“If a ‘Kindred’ movie ever gets made, I wouldn’t be involved,” Octavia Butler wrote in a letter in 2000. “It won’t be my movie and I suspect it won’t be much like my book . ”
It was another Butler prediction that was mostly on target, though she was wrong about the format. Edited by the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins for FX on Hulu, “Kindred’ is neither a film nor a completely faithful interpretation of the novel. But it comes at a time when there’s more interest in Butler’s body of work than ever before, and how her prolific writing, mostly science fiction novels, continues to resonate with our world more than 15 years after her death.
“Kindred” is Butler’s best known and most widely taught novel. Published in 1979, it tells the story of Dana Franklin, a 26-year-old African-American writer who, from 1976, repeatedly and unexpectedly travels to a mid-1800s plantation in Maryland. Each time Dana arrives in the past, she saves the life of Rufus Weylin, her white slave-owning ancestor; she returns to the present only when her own life is in danger.
In a 1988 interview with the literary critic Larry McCaffery, Butler said that Kindred, with its mix of genres, periods, and antebellum histories, was informed by ideological debates she had had while studying in the 1960s about the extent to which slaves should be have rebelled against their masters.
Knowing this, Jacobs-Jenkins sought to capture those tensions as he updated the story to convey the complexities of our post-Obama racial realities. A lifelong Butler fan, he wanted to turn ‘Kindred’ into a television series way back in 2010, when he debuted his first full-length play, ‘Neighbors’, at the Public Theater.
The drama was well regarded, but it was Jacobs-Jenkins’ 2014 Obie award-winning play, “An Octoroon,” that established him as one of America’s most exciting young playwrights. A satirical adaptation of Dion Boucicault’s ‘The Octoroon’, a 19th-century melodrama about the tragic love story between a European-educated white plantation owner and the play’s main character, an enslaved woman. The piece inspired critical raves and popular ticket sales. In his review for DailyExpertNews, Ben Brantley wrote that its success “seemed to cement the author’s reputation as one of this country’s most original and illuminating writers on race.”
Even then, Jacobs-Jenkins remained committed to “Kindred.” In 2015, he convinced Courtney Lee-Mitchell, the novel’s rights holder, that it should be a television series and not a movie as previously thought by other potential producers and even Butler himself. The decision to stretch the story across multiple seasons has drawn some criticism. (All eight episodes of Season 1 are available on Hulu, but the series has not yet been renewed.)
Nevertheless, Jacobs-Jenkins hopes his expansion of the novel’s universe encourages more people to discover Butler’s writing for themselves.
“After seeing this, I want people to question their assumptions about what they think they know about history, about themselves,” he said. “I want them to read Octavia’s work.”
In a video interview earlier this month, Jacobs-Jenkins talked about his introduction to Butler’s writing, the motivations behind some of his changes to her story, and why he thinks television and theaters need even more stories about slavery. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.
When did you first come into contact with “Kindred”?
My relationship with Butler preceded my engagement to “Kindred.” I was one of those kids who read Stephen King on the playground for no good reason, and Ray Bradbury’s novels were also important objects of transition for me. I was about 12 or 13 years old when I had a babysitter who went to Howard, who was also a black nerd. She said to me, “You should read Octavia Butler.” So I started her Patternist series. And when I got to college, I read her on an African-American studies syllabus and remember thinking, Oh, this person I’m reading for fun is academically important. That’s also when I heard about ‘Kindred’, which was strangely one of my later introductions to her work.
Before, when I was reading her, it felt very much like a secret; it felt good to be part of that weird underground. And now she’s been mainstreamed in this massive way.
How did this adjustment come about?
Slavery is the material of my creative life. I remember becoming obsessed with the visual work of Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon and Kerry James Marshall and wondering why they were so ahead of the theatre. So then, I said, I’m going to dive deep into these people, and I’m going to write a play based on my deep dive. I sniffed what their discourse was and tried to translate it into a theater space. And the truth is that my creative life is ultimately guided by fandom on some level as well, and I remember rereading “Kindred” in 2010 and thinking, This is a TV show. It was a eureka moment.
I immediately started figuring out how to get the rights. It had been under option since 1979 because people kept trying to make it into a movie. And I was like, It’s not a movie. Because the whole book is about the experience of the passage of time and watching people transform, witnessing their development, growth, decay and shift of their allegiances. It took me six years to get the rights, and then it became my job to translate it and finally peel back the layers for people.
Speaking of time passages, her novel was set in 1976 to coincide with the bicentennial year of the Declaration of Independence. Why did you set up the series in 2016?
Along the way, I became very close friends with Merrilee Heifetz, Butler’s literary executor and her lifelong agent. One of the things she said to me was, “Octavia would have liked you to make this for now.” So I took that to heart. I think 2016 was that last gasp of naivete about how we had processed the legacies of this racial regime on which the country is based. Do you remember the day after Obama was elected, there was suddenly a discussion about a phrase called post-race? I remember asking, “What is that?” I also think because people haven’t seen the 2016 results [presidential] With the elections approaching, we suddenly felt as if we were falling back as a country. “Kindred” was the ultimate metaphor for that too.
Another surprising change was that you included her mother as the main character. What inspired that storyline?
Merrilee also told me that Octavia referred to this book as one she never quite mastered. That interested me because this is her most read and well-known book, and it also directed me to her archives, which had just been cataloged at the Huntington Library.
I’ve read every version of “Kindred,” and there are some where she experimented with this mother figure. In her canon, she is obsessed with mothers. I don’t want to psychoanalyze another artist, but her relationship with her mother was very complicated. Merrilee once told me she would say, “Octavia, I want you to write a memoir.” And she’d say, ‘I’ve already written a memoir; it’s called ‘Kindred’.”
Unlike many other contemporary depictions of enslaved people in television and film, Dana is not alone. She has a community in each of her periods to help her. Why was this important to portray?
I think Octavia was obsessed with family. I mean it is called “Kindred,” and it’s about making the family political. My approach was to always think about what she was doing and try to replicate or expand that universe – I took all my cues from her, except I put it in 2016. At the same time, she always tried to understand why tribalism exists, why genes are so varied as a concept, how they are used to oppress people and what oppression is ultimately rooted in.
Dana has to make some tough choices for herself and often risks the lives of other enslaved African Americans to ensure she survives in the present. How did you go about bringing her moral ambiguity to the screen?
That’s an essential part of the book and I think that’s what makes Dana interesting. Most people do not participate in active rebellion, but fight on a small scale to maintain their freedom of choice. This is driven home to Dana, who says to herself, “Wait a minute, to ensure my existence, I have become someone who could destroy or erase the existence of countless people. I want to be seen as good, and I want to think my goodness will pass to Rufus as well. But playing both sides is not how justice happens. You will be morally compromised in all your actions if you still think about yourself. That’s the interesting challenge she has to negotiate.
Why did you think a multi-season arc was best for this story, rather than adapting it as a one-season limited series?
I just didn’t think you could read this book in eight hours. It’s about being with people over time and really feeling these tectonic shifts in their personality. I thought the idea of squeezing in six different actors for Rufus would have felt like a party trick. I’m sure someone out there could have made that thing, but I just wanted to give us the fullest canvas I could to tell the story.
Do you ever worry that the public is getting tired of stories about slavery?
There’s an interesting quota that we all want to put on stories about slavery, and I think that question is often only asked of black creatives. There are a thousand programs on the air about wealthy white families doing sympathetic harm, and no one puts a quota on that. I find it interesting that there is a desire to check every story about a creative person’s history. I mean this is my history and my family history.
I also think that people are concerned, scared or sick of the tropes and stereotypes associated with this work and await the familiar scene where a female enslaved person is raped or someone is tied to a post or tree and beaten. But to honor Octavia’s book, I’m trying to find new things to talk about. We should never stop telling these stories, especially when people try to erase them from the history books.