Book Review: "The Matter of Black Lives" ed. by Jelani Cobb and David Remnick

The New Yorker is one of my all-time favourite publications. I try to get a subscription if and when I can (when I have enough money to pay for a subscription to it) and I am constantly amazed at the way in which they continue to be such a high quality publication every week. One thing I love reading about in that magazine is the sections on literature. This is not just literature in terms of books, but also letters, essays and ideas that are published within the columns. It's really interesting to see exactly what the people who write the books, who do the research and who are a big part of a changing culture have to say about the criticisms and judgements of the ideas that are at play in our world today.

In this book, the editors have managed to put together some of the most incredible essays on the Black experience. Stated on the back cover is something very profound:

"This is not an anthology about race. It is a collection about a broad, fascinating set of events and the people who are most commonly tasked with confronting it. The American future is precisely as bright or as dark as our capacity to grapple with this enduring concern. This collection is a chronicle of at least a part of our past and a lens to help envision a better American future."

Tackling incredibly serious subjects, this book is filled with some of the best writers from everywhere who have been summoned to write something about what it really means to be Black. This is something that I read with vivid intensity as these stories are, in my opinion, a huge part of the narrative of our changing world as a whole.

One story in the book I want to highlight is entitled "Phillis Wheatley on Trial" and it comes under the section "Life and Letters". It is an example of a brilliant story of the Black experience that really opens our eyes on what the past really was. It is a story by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and was published in The New Yorker on the 20th of January, 2003. The story is about a girl called Phillis Wheatley who was also a poet, published in the UK and the USA respectively by the age of fourteen. She was also a slave in the late 1700s. The introduction to her story is powerful and blinding with its ability to reanimate her life into something we can all learn from:

"It was the primal scene of African-American Letters. Sometime before October 8, 1772, Phillis Wheatley, a slim African slave in her late teens who was a published poet, met with eighteen of the most influential thinkers and politicians of the Massachusettes Colony. The panel had been assembled to verify the authorship of her poems and to answer a much larger question: Was a Black Person capable of producing literature? The details of this meeting have been lost to history, but I've often imagined how it all might have happened. Phillis walks into a room - perhaps in Boston's Town Hall, the Old Colony House - and stands before these New England Illuminati with a manuscript consisting of twenty-odd poems she claims to have written. She is on trial, and so is her race."

The story goes through her poetry, her life and the way in which she went from being practically illiterate to a published and respected poet within the space of about six or seven years. A brilliant mind, she is a representative for a whole race of people who had their accomplishments diminshed by oppressors who were envious of not being to think on the same level. Some of the most articulate people in literature and in history have been Black and so, this is not only a book about the experience of Black people, it is also a testament to their literary brilliance with the vast majority of the writers in this anthology being Black.

The book begins with James Baldwin, rightly so and in my opinion the most articulate man in history - at anything. We get words from Toni Morrison, Kelefa Sanneh (who wrote a great book called "Major Labels"), Jamaica Kincaid, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Hilton Als, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Zadie Smith and many, many more. Each writer takes a different perspective in the past, present or even the future for what the life of a Black Person means in time, in context and what the hopes are for the next generations.

I have learnt a great deal from this book about not only people like Phillis Wheatley and the words of the great literary icons of the Black experience, but I have also learnt from writers I had never heard of before, people who had seen things such as the article by Edwidge Danticat who wrote about the paintings of a man called Jacob Lawrence - a man who I had only heard of through his painting of "The Builders" being in the White House. I learnt quite a bit about him and his paintings from that article. It is an entirely different thing to image though, that these stories have been purposefully hidden by people for years, entire biographies of great people, stories of pain and stories of happiness, academic papers and letters, all of it in some way has been shaded from us in favour of the majority.

In conclusion, I have to say that this book was thoughtful as it was immersive, I was left breathless by the sheer amount of ideas put forward in the book. This is something that everyone should read.