"I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people"
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Butler swats away the comforting alibi of genealogy. Ancestry research can let readers keep slavery at arm's length: a puzzle to solve, a lineage to trace, a tidy narrative of origins. She insists she wasn’t building a family-tree plot but staging an affective encounter. The verb choice matters: not understand, not learn, but feel. That demand is almost accusatory, because it refuses the reader the usual escape routes of historical distance and moral self-congratulation.
Her phrasing turns slavery into a physics of harm. "Emotional and psychological stones" suggests not a single trauma but a constant barrage - blunt impacts, cumulative bruising, the kind of violence that doesn't always leave visible marks but reshapes how a person moves through the world. The subtext is that slavery’s most durable technology wasn’t only the whip; it was the forced adaptation: vigilance, fear, numbness, the internal negotiations required to survive being treated as property.
Contextually, this is Butler staking out why speculative fiction - especially her own time-bending, body-and-mind horror in works like Kindred - is not escapism but a delivery system for history’s lived experience. By collapsing temporal safety, she makes the past invasive, not archival. The intent isn’t to hand readers an educational takeaway; it’s to implicate their nervous systems. If you can be made to feel it, even briefly, you can’t pretend it was merely "then."
Her phrasing turns slavery into a physics of harm. "Emotional and psychological stones" suggests not a single trauma but a constant barrage - blunt impacts, cumulative bruising, the kind of violence that doesn't always leave visible marks but reshapes how a person moves through the world. The subtext is that slavery’s most durable technology wasn’t only the whip; it was the forced adaptation: vigilance, fear, numbness, the internal negotiations required to survive being treated as property.
Contextually, this is Butler staking out why speculative fiction - especially her own time-bending, body-and-mind horror in works like Kindred - is not escapism but a delivery system for history’s lived experience. By collapsing temporal safety, she makes the past invasive, not archival. The intent isn’t to hand readers an educational takeaway; it’s to implicate their nervous systems. If you can be made to feel it, even briefly, you can’t pretend it was merely "then."
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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