Between the Book and Me
An Unexpected Self-Review
I’m not quite sure what compelled me to pick up “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, but from the first few pages, I knew it would be hard to put down. Although I realize I am late in reading this particular novel, I am no stranger to this genre. Having read a variety of epistolary works in the past, I find myself drawn to the raw and candid tones of the contemplative narrator. “Between the World and Me” seemed to have made itself present in my life at a time where I perhaps needed it the most. In today’s digital age where news bytes dominate every medium of communication, where information becomes news-worthy as quickly as it evaporates into the ever-expanding digital archives, it has become all the more difficult to keep up. With the deluge of information, one may think that this would make it easier to be sustain a certain level of social consciousness and internalize the goings on of the world as it reaches your fingertips; well, quite the contrary. We as a generation are becoming desensitized, adaptively harsh individuals where news of injustices, inequality, and disenfranchisement is becoming commonplace.
So perhaps I wasn’t quite ready to read Coates years ago. I wasn’t quite ready to ingest and fully absorb the profound nature of his writing. I wasn’t quite ready to step into shoes that were very uncomfortable and walk a painful journey through history, and even more painful, through modern day. “Between the World and Me” contextualized prevalent social issues that I, as an overexposed 20something, never fully understood. Perfectly capturing the zeitgeist of the digital age, injustices are no longer kept in the shadows as we now all have the ability to have a voice. The chants of “Black Lives Matter” and the rally cries at police brutality protests have, regrettably, fueled a short-lived anger within me that was then extinguished and reignited for another cause. Coates’s novel resonated with me, I was able to take disparate thoughts and emotions from my past exposures and weave them into a narrative that I found a way to internalize. Spurring discussion with anyone who was willing to listen, I spent most of my post-novel phase learning the viewpoints of those around me and opened a window into a world that I was blindly living in all along. Perhaps that was the most unsettling of all — do we find refuge in a false sense of comfort we build for ourselves touting our awareness of social issues just because we as a society have been taught to be accepting? This novel challenged the very pillars of my character that I have prided myself upon. Was I, as Coates so defiantly described, a “dreamer”? Blinded to reality yet lulled into a false sense of security.
Much as the narrator struggled to find his own identity and make sense of it in an innately unjust world, this book has made me wrestle with my own reality and truth of consciousness.
