Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Dancing for Liberty

2020; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/abr.2020.0054

2153-4578

Grace Heneks,

American Literature and Culture

Dancing for Liberty Grace Heneks (bio) The Water Dancer Ta-Nehisi Coates One World www.oneworldlit.com/books/the-water-dancer-hc/the-water-dancer-oprahs-book-club-tr 576 Pages; Print; $27.00 In Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (2017), he uses the language of “plunder” to explain the legacy of racism in the US He states, America is literally unimaginable without plundered labor shackled to plundered land, without the organizing principle of whiteness as citizenship, without the culture crafted by the plundered, and without that culture itself being plundered. Coates’s rhetoric of plunder also informs his debut novel The Water Dancer, a book very much concerned with America’s system of expropriation, the people it steals and enslaves, and its abiding influence on the land. It is a novel steeped in US history as well as the history of African American literature; Coates draws upon both, reclaiming the stereotypical trope of the “magical negro” to explore the legacy of slavery and the power of memory to engender liberation. The novel follows enslaved protagonist Hiriam Walker’s journey to self-actualization in antebellum Virginia. The novel begins with a tragedy: a horse-drawn carriage crashes off a bridge during a storm. Hiriam magically survives the ordeal while his white half-brother and heir of the Lockless plantation, Maynard Walker, drowns. The crash is just one in a series of disasters for their father, who has poorly managed the plantation into a pile of debt amidst a climate disaster. Tobacco farming has destroyed the soils of Virginia as families leave and make their way westward to new soils and opportunities for plunder. More and more slaves must be sold “Natchez-way” to pay off rising debt. Hiriam narrates the events from some unknown future, a position that allows him to witness and remark upon the atrocities of white supremacy in the makings of the “peculiar institution” of slavery. Similar to other contemporary neo-slave narratives such as Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), Coates infuses his novel with magic. Like his mother before him, Hiriam has a water-driven superpower known as “conduction” that allows him to fold the earth “like fabric,” allowing him to travel great distances quickly. Hiriam’s powers bring the attention of “The Underground,” a movement reminiscent of the Underground Railroad of historical record. Harriet Tubman even features in the novel as “Moses,” with her own powers of conduction and sage advice for the young Hiriam. However, before Hiriam can conduct people to freedom, he must learn how to call forth his powers at will. He soon discovers that memory, particularly the painful memories of his past, is the key to unlocking his powers of conduction. In her essay “Rememory,” Toni Morrison distinguishes between history and memory. She states that she came to rely on inherited memory instead of recorded history. This collective memory is truer and more important for black Americans because they are treated like “objects of history, not subjects within it.” Coates takes up this power of collective memory, turning Hiriam Walker into a superhero reminiscent of Coates own Black Panther comics, who wields memory the way T’Challa wields vibranium, to fight against the system that has turned him and his family into objects of plunder. The results of this ambitious, genre-bending novel are mixed. That Coates is a great writer is clear; however, Coates is at his best as an essayist. His abilities to argue a point are evident throughout the novel. Lines such as “I was a man well regarded in slavery, which is to say I was never regarded as a man at all,” and “The tasking men were people to me, not weapons, nor cargo, but people with lives and stories and lineage” demonstrate Coates’s rhetorical abilities. In a novel, however, these rhetorical moves come at the expense of plot and characterization. As a result, the novel’s characters are dull, their voices hard to distinguish from [End Page 10] one another. Instead, Coates simply uses them as devices to ruminate on...