Kindred

This is the first book we have worked through for the Afrofuturism class I am taking at Emerson College. Apprehensive as I was at the beginning of the course [partly due to slack planning on my part], I am now very glad that I took this on. The list of books we are working through are page turners [and I hope I can share each one].

Kindred is a graphic adaptation by Damien Duffy and John Jennings of Octavia Butler’s novel by the same name/title. It is a story of a woman [Dana] who time travels to a daunting past – that of her ancestors. A time when her ancestors barely had any rights, worked on plantations for hours on end, were whipped or sold or killed for the smallest show of defiance, a time when black people were owned by white people. The time travel is triggered by Rufus, a character who seems to always find himself in near-death situations, situations that pull Dana into his world. As such, she has no control of when and how she is called into the past, even though she later figures out how to return to the present [and it is not in a pretty way]. What strikes me about this story is the real-life impact the past has on the present as well as the possibility of a different future [which for Dana and Kevin is the present]. We often speak of generational trauma, and I could not help reading this in[or into]. Is it that we now have language for it that I can refer to “generational trauma”? Given the chance to go to the past, how would we act? What would we change and why? How would that affect the future?

Early in the story, when Dana experiences the tell-tell signs of a call to the past [dizziness and such], her husband [Kevin] grasps onto her and time travels with her. They are later separated: Dana is pulled out of the past [at the time she had not yet fully figured out how to return to the present], flung into the present, and Kevin is left behind. The tricky thing here is that the way time functions in the past differs from the present. A couple of months in the past turns out to be minutes or a couple of hours in the present. It is like having a dream except it is not.

There is a lot to appreciate about Kindred and I hope that you will consider picking it up. It is a quick read and has strong graphic expressions [the artists really did a great job] that add to the intensity of the story. In short, I highly recommend this graphic novel, and yes, I would read it again and again.