If nothing else, this book is about the power of storytelling. Coates took some time to write fiction after the one-two punch of “The Case for Reparations” and Between the World and Me. Now he’s back to using nonfiction to explain to us why telling stories, whether true, wholly imaginary, or somewhere in between, are crucial to how we form our identities and use them to navigate this world. The process is not so simple as that, though. If only a story could be guaranteed an audience, and if only that audience was required to listen, and if only by listening could that audience be moved to care for the ideas the storyteller conveys. If only life were that simple.
Early in the first section of the text, which is about a trip to Senegal as an adult that seems to have been in the back of his mind for years, Coates relays a story from his youth about a gruesome football injury he’d learned about from an issue of Sports Illustrated. The purpose of its inclusion here is to establish that there are times, such as when a talented athlete becomes disabled as the result of a routine play, that evil seems to win, despite the efforts of all involved. (As I paraphrase this section of the text, I realize that Coates is implying some kind of equivalence between disability and a ‘bad ending’ that doesn’t quite sit right with me.) He reflects on the fact that this story haunted him as a child because it violated the idea he held about good guys winning and bad guys losing, or at least having a negative consequence of some kind. He later explains how “Books work when no one else is looking” (p. 87) and that seems to be true of any text-based genre a storyteller may use to convey their message (i.e., it’s not just books). The lesson that evil could win is not one that many people may encounter in the stories they read, so that is why it may take time for books to do their work. Reading is a solitary activity, and these private moments of insight may not come as immediately as we would think.
The purpose of the storyteller, Coates later tells us, is to provide this clarity, even if it is delayed. Again, this clarity need not be concerned with nonfiction. Even inventive stories can help us understand how “the sharpening of our writing is the sharpening of our quality of light” (p. 19). This quotation is one of those that (as I have mentioned elsewhere on this blog) made me close the book for a minute and sigh as I stared into space. It seems so easy to understand and so obvious once someone else has put it to you that clearly and cleanly. He goes on to explain throughout the text how the light that these stories bring runs counter to the prevailing narratives that support darkness, in the sense that they are stories that venerate harm. Stories that may serve the existing social order at the expense of the marginalized.
The purpose of the storyteller is to shed light on these harms and their perpetrators and to help us imagine a world that does not “root [its] worth in castes and kingdoms,” (p. 35) even if those castes or kingdoms would have the historically marginalized placed at the top of the heap. Simply installing a new ruler from a once-oppressed population does not change the fact that people are being ruled and that a hierarchy exists. He comes back to this idea later in the text, in the section on Israel and Palestine when reflecting on “the incredible truth—that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing” (p. 170). No matter what fate has befallen a marginalized people, there is no kind of overall scorekeeping that could justify using that past mistreatment to perpetrate future harms. This is an idea so large that I know I will still be considering it well after the book has closed. It’s a question that gets to the heart of what justice actually means in practice. It’s a place where pat answers remain unsatisfying and storytellers reveal their utility.
Those uncomfortable questions about justice and victims occupy a large part of the text. In the second section of the book, Coates tells of the experience he had of joining a teacher in South Carolina who was facing disciplinary action from her school board for having taught from Between the World and Me in her classroom. Toward the end of the discussion of this case, he reflects on the larger picture of the book ban itself and remarks that schools that enact book bans are trying “not just to ensure the right answers are memorized but that the wrong questions are never asked” (p. 111). This comes after a section that discusses Freire’s critique of the banking model of education (i.e., teachers deposit knowledge and students withdraw it on tests or essays). That there exist books that put the lie to this idea of the banking model is threatening to people with power, and so they do not want students or their parents grappling with the uncomfortable, difficult questions about who victims are and what justice looks like.
He continues his critique by describing how policy change at the local level is a consolidation of a school or village board’s collective imagination about what kinds of worlds are possible. What else informs that imagination but the very books they are trying to ban? If the stories in these books weren’t so powerful, then the powerful wouldn’t want to ban them. The narratives and language that storytellers use are what helps us shape a vision of the world we’d like to have. Policing the worldview of children through books when they have the open internet at their disposal seems less like concern for the children, or (I can’t write this with a straight face) parents’ rights. It’s just about control. Power, plain and simple.
When he transitions to the final section on Israel and Palestine, he continues to demonstrate the power of storytelling and explicitly how it can be used to “erode claims to power” (p. 140). There can be nothing more terrifying to a colonial power than the witness who calls out its abuses of power. That’s just how he treats his visit to Israel. It seems so easy to see from his perspective as a Black American that Israel functions as an apartheid state. That simple conclusion belies hours and days of thinking, talking, and bearing witness to the abuses of Israel to its Palestinian counterparts. As an American who has neither a Christian, nor Jewish, or Muslim faith, he is able to connect with people across these communities and see what realities they experience in the Middle East as he works through his thoughts and tells his stories.
He leaves with a clear idea (again, writing sharpens our quality of light!) that he is visiting an apartheid state no better than the Jim Crow United States. He puts it plainly, stating that “race is ultimately a species of power” (p. 126) when considering what his Blackness means when crossing security checkpoints in Israel. Again, the idea of abolishing a hierarchical society screams off the page here. What else could you want from your continued existence? Wouldn’t you feel better if you didn’t have to exert so much energy putting systems in place that continue to tell you that you deserve to be at the top of the heap? You would, but you might be too afraid to admit it. Maybe you, too, can learn that lesson from this book when no one else is looking.
No comments:
Post a Comment