نسب

About the book Octavia Butler worked on this novel for nearly ten years of her life. She read slave memoirs, official documents, archives of historical societies, and old maps, to base her planning of the characters' paths and movements on. This is in addition to her visits to Maryland, where the events of the novel take place. It will be clear to the reader the extent of the diligent and cumulative effort Butler exerted to create spatial, temporal, and cultural contexts around the novel. Butler wanted to resist forgetting through memory, and to create continuity between the past and the present, especially since the modernity gap creates an illusion in the contemporary human that that past has transformed and become distant, erasing the suffering of yesterday’s human and his attempts at resistance and survival. Butler also addresses this gap in a local context, where there is a vast ideological difference between Black people in the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century compared to their ancestors who were enslaved. Butler lived through a radical period in American history, when most of her generation of Black people moved toward armed struggle, viewing their ancestors as victims or submissive. She wanted the reader to forge new links with the ancestors, based on empathy and historical connection, to present new concepts about oppression and resistance. This is the first novel of its kind to recreate the worlds of the American South, through a fantastical story that combines science fiction and historical realism. Year of publication: 2020 Author: Octavia Butler Translated by: Mona Krim Publisher: Takween Publications Number of pages: 458 Cover type: Paperback