Book Review: Between the World and Me
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
What does a father, who is conscious of the horrors of black life, say to his son about the harsh realities of it all? How does he, having lived under tyranny that looms everywhere and yet goes unacknowledged, impress on the young mind of the ‘cosmic injustices’ brought upon his people and the violence he will eventually have to meet?
How do you best prepare the young, innocent and naive black youth of the pitfalls of the American Dream?
In this book, the title taken from a line in James Baldwin’s long and personal essay; A Letter from a Region in My Mind, Ta-Nehisis Coates, with such striking literary style and accomplishment, strives painstakingly to explain to his son, what it means to be black in the world.
Between the World and Me aims to show the gulf that exists between the life of a black man and the ‘Good life’ — how far removed he is from it and how alienated from an existence he lives, constantly.
Written in a series of letters, Ta-Nihesi Coates shares his lived experiences with his (…) son, and traces the most important inflexion points of his life and “earliest act of interrogation, of drawing [himself] to consciousness.”
Coates begins by indicting the classroom — the education system that does not serve the interest of his blackness but rather stifles individual black thought. He writes: “I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance.”
In this, Coates endeavours to teach his son to learn beyond the classroom, because, from his experiences, “the classroom was a jail of other people’s interests.”
Coates traces the beginning of his intellectual development to his university days, a period of doubt and confusion, where he thought of himself as a dispossessed African in America. Through the books and authors he discovered and read at Howard University libraries, Coates was placed on a journey that would ultimately lead to self-acceptance.
Nothing is kept secret from his son in this book. From the time Coates smoked pot, to a girl he liked — who made an indelible mark on his Afrocentric consciousness; to the day he met his wife (on campus). It is a biography of a man aware of his perceived place in the world, a father burdened with responsibility, attempting to make a life in a country which previously owned the black body.
Coates writes to his son about how the police have been “endowed with the authority to destroy your body.” In this, Coates attempts to show the insecurity and yes, even the precariousness of being black in America.
This wrenching discovery — of a world indifferent, that will not accept him because of his skin colour; a discovery of how racism constantly morphs throughout history but bears similar effects, especially on those whom the essayist, Teju Cole, calls, “custodians of the black body.” This….puts him in a place where he has a new profound view of the world.
Coates's literary work is meticulously crafted and intended to unearth, to expose the brutality of institutional racism and white privilege. What one discovers as one reads the book, is the bravery to see the world as it is, without the fairy tales that often make life bearable.
And yet the bravery of the author is somewhat limited. It stops there. It refuses to go beyond perceived reality. There is no hope in the book. Coates refuses to see Martin Luther King Jr’s mountain top. In his estimation, America is doomed to this cycle of violence and oppression.
This hope, which would have further elevated the book, however, requires another kind of courage — a long, patient and enduring vision of the capability of people to gravitate towards change. What is required, within the modern literary circles, is not only to open one’s eyes to history’s continued injustices but also to the seemingly cliche ‘arch of the moral universe’, to which MLK (….) it ‘bends towards justice’.
Besides my disappointment at the lack of enthusiasm towards America’s future, the book still remains a must-read — a monumental work, necessary to do what Malcolm X did with vigour and what Steve Biko wrote about eloquently— to arouse black consciousness. To what end?
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