Truth in the Body

Toni Morrison called Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, "required reading." She is correct.

This little (5"x7" with 152 pages) letter from a father to his teenage son admits no distillation or summary. Like The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, one must read the whole body of prose-poetry in order to capture its essence. And you, dear reader, will receive a reward for that dedication.

So as I sit with Coates' words, swimming still in their height and breadth and depth, their piercing brilliance and brutal honesty, I can only share one facet of what I read there. This insight, though it is just one of many, hints at the effect on a reader of the fullness of the book.

Coates, as he reveals himself through Between the World and Me, is a materialist. No, not the kind that wants to amass more stuff. His writing embraces philosophical materialism. When he digs down, down, down into the "whys" and "wherefores" of his existence and the existence of the world, he finds only what is physical. Thus the "original sin" of America is its treatment of the body, specifically the black body. The American system, the American culture, the American Dream has been so constructed that the black body is subjected to the unpredictable, crushing forces of those who call themselves white. Every human is dehumanized and rendered an automaton: blacks as expendable bodies, whites as simple machinations of destruction:

"And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of 'race,' imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent the [police officer who killed] Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world's physical laws." (p83)

In this rich and honest letter, Coates tries to tell his son what he sees, how the world is. He consciously and purposefully avoids hope. Not in favor of despair, but because hope betrays the facts of the world. There is not betterment, improvement, or hope; only struggle:

"Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be. So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope." (p71)

Coates keeps his feet firmly planted in the present, in three dimensions, in the body that can act. One might intuit that he was driven to this tight focus: autonomy, ownership and safety of the physical body are precisely the things that America has plundered from those with dark skin. Thus what was or what will be are irrelevant. There is only alive or dead. The overriding concern and fear to which Coates returns is the loss of the body: that America allows the black body to be arrested, incarcerated, and killed at the whim of those who call themselves white.

"I have no praise anthems, nor old Negro spirituals. The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible--that is precisely why they are so precious. And the soul did not escape. The spirit did not steal away on gospel wings. The soul was the body that fed the tobacco, and the spirit was the blood that watered the cotton, and these created the first-fruits of the American garden. And the fruits were secured through the bashing of children with stovewood, through hot iron peeling skin away like husk from corn." (pp103-4)

Here is Coates' materialism writ large. Here might be the philosophical grounds on which I could accuse him of incompleteness. (I am not a materialist.) But wait! I wonder now whether this--even this!--resistance to materialism arises from the fact that my so-called whiteness has delivered to me privileges that are not afforded to Coates.

The color of my skin and the society in which I was raised (which came first?) give me a bone-deep confidence that I do not need to worry about the safety of my body. (For another time: how my gender also affects that confidence.) Police are a comforting symbol and source of law and order. I expect that they exist to serve and protect us, and will respect my safety even when I should run afoul of the law. And I look at the world and see it as a prelude, a pointer to something greater, something beyond. This body is a gift partnered with the gift of spirit, which will carry on in a different way when my body is laid in the soil. Which is to say: I am something more than my body.

But what if the several generations leading up to me had all been told--directly and indirectly--that their bodies were not their own? That they were not safe, because the typhoon of America could tear them apart without respect for personhood or humanity? Perhaps those raised to wonder if their bodies will survive cannot see so far as to wonder whether their spirits will survive. If the body is esteemed worthless, perhaps we are prevented from finding value in a soul. Perhaps my body must be valued as human before my spirit can be considered divine. That is: perhaps Coates comes by his materialism honestly.

I think about the over-spiritualized understanding of the Christian faith (some of which contributed to the plunder of black bodies throughout American history). But many--if not most--of those I know who verbalize the exceeding value of the spirit over that of the body live with great bodily security. And I think about Jesus' teachings and his resonances with the Hebrew prophets who offered scathing condemnation for those who took away others' physical security. And if we wish to call heaven as a witness, then we must remember that Jesus' resurrected body (!) still had scars from his crucifixion; Paul asserts that we will be given bodies (!!) in the new creation.

So perhaps an understanding of spirit, virtue, and justice begins with materialism. Before we can answer questions of what we will become or what we must do, we must first be able to declare that our bodies are safe. The innovation of Jesus and the prophets with respect to Coates' book is that before we can get to spirit, virtue, and justice we must first confirm that our brothers' and sisters' bodies are safe.

And in America, the answer is still No. So we cannot go any further.

Coates, at least in Between the World and Me, does not have a framework or an anchor for hope. But as for me, perhaps by a gift from God I may have the ability to ask, Is your body safe? and hear the answer. And maybe in hearing that answer we will find the beginning of something different.

~ emrys