Kindred - 1st Impressions

Ambrew said...

Kindred is completely blowing my hair back now that I've RE-read the 1st hundred pages. The narrative seemed deceptively simple at first. But it is anything but, and I didn't have the chance to truly appreciate this until I read it for a second time.

Anytime you're surprised or disturbed by something - there's an unexplained "gap" in the expected logic of the text - it's a pretty good indication that you should pay extra attention to it because it is central to interpreting what you're reading. And the text certainly has many of these gaps that confound the reader's expectations and sense of expected narrative logic...

The "Miracle" Gap

What immediately struck me as odd was how easily Dana's miraculous time travel seems to happen. Not much expostional text is devoted to describing it (a paragraph or two in the begining and Dana's standing by the riverside). The journey through time gets less and less expostion the more it happens - it is just an unbelievable fact which can't be explained. Kevin and Dana come to accept it pretty quickly too. There is something dream like in the ease in which this happens. It's analagous to the way the main character in Kafka's Metamorphosis accepts the absurd dream-logic of the beauracracy that destorys him. Any normal person would, after all, completely freak out or maybe even suffer a nervous breakdown if they went through what Dana experience even at the novel's outset. Certainly they'd contact authorities immediately. After all, time travel would be the greatest discovery/news story of all time.

Present Vs. Past Gap

As the narrative progresses, it is striking how much present day LA resembles 1815 Maryland. At first, it seems as if Dana is very much modern and liberated – the product of a (presumably) enlightened time and place. She is as indignant and offended as one would expect any modern day woman of color to be when Rufus casually mentions his mother has referred to Dana (her son’s rescuer !) as a “nigger”.“That was a hell of a thing for her to say right after she saw me save her son’s life” (p. 24) - Dana reprimands Rufus immediately, indignant – as if she can’t believe someone (especially so young) would dare to be so casually racist. As if it had rarely happened to her in present day California.In fact, before she realizes the time and place she’s been mysteriously whisked away to, Dana plays by modern day rules. She sees Rufus as a rude but ignorant child and treats him as such. Her natural, first reaction at the beginning of her second trip (before she know she’s in 1815) is to physically restrain Rufus immediately and threaten punishment for his bad behavior. “Someone should use one (a stick) like that on you” yells Dana after she’s ripped the burning wood from the little boy’s hand (p. 20). Clearly Dana knows it’s her right, as a responsible modern adult to put Rufus in his place and teach him respect. Even towards the end of the 2nd trip, when Dana already knows where she is, her modern values and her historical knowledge seem to give her a distinct advantage. She’s able to outthink and outsmart her rapist, for example. She knows he is a “patrol” member and based on her historical knowledge of the function of patrols at that time, Dana knows he’ll attempt to rape her and is able to prepare her defense in advance. “I understood what the man was going to do… he was going to give me another chance to destroy him. I was almost relieved.” One couldn’t imagine a woman of color from 1815, Alice’s mother for example, being so quick and determined to fight back.Dana’s confidence, presence of mind, and clear exhibition of modern day values, when she first faces the world of her historical past, gave me the false impression (and an expectation) that 1970’s California would prove to be quite different from slave-state antebellum Maryland. It was disturbing to find that quite the opposite is the case. So jarring that it became clear to me this must be one of the central aims of the narrative.As R S already pointed out, there are obvious parallels between the temp agency world and the way the slave economy of 1815 is organized – the most obvious being that the employees euphemistically refer to the temp agency as a “slave market” (p. 52) . Dana herself may not realize it (or may not WANT to realize it - she says it’s “quite the opposite, actually”) but the way the work is organized is much the same as in the Weylin plantation - where free black men and women would drift in and out seeking short term menial work for little pay. “It was nearly always mindless work ….[we were] non people rented for a few hours. It [we] didn’t matter.” (p. 53). Here, Dana seems to contradict her statement about the agency being the opposite of a slave market in the very next paragraph. There seems to be some resistance to seeing the truth in Dana’s view of modern California. A desire to ignore the underlying hierarchical structure (which the reader can see as having clear ‘ancestral’ ties to the overtly racist past) and see her present day as a sharp break from 1815. Perhaps this is a good example of internalized racism at work – in that Dana sees (and has been taught to see) her present day conditions as the natural order of things. Likewise with Dana’s racist temp supervisor. “Chocolate and vanilla porn” (p. 56) he says – making fun of Kevin and Dana’s budding romance. Dana dismisses this as the idiotic ramblings of a doofus who doesn’t know when he’s beat a “joke” to death. But is it just an ignorant joke divorced from the past? Soon after, we see the terrible origins of the supervisor’s supposedly meaningless insult. It is quite normal for white “masters” to use slave women for their sexual pleasure and tacitly approved by everyone except jealous white wives. Even Mrs. Weylin knows there’s not much she can do but torture Dana and the female slaves when no one’s looking. Black women are considered to be so sub-human that it merits no more than a wink (p. 97) – when Weylin catches Dana sneaking out of Kevin’s bedroom. Clearly the same hierarchical construct which informs Weylin’s wink is at work in the modern-day supervisor’s comment: certainly white men can have sexual relations with black women. But this is not romance, it’s just one of many ways the privileged white man is allowed to seek sexual satisfaction – and is as, cheap, fleeting, meaningless and devoid of feeling as the intercourse in a porno movie.