Of Alterity, Oppression and the Testimonies of Lived Time: Deconstructing Margins of Disability in Literature through Octavia Butler's Kindred and Toni Morrison's Sula

International Journal of Research (IJR) e-ISSN: 2348-6848 p-ISSN: 2348-795X Vol. 12 Issue 13 October 2025 Received: 12 October 2025 228 Revised: 25 October 2025 Accepted: 30 October 2025 Copyright  authors 2025 DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5281/ZENODO.17505041 Of Alterity, Oppression and the Testimonies of Lived Time: Deconstructing Margins of Disability in Literature through Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Toni Morrison’s Sula Souradipa Datta, Student, M.A. Literature, Department of English, Presidency University, Kolkata ABSTRACT Disability Studies has critically repositioned disability not as a mere individual medical deficit, but as a politically charged, socially constructed condition shaped primarily by historical trauma and systematic oppression. Building upon this theoretical premise, this paper centers on Octavia Butler‘s Kindred, arguing that disability in literature should not be reduced just to personal tragedy or metaphorical limitation; rather, it represents an embodied manifestation of racial trauma and historical violence. This argument is supported and deepened by reference to Toni Morrison‘s Sula. Grounded in Rosemarie Garland-Thomson‘s theory of disability being a social construct and core part of human experience, and Alison Kafer‘s notion of ‗crip time‘, the paper analyzes Dana‘s involuntary temporal journeys to antebellum slavery, leading to her eventual amputation. Her lost arm serves as a permanent marker of slavery that she‘s unable to fully escape, resisting traditional narratives of linear historical closure or personal recovery. Furthermore, the analysis illustrates how disability can become a state of defiance, a mode of resilience, asserting existence outside ableist norms of temporal and normative productivity. Despite her physical lack and racial trauma, Dana‘s perspective never really descends into the morose spiral fixated on the suffering of the blacks. Her ability to actively fight for her survival despite being repeatedly pulled back to a traumatic past exemplifies the tenacity and agency of black women, subverting the conventional notion of seeing disability as a sign of weakness or inadequacy. Supporting this primary analysis, Morrison‘s Sula similarly places disability as socially and politically produced, through Eva Peace and Shadrack. Shadrack, a marginalized WWI veteran, initially experiences PTSD-induced cognitive disruption caused by the disabling nature of war, echoing Dana‘s experiences of crip temporality where both of them somehow inhabit liminal spaces between past trauma and present existence. Eva‘s deliberate amputation reflects disability as a strategic measure for survival, transforming bodily impairment into an active act of agency against racial and economic oppression. This paper, utilizing Butler‘s Kindred and Morrison‘s Sula, eventually questions whether Blackness could be considered disabling in African-American history, and can disability be necessarily empowering? Keywords – Disability, Trauma, Crip time, Blackness, Resilience. International Journal of Research (IJR) e-ISSN: 2348-6848 p-ISSN: 2348-795X Vol. 12 Issue 13 October 2025 Received: 12 October 2025 229 Revised: 25 October 2025 Accepted: 30 October 2025 Copyright  authors 2025 DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5281/ZENODO.17505041 Disability in literature has long been in the mould of individual failing, a medicalised narrative that locates trauma within bodies and imagines linear cure as an inevitable horizon. The medical model of disability, which has been dominant since the 1800s, sees disability as something wrong or broken in a person that needs to be fixed. It treats disability as a problem within the individual, focusing on trying to make their body or mind fit society‘s idea of what‘s ―normal‖. This approach has often caused real harm to disabled people by ignoring their lived experiences and pushing them to change rather than making society more inclusive. Yet from the crucible of presumed deficiency, a radical scholarship has emerged – one that refuses to see disability as a personal misfortune. Instead, it exposes it as a symptom of historical oppression. From the first tremors of discontent that shook the medical model`s tight grip on bodily difference to the iridescent flowering of socio-political frameworks that insist societybuilt environments, institutions, and attitudes are what truly disable, disability studies, as the subfield of scholarly inquiry in the academic fields of sociology, medical anthropology, special education, rehabilitative medicine, and newly in the humanities field, has been a story of evolutionary rupture (Thomson 15). In the closing decades of the twentieth century, disability studies shattered the monopoly of the medical lens, moving towards a socio-cultural, political, and relational understanding of disablement with the help of scholars like Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Alison Kafer, who no longer ask ‗what is wrong with the person?‘ but rather question the world that disables them. Conceiving disability as an acquired effect of social ills opens a space for a deeper sociopolitical understanding of how racialized identities—particularly that of AfricanAmericans—are marked and marginalized in order to challenge reductive biomedical narratives and foreground the complex, lived realities of black disabled subjects. Far from passive objects of pity, these disabled bodies could disclose the fringes of self-control and power, offering vantage points from which to contest histories of erasure and exploitation. It is against this theoretical backdrop that this paper aims to analyze how Octavia Butler‘s Kindred and Toni Morrison‘s Sula carve their subversive narrative, novels that are rooted in the Black Atlantic and the aftermath of slavery. The shared racial identity of the characters of Kindred and Sula can be juxtaposed, especially through Dana and Eva Peace‘s physical disabilities, and Shadrack's mental disability, which serves in understanding disability of various types, such that they are not always detected through a medical lens, and needs a International Journal of Research (IJR) e-ISSN: 2348-6848 p-ISSN: 2348-795X Vol. 12 Issue 13 October 2025 Received: 12 October 2025 230 Revised: 25 October 2025 Accepted: 30 October 2025 Copyright  authors 2025 DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5281/ZENODO.17505041 socio-cultural and political understanding of the human body and human experiences to detect it. Primarily, Alison Kafer‘s notion of ‗crip time‘ – a temporal lens that unravels the ableist chrono-normativity of punctual productivity and linear progressoffers a conceptual framework for this paper as it envisions disability not as a tragedy but as a place of defiant futurity where we might reimagine ways of thinking beyond normative constraints. In Butler‘s time‑shifting narrative, Dana‘s severed arm is not a personal failing but the literal imprint of racial violence, the phantom limb of history that refuses to be amputated from the present. Dana‘s disability emerges from antebellum violence; her recurring journeys through time turn her body into a palimpsest, where slavery‘s echoes refuse to be repressed. Each transport back to the Weylin plantation fractures Dana‘s ableist present, forcing her into crip time that challenges conventional linear recovery. In Sula, Shadrack, the WWI veteran and a severe PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) sufferer, in his self-fashioned ―National Suicide Day‖, confronts psychological disability not as private frailty but as a communal threshold, insisting that only by living ‗off‑beat‘ to the world‘s violence can a new collective conscience awaken. These characters teach us that crip time is not a second‑class clock but a radical refusal of the normative chronicle. Further, in this regard to seeing disability not as a medical inadequacy, Rosemarie GarlandThomson‘s theory of extraordinary bodies reminds us that literature itself has always drawn meaning from the body‘s departures from the norm, but that these representations have rarely acknowledged the agency of the disabled subject. To refuse the tragic script—disability as a pitiable, private catastrophe of alterity—is to reclaim the disabled body as a locus of resistance, a crucible in which new political imaginations are forged. Morrison and Butler refuse to let disability slip back into the medical model. Borrowing from Thomson‘s argument, this paper looks to argue how both of these authors‘ disabled-bodied black female protagonists, Dana in Kindred and Eva Peace in Sula, enable the texts to represent a narrative of disability that simultaneously embraces and transcends the individual and collective history of oppression, maintaining its sense of agency. In Kindred, when Rufus clutches her wrist, slashing away her arm as she returns to 1976, that injury is not an isolated accident but the literal imprint of slavery‘s brutality on her body. Yet Dana never collapses into passive victimhood. Her sense of agency grows within the course of the novel. This way her lost limb comes to signify two truths at once: the enduring toll of white violence, and the irrepressible International Journal of Research (IJR) e-ISSN: 2348-6848 p-ISSN: 2348-795X Vol. 12 Issue 13 October 2025 Received: 12 October 2025 231 Revised: 25 October 2025 Accepted: 30 October 2025 Copyright  authors 2025 DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5281/ZENODO.17505041 agency of a Black woman who refuses to be defined simply by her disability. On the other hand, the character Eva Peace‘s self-amputated disability in Sula adds to her self-identity and dignity, inspiring awe and becoming a mark of agency, a residue of history. Thus, this paper, within these intertwined theoretical streams, aims to analyze, when taken together, how these narratives refuse the easy pathologization of impairment. They expose disability as both a wound and a weapon in a way: a wound inscribed by the arc of anti‑Black violence, and a weapon against the erasure of Black identity, reflecting the resilience of the African-Americans. Butler and Morrison give embodiment to the political claim that to survive with a disabled body in a world designed to disable is itself an act of radical resilience. In a nutshell, the paper argues that disability never empowers a body in a direct sense, nor is it a celebratory thing, but it does offer the characters, especially the two black female protagonists, Dana and Eva Peace, in both novels, ways to reclaim agency in conditions designed to strip them of it. It prompts the readers to challenge the status quo that perpetuates inequality. Unhealed Wounds: Rethinking Disability Beyond Cure From the cotton fields of antebellum Maryland to the iron-gray streets of the Bottom, disability in Octavia Butler‘s Kindred and Toni Morrison‘s Sula is never merely a matter of pathological bodies or individual suffering. Set against the shared racial (African-American history) background, both texts position the psychological and physical damages of the characters as visceral embodiments of historical violence. While disability is often viewed through a medical lens, the unfathomable violence experienced by the Americans portrays how race itself has operated as a disabling force in society. ‗Blackness,‘ in this context, has historically functioned as a socio-culturally constructed disabling condition for African-Americans within white supremacy, thus going beyond any physical or mental impairment. From slavery to segregation, rendering bodies vulnerable to systemic violence and dehumanization, Black identity has often been constructed as a marker of inferiority and criminality, shaping lived experiences across time. Throughout Kindred, Dana time-travels back and forth from nineteenth-century California to the antebellum South at the time of slavery, without a physical time machine, owing to the International Journal of Research (IJR) e-ISSN: 2348-6848 p-ISSN: 2348-795X Vol. 12 Issue 13 October 2025 Received: 12 October 2025 232 Revised: 25 October 2025 Accepted: 30 October 2025 Copyright  authors 2025 DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5281/ZENODO.17505041 strange relationship she happens to have with her slave-holding ancestor, Rufus Weylin. This makes her time-travel to the Weylin plantation to save Rufus, and brings her back to the contemporary time whenever her own life is in danger (Patrizi 132). Despite being an empowered African-American, her unexpected time travels to the time of slavery reduces her identity to her black skin, renders her body enslaved, and repeatedly subjects her to violence and dehumanization, such that even her modern identity cannot protect her from the brutal legacies of slavery. She is nearly raped and beaten - ―I had never been beaten that way before‖ (Butler 42). Within the course of the text, Dana is confronted with the grim truth of slavery and endures the ‗lived experience‘ of black history through the dehumanizing violence inflicted upon enslaved people. As she watches a black slave getting brutally beaten, ―convulsing‖ like an animal, and bloodied with his skin attached to the whip, while he pleads to his Master for forgiveness, Dana is shocked that what she has seen on television and movies is nowhere near this inexplicable torture (36). Dana‘s invocation of the term ―slavery‖ as a way of describing her trying to find work in the American job market indicates her acute disconnect from her own history and its harsh realities. Her disbelief - ―I was probably less prepared for the reality‖ (36) - reveals how racial violence collapses historical distance. ‗Blackness‘ also renders her identity unstable, as she resists stereotypical behaviors of an enslaved person, leading to her legitimacy as Black being being questioned. Her final return, marked by physical amputation, becomes the ultimate symbol of how ‗Blackness‘ is inscribed on the body, turning history into a permanent injury. Dana Franklin goes through this ‗lived reality‘ as a Black protagonist, as the novel opens by stating that she has lost two things: her left arm and a year of her life. From the outset, these intertwined losses establish a connection between bodily trauma and disrupted time—two themes that haunt the narrative long before their full meaning becomes clear. This startling revelation not only foreshadows the temporal dislocations to come but also sets a spectral rhythm for Butler's story, where both physical and psychological trauma link, and past and present bleed into one another. Although Dana survives with her soul and sense of self, she does not return from the past unscathed. Each time Dana is pulled back to her present 1976 Maryland, she bears with her ever-worsening wounds from the past. She comes back soaked, covered in mud, with trauma and pain marking her body. Dana barely evades being sexually assaulted by a patroller in her second journey, sustaining bruises and scrapes. Her next return International Journal of Research (IJR) e-ISSN: 2348-6848 p-ISSN: 2348-795X Vol. 12 Issue 13 October 2025 Received: 12 October 2025 233 Revised: 25 October 2025 Accepted: 30 October 2025 Copyright  authors 2025 DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5281/ZENODO.17505041 leaves her with deep lashes across her back, the result of a brutal whipping by her Master, Tom Weylin. On the fourth trip, she injures her back again—this time from a fall, when Kevin lands on top of her as they both attempt to return to the present. But it is her final return that is the most devastating: Dana's left arm becomes trapped inside the wall of her own living room, severed from her body (―Physical, Emotional And Mental Disabilities‖ 01). It is later revealed that she loses her arm because Rufus clings to her wrist during her final transport back to the present. In this climactic moment, Butler offers a stark physical embodiment of trauma and disability. The narrative arc of the novel is anchored by the potent and unsettling image of Dana getting her arm amputated. The revelation in the prologue itself, ―I lost my arm on my last trip home. My left arm‖ (9), sets a tone and pace for the mystery and foreboding, introducing the readers to this physical disability, a manifestation of society‘s disabling forces. The epilogue, revisiting the traumatic event, underscores its lasting impact on Dana‘s life and psyche. Dana‘s missing limb becomes symbolic of how the trauma of the past persists for the descendants of enslaved people. Moving beyond the medical lens, it can then be argued that it‘s not disability disability-centric disease to be cured, rather an acquired one, one that‘s a profound symbol of the enduring scars left by the historical violence of slavery, bridging the past and the present time in a visceral way. Dana oscillates between two time frames, through her Butler overturns the linear cure narrative, associated with the medical model of disability. Dana is wounded more deeply than the loss of her arm, as this ongoing disablement, unfolding through and because of time, leaves no space for linear healing. Yet she must physically confront her own altered body to grasp the true weight of her experience. In this regard, bringing in Kafer‘s notion of ‗crip time, ‘ which refuses to conform to the demands of normative time, bending instead to meet the needs of the disabled minds and bodies (Kafer 27), it can be said that the impaired body of Dana in the novel is forced to exist in this fractured, non-linear temporality. Each time she time-travels to the past, her present is fractured, as the physical and psychological wounds of history disrupt the linear flow of time. Dana‘s disability, which will mark her beyond time, becomes reflective of how disability is not just an individual problem to be cured, resisting medical narratives of progress and recovery. Dana‘s amputated limb originates from an International Journal of Research (IJR) e-ISSN: 2348-6848 p-ISSN: 2348-795X Vol. 12 Issue 13 October 2025 Received: 12 October 2025 234 Revised: 25 October 2025 Accepted: 30 October 2025 Copyright  authors 2025 DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5281/ZENODO.17505041 impossible temporality. To resist this linearity, a horizontal mode of interjecting histories is required, and as for Dana, it challenges the complete erasure of disabled histories (139). Her experience, thus, invites a reimagining of witness and agency beyond the limits of linear time, embracing a composite identity that seeks acknowledgment for all its intersecting selves (138). Rejecting the medical model helps us to think of a futurity beyond the conventional societal constraints that mark them for being potentially different. Generally, when people talk about ‗disability‘, they immediately tend to think of physical impairments; they hardly think of psychological scars caused by historical and racial violence. The quite peripheral character in Morrison‘s Sula, Shadrack, serves as a poignant representation of the enduring effects of war and the persistent force of racial oppression. As a veteran of World War I, he comes back with a body that does not show much injury and the violence that he had experienced in war, but it had left his mind deeply scarred. This profound psychological impact shattered his sense of time and space. Like Dana, Shadrack‘s racial identity marks his past and present existence, as his reflection makes him see ―a black so definite, so unequivocal, it astonished him‖ (Morrison 13). ‗Blackness‘ is both the marker of his mistreatment at the hospital and the reason for his unjust arrest for ―vagrancy and intoxication,‖ despite his only crying and attempting to untie his shoes after discharge (13). His ‗Blackness‘ increased the odds of surviving with the enduring effects of oppression. Further, moving beyond the medical model that views disability as an inherent problem caused by a health condition that needs to be fixed or treated, Shadrack‘s trauma-induced PTSD can be seen as a manifestation of war brutality. In 1919, within the walls of hospital wards, the figure of Shadrack is first introduced in the novel, who has presumably passed out after witnessing the gruesome, barbaric violence of WWI. Initially in the text, he keeps revisiting the past through the intrusive flashbacks and hallucinations of the traumatic experiences he has had. Shadrack‘s fractured psyche carried a strong feeling of chaos and non-linearity. Upon waking up in the hospital, he looks at his own hands with confusion and terror, convinced they might ―grow in higgledy-piggledy fashion like Jack‘s beanstalk‖ (9) or fuse into "a permanent entanglement with his shoelaces" (13). His overwhelming traumainduced anxiety only comes to a halt when he reassures himself that his hands are still International Journal of Research (IJR) e-ISSN: 2348-6848 p-ISSN: 2348-795X Vol. 12 Issue 13 October 2025 Received: 12 October 2025 235 Revised: 25 October 2025 Accepted: 30 October 2025 Copyright  authors 2025 DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5281/ZENODO.17505041 securely attached to his wrists, unlike the horrifying memory of a fellow soldier who continued running even after his head had been blown off (Kouassi 1315). Shadrack‘s mental/psychological disability, caused by the disabling nature of war, positions his mind and body as an archive. Like Dana, his mind recalls and represents, and such representations become reflective of the African-American history. Therefore, Shadrack‘s trauma-induced fractured psyche adheres to living, inhabiting, and negotiating the social ableist norms. This intricate link between mind and body is emblematic of Kafer‘s ‗crip time‘, as it challenges the conventional notions of linear progress and recovery. Instead of fitting disabled bodies and minds into normative temporal frameworks, the idea of crip time allows a rethinking and disruption of the same, straightaway subverting the normative limitations. Shadrack inhabits a liminal space between the past and the present. His creation of the ―National Suicide Day‖ reflects this notion in a way where he fails to follow a typical path towards recovery, due to his psychological imbalance (7). This day is, at large, a manifestation of the Black community‘s lasting struggle with racial oppression and violence. This way, the mental disability that Shadrack suffers from pushes back against the pressures of normative time, making space for those harmed by societal and historical ills to exist outside its boundaries. It can be said that rather than bending Shadrack‘s disabled mind to meet the clock, Kafer‘s idea of ‗crip time, ‘ if applied here, bends the time to meet Shadrack‘s disabled mind (27). After returning from war, he exists in a kind of suspended time in the present, caught between the memories of the past and the fear of the future. According to Kafer, this strange temporality includes the experiences of those with PTSD, like Shadrack, who inhabit somewhat anticipatory time and scan their days for events, where such scans can be both moving forward and backward in time, while existing in the present (38). Shadrack‘s strange sense of time that serves as a kind of resistance on the part of the disabled bodies and minds, against the ableist orders, is somewhat similar to Dana's in Butler‘s text, whose involuntary time-travelling experience shatters the normative limitations of time and space. Shadrack, like Dana, rejects the idea of ‗moving on‘; rather, their mental and physical disabilities become spaces where the past continually intrudes, where healing is not linear, nor can it be anticipated, but cyclical, unpredictable, and incomplete, thus asserting their agentive presence. International Journal of Research (IJR) e-ISSN: 2348-6848 p-ISSN: 2348-795X Vol. 12 Issue 13 October 2025 Received: 12 October 2025 236 Revised: 25 October 2025 Accepted: 30 October 2025 Copyright  authors 2025 DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5281/ZENODO.17505041 Sustenance and Survival: The undeniable legacies of Black disabled women This leads to the second part of the paper, which argues how the Black female protagonists of both Butler and Morrison, despite being racially and physically disabled in the eyes of society, are never victimized or demoralized, nor are they portrayed as weak links. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson‘s argument of how the ‗extraordinary bodies‘ of the black women, being the physical witness to violence and oppression, serve as a collective conscience by becoming a testament to the resilience and dignity inherent in the AfricanAmerican narrative of self (116). This exactly happens to be the case for Dana in Kindred and Eva Peace in Sula. Instead of depicting disability through a lens of inadequacy, Butler grants agency to Dana to transcend the confines of time without a physical time machine. As the novel progresses, her agency grows. In the chapter ―The Fight‖ (108), Dana exhibits an increased agency when she contests the power and control her white ancestor, Rufus, wishes to assert on her. Rufus must learn to respect Dana if he wants her to continue helping him in times he finds himself in trouble. However, Dana quickly realizes that even though she is in a position of authority, she must carefully balance it, knowing that if Rufus feels she is overstepping her ―place,‖ he could retaliate by harming other slaves (164). In order to shield others, Dana often resorts to pretending submission. However, when all her attempts to create a more balanced and respectful relationship with Rufus collapse, she is ultimately left with no choice but to kill him in self-defense. Rufus‘s persistent refusal to acknowledge Dana‘s autonomy, coupled with his critical misjudgment of her strength, propels her toward this final, irreversible act, forcing her to cross a boundary she had long tried to avoid. Dana‘s disability doesn‘t relegate her to a passive victim status; she is the active writer, narrator of her own story, who remembers and represents. Her ability to adapt to the shifting conditions without losing the sense of self speaks volumes in itself. The fact that the lens representing the black disabled bodies needed to be changed makes Butler‘s attempt to bring empowerment in the narrative, tone, and plot all the more important. With each timetravel to the antebellum South, Dana is confronted with the harsh realities of slavery, as she endures the dehumanizing violence inflicted upon the enslaved people. She goes on to endure ―Horror stories. Except that they were true, and [she] was going to have to live with them for as long as [she] was [there]‖ (75), starting from threats to literally witnessing a brutally