The harrowing and by now well-publicized story of a young West African girl fleeing the much-debated ritual of female circumcision and seeking asylum in the US. This worm's-eye view of her torturous incarceration at the hands of the INS is so well told that, even knowing the outcome in advance, you are held in suspense by the sheer horror of her ordeal. Seventeen-year-old Kassindja fled her native Togo the night before her circumcision and arranged marriage were to take place. Still in her wedding clothes, with only $3,000 of her sister's money, a fake passport, and the covert guidance of a refugee smuggler, she flew to DÅsseldorf, Germany. There she befriended a German woman in the airport lounge and went home with her. Within a few weeks, she met a young Nigerian who offered her yet another passport and ticket, this time to Newark, N.J., where she had family and felt sure she could find refuge from the mutilation and possible death that awaited her back in Togo. Instead, she found herself in Esmor prison in Elizabeth, N.J., and, over the course of nearly two years, a series of similar jails where abuse, humiliation, malnutrition, filth, and human rights violations were the norm. In deceptively plain English, rich with fear, pain, and unflinching detail, Kassindja, a devout Muslim, takes the reader on an unforgettable religious pilgrimage into the many-tiered Inferno of the INS penal system. Through the Herculean efforts of a devoted legal team who took her case pro bono (one lawyer, Bashir, is her coauthor), Kassindja was finally granted asylum on appeal, and now resides in Arlington, Va. Readers will find themselves testing their naivetÇ by how many times they stop to remind themselves that this story takes place in the mid-1990s in America. A Midnight Express in New Jersey—this book will make one by turns, angry, afraid, and ashamed of one's complacency.
Pub Date: March 9, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-31832-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1998
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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