Kindred - Literary Love

I fell in literary love. Again. But the first time in years. I haven't had a literary love fall in years. The first time was Toni Morrison's Beloved. The fifth time I read it. Yep, on the fifth time the story wrapped itself around my brain in one comprehensible montage and I was overwhelmed by the creative masterpiece I had experienced.

Then, a more recent literary love fall occurred three years ago, when I read Anita Diamonte's The Red Tent. I was smitten. Consumed. Enraptured.

Both of these women took words and pen and created a world unto itself - in which the stories are so multi layered that a critical analysis yields so many different valid points and perspectives. It is an artist who can take the written word and swirl it into something so complicated yet so simple, capturing your mind with the arc and swerve of the characters and life's circumstance.

That's really what I always wanted to be. A literary artist. Someone who could take words and fit them together in such a way that it formed a simple maze, an easy logarithm. An engaging read which leads the mind to keep thinking, to continue calculating, to formulate endless what ifs and possible scenarios. Like the Harry Potter Series, like I Am Legend, like Star Wars...

I have strayed from that.

I read Octavia Butler for the first time. The novel Kindred. I have to sigh after writing the title, I am smitten. Absolutely in love with this masterpiece, a carefully drawn sci fi of a woman who inadvertently time travels to the antebellum south. The book may replace Beloved in my heart as an all time must read. But the beauty is in the simplicity, in the telling of the story without an agenda, without clearly defining right from wrong or labeling good and evil. The archetypal characterisations don't fit and aren't here.

In Kindred, Dana is drawn to the past to save Rufus, a young white boy whose family owns slaves and who will be Dana's great grandfather. If he continues to be careless with his life, without Dana's intervention, he will die before Dana's many times great grandmother will be conceived, annihilating Dana's family.

That's the premise. But it is so much more complicated than that. How about the fact that once Dana saves Rufus, he is drawn to her. He loves her. But not in a sexual way. However, he finds himself inexplicably in love with Alice, the young girl who is her great great grandmother and looks exactly like her. Who he rapes, but loves, but rapes and eventually ruins (thankfully, the reader never gets details of their love life). And, upon Alice's death he tells Dana that she and Alice were one to him.

Therefore, if Dana had never saved Rufus, he would have never fallen in love with Alice in the first place, which turned out to be the cause of all Alice's problems. And while Dana thought she was saving both Alice and Rufus, was it her inclusion that actually ruined both their lives (Rufus fails to take a wife, so smitten by Alice).

This is just one of a million scenarios in which the brilliant story captures the mind. But my other favorite thing about this book is there is no obvious black theme. No Spike Lee type announcements, no Roots clarity. It even bests Beloved in that it doesn't delve into every dastardly result of slavery to prove the point of how awful it was, demonstrating every horrific imaginable scene.

Instead the horror is simply portrayed in the day to day, in the simplicity of a society defined by slaves and slave owners. As horrible as Rufus father may seem, we come to understand that he is just a man in his times. Just as is Rufus. Their understanding, their logic is different, is formed from the very fabric of America as it was then. Similarly, the slaves were who they were, people in a horrific circumstance. Their coping, their manipulating, their attempts at dignity were simply what they were. There is no over done moment when Rufus or his father denounce the woes of slavery, there is no fantastic moment when a slave becomes an empowered symbol of liberty. Instead the story lets the characters be, and Dana is forced to adjust to the cloth in which she has been sewn. This modern 70's woman becomes a slave in every form of the word, it was the only way to matriculate. And she is faced with choices and situations that boggle the mind, rendering all her education and high ideas useless in the face of a basic need to survive.

I've gone on too long. As I tend to do when I am in love. Again. Kindred is a wakeup call to me, a charge to return to the genre I believe I am called to write - speculative fiction. It is time to leave the "luving" writing alone - the easy stuff that passes the time- and begin my research to churn out the classic that lies deep within me. Somewhere.