Intimate responses to fiction cohere into a moving meditation on race.
Toni Morrison’s novels elicit powerful feelings of fear, grief, and anger.
Friends and colleagues at the College of New Jersey, Bennett (Toni Morrison and the Queer Pleasure of Ghosts, 2014, etc.), Brown-Glaude (Higglers in Kingston: Women’s Informal Work in Jamaica, 2011, etc.), Jackson (Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body, 2010, etc.), and Williams (co-editor: Representing Segregation: Toward an Aesthetics of Living Jim Crow, 2012) gathered informally for several years to discuss the novels of the iconic Nobel laureate: “Morrison is our griot, a singer and social commentator, the keeper of traditions and the exemplary engaged citizen of our world.” Black and white, three women and one man, all parents anxious about their children’s futures, they discovered that Morrison’s works spoke to each of them directly, helping them to understand what it means to be black in America and to “live whole in times of uncertainty.” To structure the conversations conveyed in this insightful group memoir, they agreed to focus on four novels—The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved, and A Mercy—assigning each to two writers to show how the same novel affects different readers. Besides offering close, fresh readings of Morrison’s narratives, the authors share personal stories about the experiences that have shaped them as readers. Bennett, for example, grew up knowing he was an anomaly in his racist military and law enforcement family. Reading Song of Solomon, he writes, gave him a “feeling of floating outside myself” that allowed him “to feel comfortable as an outsider.” Jackson, writing about Beloved, and Brown-Glaude, about Song of Solomon, reveal their fears as mothers, consumed by worry about how to keep a child safe in a world where so many unarmed young black people have been killed by police. “My fear is borne out of the unpredictability of those deaths,” Brown-Glaude writes. “And my fear, at times, turns to anger toward those mothers of white sons who do not have to live this way.”
Intimate responses to fiction cohere into a moving meditation on race.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-299-32494-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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
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
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