness is available for such a non-recognition of humanity.<\/p>\n And, this is the truly revolutionary part of Butler\u2019s Kindred<\/em> to me as a scholar of religion and race. The novel does not<\/em> present a resolution or transcendence of the experiences of the slave past, but rather a complex embodied memory that holds a solidarity for some ancestors and a rejection for those who fail to recognize their shared humanity with their descendants.\u00a0 Genealogy is excised, exorcised even.\u00a0 Anti-black violence is not absolved. In the midst of an activist context shaped by Black Lives Matter, and its queer women of color leadership\u2019s call for a valuation of black lives and the black life matter of black bodies, this non-forgiveness for the violation of black bodies is profound.\u00a0 To not forgive, to not give up one\u2019s body\/sexuality for white supremacy, to defend one\u2019s body (even from an ancestor) illustrates a thick love for self and black enfleshment in the midst of processes that threaten to commoditize and dehumanize black people.\u00a0 In his contemplation of black intellectual writing in the Age of Ferguson, Julius B. Fleming, Jr. asks, \u201cWhat can you do when you study the shattering of your own flesh, when you teach the historical destruction of that flesh, write about it, present on it, find it tucked away in the recesses of archives the world over?\u201d[3]<\/a> For me, Butler\u2019s Edana and Duffy and Jennings\u2019 graphic adaptation of Kindred<\/em> provides an answer through their depictions of Edana, a political and spiritual ancestress, a sankofa archetype that calls for an immanent engagement with the past in the present.\u00a0 More broadly, these conjoined works offer us conceptual and visual portals to excavate black history, to come face-to-face with our nation’s past, our physical and political resemblance to our ancestors in times that are mutually imprinted by anti-black violence and shaped by the metaphysics of fugitivity and freedom movements.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n [1]<\/a> James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro<\/em>, film, directed by Raoul Peck, (2017; New York: Magnolia Pictures).<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time<\/em> (New York: Vintage International, 1993), 98-99.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Julius B. Fleming, Jr., \u201cShattering Black Flesh: Black Intellectual Writing in the Age of Ferguson,\u201d American Literary History <\/em>28 (2016): 832.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Todne Thomas \u201cHistory is not the past. It is the present.\u00a0 We carry our history. We are our history.\u201d\u00a0 – James Baldwin [1] Octavia E. Butler\u2019s Kindred Adapted by Damian Duffy and John Jennings This month I\u2019m reading the … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/religion\/files\/2017\/03\/kindred-picture-208x300.jpg\")
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