Kindred and “None of Us are Free” “None of Us are Free” can be connected to Octavia E. Butler 's Kindred through the slaves´ teamwork. In the novel, characters such as Alice and Sarah show the themes of unity and compassion that are in the song. Since “None of Us are Free”calls on its audience to stand as one, there are many similarities that can be found within Kindred, a novel about Dana´s struggle to help her kin and the slaves. The slaves care for each other, feel the same hopelessness, and can empathize. The song “None of Us are Free” and Kindred by Octavia E. Butler both convey a message of solidarity for the oppressed to urge them to look out for each other through their hardships. “None of Us are Free” and Kindred emphasize understanding …show more content…
From “None of Us are Free”, “there are voices sill calling across the years . . . and they will until we all come to understand,” (Line 3, 6). In Kindred, Dana’s slave ancestors call across the years both literally and metaphorically. Literally, she is called when Rufus needs help, but through her trips she also helps Alice and the other slaves. Metaphorically, the voices of Dana’s ancestors call across the years because Dana and other African Americans still suffer racism and prejudice in their time. In Kindred, when Dana and Kevin are having a conversation, a man starts to harass their interracial relationship, calling it “chocolate and vanilla porn” (Pg. 56). In many ways, people of color and females are suffering, and they will until the world understands their struggles. Kevin, at first, dismisses Dana’s feelings when both of them are transported back to Rufus’ time. It is not until he spends five years trying to free slaves and evading authority that he can understand. “None of Us are Free” and Kindred discuss the everlasting effects of the past and how problems can never be solved without
It is said that history repeats itself. In a way, events in history are eternal as they will always re-occur in one way or another. War is eternal. Love is eternal. Hate is eternal.
In his “’No.’ : The Narrative Theorizing of Embodied Agency in Octavia Butler’s Kindred,” Bast underscores humanity’s desire for agency, one’s “ability to reach decision[s] about themselves and [express them]” and how one’s agency can benefit a society or a community (Bast 151). In the beginning of his article, Bast labels this decision-making and expression as beneficial and necessary for a community, while simultaneously underlining society’s limitations put on mankind’s freedoms such as discrimination, prejudice, or injustice. Nevertheless, he follows up by stating that it is simply human instinct to want to express thoughts even if other factors oppress them, undermining these social limitations.
Kindred In the novel Kindred, the author uses the source of time travel to travel back to the nineteenth century in the United States, to experience the lifestyle of enslaved African Americans by the Whites. Traveling back in time, the author uses Dana to revert to slavery, experiencing abuse and having to adapt quickly to the environment. Readers can experience both mental and psychical experiences the antebellum slaves experienced during this time, though treatment varied from master to master, the diurnal living of a slave was still difficult. Throughout the novel, differences of the modern and past time are illustrated to see how the society has changed with time and how it responds to the decision and the way of life of others.
The novel Kindred explores Yearning in people that were slaves in forms of love, freedom, and family. On page 36 of kindred a man that is Alice's dad is a slave that left without a pass and got beat for it while he just wanted
also utilizes anaphora to emphasize the importance of the issue and acknowledge it. Many people have told King and his supporters that it is not the right time and they need to wait. In response, he explains just how badly colored people are treated and why they can’t “wait”. He knows these white clergymen can never fully understand the hardship created by segregation and discrimination. To illustrate it for them he lists off the injustices, from the emotional pain of explaining racism to his kids, to examples of lynching and extreme police brutality.
“On Pins and Needles Defending Artistic Expression” What would one expect the viewpoint of an American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts’ (also known as ACLU) lawyer and journalist to be regarding tattoos as a form of artistic expression? Carol Rose is the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. Being a lawyer and journalist, Carol has spent her career working for and writing about human rights and civil liberties, both in the United States and abroad”(Rottenberg 36). Because of her eminent profession, one would naturally assume that Rose leans more towards a liberal point of view. In regards to tattoos, that assertion would be correct.
Butler used this to set the tone for the past travels as well as the present. In the past, clearly blacks are not respected. On her first trip back, Dana had just saved Rufus from drowning and was not only referred to as a nigger by Rufus’s mother, Margaret Weylin, but even had had a rifle pointed at her by his father, Tom Weylin. Dana is not used to being called by racial slurs, and surely does not understand why she would have her life threatened for saving Rufus, in her time she is not judged on her skin color. These scenes helped me to feel how frustrating it must have been and is today for blacks to experience racism, they don't even see them selfs as anything different from anyone else, but some people seem to view them as evil animals with
Larsen uses inner conflict to make it coherent how racism will cause problems in relationships. First, Clare Kendry married a white man who detests people with color. She never told her husband
Today, money has made many people believe that you need to have a lot of money to live a great, happy life. People in the world, especially the people who don’t have as much money as the ones that do, look up to people like popular idols, because they have money. People think they have a great living life with all the money they have earned during their lives. In the short story “Why You Reckon?” by Langston Hughes, the author uses diction, colloquialism and dialect to express the fact that just because people have the money to go out to eat somewhere expensive or buy the newest clothes, does not mean that a person is happy all the time and expresses how people in the town talks. Money is what makes the world goes round and everyone has come
There are many interpretations of what torture is and how something can be classified as torture. In “Believe Me It’s Torture” Christopher Hitchens talks about the United States and its various uses of interrogation tactics to get Important information from suspected terrorists. In the article the author often brings up the waterboarding tactic that is often used and how there is a large controversy over whether it is in fact torture or if it is just simply harmless. The article states, “waterboarding was something that Americans did to other Americans, it was inflicted upon and endured by the Special Forces in a form of training called S.E.R.E (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) so that they could build up a resistance to it so that they
In Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred, Dana battles an external conflict of time traveling to the past, and experiencing what it was like to be a slave. Dana ultimately resolves this conflict by killing her ancestor named Rufus to return to her present time; however, this choice also illustrates her true character as both scared but brave. Dana’s decision to kill Rufus because she did not want to live in a time where slavery and racism occurred also reveals the universal theme that racism was very common in the past, and it still occurs till this day. When traveling to the past Dana struggles with an external conflict of racism and slavery.
In 1773, there were slaves all over colonial America working in plantations, and cleaning their masters houses. It wasn’t common for a slave to be writing poetry with their owners consent. Phyllis Wheatley’s success as the first African American published poet was what inspired generations to tell her story. It was her intellectual mind and point of view that made her different from others, both black and white. Phyllis’s story broke the barrier for all African American writers, and proved that no matter the gender or race, all human beings are capable of having an intelligent state of mind.
Dana was a positive part of Rufus’s environment because she was the one who really helped him through the good and the bad. Dana tried to help Rufe reach a realization that slavery was clearly wrong and tried . But in the end not much changed. “What’s he done to you?” ‘Sent me to a field, had me beaten, made me spend nearly eight months sleeping on the floor of his mother’s room, sold people. . .
Racism during Cullen’s lifetime was incredibly prevalent, and one can without much doubt infer that the kind of racism depicted in “Incident” would be worth far more than the mere sixty-nine words Cullen grants the poem. One may believe this
This reference in particular evokes the strongest emotional response from black people because many African Americans revered Lincoln for his decision to sign the revolutionary Emancipation Proclamation, and how the document symbolized a free future for slaves--the ancestors of the blacks in the crowd. But the next few lines following this allusion also persuades those ignorant of how little things have changed by highlighting the “manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination” that blacks still suffer from despite the hundred year gap. Here, he uses the connotations of “manacles” and “chains” to evoke a negative emotional response from the audience, especially from those unaware of the need to change, causing their opinion to match the speaker’s: against segregation. Additionally, King weaves biblical allusions into his speech to appeal to the Christians within the crowd. He uses the “dark and desolate valley of segregation” to illustrate the injustice African Americans have endured for centuries and juxtapositions it with the “sunlit path of racial justice” to exemplify a future where true freedom exists for