'Kindred' demonstrates the power of stories to generate empathy

To focus on the entertainment value of this story would be to miss the point of why it's being told

Roger Ebert famously described the audiovisual medium as an empathy machine. New Hulu series Kindred, adapted from Octavia Butler's 1979 novel, is a good demonstration of how accurate those words were. In this story, Dana James, a modern, independent woman from the 21st century, is mysteriously dragged across time into the Antebellum plantation where her ancestors lived, and the past horrors of American history become lived reality for her, and much less directly, for the viewer.

There's only so much that a story can tell you about the human condition, and yet our most effective way to express it is precisely via storytelling. This tension was in Butler's mind at the time of writing Kindred. One important lesson from social justice movements is the idea that some experiences can't be fully communicated. You'd have to have been there. Butler herself cited such a gap in perspective as one of the motivations for her novel: the facts of American slavery that you can find in a textbook weren't just a history lesson for the people who had to live through it. From our vantage point in this century, it's too easy to feel detached from a monstrous social order that happened to people who are now dead. It's too tempting to develop for the enslaved populations of yesteryear the same indifference one might feel for the ancient Sumerians. Kindred seems to be saying to American audiences: this isn't just a tale of times past. This is your tale, your life. You exist because of these horrors. You don't get to form a concept of yourself that doesn't include the evil that happened here.

The merit of a work like Kindred is that it helps make these truths accessible even to those of us who have no ties to that history. That's the effect of the empathy machine: someone like me, a complete outsider, gets something as close as possible to bearing witness. I still have no idea of what it's like to live under race-based slavery, and I cannot pretend to have any standing to speak on American racial relations; I'm not American, not Black, and not descended from slaves. My identity is Latino, which comes with a historical baggage of its own. I cannot say what Kindred means for Black American viewers. Black critics have already commented on Kindred's representation of slavery far more competently and acutely than I ever could. What I can say is that, for an outsider like me, the series succeeds at touching the crucial emotions of curiosity and empathy that are the base minimum for solidarity.

A while ago, when I reviewed the TV adaptation of The Underground Railroad, I said that slavery narratives don't exist to entertain you. They tell violent events, but the violence isn't supposed to be exciting. They tell of pain and betrayal and injustice, but not so that you can get vicarious satisfaction through the victory of the good guys. In Kindred, Dana comes to believe that her role in the story is that of a heroine whose quest is to preserve her lineage. But she's not thrown into the past because she's destined to save the day. She's there because those events made her, as they made the country. She's there because those events are in her and all around her, as is true of every American.

Butler published her novel in 1979, at a particularly fluid moment in both the civil rights struggle and the speculative genres. The inexplicable phenomenon of being transported to the lives of Dana's ancestors hits very differently now, for a generation of viewers who grew up with Back to the Future or The Butterfly Effect. Dana (and the screenwriting team) spends too much of the runtime trying to figure out the rules of time travel, as if this were the kind of story that gets resolved by a stroke of genius. But Kindred is not a technical mystery in the vein of Asimov or Clarke. Dana starts her journey with the wrong impression of what kind of story she's in. To be fair, this may be intentional on the writers' part: the character of Dana is a writer herself, so it's understandable that her first impulse upon meeting the unknown would be to analyze it as a story, to pull it apart and try to make sense of the plot logic. And that's the mistake that Kindred warns against. To treat history as a story is to blur its facticity. Stories have a resolution; history simply goes on. And the history of American slavery has very much gone on.

The irony of this message about the value of true history is that Kindred is, of course, just a story. When the novel was first published, it was viewed by some critics as a feminist response to Roots, which does claim to be true history. Whereas Roots narrates the effort to reconstruct events from second-hand testimonies, Kindred suggests that nothing less than direct, personal experience will do. If you weren't there, you're not going to understand. And if you don't understand, it's not your fault, but you shouldn't use that as an excuse either; it's still your responsibility to make an effort toward empathy.

Despite the emotional effectiveness of this adaptation, sometimes it steers too far in the direction of a cerebral time travel puzzle, which is the wrong approach for this story. The use of a break in the rules of reality in a seemingly ordinary way to express a painful history is a narrative technique that doesn't match the Anglo-speaking tradition of hard science fiction and is closer to the Latin American tradition of magical realism. Kindred expresses a unique relationship that Black Americans have with time, one in which years' worth of suffering seem to pass while the majority doesn't notice, and the one sentiment capable of linking those incompatible perspectives is the universal human experience of mortal dread. It would have been more satisfying if, instead of the technicalities of time travel, the writers had given closer attention to the human side of the story.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Hugo Nominee Interview: Lynell George

It is with great joy that I welcome journalist Lynell George to Nerds of a Feather.  Her book A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler (Angel City Press 2020) is a Hugo nominee for best related work.  George is a Los Angeles based essayist and journalist who was able to meet Butler at a number of book-ish events over the years.  A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky was born out of George's time spent with Butler's archives at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and explores how Butler thought about the world, and how she shaped herself. 

Of science fiction, Butler once said it was "a handful of earth, a handful of sky, and everything in between."  Using photos of Butler's ephemera, A Handful of Earth, a Handful of Sky allows the reader a glimpse into the every day world of a very private writer, for example how Butler found inspiration in daily mundane things like riding public transportation and hearing snippets of stranger's conversations.  A must-read for fans of Butler's work, anyone interested in how a writer gets from "here" to "there", how a writer shapes who they want themselves to be, will be interested in this book. 

George's articles and essays have most recently appeared in the L.A. Times, LMU Magazine, High Country News, and LAist, and she is the author of No Crystal Stair: African Americans in the City of Angels and After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame.  She is the recipient of a 2020 Distinguished Journalist award and has won a Grammy.  You can learn more about George at her website, Lynellgeorge.com.   She was kind enough to answer all my questions about her four year journey writing A Handful of Earth, a Handful of Sky,  what surprised her along the way, and more. 

NOAF: Welcome to Nerds of a Feather, can you tell us a little about yourself?

Lynell George: I am a writer. I’m a longtime journalist by profession and have covered a wide range of beats —arts and culture, literature, social issues, human behavior and hard news. I grew up as a curious reader. I still am today. I was born and raised in Los Angeles.

NOAF: Congratulations on your Hugo nomination for A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky. What inspired you to write this book?

LG: Thank you very much. After spending many hours in Butler archive at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, I became very interested in Butler’s daily routine and rituals. Everyone’s creative life looks different. There are no set rules and I was fascinated by how Butler began, so very early, to sketch out what it would look like to have a creative life. She planted the seeds very early, just dreaming on the page. She worked with what she had. Humble objects: Hand-me-down books, repurposed journals, recycled scrap paper. She haunted the library for riches. I found it extremely inspiring.

NOAF: In 2016, you participated in a project celebrating Octavia E. Butler called Radio Imagination, organized through the Los Angeles arts nonprofit Clockshop. Your submission was “Free and Clear”, a posthumous interview with Butler. What's the connection between “Free and Clear” and A Handful of Earth, a Handful of Sky?

LG: “Free and Clear” was a jumping off point for me. With that piece, I stitched together Butler’s own words to create a first-person narrative. Part of her writing ritual was asking herself questions that time, or research, or a conversation with someone might answer. Some questions became more complex over time. Some questions haunted her and she’d ask them everyday. So I looked at those patterns and questions in her daily life – what she wrote down in those diaries and journals and on her calendars—and looked at the ways in which she attempted to answer them. 

I decided that the shape that the “posthumous interview” should take would not be me, the journalist, asking questions, but Butler asking and responding her own queries, considering her own themes, talking out loud. The road to A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky branched off from “Free and Clear” because I could still “hear” Butler talking about the daily rituals– the new questions and new answers she’d involve herself in day after day in the books she was writing. 

 “Free and Clear” allowed me to hear how her mind worked. Being inside another writer’s process, in such a vivid way, was complicated. And visceral. I carried her worries, regrets, curiosities and joys with me. I knew I wasn’t finished with Butler. I knew that I wasn’t after a biography; Gerry Canavan’s had just come out with his deep dive into her life and work and I as aware that there were biographies in the pipeline. Instead, I was very interested in a very particular sliver in her path toward “self creation.” The archive gives you a sense of her day-to-day rituals, how much he had to struggle through to find the space to even begin to write. 

A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky was a way to visually chart the process of her writing life. What tools did she need? What did she touch everyday? Her notebooks, her journal, her bus pass, her library card… Each chapter takes one of those objects to tell the story of her routines, rituals, roadblocks, repeated affirmations that gave her the focus she needed to become. Writing for a living isn’t simply about what happens on the page. It is about how you arrange your life, the ingredients you need to do so. It’s about drive and commitment. it’s It would be helpful to anyone who was attempting not just a creative life, but attempting something unusual or difficult.

 

NOAF: How long did it take you to write A Handful of Earth, a Handful of Sky? What was going through your mind while you were researching and writing the book?

LG: I spent about four-plus years in the archive and began the first writing back in 2019, then finished up a draft in the summer of 2020. During the early research, I was just trying to get a sense of the archive, which is quite large: About 400 boxes of materials that include her drafts, diaries, newspaper clippings, and datebooks. You get a real sense of a writer’s life and the attending obsessions. It was familiar and also very specific to Butler. As I moved through, I was often aware that this experience— although I was “in conversation” —was nothing like “interviewing” someone. In a certain way I was walking with her through her day, looking over her shoulder as she paid her bills, read the newspaper or coaxed herself through another draft of a short story.

NOAF: Your read your way through the Octavia E. Butler archive at Huntington Library. What was the most interesting thing you came across while you were going through the archive? 

LG: So much. So hard to pinpoint. But one thing that struck me was her photography—he landscapes and streetscapes in particular. Some of it was to help her in her own research and enable her to be detailed in her descriptions of place. (She drew maps as well.) I wanted to know more about the images and would like to go back and spend more time looking at that work. She had an interest and a talent in photography. It was something, at one point, she considered as an alternative career path.

NOAF: What do you hope readers will get out of A Handful of Earth, a Handful of Sky?

LG: That there isn’t really anything “romantic” about a writer’s life, though movies and books sometimes tell you otherwise. It’s tough, tough work. Everyday it means staring down your fears and your demons. As Butler said, writing meant being alone with your thoughts – all of them. She didn’t put a lot of stock in “inspiration”, she believed more in habit. Relied on it. Sitting in the chair and writing the sentence and the next sentence. Getting it out of your head and on the page. I hope it will demystify the process and remind people that there are good days and harder days. Keep going.

NOAF: Octavia E. Butler spent most of her adult life in Pasadena CA, and you have lived in and around Pasadena and Los Angeles. Did you ever get a chance to meet her? What was she like? 

LG:  She lived in Pasadena and then later, after college years, in the city of L.A. I used to see her at her book signings at bookstores. She didn’t read text at these events, she’d talk about her books and the process of writing them and would be open to questions. She was always kind and generous with her time. The last time I saw her, she gave the keynote at the “Black to the Future Festival” in Seattle. I had hoped to see her again to interview, but that didn’t happen. She died just a couple of years later.

NOAF: Who are some of your favorite writers and artists? Why does their work speak to you?

LG: I love this question because I read different people and different forms for different moods or feelings. When I was just starting as a journalist and just beginning to write about race and hierarchies I gravitated to James Baldwin’s nonfiction. He helped me understand precisely what an urgent reported and personally observed essay could do. I learned how to think on the page with his work. I love Toni Morrison. She was one of the people my mother revered and was inspired by. In copies of her books I still find my mother’s notes about memories that a particular passage of a novel unlocked in my mother’s memory. 

I reread Gwendolyn Brooks’ gorgeous novella “Maud Martha” before I started writing A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky. It was the sort of mood that I wanted to be drifting in as I was writing, sitting with someone through their good days and bad days. I’m also inspired by photographers, like Roy DeCarava and Dawoud Bey, who take us deep into the intimacies of Black life. More private, over-the-shoulder moments that show us grit and grace. Music too: So much music, too much to name. But sometimes, I’ll put on something to transport myself to another time and place, to let the walls, floors and ceilings fall away.

NOAF: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me.

POSTED BY: Andrea Johnson lives in Michigan with her husband and too many books. She can be found on twitter, @redhead5318 , where she posts about books, food, and assorted nerdery.

Reading Octavia E. Butler: Fledgling and Collected Stories

One of my reading goals for 2021 is to read the remainder of Octavia E. Butler's work, as well as revisiting some of the classics that have already earned a place on my favourites shelf. And what better way to stick to a reading goal than to tell you lovely readers about it? With Lilith's Brood, Kindred and the Parable books all read in previous years, I decided my first read would be the initial volume of the Library of America's collection of her works, containing Kindred, Fledgling and Collected Stories. I didn't reread Kindred this time - though I consider it to be as close to essential reading as any single book can be (content warnings for its depictions of chattel slavery in the US South), but I devoured the other two thirds of this bind-up, with excellent results.

Fledgling is Butler's last completed novel, a story which stands well alone but in another world could have been the start of something much longer. It reimagines the vampire myth in a way that plays upon the psychological appeal vampires can exert on their prey, creating the Ina, a symbiont species which gathers a group of humans and forms a mutual bond with them, feeding on them in exchange for increased longevity and healing and a whole lot of mutual pleasure. The protagonist of Fledgling is Shori, a juvenile (though still super old in human terms) Ina who is the result of genetic experimentation by her mothers: unlike the rest of her species, Shori is able to control her sleep cycle and move around relatively freely during the day, rather than going to sleep or being severely burned by sunlight. As part of this genetic enhancement, Shori is Black - a fact we find out relatively far into the novel's own text, although like Kindred before it, the marketing is likely to have given this away before the reader encounters it in the story. She is also, when we encounter her, an amnesiac, and through the novel's opening chapters we piece together the fate of her family and the challenge that now faces her to re-establish her own safety and right to exist against uncertain forces determined to wipe her out.

Like Lilith's Brood, Fledgling immediately engages the reader in a world where humanity encounters a more powerful alien force, one which fundamentally challenges specific biological truths we build our self-identity and social structure around. Complicating that alien interaction is, of course, a big helping of human prejudice, and both race and gender (particularly masculinities) sit at the heart of Shori's experience, and the experiences of her symbionts. In Fledgling's opening scenes, Shori is picked up by Wright, a human man who becomes her first symbiont before she's entirely aware of her own power and what she's doing. Wright is shown as being a decent person with a basically sound moral compass before he comes under Shori's influence, but his relationship to her as a symbiont, and his acceptance of the other symbionts she brings into their "family", is clouded by his conception of his masculinity and the expectation that his sexual relationship with Shori includes an element of ownership, at least where other men are concerned. The powerlessness that comes with being a symbiont, biologically unable to challenge a structure that he's intellectually resistant to, makes for a lot of interesting tension as the novel progresses and Shori's relationships with her humans and other Ina become denser. And then there's the impact of Shori's Blackness, and the challenge it presents to those around her trying to understand the truth of her family's murder. Because the Ina have never previously had races, her extended family strongly resist the explanation that the violence done to her was a result of racism, brushing it off as a human affliction and not something they would entertain. Unsurprisingly, the truth turns out to be rather different, and the challenge which Shori presents just by existing is treated delicately but unflinchingly within the story.

Fledgling is a fairly slow narrative: it has its action sequences, but a lot of its story simply involves exploring the society of the Ina and their symbionts, and Shori's journey to rediscover her heritage and come to terms with what was done to her. It doesn't pack the same level of punch as Kindred or the Parable books - and it didn't make me ache for lost sequels in the same way that Parable of the Trickster does - but for the kind of story it's supposed to be, Fledgling deserves to stand among the best reimaginings of the vampire mythology, one that pushes the psychological elements of the myth to fascinating new levels.

The short fiction in here is an intriguing mix (all of it originally published in the second edition of Bloodchild and Other Stories), and much of it also deals with the subject of humanity pushed beyond its biological "comfort zone" to a point where societies, or even survival, look very different. Sometimes, that's about contact with the alien: "Bloodchild", perhaps Butler's most famous piece of short fiction, is an alien symbiosis story in which humans are offered a home on the planet of the alien T'Lic, in return for carrying their eggs to gestation, while "Amnesty" posits an alien society of "Communities" which gain pleasure from contact with humans, and hold economic sway over earth. Both offer complex pictures of the choices their human protagonists make, though Xuan Hoa, in Bloodchild, is much younger and at a different stage of reckoning to Noah, the older and more resigned protagonist of Amnesty. In other stories - like the post-apocalyptic "Speech Sounds", or the story of a fictional degenerative disease and those who know they carry it that is told in "The Evening and the Morning and the Night" - the challenges are more internal, though no less overwhelming. The latter, in particular, stayed with me long after the curtain fell for its strange hopefulness in the face of the inevitable. Its protagonists, both sufferers of a disease that causes people to disassociate and compulsively self-harm in later life, bond and make plans for their future despite knowing it will end in violent, self-afflicted death; when it is discovered that there might be another alternative (one which relies on a well funded private healthcare institute of the kind unavailable to most sufferers), its a moment that opens doors without diminishing the impact of the disease on their autonomy and self-preservation. It's a weird effect, one which I struggle to put into words, but which really hit home for me and made this probably my favourite story of the collection. And while I had less luck with the non-alien stories, the non fiction pieces here are well worth reading for their insights into the life and challenges of a Black woman trying to push the boundaries of science fiction in a world that couldn't fathom someone like her doing so.

I'm excited to see where my Butler reading takes me from here: next stop, the world of the Patternist, beginning with chronologically-first Wild Seed. See you then!

POSTED BY: Adri, Nerds of a Feather co-editor, is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy

Summer Reading List 2020: Spacefaring Kitten

I don't like summer, specifically, but usually reading makes it more bearable. Here's my summer reading list for 2020.

The Texas-Israeli War: 1999 by Jake Saunders and Howard Waldrop

What, according to Foreign Policy, constitutes "one of the most bizarre SF books ever written"? In a world pretty much demolished after Ireland spiced up the UK water supplies with LSD, causing spaced out British politicians to invoke nuclear armageddon, Texas has declared independence and kidnapped the president of the United States. The novel, AFAIK, tells about an Israeli squadron of tanks with nuclear reactors going in to save the president. Foreign policy promises punchy prose and a fair bit of sex and I hope that is what I'll get!

I've long been fascinated by works of Howard Waldrop, the short-fiction author best known for his Nebula and World Fantasy Award winning "Ugly Chickens" — I suppose that is why I happen to have this book on my shelf. Until sitting down to write this summer reading list, I had absolutely no idea who Jake Saunders was. But what do you know? Turns out he is the comic shop owner who famously campaigned against superhero comics featuring too subversive and unwholesome stuff, his key grievance being the realistically rendered childbirth in Alan Moore and Rick Veitch's Miracleman #9 in 1986 (not, for example, silly spandex violence).

Books of Blood by Clive Barker

Summer is the season of bodies and flesh, so what would be a better time to read some horror stories about them? Books of Blood is Barker's series of collections of visceral horror tales that first made him famous. I have vague memories of reading "The Midnight Meat Train" here and "Pig Blood Blues" there as I have come across them in some anthologies, but I have never exposed myself to an actual Book of Blood in its entirety. About time!

Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link

Compensating for Barker's gorefest, a book with monsters who are a little prettier might be a good idea. I've read a bunch of fascinating stories by Kelly Link but haven't yet got to this beautiful book with black-edge paper, cool graphic design and illustrations by Shaun Tan. I believe it's a YA collection that repackages some stories printed in earlier Link collections Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners as well as some that were not in them.

Moxyland by Lauren Beukes

Zoo City and Invisible Girls by Beukes are two of my favorite books I have read in a long time, and I'm literally itching to get my hands on her debut novel Moxyland. I expect it to be shorter, meaner, grungier and more cyberpunk-ish take on near-future South Africa with corporate wars, future tech and teenage riot. Hope I won't be disappointed.

October by China Miéville

Due to an academic project, I've been diving quite deep into the early years of the Soviet Russia and the later Stalinist purges. The October Revolution (which happened in November but they had a shitty calendar) is a colossal moment for the history of the 20th century, and I cannot think of a better person to reconstruct the eery, revolutionary world filled with great promise, brutal violence and intense future shock than fantasy author China Miéville. Even though his October is strictly speaking nonfiction, there's bound to be some genre atmosphere in here somewhere.

Xenogenesis Trilogy by Octavia Butler

Getting my hand dirty with Octavia Butler's works is something I have been planning to do for some time. It took some time and effort to hunt copies of the translations of Dawn, Adulthood Rites and Imago from used books stores — they are the only Butler books translated around this part of the world and they were published 30 years ago. Summer is a nice time for flexing some other language muscles as well.

Booky summer, everybody!

***

POSTED BY: Spacefaring Kitten, an extradimensional enthusiast of speculative fiction, comics, and general weirdness. Contributor since 2018.

DYSTOPIAN VISIONS: Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler

Dossier: Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. [Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993]

Filetype: Book

File Under: Stateless Dystopia
 
Executive Summary: Los Angeles 2032, most Americans with any sort of privilege live in walled communities for protection. Lauren Olamina's community is overrun and she flees north with other survivors. Lauren has a vision of a new religion and as the refugees cling separately to survival, a community forms around Lauren and her religion of Earthseed.

Dystopian Visions: With a collapsed government that is all but powerless to protect its citizens, the America of Parable of the Sower is pure dystopia. I frequently want to call this post-apocalyptic, but the only apocalypse is the breakdown of society and government services and I usually look for something extra for the apocalypse, though to the characters in the novel there is likely no real difference.

Utopian Undercurrents: God is change and humanity has the ability to reshape themselves and reshape god, and by doing so, to rebuild a better life out among the stars. So much of Parable of the Sower is a blended post apocalyptic dystopia, but Earthseed is the utopian undercurrent running through the novel - it's the little bit of hope and possibility of what humanity could be again.

Level of Hell: Seventh, because apparently there is still sort of a functioning nation tucked into the enclaves and wherever the power of the Army can reach, but this is a violent and nasty America.

Legacy: Nominated for a Nebula Award in 1994, Parable of the Sower is one of the standout novels in the superb and too short career of Octavia E. Butler. It remains a powerful and important novel.

In Retrospect: Parable of the Sower seems eerily prescient right now. Set not that far into our future the novel begins to take on some frightening possibilities as something not as distant as it might have as when it was originally published in 1993. More - Butler envisions a demagogue candidate for President calling out to his followers to "Make America Great Again" and encourages violence against anyone not a white American in such a way that he can never be truly blamed for the actions of his followers - but it's clear that he supports and approves of it. Naturally, this is the man elected to office. This is a frightening plausible future America that I can only hope is an alternate timeline that we're not going to go down. As good and important a novel it was when first published, Parable of the Sower is a vital and essential novel today.


Analytics

For its time: 5/5
Read today: 5/5.
Oppressometer Readout: 10/10.
Note: this dossier has been adapted from an earlier review.



POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Writer / Editor at Adventures in Reading since 2004. Nerds of a Feather contributor since 2015, editor since 2016. Minnesotan.