THE DÉJÀ VU | Kirkus Reviews

The highly effective story of a father’s previous and a son’s future.

Atlantic senior author Coates (The Lovely Battle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Street to Manhood, 2008) gives this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his personal experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I’m wounded,” he writes. “I’m marked by previous codes, which shielded me in a single world after which chained me within the subsequent.” Coates grew up within the powerful neighborhood of West Baltimore, crushed into obedience by his father. “I used to be a succesful boy, clever and well-liked,” he remembers, “however powerfully afraid.” His life modified dramatically at Howard College, the place his father taught and from which a number of siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had at all times been one of the essential gathering posts for black folks.” He calls it The Mecca, and its college and his fellow college students expanded his horizons, serving to him to know “that the black world was its personal factor, greater than a photo-negative of the individuals who consider they’re white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their unique racial id; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides folks, however somewhat “the precise damage accomplished by folks intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they’ve named issues greater than something we might ever really do.” After he married, the creator’s world widened once more in New York, and later in Paris, the place he lastly felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist desires. He got here to know that “race” doesn’t totally clarify “the breach between the world and me,” but race exerts a vital pressure, and younger blacks like his son are susceptible and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately desires his son to have the ability to reside “other than concern—even other than me.”

This shifting, potent testomony may need been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”