Dana’s Lost Left Arm Symbol Analysis

Dana’s lost hand both opens and closes the novel, bookending Kindred with a reminder that Dana’s intense experience in the past may be over, but it is not something that she can move on from unmarked. Significantly, Dana seems to lose her arm because Rufus keeps hold of her wrist when she transports back to the present. Rufus’ touch symbolically represents the power that Rufus had as Dana’s master and the lingering effect that living under the white master’s thumb had on enslaved people and their children. Dana is alive, with her soul and relationship with her husband Kevin intact, but she could not return from the past whole. Her time as a slave has left a deep impression on her psyche as Dana comes to terms with the dehumanizing effects of slavery on her fragile human body.

Unlike many of the wounds, both physical and emotional, that Dana suffered from her time in the Antebellum South, the loss of an arm is a permanent disability that will mark Dana forever. There is nothing Dana can do to regain her arm, just as the systems of slavery have permanent consequences on African American lives and race relations in America. The traumas of the past are not over for the descendants of enslaved peoples in America, as the African American population still feels the effects of the years of oppression and abuse that their ancestors endured as slaves. This is not something that can easily be “gotten over” or “moved past.” Losing her arm gives Dana a physical reminder of how this history still affects her. While Kevin, a white man, is able to look forward to a future where he and Dana no longer have to be afraid of being sent back to the past, Dana’s lost arm shows how Dana will never be able to fully forget about the trauma her ancestors suffered.