So I should've posted this almost two weeks ago... oh well better late than never.
Some time towards the end of our last school week, we got to writing about and then discussing the passage in Kindred in which Dana first witnesses a slave getting brutally beaten. I'm sure all of us can agree that the way this event is presented to us in the novel allows for us to have quite a different reaction to similar events that took place in the time period. In history classes ever since elementary school all we've been given was the facts and so getting on a more personal level of what a slave beating was like definitely allowed us to develop a more repulsive reaction to slavery.
As I was writing, and later as we discussed, however, I realized that I was only one of many who noticed that our reactions to the slave getting whipped was nothing compared to Dana's reaction. The obvious reason for that would be that Dana actually witnessed this slave getting beaten with her very own eyes while we comfortably sat in our sofas reading about Dana's reaction. But as I delved into the symptoms of Dana's severe reaction, I was reminded of a video I watched a while back. The video was about a Syrian father who had thought that his toddler son had been killed in one of the many massacres the Syrians had gone through (and are still going through today) but had found the son still alive and well. The video brought me to tears as the father and son cried and tightly embraced each other.
I was also reminded of the times when I had to do research for a research paper about a Syrian refugee camp. The research itself made me slightly depressed and saddened and I just didn't want to continue with my research or finish the paper altogether. The two connections I saw immediately between the video and my research and Dana's witnessing the slave getting beaten was: 1. My more extreme reaction to the video and Dana's reaction were similar because we had both witnessed the event before our very eyes (I certainly wasn't in Syria but I did see the video only a short time after the incident had happened) and 2. My wanting to stop researching for my paper is similar to Dana's tries to blur out the cries of the slave as he was getting beaten.
As I was writing down these thoughts in my notebook, I heard a comment that I found quite interesting and relateable. One classmate said that she was trying to experience or get closer to Dana's reaction by imagining what happened to the slave happening to a loved one. I looked over my notes and realized that I could easily imagine any of the atrocities happening to the Syrians, or any Middle Eastern, happening to me or my loved ones (in fact, I've on many occasions asked myself how would my family and I be in similar states to the Syrians and many other Middle Easterns experiencing such violence today). Similarly, maybe part of Dana's reaction had to do with the fact that she was black. She could easily imagine what happened to the slave happening to her (and it kinda does later in the book). Generally speaking, though, I think it's safe to say that when such violence is being done to your people, you feel so much more extremely, whether it's because you find it so relateable and can easily see it happening to you or someone you love or if there's a stronger connection between you and those of your same ethnicity.
This sense that Dana reacts especially strongly to what she witnesses in the past in part because of her racial identity makes a lot of sense. And the fact that these people *are* her kin--on a quite literal level, not just in the sense of "her people"--enhances this identification further. Everyone always remarks how much Alice and Dana resemble one another--a family resemblance. This gives her experience of the distant past a visceral immediacy that closely resembles the visceral immediacy you describe while watching videos from contemporary Syria.
ReplyDelete