Ta-Nehisi Coates: New Book, Banned Book

Why Ta-Nehisi Coates belongs in the high school library

Hello Friends,

I’m scheduling some posts early so I can take a break for three weeks and fully concentrate on starting a new project (a middle grade novel—wish me luck!). I’ve realized that I am so passionate about book censorship, library issues, and small press publications getting their due that I often don’t add anything about myself. I happen to be thinking about myself just now because I am using Fluorouracil cream to target pre-cancers on my face. It must be doing a good job because my skin is turning red (Okay, scarlet. Okay, purple.) and crackling. I look like someone beat me up. 

This post will be live on Sunday, October 6. That’s my younger brother’s, John’s, birthday. Unfortunately he passed away at the end of last year, so this is the first birthday we are missing him. He was many things, an extremely complicated man. Writer and podcast host Alyson Shelton, along with Lynn Shattuck, is putting together an anthology on sibling loss and asked if I wanted to have an essay included. I wrote one honoring John. I hope the anthology finds a publisher. If it doesn’t, I’ll post the essay here. I imagine some of you have similar sibling stories and complications. 

Happy heavenly, John!

Ta-Nehisi Coates: New Book, Banned Book

In a recent post, I mentioned that Ta-Nehisi Coates had a new book coming out. The Message launched on October 1, so it’s here. 

My friend Carol pointed out to me that Ta-Nehisi Coates was going to be interviewed by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show discussing The Message and that it was about how to tell stories. After watching the interview, I went to YouTube to see a few more. A CBS feel-good piece at Howard University and an argument about Coates’ writing on Israel. You might enjoy these. 

Author Ta-Nehisi Coates talks new book "The Message"

Ta-Nehisi Coates - “The Message” & Understanding the Humiliation of Oppression | The Daily Show

CBS Host Gets Heated After Ta-Nehisi Coates Defends Basic Human Rights

I’m overwhelmed with my reading just now, but I bought the audiobook. Meanwhile, I thought it would be interesting to look at the banned book element of Coates’ work. 

Between the World and Me

Back in 2016, I bought Between the World and Me for my high school library. I booktalked it and wrote about it at the time in an effort to get my students interested in it, get the book in their hands.  Since then, it’s been removed or threatened in various school districts. In Vanity Fair, an excerpt of The Message discusses this. Here’s my original review without any updating about the last eight years. (I do this because I want to show my initial reaction as someone who is selecting and buying books for teen readers, so you can see the librarian at work. I understand that much has happened in those eight years!)

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates 

“This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.”

Often books have an opening sentence–or a sentence very early in–that summarizes the significance of the work. The above sentence does this in Between the World and Me.

Between the World and Me is a letter to the author’s son, Samori. Coates is helping his son define how to live and in doing so, is having a conversation with African American youths. To do this is to have  an honest conversation with us all about what it is like to be an African American male in contemporary America. And in doing this, Coates needs to talk about his own life, his own experiences, his own body. And thus, he must address the history of race relations in the Unites States, which means he must address the concept of race and how it has been created by racism rather than vice versa. To this complex layering of the most perplexing and significant issue in the history of the country, add great writing, and it’s no wonder Between the World and Me is the recipient of multiple awards, including The National Book Award for nonfiction.

Coates immediately addresses the issue of the black body in danger because it is black.  

That was the week you learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go free. The men who had left his body in the street like some awesome declaration of their inviolable power would never be punished. It was not my expectation that anyone would ever be punished. But you were young and still believed. You stayed up till 11 p.m. that night, waiting for the announcement of an indictment, and when instead it was announced that there was none you said, ‘I’ve got to go,’ and you went into your room, and I heard you crying.

While I don’t usually quote a book at length, I do so in the following because this direct address to his son is an admonition to us all–we shouldn’t be looking away, can’t be looking away if we expect change.

I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-­year-­old child whom they were oath-­bound to protect. And you have seen men in the same uniforms pummel Marlene Pinnock, someone’s grandmother, on the side of a road. And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible. There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing–­race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy–­serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this.

Coates reveals his own past as he contemplates the burden that racism has placed on his back. He immerses the reader in details of his childhood in Baltimore, of his youth at the traditionally African-American Howard University (‘the Mecca’), of visits to Civil War battlefields, of  Chicago’s  South Side, and of  a freer sense of existence in Paris. His deep sense of injustice is anchored in the tragic killing of a Howard University classmate, not long after after Coates left the university. In 2000, Prince Jones–unarmed–was killed by an undercover police officer. Jones was the young man one images as on the road to escape such a fate–a deeply religious, kind, and smart university student with a bright future. (This is not to suggest that others deserve such a fate–but only that Jones appearsto be escaping it.) He is the young man who consistently brings the book back to its center, from whom it can never drift very far.

High school housekeeping: Yes, this is a complex text, and the author dives into the deep. But it’s not very long–and if, on special display in a library, its brevity is what attracts the teen reader, that’s fine. Because the topic and the tone will carry him or her through the important task of thinking about the American concept of race, of about what it means, in Coates’ words, to ‘think you are white.’ A reader might at first consider Between the World and Me an angry book. But s/he’ll quickly realize it is really righteous outrage that drives the author to bring this discussion into our collective consciousness.

Why this book belongs in the high school library

• It engenders empathy (again!)

• It’s a dive into social justice from the POV of a Black American man

• It forces the reader to consider the concept of race

• It does all this quickly, in a short text, which busy high school students will appreciate

What I’m reading

Since my recent posts have been long, I haven’t added what I’m reading. But I have been reading, so here’s an update.

Print

Conversations with George Saunders edited by Michael O’Connell. 

Like every other writer in the universe, I’m a fan of George Saunders. Here are fourteen interviews taking place over two decades. Saunders discusses his childhood and his various careers; his work and its meaning; his approach to writing (process and craft). There’s a lot to think about for writers, all good stuff. (Note: if, for some impossible to understand reason, you are a writer and haven’t joined

Story Club with George Saunders

you should.)

Shadows of Carcosa: Tales of Cosmic Horror by Lovecraft, Chambers, Machen, Poe, and Other Masters of the Weird selected by D. Thin

This is not my usual fare, but I have an idea for a novel with supernatural elements and I can’t get it going. I figured I needed to read more weird stuff. So far, in this collection, I’ve read Edgar Allan Poe’s “MS. Found in a Bottle” (not as weird as other stories of his I’ve read); “The Squaw” by Bram Stoker and “Moxon’s Master” by Ambrose Bierce. Stoker’s tale takes place in Nuremberg, so I thought the title must have meant something other than the pejorative we know. I was wrong. There’s an American adventurer in the story, who tells the (apparently) English honeymooners a revenge story of a Native American woman against a man who kidnapped her child. There is some crazy torture chamber stuff here. All in all, pretty creepy.

“Moxon’s Master” is a clever title. The story is about an intelligent robot who turns out to be emotionally unable. But as we’ve seen in other Bierce stories, there’s a twist. It’s not on the level of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” but it’s good. (I think all high school students, for decades, read “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” but if you happened to have missed it, read it!)

A Suffragist’s Guide to the Antarctic by Yi Shun Lai: This is a wonderful YA novel, so I wrote a full review on School Library Lady.

Audiobooks

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout 

I’d read My Name is Lucy Barton and loved it, so I wanted to continue with a sequel. I put this on hold at the library a while back and my turn came up. My Name is Lucy Barton is a powerful, stripped-down-to-the-essential novel. Publishers note: “Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn’t spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy’s childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of Lucy’s life: her escape from her troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, her love for her two daughters. Knitting this powerful narrative together is the brilliant storytelling voice of Lucy herself: keenly observant, deeply human, and truly unforgettable.”

I just started Lucy by the Sea. It details Lucy’s life during the pandemic as she leaves New York for Maine with her ex-husband. 

That Librarian:The Fight Against Book Banning in America by Amanda Jones 

I want to review this later, so no details now!

Sexism & Sensibility:Raising Empowered, Resilient Girls in the Modern World by

Jo-Ann Finkelstein, PhD

I may want to review this one, too, so stay tuned.

Library and challenged/banned book news

Book banning activists target Little Free Libraries in Utah from Axios

State Rep. Sahara Hayes (D-Salt Lake City) recently announced on Instagramthat she planned to celebrate national Banned Books Week by placing titles that are banned in an Utah school inside Little Free Libraries. That led to accusations that she was distributing "explicit content" to children in violation of Utah laws.

Brooke Stephens — a leader with Utah Parents United who called for Hayes' prosecution and has previously mobilized parents to report librarians to police — argued last week that owners of Little Free Libraries should face prosecution if they make "obscene" material available.