Kindred

Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation by Damian Duffy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I read both the original novel and the graphic adaptation of Kindred, and I was impressed/horrified/entertained by both. I don't like to compare books by format, or stories by medium, so I won't. I'll just say that the audiences for each version are slightly different, with some overlap, and I think I'm in both.

The basic premise of the story is that Dana, a young black woman living with her white husband in Los Angeles in the 1970s, suddenly and inexplicably travels to pre-Civil War Maryland where, over the course of several visits, she realizes she has met one of her white ancestors, Rufus, the son of a slaveholder. While at first she is only in the past for several hours, and then several days (the equivalent of a few minutes in the present), eventually she finds herself truly living in the past, struggling with the contrasts and intersections of her blackness and womanhood in both her modern life and the life she creates with her ancestors, both free and enslaved.

Not quite sci-fi (the time-travel is never explained, nor is it the focus of the story), Kindred captures and examines the absurdity of slavery from a modern and female angle. It explores the complexity of living as a black woman with a white husband, especially when viewed from a historic lens. It's a powerful story that translates well as a graphic novel.

The grim tone of the story comes across immediately in the muted illustrations, and the choice to give more color to scenes set in the past enforces the fact that this is where the main action of the book takes place. Much of the dialogue remains, and that is what moves the story along to its stark conclusion.


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