In ‘The Water Dancer,’ Ta-Nehisi Coates Creates Magical Alternate History
The Water Dancer
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Hardcover, 403 pages | purchase
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In an test on subspecies and memory, Toni Morrison wrote of “ the try of commend, its inevitability, [ but ] the chances for liberation that lie down within the action. ” Ta-Nehisi Coates ‘ new fresh, The Water Dancer, is an experiment in taking Morrison ‘s “ chances for dismissal ” literally : What if memory had the exponent to transport enslave people to freedom ? Coates is well known as a writer of nonfiction, including Between the World and Me and We Were Eight Years in Power, but with a fresh fresh and his employment on the Black Panther comic series, he is straying into inquisitive fiction. The results are desegregate. At its best, The Water Dancer is a melancholy and cliff-hanging novel that merges the bondage narrative with the genres of illusion or quest novels. But moments of great lyricism are matched with clichés and leftover narrative gaps, and the mechanics of plot sometimes seem to grind and stall. Coates ‘ protagonist, Hiram Walker, can remember everything — faces, stories, facts — with photographic recall. But there is one exception : his mother, who was sold south when Hiram was 9 years old by his beget, the owner of a fade Virginia plantation called Lockless.
One day, when Hiram is driving across a bridge, he has a sudden sight of his mother dancing. Before he understands what is happening, the carriage is in the water system. His buddy drowns, but he is transported to guard. Hiram learns that he has a office called conduction, a power shared by the bang-up elude artist Harriet Tubman, whom enslaved people ( in this novel, “ the Tasked ” ) call Moses. Conduction made the earth fold “ like fabric, ” and on contact with water, Hiram can use it to transport himself and other people across great distances. But to do it, he needs to entree a powerful source of feel. He needs to remember his mother. The mobilize of personal feel, faith or memory to access supernatural powers is a regular trope of fantasy. But for Coates, remembering is not merely a personal process — it involves tapping into the collective culture, memory and pain of generations. In her essay, Morrison distinguishes between history and memory : When it comes to black Americans, inherit memory is more important, and more true, than history, because they are treated like “ objects of history, not subjects within it. ” Coates writes besides of “ heroes who did not live in books, but in our talk ; an entire earth of our own, hidden away from them, and to be separate of that earth, I felt even then, was to be in on a hidden, a secret that was in you. ” This collective memory is besides partially of the power needed to achieve conduction.
The book ‘s most affecting and afflictive giving is the temp fantasy that all the people who leaped off slave ships and into the Atlantic were not drowning themselves in terror and anguish, but going home .
For me, the most moving region of The Water Dancer was not Hiram ‘s elude or the escape of the people he loves, but the possibility it offers of an alternate history. In epigraph between chapters, Coates quotes poems and writings about people who were captured and drowned in the middle passage. We read lines from Robert Hayden : “ Lost three this dawn leaped with crazy laugh / to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under. ” Coates besides quotes from a contemporary eyewitness : “ The negroes, in the meanwhile, who had gotten off, continued dancing among the waves, yelling with all their might, what seemed to me a song of prevail. ” With his metaphor of conduction by water, Coates gives us permission to read those scenes differently. The book ‘s most affecting and atrocious endowment is the temp fantasy that all the people who leaped off slave ships and into the Atlantic were not drowning themselves in terror and pain, but going home .
