A fascinating account of what it truly means to bear witness.
A survivor recounts untold atrocities in Africa.
First-time author Kimani knows pain, both on a personal level and as a journalist covering political events in Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In fact, she notes, covering Rwanda from 1999 to 2005 left her “gutted. Listening to the survivors of the war and genocide, as well as the perpetrators of the terrible crimes committed during this period, forced upon me terrible questions, all starting with why and ending with no answers.” Interestingly, though, what follows in this brief account is not the detailed litany of personal or recorded tragedies one might expect from a writer employed to recount fact, but the more abstract reflections of a poet-philosopher trying to come to grips with such tragic stories. Kimani does allow some of the horror to seep through with graphic clarity–particularly when discussing gang rape or the wounded being left to die in pit latrines–but mostly she expresses her realizations regarding what it means to be a survivor: “You become aware of the complexity of life, how love and hatred, life and death, fragility and tenaciousness somehow exist as part of the same event, same being, same person, whether victim or perpetrator. This is the reality of having survived war, violence, loss, and personal tragedy; it is a reality that any survivor anywhere in the world knows and shares and can understand. It is the reason they don’t forget.” Equal parts poetry and short prose passages, this powerful testament to overcoming seemingly insurmountable trauma wavers between introspection and philosophical contemplation, ultimately making for a work that doesn’t quite cohere in the telling–a fact that perhaps offers the greatest evidence of the fractured nature of survival that the author reveals.
A fascinating account of what it truly means to bear witness.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2006
ISBN: 0-595-39653-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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SEEN & HEARD
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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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