A Song of Despair

I avoided reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me when it came out this summer because I knew that I would be jealous. I was suffering from a bout of writer’s block in mid-August, suffused with the typical doubts about my talent, my self-worth, my future, and I knew that immersing myself in a work by as brilliant a writer as Coates—someone who not only wrote well but wrote well on one of the essential topics in American life—would only raise the volume of my own despair and leave me feeling helpless before the author’s own brilliance and bursts of lyricism.

Now that I’m 70 pages into a new project of my own—and with two significant new published stories under my belt—I felt I was ready to finally tackle this acclaimed cri de Coeur from my favorite journalist. So I skipped the shopping lines of Black Friday and roused myself from tryptophanic coma in order to read the recently-awarded winner of the National Book Award.

The experience was well worth the wait. Freed of any temptation towards jealous or insecurity, I was able to marvel at the harrowing descriptions of growing up black in Ronald Reagan’s America. Coates’ prose—somehow both stark and lyrical—transported me from the bleak street-life of West Baltimore to the almost Dionysian feast of the mind at his self-proclaimed Mecca, Howard University. The book comes to a rich emotional climax when Coates pays a visit to the mother of Prince Jones, his Howard classmate who was killed by the police soon after his graduation.

It’s ironic that my greatest fear before reading this book was that the prose would leave me in a state of personal despair. Despair is in fact that dominant emotion of the book. Coates writes again and again how the forces of white supremacy on the one hand and the ghetto street code on the other tended to operate almost as though they were laws of physics—an unavoidable inertia that had a logic of its own.

I think one of the reasons the book has been so popular is precisely because of this despair. Life in the inner cities—as it is portrayed in books, films or music—tends to be painted in the most vivid colors. We see the occupants of these grim districts fighting against despair with the righteous rage of hip hop or the soulful hope of gospel. We rarely get to see the despair itself—the daily grind of survival in streets ruled by fear.

Many people have wondered why Coates’ book has been so popular among white readers. I think this despair is precisely the reason. The anguish of growing up in Brownsville or West Baltimore is presented straight with no chaser. More to the point, this is a moment of despair in America. Each day, the American Dream (or as Coates simply calls it, The Dream) seems to be more of an illusion and there is little hope in finding any kind of solution or substitute.

This becomes an existential crisis because America is a willfully optimistic country, convinced of its exceptional role in world history, obsessed with creating a better future. There is some room in the American psyche for anger—after all, anger is only an expression of the outrage that things are not yet the way they are supposed to be—but despair is a condition that has never found a home in America. Despair calls into question America’s very purpose. We are permitted to criticize the conditions we live in, but we are not permitted to doubt that they could be improved upon.  In American letters, perhaps only Miss Lonelyhearts has touched on the inescapable bleakness that is at the core of Between the World and Me.

While writing a book that was expressly intended for a black readership, Ta-Nehisi Coates has struck a universal chord by daring to admit that despair, by staring at the cold light of the morning that comes at the end of the American dream. By accepting that light and refusing to blink at the view it illuminates. Although I have strong criticisms of certain aspects of this book, which I will save for another post, on the whole Between the World and Me is a beautifully composed song of despair that should resonate across a nation that is clinging to the last broken shards of its own deadly innocence.