Damian Duffy: Kindred - A Graphic Adaptation

[bibliogramma]

I have a confession to make. As much as I adore Octavia Butler’s work, I have never read Kindred. I don’t think I could. It’s a thing I have, that goes along with being deeply emotionally drawn into the lives of the protagonists of the books I read, and the films I watch. I have a hard time handling any kind of slave narrative, or any narrative where people are unjustly accused an punished, especially if it is a true story, or a historically accurate fiction. (I had a hard time with parts of Les Miserables, too, but the fact that I read it in my struggling French as part of a course enabled me yo distance myself enough.)

But I’ve always wanted to read it, and so when Damien Duffy and John Jennings released their graphic novel adaptation of Kindred, I decided this was one way to come as close as I could without freaking out too much while reading it. I find the visual format just distancing enough.

I’m still overwhelmed by the narrative. Not just the realities of live in a society based on slavery, but the way that the characters from the modern era, Dana and Kevin, have to struggle against the mindset of what being a member of the slave class, and the owner class, can do. And the exploration of how relationships are twisted and distorted by the fact of slavery - not just those that cross racial lines, but those between black slaves, and white slave owners. The sexual exploitation. The destruction of families, the denial of kinships, white slave owners selling their own black lovers, siblings and children. The forced and stolen labour. The dehumanisation. The brutal punishments. All the things that one knows about, but can hardly bear to think about.

I’m still overwhelmed by the impossible situation that Dana is placed in. To have to facilitate rape in order to ensure one’s own existence, to act as the guardian angel toward a man who consistently commits or orders acts of violence against the humans he holds a power if life and death over, because he must survive to father the child you are descended from. But Butler has that habit, of putting her characters into situations that you don’t think they can bear, ad yet they do.

I’ve read enough about Kindred over the years to know that Duffy has done a fine job of incorporating the story and the themes that Butler addressed in her novel. And I’m grateful for the style the illustrator has chosen - just realistic enough, but not too realistic, another slight act of distancing that makes the subject matter easier to bear.

I will be seeing some parts of this in my mind fir some time to come, I think. And it’s good that I have finally had some experience of the novel, albeit at this distance. Maybe someday I will be able to read the novel for myself.