“By going to the future you bump right into the past”:

Time-travel with Octavia Butler and Malidoma Somé.

I am a vocal Octavia Butler and Malidoma Somé evangelist. Deep gratitude to ancestors Dr. Consuela Frances and Grandma Myrtle G. Glasco for guiding me to their teachings. In 2017 I was pursuing a degree in Public History. My thesis - and survival - called for proof that I was magic, capable of time-travel, and that I could heal my ancestors and myself. Butler’s Kindred and Somé’s Of Water and the Spirit are sacred texts that prove exactly that. Although Butler’s story is fiction, and Somé’s is autobiographical, they both affirm non-linear time, epigenetic healing, and that we ARE

Afrofutures.

Kindred follows the supernatural experiences of Dana, a 26-year-old Black woman writer living in 1976 California. She’s married to a white man named Kevin. The book begins on Dana’s birthday. She and Kevin have just relocated. While unpacking, for reasons unknown to Dana, she is transported to what seems like a completely different world.1 There she encounters a frantic, screaming, drowning child.2

1 Octavia Butler, Kindred (Boston: Beacon Press Books, 1979), 12.

2 Ibid., 13.

Instinct moves Dana to rescue the child—a young white boy. Upon pulling him out of the water, Dana is imediately accosted by the boy’s mother. The mother begins beating Dana, assuming the woman who just saved her child is actually hurting him. Suddenly, the boy’s father is also there. He points a rifle at Dana. Then, everything vanishes and Dana is home again.3 Dana doesn’t begin to understand her bizarre trip until she goes again. She is home for less than an hour before she begins to feel dizzy and disappears a second time.4 And these non-consensual, interdimensional round-trips continue throughout the story.

We learn that Dana is traveling to the home of her ancestors, the Weylin Plantation, in 1815 Maryland. The boy she saved is Rufus, her white, slave-owning ancestor. She later meets Alice, her enslaved ancestor. Dana realizes she must keep them both alive, at least until Hagar is born. Born in 1831, Hagar records their family tree in a Bible that is eventually passed down to Dana’s uncle. This is how Dana begins to recognize the names of the people she is interacting with in the past. She has seen them before.5 Here Butler notes the importance of family archives. Proof of our ancestors’ intentions. How would Dana have understood her role without these records?

In Of Water and the Spirit, Somé narrates growing up in what is currently known as Burkina Faso. He describes the magic he witnesses regularly among the Dagara people. For example, he shares a ritual that takes place after his grandfather dies. During the ritual, men in his village cook in upside-down pots that sit on the ceiling. He writes,“The out-of-gravity culinary art was a secret practice performed only when a leader of exceptional standing died. The day of my grandfather’s death was the first and last time I ever saw it. For, as things changed in our tribe, the practice passed away, perhaps along with the secret…”6

Shortly after his grandfather dies, a French Jesuit priest kidnaps the four-year-old Malidoma.7 He spends the next 15 years of his life in violent French schools. He’s beaten and whipped by instructors—forced to learn to read, write, and speak French.8 He’s subject to sexual abuse from older students and instructors.9 He is made to think linearly, and only believe what he can see, prove, or explain.

Somé eventually escapes. When he returns to his village, he is 21-years old—well past the age that Dagara adolescents go through adult initiation rites. After consulting their ancestors and spirit guides, the elders decide he must go through initiation anyway. His name, Malidoma, means “befriend the stranger/enemy.”10 To do so, he must know the secrets of his own people, as well as the secrets of the West. It is believed that he can then bridge the gap between the oppressed and the oppressor, and keep the magic of his people alive.

3 Ibid., 14.

4 Ibid., 19.

5 Ibid., 28.

6 Malidoma Patrice Somé, Of Water and the Spirit (New York, New York: Penguin Compass), 1994, 52.

7 Ibid., 87.

8 Ibid., 92

9 Ibid., 108.

10 Ibid., 4.

Like Dana, Malidoma travels through time and space. Black life often blurs the lines between memory and imagination. While reading Somé’s book, I’d forget that it wasn’t Fantasy or SciFi. Somé’s reality confirmed that Afrofuturism is an actual magic that Africana people Be. Far beyond a genre, or literary device. We ARE Afrofutures. Many of us have just been forced to forget. Somé writes:

…In Western reality, there is a clear split between the spiritual and the material, between religious life and secular life. This concept is alien to the Dagara. For us… the supernatural is part of our everyday lives. …The material is just the spiritual taking on form…The world of the Dagara also does not distinguish between reality and imagination…To imagine something, to closely focus one’s thoughts upon it, has the potential to bring that something into being.11

If we believe we can heal backwards and forwards, we can. And do. The endless parallels made me wonder if Butler was somehow familiar with Somé’s initiation. However, she channeled Kindred 15 years before Malidoma recorded his experience. Octavia Butler was from the future.

In Kindred, Dana can remain in the Antebellum South for months at a time, becoming further indoctrinated into the normalcy of slavery. Each time she returns to the present, she learns it is the same day as the day she left. Butler writes, “I went back into the house and turned the radio on to an all-news station. There, eventually, I learned that it was Friday, June 11, 1976. I’d gone away for nearly two months and come back yesterday—the same day I left home. Nothing was real.”12

Similarly, when Malidoma recalls aspects of his initiation process, the time spent in different dimensions always feels longer than time is perceived in the present. The elders create a portal out of buffalo skin that will transport the initiates to the underworld.13 The boys line up, and one by one are told to jump through the portal. For those waiting on the boy ahead of them to return, only a few minutes seem to pass. However, the time Malidoma spends in the underworld feels much longer. Although it’s unclear how long Malidoma is gone, his descriptions of the underworld suggest he is there much longer than a few minutes. Malidoma writes:

When the flames were finally extinguished and I was somewhat recovered from my crashing return, I realized that the boy behind me had already been sent through the gate, and that I was being regarded enviously by those who were still waiting. The elders either did not care or else were too busy to notice me. Even though it felt like I had spent the whole afternoon in the light hole, the sun had not moved an inch from where it had been when it was my turn to jump.14

In order to heal, we must visit past timelines, addressing wounds that manifest in the present. My mother described spiral time to me while I was surviving undergrad. Plainly stated: Time is relative. What is perceived as a few minutes to an adult seems agonizingly long to a child. But the same amount of time has passed. And time seems to move faster the older we get.

Ancestrally speaking, the sooner we grapple with our pasts, the sooner our presents align with the freedom we desire. You might repeatedly find yourself in what seems like the exact same point in time. You’re not, though. You’re actually at another point in the spiral. Time isn’t linear at all.

Both authors describe the physical and spiritual scars we carry across time. During the two-month visit to 1819, Dana secretly teaches some enslaved children to read. When the plantation owner discovers this, Dana is whipped for the first time. Butler writes, “Weylin dragged me a few feet, then pushed me hard. I fell, knocked myself breathless. I never saw where the whip came from, never even saw the first blow coming. But it came—like a hot iron across my back, burning into me through my light shirt, searing my skin…”15

Dana is always transported back home when her own life is threatened. She passes out from the pain. After coming to, she realizes she’s home again. Butler writes:

…I went into the bathroom and turned on the water to fill the tub. Warm water. I don’t think I could have stood hot. Or cold. My blouse was stuck to my back. It was cut to pieces, really, but the pieces were stuck to me. My back was cut up pretty badly too from what I could feel.16

She carried the scars from slavery back to the present. Malidoma shares a related experience. As the male initiates return through the portal, many of them are still covered in bright, violet flames. He writes:

I was covered with small flames. Though I fought hard to put them out with my bare hands, I was not doing a good job. I needed to work faster to fight the fire that was consuming me…

11 Ibid., 8.

12 Kindred, 115.

13 Of Water of the Spirit, 234.

14 Ibid., 246.

15 Kindred, 105.

16 Ibid., 113.

…I lay on the ground, exhausted. I got up and took a look at the body that had been invisible to me for so long. There were scattered burns all over it—I still carry the scars—and the burns were stinging from the sweat that began to pour from my skin.17

According to Dr. Keisha Ross, “Historical trauma is most easily described as multigenerational trauma experienced by a specific cultural group… As a collective phenomenon, those who never even experienced the traumatic stressor, such as children and descendants, can still exhibit signs and symptoms of trauma.”18 This is true regardless of if we name our trauma, the causes of our suffering, or acknowledge the harmful ways we’ve learned to survive harmful environments. And yet, the sooner we initiate all the above, the sooner our ancestors step in.

Somé writes:

When a person from my culture looks at the descendants of the Westerners who invaded their culture, they see a people who are ashamed of their ancestors because they were killers and marauders masquerading as artisans of progress. The fact that these people have a sick culture comes as no surprise to them. The Dagara believe that, if such an imbalance exists, it is the duty of the living to heal their ancestors.”19 title: choosy

17 Of Water and the Spirit, 246.

18 Keisha Ross, “Impacts of Historical Trauma on African-Americans and Its Effects on Help-Seeking Behaviors, ”accessed September 9, 2017, (presentation) http://www.umsl.edu/services/cps/files/ross-presentation.pdf.

19 Of Water and the Spirit, 10.

Artist:kalin devone

Plate 10 title: fuschia holler

If this is not done, we should expect to perpetuate and pass these unhealed wounds down to future generations. Somé goes on to explain that when we take on the important work of healing those who came before us, we are actively healing ourselves in the present.

I’ve always believed in supportive, omnipresent ancestors. But if we carry their trauma, that means they haven’t healed. What would it look like to heal their trauma as well as our own? How far and wide would that healing ripple out?

In Kindred, Dana physically nurses two of her ancestors back to health. Both Alice and Rufus would die without Dana’s care. Dana even encourages Rufus to free his last two children, including Hagar.20 Would Dana’s ancestors have been freed without her? If infinite timelines simultaneously exist, and time isn’t linear at all: are we to understand that Dana went back in time and changed the past? Or is it that those timelines always converged? Was this just another version of reality, as Somé suggests? What I mean to say is: what if the existence and survival of that family always rested on this descendant? Dana didn’t change the past. The future and the past were one in the same.

The liberation of the ancestors always depended on the descendants. An intergenerational, interdimensional healing circle across time and space. We are healing backwards and forwards.

So be it. See to it.

May our ancestors add blessings to the reading of these words.

20 Ibid., 235.

If you were given a chance to visit one of your younger selves, which one would you choose and why? Would you attempt to change the course of their life, thus changing your present? If so, why?

Artist: elle ivy greene Plate 11