Between two texts

By Tor Anderson

"Kindred," the widely popular 1979 novel by author Octavia E. Butler is an interesting text to analyze through the lens of literary theorist Trinh T. Minh-Ha's claim that "categories always leak," as this novel is built upon a narrative that spans and "leaks" across numerous areas, the most apparent of these categories including time, race and gender.

The titles of the chapters themselves, a few examples being "The Fall" and "The Fire," posit a narrative structure of such biblical proportion as to suggest that all actors within the novel are indeed bound to one another, whether it be through time, coincidence, or blood relation.

All members present throughout this epic are connected in some way and I argue that these discovered similarities in the Antebellum South between Dana and her "masters" serve as excellent proof that despite the depraved level of racism exuded by Weylin and other slaveholders, their attempts at separating themselves via race is ultimately thwarted by the fact that categories indeed, "always leak."

Dana attempts to articulate how reductive the categorizations of race, gender, and even time are regarding her relationship with Rufus and what they may indeed have in common when disregarding the entrenched societal attempts at imposed racial separation: "What we had was something new, something that didn't even have a name.

Some matching strangeness in us that may or may not have come from our being related." Throughout "Kindred," Dana and Kevin also inhabit a confounding array of relationship dynamics through their travel across time and space.

While current racial tensions in the United States, particularly in post-Watts riots LA, are elevated and very much present regarding their interracial marriage, Kevin and Dana are forced back to a place in time where he is forced to act as her owner for their continued safety. While in 1976 they shared many similarities which led to their eventual marriage, these shared experiences seemingly lost their significance the moment they were taken back to a slaveholding state circa 1815.

Dana's intellect is simultaneously disregarded, punished and utilized to the benefit of Rufus' education; existing as a complex individual possessing innumerable facets regarding personality, agency, and a spectrum of other traits, Dana is unsuccessfully forced into the unidimensional existence of a black slave.

Maxine Hong Kingston's "The Woman Warrior" is another excellent novel to investigate through the focus of Minh-Ha's claim that "categories always leak."

Kingston's structuring of her novel serves as an elegant method for illuminating the constraining nature of categories; her work exists as a chimera of Chinese legends and memoir and through this amalgamation of genres she effectively portrays her life as a first-generation Chinese American woman.

The author is continually torn between ancient family traditions and acculturating within an entirely different landscape of values and social structure. When she is excelling within her newfound home of California and receiving straight A's, her mother dismisses these achievements and regales her of true accomplishments carried out by ancient Chinese heroines.

She is trapped between the ancient traditions of her family and the newfound customs encountered within America, summing up her crisis of identity aptly: "I could not figure out what was my village." While Kingston inhabits a rich suspension of cultural and personal categories which indeed feed and leak into one another, she is ultimately judged through the constrictive natures of each of the societal realities she is now surrounded by.

The author is pigeonholed into separate social identities, and each of these categorizations is comprised of varying degrees inequality, expectations, and oppression. Kingston exhaustively details the negative Chinese sentiment towards females and the raising of girls, and this potent discrimination, while still finding a degree of compliment within American culture, is utterly blatant and serves to do nothing but confound an individual attempting to balance family tradition and attempted cultural acceptance.

I argue that while it is irrefutable that the categories comprising an individual merge and leak together to form indefinable ecosystems of selfhood, the author's family and newfound American milieu refuse these porous boundaries and act in concert to create a static social assignment which is as toxic as it is archaic.

Regarding literary genres or the lack thereof when discussing "Kindred" and "The Woman Warrior," I contend that both inhabit the realms of literary fiction rather than popular fiction, as each text shares attributes that defy categorization and genre labels and focus more on characters rather than plot, along with illustrating experimental language and the inclusion of unique poetics. Minh-Ha further relates her stance on genre fluidity with leaking categories, comparing her act of writing to viewing multiple experiences across an array of mirrors, essentially stating that perspective is relative and in her estimation the goal of her writing is to reveal these varied encounters.

She states that to her, writing is a " ... multipolar reflecting reflection that remains free from the conditions of subjectivity and objectivity and yet reveals them both," and that she writes to "show myself showing people who show me my own showing."

Unpacking this dense reflecting language, I understand it to mean that Minh-Ha's goal through her art is to attempt to give the reader a perspective on how others tend to categorize and limit others they perceive around them and although this inexhaustible proclivity is in many ways unfair or entirely inaccurate, these classifications eventually display the cross-border intricacies of which these generalizations will never be able to fully envelop.

This article was published in the Fergus Falls Daily Journal, Minn. and distributed by Tribune Content Agency.