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A Conversation with Octavia Butler
W&B: In writing Kindred, what were you trying to say about slavery?
Butler: The idea really was to make people feel the book. That’s the point of taking a modern day black person and making her experience 代写英语论文slavery, not as just a matter of one-on-one but going back and being part of the whole system.
W&B: Is this something that you felt other authors had not covered?
Butler: Actually, I had never seen it done.
W&B: Is there something that you would like to have readers know about this edition of Kindred?
Butler: There is that introduction, not written by me. I think that if people haven’t read the book yet, it would be a good idea for them to read the introduction at the end. I actually tried to have it put there, but nothing happened. Otherwise it blows the book a bit. It should be an afterward instead of what it is.
W&B: Why did you pick that particular period of the 1800s to write about? Was there anything that drew you to that time?
Butler: No, I wanted to begin early enough so that the Civil War didn’t become part of the story. I wanted the Rufus character to have time to grow up. I also was aware of the two particularly famous Marylanders who had been slaves, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. There are places where my characters actually mention Tubman. They were there then. That was a time I felt a little bit familiar with.
W&B: Why did you set the book in a border state like Maryland instead of setting it down in the deep south?
Butler: Because I wanted my character to have a legitimate hope of escape. A stranger plopped down in the middle of Mississippi was pretty much going to stay there. People who were born there [in Maryland] did escape. There were a number of escapes in a book that was one of my sources. In Maryland [Dana] was less than 100 miles from freedom.
W&B: How much do you think the slaves of that era really knew about escape routes?
Butler: It would depend on the slaves, really. Some knew nothing. That’s why some of them, even in their effort to escape in Maryland, wound up starving to death or getting caught, because they didn’t know which way https://www.51lunwen.org/euroliterature/they were going. They might be able to find the North Star and all that, but if they didn’t know what to eat or what not to eat…that’s one of the advantages that Harriet Tubman had. Her father had taught her how to live off the woods. She escaped and that’s one of the reasons she survived. But other people did not—either didn’t survive or just didn’t succeed.
W&B: Do you have any ideas about the numbers of people who did make it to freedom from Maryland at that time?
Butler: I know that Harriet Tubman is credited with bringing about 300 out of Maryland, but I don’t know how many apart from that. Probably quite a number. It’s not the sort of thing that the slavemaster structure in Maryland would have wanted to have widely known, of course.
W&B: You said that Kindred was the first novel that you knew of that tried to make readers understand what it felt like to be a slave.
Butler: Not so much make a person understand, but confront a modern person with that reality of history. It’s one thing to read about it and cringe that something horrible is happening. I sent somebody into it who is a person of now, of today, and that means I kind of take the reader along and expose them in a way that the average historic nove本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。