Liberian Literary Magazine Promoting Liberian literature, Arts and Culture
Book Review Between the World and Me
Between the World and Me |
by Ta-Nehisi Coates review |
– a now exalted writer and |
spokesman |
for |
black |
America |
|
|
Reviewed by: Sukhdev Sandhu
The prominent journalist has issued a passionate call for change. But where are the discussions of class, and is he guilty of parochialism?
Ever since 1976, when the US government officially recognised Black History Month, February has been a time – especially in state schools – to celebrate the emancipatory struggles of runaway slaves, pioneering medics and lawyers, and poets and“ freedom riders”. For the young Ta-Nehisi Coates, growing up in Baltimore, it was also a time of mystification and shame. Watching newsreel footage of the civil rights movement, he got the impression that“ the black people in these films seemed to love the worst things in life – love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the firehouses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them into their streets”.
These days, Coates is a prominent journalist for the Atlantic where his tendency to puncture sunny-side-up political platitudes has not abated. In“ Fear of a Black President”( 2012) he wrote of Barack Obama’ s“ remarkable ability to soothe race consciousness among whites” and how“ this need to talk in dulcet tones, to never be angry regardless of the offence, bespeaks a strange and compromised integration”. In 2014 he published“ The Case for Reparations”, a lengthy and widely debated essay in which he argued that reparations would mean“ a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our selfimage as the great democratiser with the facts of our history”.
It is understandable, then, that there has been a lot of fanfare for Between the World and Me. It appears at a moment when, thanks to mobile phones and social media, the ghastly spectacle of black Americans – many of them young and unarmed – being strangled, clubbed or shot by police officers has created a cacophony calling for change. Black Twitter, Black Lives Matter, hashtag activism: it is a marvellous noise, an Occupy-style swarm energy that, for veterans of an older media imperium, can appear befuddling. What they want is a figurehead, a mansplainer, a gravitational node amid all these centrifugal conversations.
They could certainly do a lot worse than Coates, whose book has already been lauded by Toni Morrison(“ I’ ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died”), and helped him to win a prestigious MacArthur“ genius” award. A self-conscious step back from a present whose crimes and bloodiness it sees as consistent with American history, the volume is a rather strange blend of epistolary nonfiction, autobiography and political theory that has at its heart a simple message:“ In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage.”
Many of the ideas Coates rehearses here are associated with the school of thought know n as Afropessimism. Black Americans were enslaved longer than they have been free, and as a result the deaths of Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin are“ merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings and humiliations”. Later he argues:“ The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting
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