Butler on Kindred

Here's an excerpt from an interview with Octavia Butler from 2004, twenty-five years after the publication of Kindred:

Joshunda Sanders: Why do you think Kindred has been one of your more popular works?

Octavia Butler: Because it's accessible to a number of audiences: black studies, oh, I guess I have to modify my vocabulary here -- African American studies, women's studies and science fiction. It sometimes reaches people who might not otherwise read that kind of book, who might not read a history, a historical novel even about that period unless it was a Gone With the Wind type.

[With Kindred] I chose the time I was living in. I thought it was interesting to start at the bicentennial and the country's 200 years old and the country's still dealing with racial problems, and here's my character having to deal with slavery all of a sudden. If I had written the book now, it probably wouldn't be very different. What I was trying to do is make the time real, I wanted to take them back into it. The idea was always to make that time emotionally real to people. And that's still what it's about. The nice thing is that it is read in schools. Every now and then I hear about younger kids reading it and I wonder how they relate to it. All too often, especially young men, will feel, "Oh, if it was me, I would just..." and they have some simple solution that wouldn't work at all and would probably get them killed. Because they don't really understand how serious it is when the whole society is literally arrayed against you and arrayed to really keep you in your place. If you get seriously out of line, they will kill you because they fear you.

Kindred was kind of draining and depressing, especially the research for writing it. I now have a talk that begins with the question, "How long does it take to write a novel?" and the answer is, as long as you've lived up to the time you sit down to write the novel and then some. I got the idea for it in college. But a lot of my reason for writing it came when I was in preschool, when my mother used to take me to work with her.

I got to see her not hearing insults and going in back doors, and even though I was a little kid, I realized it was humiliating. I knew something was wrong, it was unpleasant, it was bad. I remember saying to her a little later, at seven or eight, "I'll never do what you do, what you do is terrible." And she just got this sad look on her face and didn't say anything. I think it was the look and the memory of the indignities she endured. I just remembered that and wanted to convey that people who underwent all this were not cowards, were not people who were just too pathetic to protect themselves, but were heroes because they were using what they had to help their kids get a little further. She knew what it was to be hungry, she was a young woman during the Depression; she was taken out of school when she was ten. There were times when there was no food, there were times when they were scrambling to put a roof over their heads. I never had to worry about any of that. We never went hungry, we never went homeless. I got to go to college and she didn't even get to finish elementary school. All that because she was willing to put up with this nonsense and try to help me. I wanted to convey some of that and not have it look as though these people were deficient because they weren't fighting. They were fighting, they just weren't fighting with fists, which is sometimes easy and pointless. The quick and dirty solution is often the one that's most admired until you have to live with the results.

The entire interview is available here.