Tag: Ta-Nehisi Coates

Writer’s Desk: Write with Conviction and Humility

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

In a recent piece for the New Yorker that ranged from George Orwell’s Why I Write to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book The Message, Jay Caspian Kang grapples with a problem that can bedevil some of us who make words as a vocation: How much does our writing matter, and should it?

Writers, dramatic and vain by nature, seem particularly ill-suited to offer wisdom. Perhaps there are some lessons to be gleaned from a lifetime of reading and typing, but if they exist they’ve mostly hidden themselves from me. Call me a cynic, but I’ve grown to see writing as a vocation that should be performed dutifully, with ample amounts of irony and self-deprecating humor. This isn’t to say that writing can’t influence politics or provide hope, but I am not sure that anyone can really set out to achieve that goal. Our job is to type…

Kang is not arguing that writing cannot be used to advance a larger purpose. Drawing on a talk he once heard from George Saunders, Kang posits that when writing, “you type, tie it together, and hope that, more often than not, something resonates.”

The trap that writers can set for themselves, Kang believes, is setting expectations for their work which exceeds their abilities:

I do not think it is the job of writers to “save the world,” nor do I think they should set out to do so—not out of any objection about the sanctity of art for its own sake but, rather, because the pressure to always be political, significant, or weighty leads to leaden, predictable prose…

Do good work. Hope that this will resonate and connect with readers in a way that enriches them and even broadens their perspective.

Just do not expect to change the world.

Screening Room: ‘Equalizer 2’

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Denzel, paying the bills (Sony)

The sequel to Denzel Washington’s surprise hit The Equalizer is hitting theaters this week.

My review is at Film Journal International:

When Antoine Fuqua’s sequel begins, Robert McCall (Washington) is far from his blue-collar Boston life. We find him in a Muslim cap and beard on a train through Turkey, reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me and keeping a watchful eye on a man traveling with a young girl. A few clipped lines of dialogue (“American?” McCall is asked; “Guilty,” he responds) and some swiftly crippled henchmen later, the girl is safely back on American soil and McCall is back to his day job…

Reader’s Corner: Black Lit on ‘Luke Cage’

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Those who track the ever-evolving ecosystem of Marvel series on Netflix have been generally pleased with the current season of Luke Cage, following the further exploits of the superhuman-strong fugitive just trying to build a quiet life in Harlem.

At least one watcher has noted the prevalence of call-outs to works of black literature. Some of the books noticed on screen by BlackNerdProblems:

  • Charcoal Joe – Walter Mosley
  • Between the World and Me – Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
  • The Souls of Black Folk – W.E.B. Du Bois

Reader’s Corner: ‘We Were Eight Years in Power’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, politics1 Comment

When Ta-Nehisi Coates published his third book, We Were Eight Years in Power, a collection of essays on black American history and current affairs late last year, the country was still just getting used to its new presidential reality. Or not.

My review is at RainTaxi Review of Books:

Until recently, when the true desolation of the early Trump era has started metastasizing in even the most ardent optimist’s heart, America had a script to use after a catastrophe. Whether a mass shooting, natural disaster, or police atrocity, each event was termed an opportunity for a “national dialogue” on guns, race, class, climate change, or what have you. Those conversations never happened because there was always another catastrophe, and in any case, the culture had mostly lost interest in the public intellectuals needed to push forward such a conversation. That changed, however, in 2014, when The Atlantic published one of the most talked-about pieces of writing in recent memory, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations.” Suddenly, the country was having a conversation. And it wasn’t an easy one…

Writer’s Desk: Be Ready to Fail

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Back in 2008, Ta-Nehisi Coates published The Beautiful Struggle, one of the great American memoirs of the past few decades. In 2015 came Between the World and Me, a tender but hard-edged book-length essay on everything his son needed to know about growing up black in America.

As one of nation’s top public intellectuals, and one whose prose style is so frequently lauded, it’s difficult to think of Coates now in the same way that most writers think of themselves: frustrated, frightened, failing. From Coates’ latest book, We Were Eight Years in Power:

[Writers] must learn to abandon appeal and expectation. Failure is the norm for writers—firings and layoffs, rejected pitches, manuscripts tossed into the wastebins, bad reviews, uninterested editors, your own woeful first drafts, they all form a chorus telling you to quit with whatever dignity you still have intact.

It’s a bracing reminder of the everyday struggle. But then Coates reminds us how to muscle past it:

If you are going to write, you must learn to work in defiance of this chorus, in defiance of the unanswered pitches, of the books that find no audience, and most of all, in defiance of the terror radiating from the blank white page.

Remember that failure is not just an option, but a likelihood. If you can’t acknowledge that fact, then maybe writing is not for you. If, however, you are the person who can put their shoulder to that always-closed door and keep pushing, then maybe you have what it takes.

Reader’s Corner: Vote Now

On By chrisbarsantiIn BooksLeave a comment

oscar-waoInstead of just announcing what the new all-city book club selection is going to be, New York took it to the people with OneBookNY. They chose five possible books and are asking people to vote on what they think everyone should read.

The five books are:

  • Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  • Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
  • The Sellout by Paul Beatty
  • A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

Couple interesting choices here. Coates’s book is nonfiction, departing from the usual novelistic mold, while Beatty’s (amazing) novel is set quite definitively in Los Angeles. Seems like either Diaz or Smith’s (also amazing) novels are the right choice here, but who’s to say?

Voting closes February 28.

Reader’s Corner: What the Bigots Had to Read

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NightWieselA few months ago, some teenagers spraypainted swastikas and various other offensive things onto a historic black schoolhouse in Virginia. When they were sentenced, the judge said they were going to have to read a book each month for the next 12 months and write a report on each one.

Here’s the list of books they could choose from:

  1. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
  2. Native Son, by Richard Wright
  3. Exodus, by Leon Uris
  4. Mila 18, by Leon Uris
  5. Trinity, by Leon Uris
  6. My Name Is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok
  7. The Chosen, by Chaim Potok
  8. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
  9. Night, by Elie Wiesel
  10. The Crucible, by Arthur Miller
  11. The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
  12. A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini
  13. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
  14. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
  15. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
  16. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou
  17. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot
  18. Caleb’s Crossing, by Geraldine Brooks
  19. Tortilla Curtain, by T.C. Boyle
  20. The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison
  21. A Hope in the Unseen, by Ron Suskind
  22. Down These Mean Streets, by Piri Thomas
  23. Black Boy, by Richard Wright
  24. The Beautiful Struggle, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
  25. The Banality of Evil, by Hannah Arendt
  26. The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead
  27. Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi
  28. The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang
  29. Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
  30. The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson
  31. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
  32. Cry the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton
  33. Too Late the Phalarope, by Alan Paton
  34. A Dry White Season, by André Brink
  35. Ghost Soldiers, by Hampton Sides

handmaidstale1Certainly several of these books would be considered standard assignments in any basic college course that dealt with multicultural or tolerance issues (Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Alan Paton, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Harper Lee).

But others selections are more interesting, such as Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son (a North Korean defector struggles to adapt to life outside the dictatorship) or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (dystopian fiction about a theocratic America in which women are merely vessels for reproduction). It sounds like the judge is looking at a broader idea of educating here that involves not just tolerance but empathy–which is, after all, one of the greatest lessons that fiction can provide.

Weekend Reading: December 23, 2016

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christmas_card2_bylouisprang

Weekend Reading: September 23, 2016

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awomanreading1

Weekend Reading: December 4, 2015

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Quote of the Day: ‘Between the World and Me’

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In his acceptance speech at last night’s National Book Awards—where his Between the World and Me won the nonfiction prize—Ta-Nehisi Coates dedicated the award to his friend Prince Jones, who was pursued and killed by a police officer who mistook him for a criminal.

coatescover1Coates went on to say this about the book, which is structured as a letter to his son:

I’m a black man in America. I can’t punish that officer; Between the World and Me comes out of that place. I can’t secure the safety of my son. I just don’t have that power. But what I do have the power to do is say, ‘You won’t enroll me in this lie. You won’t make me part of it.’

You can read an excerpt from the book here.

And his first story about the killing of Jones is here.

Writer’s Room: Make It Hard on Yourself

On By chrisbarsantiIn BooksLeave a comment

The scarecrow was made of straw ... so it applies

Ta-Nehisi Coates posted a piece in The Atlantic a few days back about how to be the best kind of political-opinion journalist. His advise is well-suited for those many who make their livings opinionating throughout the Beltway mediaverse and blogosphere, but is also a good rule of thumb for writers in general:

…To paraphrase Douglass, a writer is worked on by what she works on. If you spend your time raging at the weakest arguments, or your most hysterical opponents, expect your own intellect to suffer. The intellect is a muscle; it must be exercised.

He’s talking about the bad habits of political writers, who tend to pick the most obvious strawmen to go after as a way of formulating their own beliefs. This is an attractive way of operating, but ultimately lazy.

But everybody who puts pen to paper or key to blog is well served with this advice: Don’t do what you’ve always done. This isn’t to say that all writers shouldn’t identify their areas of strength, but to never venture outside those safer realms is to risk creative calcification.