Review of the water dancer6/28/2023 ![]() ![]() Despite the fact that Hiram is a ‘strange child’ with exceptional powers of memory, he is unable to remember anything about her – a fact that becomes crucial when he discovers he is capable of conduction, a magical power that allows him to teleport himself across large distances. His father is the plantation owner while his mother, a slave, was sold away from Lockless when Hiram was a boy. ![]() In his debut novel, The Water Dancer, the kind of national awakening Coates imagines for his country is allegorised through the story of Hiram, a young man born into slavery in the 19th century on a Virginia tobacco plantation, rather unsuitably named Lockless. In his 2014 essay ‘The Case for Reparations’, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote that compensating black Americans for the injustices of slavery ‘would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history’. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |