Liberian Literary Magazine
to w hich, likely to the end of
our days, w e must inv ariably
return.”
These are all forceful
claims – ones made w ith a
characteristic
pivoting
tow ards the (male) black
body and the frequent use
of w ords such as “plunder”
or “shackle”. They are
accompanied by vivid
recollections of grow ing up
in
gang-ridden
West
Baltimore w here the local
lads’ uproarious nihilism is
ascribed to the know ledge
that “w e could not get out”
and that “the ground we
w alked was tripwired”.
Coates is at his dreamiest
w hen ev oking his time at
How ard
University,
a
historically black college in
Washington, DC, that he
calls
“the
Mecca”.
Cosmopolitan,
teeming
w ith “Ponzi schemers and
Christian
cultists,
Tabernacle fanatics and
mathematical
geniuses”,
it’s a place of self-discovery
and
self-invention,
“a
machine
crafted
to
capture and concentrate
the dark energy of all
African peoples”. I t is here
that he immerses himself in
black literature and history,
meets his future w ife and
befriends a middle-class
student called Prince Jones
w ho is later unlaw fully killed
by an undercover police
officer.
I n part, the book is an ode
to w riting itself. Coates
includes excerpts from
Baldw in, Richard Wright
and Sonia Sanchez as well
as Nas and I ce Cube. He
describes “the art of
journalism” as “a pow erful
technology for seekers”.
Promoting Liberian literature, Arts and Culture
And he remembers his time
at How ard as being one
w here he learned the
pow er of poetry as much as
of slogans, and that “The
Dream
thriv es
on
generalisation, on limiting
the number of possible
questions, on priv ileging
immediate answ ers.”
The Dream is something
Coates often inv okes and
damns
as
psychically
disfiguring. The Dream, he
explains, is “perfect houses
w ith nice law ns. I t is
Memorial Day cookouts,
block associations, and
driv eways … treehouses
and the cub scouts. The
Dream
smells
like
peppermint but tastes like
straw berry shortcake.” I t’s
hardly new s that there are
many tens of millions of
Americans – of all colours –
w ho hav e rarely had a w hiff
of this aroma. As such, the
passage merely highlights
the inaudibility of class in
this book. There is also
precious little about Asians
or Latinos, tw o other groups
w hose national identities
hav e been scrambled and
redefined by imperialism,
internment and legally
sanctioned alienation.
Betw een the World and
Me
apparently
came
about w hen Coates asked
his editor w hy no one w rote
like Baldw in anymore; his
editor suggested he try.
Borrowing the epistolary
form of Baldw in’s The Fire
Next Time
(1963),
he
addresses it to his 14-yearold son Samori. But Coates
doesn’t w rite like a father so
much as an apprentice
theologian or a sophomoric
logician. Sentences begin
14
w ith “Thus”, “I propose”,
“This leads us to another
equally important ideal.”
The tone is consistently one
of aspirational grav itas, of
bew hiskered
patriarchs
and dollar-bill ov erlords.
A
comparison
w ith
Coates’s prev ious book, a
2008 memoir entitled The
Beautiful Struggle, is telling.
There he w rote about the
w orld into w hich he grew
up: “cable and Atari
plugged into ev ery room,
juv enile parenting, niggers
sporting kicks w ith price
tags that looked like
mortgage
bills”.
He
believ ed in structural racism
and
enforced
underdev elopment, but he
described those forces in
less portentous language:
“We thought all our battles
w ere homegrow n and
personal, but, like an evil
breeze at our back, w e felt
inv isible hands at w ork, like
someone w as still tugging
at lev ers and pulling
strings.” I n 2015, Coates is a
more exalted w riter, but his
prose seems increasingly
v entriloquised and
his
insistence
on
AfroAmerican exceptionalism a
kind of parochialism.
Ta-Nehisi Coates