Book Review– Between the World and Me
Between the World and Me
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Fear of the African-American father in White America is a reality that is swept under the belief that racism is an overplayed and outdated issue. Fact of the matter is this; racism never stopped lurking in the social fabric of the United States, it merely morphed from one form to another. Ta-Nehisi Coates writes of this reality through an intimate letter addressed to his son. He writes of a nation that is pivoted on policies that led to the mass incarceration of the Black Man, a nation that refuses to prosecute police officers who gun-down innocent African Americans.
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes his best seller book– Between the World and Me in a shockingly poetic manner. The book is remarkable in terms of the depth of feeling and the almost surreal power of Coates’s writing. Coates exudes inspiration from the voices of the literary heroes he grew up reading, and equally from hip-hop culture which was birthed by the civil rights movement. These elements make this book unprecedented in it’s literary value; introducing the perfect marriage between sophisticated language and mainstream culture to elevate an incredibly important message about the Black Man’s struggle in White America.
“Still, Coates urges his son to struggle. “Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. . . . But do not struggle for the Dreamers. . . . Do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle for themselves.” He says this even as he notes that the Dreamers are actively building the deathbed for us all. Technology has freed the Dreamers “to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself.” — Michelle Alexander, New York Times
Coates was deeply affected and completely absorbed the nature of his environment growing up. As a child in Baltimore, he would dedicate large parts of his mental space simply to figure out how to get to and back from school in a neighbourhood infested by murderous gangs. He describes the “need to be always on guard” as being exhausting, “the slow siphoning of essence”. It is in this way that the book teaches the reader about the tenderness of a parent’s worry for their child’s wellbeing. And in doing so, the book beautifully translates the author’s innate message of the racial struggle that still exists today.
The book topped the best-seller list for months on end, finally winning the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2015. The following year, it won the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. The diversity shown in the language of this book is acknowledged as being of “essay nature” and only serves to elevate the brilliance of writing that Coates possesses.
For those interested in picking up a new book, this one will surely not fail you!
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