Chasing the Spector of Traumatic Slavery: Poetics of Postmemory in Octavia Butler’s Kindred

Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979) employs time travel, one of speculative fiction’s traditional premises, where stories about American enslaved experiences stage slavery as a locus of inventory of ultimate horror like violence,pain, and death as well as communal bondage and resilience. Dana Franklin (the protagonist of Kindred) shuttles between the two times and spaces against her will; between her present-time 1976 Los Angeles and a Maryland plantation in the antebellum era. The most imperative recent disputes in African American literary studies entail the significance of the enslaved past experiences to understand our contemporary moment. This paper first defines her as a diaspora, and then looks at an overview of the neo-slave narrative genre, especially in regard to the poetics of postmemory and the function of testimony as affect. Then, I discuss how the narrative form of time travel as a narrative formulation is particularly suited to a better understanding of traumatic memory as subject to afterwardness which allows to “retrospective reinterpretation once occluded material” to be recovered through mourning (Roger Luckhurst 88). Finally, I would like to suggest that Dana’s repetitive visits to the site of slavery and the subsequent injures she suffers function as trope for slavery memory and also for the evidence of lived experience. By these means, Butler engenders in Dana and readers of this novel contemporary memories of and identification with traumatic incident of slavery