The Corporeality of Home

I wrote about this subject in my last blog, but for some reason I can’t get it out of my head so sorry if I am beating a dead horse but I am still trying to reconcile where and when is home for Dana, or if it even exists. This is more for my own purposes, since I'm writing my final paper on the subject...

This novel disrupts and dislocates the conceptual understanding of the ostensibly intangible idea of ‘home.’ Both Dana and Kevin struggle throughout the novel to reconcile the seemingly elusive idea of ‘home’ and where and when it exists, whether it is in 1976 Los Angeles or nineteenth-century Maryland. As the novel progresses, it becomes apparent that the traditional notion of ‘home’ as a safe and familiar place isn’t applicable, that the ‘homes’ that Dana is faced with are at odds with such a concept. As Robert Crossly writes in the novel’s “Reader’s Guide,” Kindred challenges the conception of the home as a “magnet for American sentiment and homilies: ‘There’s no place like home’; ‘Home is where the heart is’; ‘You can’t go home again’” (Crossly 267). Instead, home is posited as a convoluted, dangerous, contradictory place, a place where family, safety, and refuge take on a whole new meaning.

Home becomes a paradox for Dana, “the meaning of a homecoming…impossibly complicated” by the dislocation of time and space (Butler 267). No matter where Dana is, chronologically or geographically, she remains haunted by her life both past and present. As John Washington says, “home ‘is a place to which you belong and which belongs to you even if you do not particularly like it or want it, a place you cannot escape, no matter how far you go or how furiously you run’” (Rushdy 140). In other words, ‘home’ is not necessarily a matter of choice but rather a place where simply “belong.” Home is defined in many different, conflicting ways in Kindred. Dana makes “a connection between family and home, between kindred and place,” thus mentally crossing both time and place in her associations with ‘home’ (Rashdy 141).

When Dana travels to the present for the very last time, her arm appears to be simultaneously “growing out of” and “into” the wall, as if her limb is moving in two divergent directions at once though it remains in stasis. The wall becomes a sort of barrier or portal between the two worlds, representing a kairotic moment for Dana, a place literally outside of and beyond the boundaries of time. For a few moments Dana’s body is literally torn between two completely divergent realities in terms of their chronological, geographical, and historical locations. This moment that transcends linear time and space locates Dana within both of her ‘homes’ at once. She is marked permanently by her experiences, and even after the fact Dana is haunted by the ghost of her arm. She will never be able to physically or psychologically escape the experiences and traumas as they are rooted deep within her body and her mind, that have marked her permanently, representing a “kind of birthmark” (Butler 267). The first thing that Dana does after her arm is fully healed is visit the Weylin plantation, or what is left of it, thus revealing that “both her California house and the Weylin plantation have become inescapably ‘home’ to her” (Butler 267).

Blurring the lines between past and present throughout the novel, Butler ultimately meshes the two with Dana’s limb as the liminal divide, crossing the portal between Maryland and California, slavery and freedom, Rufus and Kevin, the nineteenth and the twentieth century, one home and the other. She lives simultaneously in both eras, both houses, both mentalities, as they have become one for her. It isn’t a matter or choice of her own agency, rather both places evolve into spaces wherein she is attached, for the familial connections, sense of refuge, and emotional attachments each place respectively holds for her. It doesn’t seem that the concept of home is truly reconciled in the sense that Dana chooses her home, rather all of her experiences, emotional and physical losses and gains, culminate in an amalgamation of kindred spirits that create a world in which she is able to explore her own self and genealogical past, thus Dana becomes mentally and emotionally joined to both ‘homes,’ no matter where she is located in terms of time or space.

Works Cited:

1. Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003.
2. Rushdy, Ashraf H.A. “Families of Orphans: Relation and Disrelation in Octavia Butler’s Kindred.” College English 55.2 (1993): 135-157.