I recently read The Time Traveler’s wife by Audrey Niffenegger and was surprised by its similarities to and differences from Kindred by Octavia Butler. Both novels center on a main character who has a surprising ability to travel back and forth in time, and both characters are incapable of controlling their own movements through time. The Time Traveler’s Wife is a touching tale of love and destiny/manipulation while Kindred, also partially a romance, raises many social issues and questions racial categorization. The differences in the books led me to question something: why are we so capable of seeing the atrocities of the past and generally bad at seeing the structural problems of the present? While I know that the author’s just had different focuses, I also believe that the times their tales are set in raise separate questions, as do their narrators.
In The Time Traveler’s Wife the main character is a white man and in Kindred the main character is a black woman. While both books attempt to address the disturbing and disruptive aspects of time travel (not knowing when/where you are, not being able to control your departure and arrival, having an unfortunate amount of control over your own present), The Time Traveler’s Wife spends much time reminiscing on punk music and questioning the relationship between the past and the present, while Kindred covers such miserable topics as rape, slavery, and the possibility of one’s own non-existence. Butler’s character, Dana, lives in 1976 but travels back to the antebellum era in the United States, so her encounters are for more encumbered than Henry’s (the time-traveler in Niffenegger’s novel).
While Butler deals explicitly with Dana’s racial disorientation when plopped into the slavery south, Niffenegger’s plot all takes place within Henry’s own lifetime, so things don’t change that drastically between each of his travels besides haircuts, suit styles, and popular music. The fact that Henry can travel back in time and still be considered a human in whatever time he is in, albeit a strange human, makes his case different from Dana’s, and I think this aligns with our contemporary view in the United States as the present as undeniably better than the past. Does this necessarily mean the present is good, though?
Reading these two books together made me wonder: what structural oppression was Henry witnessing that may have seemed normal because he was more or less familiar with it? When we go back in time by a century it is easy to see the problems (for example, people who look like you are treated like animals), but how can we begin to see these problems in our present?
I suppose my ultimate question is: how does power work and how do atrocities like slavery get authorized for so long? I am somewhat convinced that it is the small, day-to-day interactions with the people that we love and with strangers that make and re-make the structures of power that we live within. We have moved so far away from the day-to-days of slavery that we no longer even see them as reasonable practices, but what are our daily habits in the present that one day will seem awful and absurd? How are we to know? It is like the old saying: we cannot see the forest for the trees. We are so caught up in small details that the bigger picture is completely unattainable.
So, what is our forest? Does it include racial oppression?
One more note: In Kindred Dana’s husband, Kevin, is a white man, and they have a strong relationship. He does not believe her stories of time travel at first, but eventually he travels back in time, too, and actually gets stuck there. When he and Dana are in the past he acts as her master so that they can travel together, and while he is initially uncomfortable with this role he does it and does it rather well. Dana often feels uncomfortable with his attitude towards her, even though she knows it is a performance for her own benefit. This made me think: are there still traces of this power relationship of white male vs. black female in contemporary relationships? Does the relationship between Dana and Kevin in the present have anything in common with the way they act when in the past? What small, day-to-day elements of life today are in fact carryovers from daily practices begun over a century ago? Will we ever look back and see the time period from 1800-2100 as part of the same forest? The differences between Dana’s life in 1876 and 1976 as such inconsequential trivialities as I now see Henry’s changing hairstyles and favorite bands?
Racial Anxieties 