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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