The Arterial Flow of Time Travel
Act Courageous. Act Confident. Act Quietly Intelligent.
What is it like to travel back in time? Many of us dream of dropping ourselves into the distant past, wrangling with the dinosaurs of the Jurassic past, seeing how the Egyptians built the pyramids, or even hugging a deceased relative one more time. Overcoming linear time, through science fiction, has a literary feature that has expanded the literary possibilities, often transposing a character into new worlds, otherworldly in both space and time. But in Octavia Butler’s Kindred, time travel takes a turn for the worst, a protagonist is wriggled into a disfigured state.
The text centers on Dana, an African American woman, who initially exists in the early 1990s, but is repeatedly thrust into her ancestor’s antebellum lives. She does not enter this world with wonder, but finds herself, living in the lower rungs of the caste system, as an enslaved Black woman. Recounting her final journey, Dana is caught between a space of lament and relief:
“I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm. And I lost about a year of my life and much of the comfort and security I had not valued until it was gone. When the police released Kevin, he came to the hospital and stayed with me so that I would know I hadn’t lost him too.”
Butler writes with an arterial flow. The amputation has multiple aims, it is not merely physical but metaphorical, it is an active form of science fiction, history, and time travel. The novel is a soaring and damning exploration of kin: Dana encounters one of her ancestors, a white man who sexually assaulted one of the Black women's ancestors. Here, Butler deftly handles the complex themes of how science fiction can operate as historical fiction, but more than that, how under enslavement, the family, as precarious as it was, was gripping with sexual violence.
Between the 1500s, when the first slaves stepped offshore until the end of the 1800s when slavery was abolished, 12 million Africans were sent to the Americas and 45% of them came from the Caribbean. Many of them worked in cotton fields, tobacco factories, and railroad constructions, and many founds themselves under captivity over—and outside the realm of full personhood—from their white fathers/enslavers. The world that Butler conjures, even its hardship, is more generative than the suffering, it is an attempt for a descendant of slaves to actively challenge the white enslavers who were the arbiters of brutality. As an African American in the future, going back in time, Dana was not merely an enslaved person when she stepped into antebellum Maryland, but a rabble-rouser, who, with fresh immediacy, actively resisted the socially constructed racial hierarchy.
Commenting on the significance of Octavia Butler’s work, Gerry Canavan wrote in Public Books, “There’s something more than a bit therapeutic in this work. As truly nightmarish as her stories very often are, there is something about them that is healing, centering, that cracks us open and lets us see ourselves in a new way.”
On Saturday, 25 June, I was reminded of Butler’s power when I was in conversation with Denise Ferreira da Silva at Savvy Contemporary Art Center in Berlin. I was thrilled to think deeply with Denise about history, power, and criticism, to convene with a Black feminist philosopher, about the textualization of her work, and more specifically her thought-provoking book Unpayable Debt. The text is not simply making a descriptive claim about the world but inviting us to have a dialogue along the various philosophical threads. Professor Ferreira da Silva offers a Black feminist reading of Butler. She argues that Dana, the protagonist of Kindred is a wounded captive body in the scene of subjugation, a product of a racial system that emerged in the context of American slavery, inviting us to trouble the family, or any notion that the descendant of slaves can ever pay their debts. (If anything, the descendants of slaves, by all accounts, should be rendered debt-free in a society that has actively dispossessed the majority of freedom.) But more than anything, Ferreira da Silva inclines us to think more deeply about where and who we extract violence. The challenge, in my opinion, is to find a sharp balance between learning these histories and working through uncompromising stories.
We are a storytelling species, a thinking species, a myth-making species, and a loving species. I am learning to dream in the way that I was not taught to dream, to fly in ways that allow me to levitate above the dregs of chaos. Whenever I read, parse, and discuss Octavia Butler’s work, I am ensconced by her attention to detail, and her capacity to transcribe her brilliance through her discipline and persistence. Time travel, even when it brings us to a history that irks our soul and spirit, can be the fulcrum for our freedom. When Butler was discouraged by an anti-Black world, she tried to overcome self-doubt by redirecting her thoughts by writing inspirational notes to herself such as: ‘Take the offensive against your fears … conquer them by sheer boldness.’” These words provide fodder for one to activate one’s imagination amid uncertainty, no matter the time or space.
Roe vs. Wade
Last month, I wrote, “On Reproductive Justice” for the London Review of Books blog about how the Supreme Court was trying to undermine bodily autonomy by overturning Roe vs. Wade. On 24 June, that day came. That day, I went between a state of shock and despair, knowing that the US placed more value on reversing people’s right to control their bodies than people’s alleged constitutional right to possess a firearm. I was incensed that the Supreme Court would vote to remove federal protection for abortion as we know it, amid a severe shortage of infant formula. But that’s the US, a country that professes itself to be a land of the free while indulging in finding a way to severely limit people’s ability to decide whether or not they want to have children. Hypocrisy is one of America’s many tenets.
Abortion advocates are reflecting on this catastrophic decision. By some estimates, 41 percent of people of childbearing age, across the South and Midwest, may lose access to their nearest abortion clinic. Which would mean that many will either have to travel hundreds of kilometers to reach a provider. This is a public health issue. As Melody Schreiber wrote in The Guardian, removing the constitutional right to an abortion will lead to higher maternal mortality. Schreiber notes that not only in the United States have the highest maternal mortality rate among developed nations, but the rate is increasing, and disproportionately impacting people of color. For being with difficult pregnancies, including ectopic pregnancies, having legal access to safe abortions can be a matter of life and death. But abortion rights should not just be framed as a matter of health or a decision of last resort, it is an act that should be freely available to people, no matter their reasons. It should be noted that sympathy abortion narratives, while important for describing the broad reasons people choose to terminate an abortion are important, they are not the only reason. Maggie Doherty discussed her abortions in The Yale Review arguing that:
As a narrator and writer, I want to be sympathetic. But as a political actor and a feminist, I want to be fearless and uncompromising. I want to read detailed narratives about people who needed abortions to escape impossible circumstances or to prevent needless suffering—but I also want to read stories about people who choose abortion freely and easily, simply because it was their right to do so.
This is the politics we need: unapologetic and bold. In the coming months, abortion rights groups will be helping pregnant people who struggle to compile the cash and coordinate the time away from work, childcare, and transportation necessary to get the procedure. If you can, please donate to an abortion fund so that pregnant people can have access to safe abortions.
At the bare minimum, we should, as Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez noted, impeach supreme court justices that lied about not wanting to overturn Roe vs. Wade. I stand with Ocasio-Cortez in a plan to revoke Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch (as well as Clarence Thomas) from the Supreme Court, but I would go one step further. There is no reason that an unelected council of 9 people, without accountability or oversight, should be deciding the fate of millions of people with wombs. The fact that they are valorizing an eighteenth-century text that initially defined enslaved Black people as three-fifths of a person says more about the dubious catechism of American society.
Writing
Still writing my manuscript Captive Contagions (One Signal/Simon & Schuster)
Interviews & Podcasts
I was part of Act 1 of Future Perfect: Encountering in Three Acts with Denise Ferreira da Silva.
Reading
Here are some books about abortion and reproductive justice:
Verónica Gago | What Latin American feminists can teach American women about the abortion fight
Diana Greene Foster | What Happens When It’s Too Late to Get an Abortion
Katrina Kimport | No Real Choice: How Culture and Politics Matter for Reproductive Autonomy
Natasha Lennard | The End of Roe
Dorothy Roberts | Reproductive Justice, Not Just Rights
Speaking of bodily autonomy, here is a poem by the great Lucille Clifton which might inspire or excite you.
By Lucille Clifton,
these hips are big hips
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don't like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top!