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Jordan Wall
EN 102
Discourse Analysis-Rough Draft
4/16/19
How Kindred reflects on societal norms
Octavia Butler’s Kindred takes place in two time periods, the late twentieth century and
early nineteenth century. Butler, known for her science fiction writing, creates a story in which
her protagonist, Edana Franklin, known as Dana, travels in time from her modern, post-Civil
Rights Movement life in 1976 California to the antebellum South of the early 1800s. These
historical and geographical placements allow Butler to fully explore the tension between love
and power among her characters and to manipulate the stereotypes commonly associated with
African Americans in the twentieth century. Butler demystifies, dispels, and renders powerless
some of the controlling images that helped to naturalize oppression throughout history as the
reader comes to understand what it meant to live as a slave for Dana, who struggles to maintain
her sense of self, and for the black men and women who were born in the era of slavery.
Why did Butler write Kindred? A Nigerian writer name Chinua Achebe wrote “The
Novelist as Teacher,” and in this he wrote a writer “must remain free to disagree with his (her)
society and go into rebellion against it if need be. But I am for choosing my cause very
carefully” (42). Achebe is telling the audience that as a writer you should be free to write what
you want despite society. In Butler’s case, this matters because she wrote this to show “young
people what it might feel like to become a slave: not merely to teach them the brute facts about
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this American institution, but to show them” (Bellot). This being in response to hearing young
black people saying that they wouldn’t have tolerated slavery if it happened to them. Butler’s use
of a protagonist from the civil rights era having to bounce back and forth to the antebellum south
shows the audience no matter who you are you will have to blend into the environment to
survive. I also want to point out that in the story being a white male didn’t have a negative affect
on you. Kevin, Dana’s husband, is a good example of this. Doing the story, it shows that Kevin
more easily assimilated into roll, even having his wife, Dana be his slave. Butler not only
stressed a controversial topic but tried to impart knowledge of how the antebellum south really
was and how we would all have to conform to the time period.
Butler sets up a world that is realistic, but contests the romanticized stereotype of the
