Octavia Butler, 1979
the fifty-second book in the visitor recommendation series;
suggested by Amy Hill
The first class I audited after returning to the greater Berkeley area in 2005 was on the apocalyptic imagination in American culture. On the syllabus were both books in Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. These books take place in a future dystopia in which water and food are scarce, those who step outside their fortified enclaves are liable to be murdered within minutes, and the institutional void is eventually filled by a totalitarian theocracy. So I was expecting more of the same, or else something even further out into the realm of sci‑fi, since I had heard that a lot of Butler’s work dealt involved human-alien hybrids on distant planets. Instead, it turns out that Kindred is essentially historical fiction: the only element that steps outside the bounds of realism is the involuntary time travel that launches the protagonist (and, on one occasion, her husband) into antebellum Maryland—which, though it eventually ended up on the Union side, was a slave state. This protagonist, Dana, recently graduated from temp work to a fledgling career in fiction, is the direct descendant of a freedwoman named Hagar, who lived from 1831 to 1880. Dana discovers that in order to preserve her own existence, she must jump from her present, 1976, to various points in the nineteenth century, taking on the role of a slave in the process, in order to repeatedly rescue Hagar’s father from mortal danger so that he lives long enough to sire Hagar… knowing full well that he does so by subjecting one of his slaves to a lifetime of rape.
So, yeah, a few pages in, I thought, wow, this is quite different from the Earthseed books—and then a few pages further in, I thought, wait, it’s actually almost the same. You want to read about a dystopia? No need to imagine one lurking in the future, for it’s hard to conjure up a darker dystopia than the fairly recent past. Butler’s chief project here is to use sci‑fi trappings to introduce a new audience to the hell that was the life of a slave: not just a dismal existence of unbroken, grueling labor, not just condemnation to the bottom rung of a hierarchical society, but outright torture. The physical torture of whippings, the psychological torture of having one’s spouse or children stolen and sold… not only are these horrific in themselves, but more subtly, they lead to a crisis of identity for Dana and her fellow slaves, tormented by the way that these atrocities have conditioned them to accept the intolerable. And even those who theoretically benefit from the power imbalance lead grim lives immersed in brutality.
The thing is, this is pretty much every slavery story. So is there any point in finding a new angle in order to tell it yet again? The answer is yes, so long as there are still people who haven’t heard it yet. Consider the infamous case of Richard Cohen, a newspaper pundit who by the very nature of that job was supposed to know something about the world, who attested in 2013 that it wasn’t until he watched the movie 12 Years a Slave, at the age of seventy-two, that he learned that “slavery was not a benign institution in which mostly benevolent whites owned innocent and grateful blacks”. And you can say that, okay, he went to school in the 1950s, in a neighborhood where less than ten percent of the population had any non-European ancestry, and times have changed. But given the current crusade by the far right to leave its bootprint on red and purple state education, we can look forward to tens of millions more people who will need to learn this lesson in the generations to come.
Halle Butler, 2019
the fifty-third book in the visitor recommendation series;
suggested by Caleb Wilson
Sparks have a song—one of their best, actually—with the improbable title “So Tell Me Mrs. Lincoln Aside from That How Was the Play?”, which is about pretending to listen to someone else talk. Sample lyrics: “Nodding my head like a bobblehead doll / Trying to smile, ignoring it all”; “Wandering mind, meandering words / I couldn’t tell you any I’ve heard”. This book is basically two hundred pages of that.
Like Kindred, The New Me is about a temp; that’s about where the similarities end. When we meet the temp in The New Me, Millie, she has a gig answering phones at a furniture showroom; she hates the inane chatter of her co-workers and the meaningless tedium of the job, but when she gets the impression that she is about to be offered a permanent position, she starts to grow optimistic that, despite her misgivings about committing to a life as an assistant receptionist, this could represent a turning point for her. After all, things right now are not great, Bob. She’s thirty, and still relies on her parents to pay for rent and food. Her social circle has dwindled to a single acquaintance, Sarah, whom she doesn’t even like, but who is all that stands between her and total isolation. They get together to sit around in Millie’s apartment, drinking beers, smoking cigarettes, and taking turns complaining about their jobs while the one not talking grits her teeth and prays that the one talking will shut up.
Would that both their prayers could have been answered! This is like a modern version of one of those novels from around the year 1900 in which the protagonist falls upon harder and harder times—e.g., when Millie is not only not offered a permanent position but actually let go both by the furniture shop and the temp agency, she ends up working at a nightmarish call center—but I found it hard to summon up much sympathy because Millie has so little to recommend her. She’s basically indistinguishable from the inane co-workers she complains about, snidely judging the people around her by their clothes and demonstrating no talents for anything other than the ability to coin some pithily crass phrases. I kept waiting for the new version of her promised by the title to emerge. But it turns out that “the new me” is just the regular her imagining a future version of herself who can afford to shop at Whole Foods.
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