Reviews

"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."

This book draws you in itself by opening with these lines and right from the very beginning, you latch on to the confusion, frustration and struggle for identity that the central character goes through as a young Black American from the South at the threshold of the 20th century. So, at this point of time, slavery has ended going two generations back from our protagonist but as history tells, racism definitely has not and this social scar plays a pivotal role in controlling the protagonist's fate. With the characteristic coming-of-age beginning, in the culminating teenage years, when any general person goes through figuring out who they are and what they are trying to be in their lives, we find our protagonist (literally) fighting and thrashing blindly against fellows from his own race to assert his identity. His individuality is constantly threatened and subsumed in the perception of his race - the uneducated, primitive, just-liberated and confused-in-the-face-of-possibilities "Negro". The protagonist is constantly reminded of the expectations that his race has from him as the future generation. He recognises the symbol of emancipation that he is supposed to become and in the most fertile years of his life, his college years, he faces the first shock of his life - the powerless facade and sterility of his own identity in the bulk of conformity demanded from him. He ultimately uproots himself from the futile future that he envisioned from himself and moves towards to the more progressive and liberating north - New York.

His transition brings forth another aspect about the plasticity of identity through the circumstances in which our protagonist finds himself. He joins a Brotherhood there which is controlled by powerful people of America who are trying to uplift the Black population and raise their collective identities through "scientific approach" of social movements. His prior disillusionment from the high hopes that he had from his academic career makes him adopt a clean-slate approach in redefining himself as he is included as a Brother. Here, for a moment, the narrator takes a breather in his new found freedom. The independence and a sense of purpose in contributing towards the representation of his race and being a spokesperson for its noble causes brings him relief and confidence. But the previous life that he was forced to abandon ghosts him and aches him with a sense of loss and betrayal. The readers recognise how identity, despite being an individual attribute and a personal (conscious/subconscious) choice, is still dependent on one's surroundings, one's fellow individuals and how one relates to them. From that perspective, it acquires the temporariness and variability of something like changing clothes - where one can acquire or discard a role as one chooses an attire for an occasion. The metaphorical invisibility of a person that the author constantly accompanies as a feeling becomes asserted here. People do not see you, they see what they think they ought to look for and consequently, want to see. In one exaggerated instance, the protagonist gets recognised for some other powerful fellow simply when he wears a hat and shades. While he revels in the alternate identity, he sees the inconsequential, fragile placeholder of an identity through self-reflection (pun intended!).

The final blow which completely awakens the protagonist is when the Brotherhood's true motives are revealed. Like our narrator, the readers realise that even the progressive, scientific people who are working with the philanthropic and noble intentions, see Black population with the impersonality of an objective, subjects in a controlled, social experiment. The protagonist's individuality is diffused into the race's fate and his thoughts are overshadowed by the needs of the abstract collective brethren. The narrator feels a similar reduction of his humanity in the labels of his skin colour and the corresponding expectations that the backwardness of his race experienced during the much awful times of slavery. One can imagine those people who followed and supported slavery will be as blind to the individuality of the enslaved, as much as we are to the animals on whom we depend for our comfort and sustenance. The transactional and inconsiderate relationship which separates the two races was being experienced in the modern times - the interests of one being rooted in the expendability of the other - constructed with an empathetic facade and masked under a nobler intention. The central character is constantly struggling to retain his individuality and a sense of purpose stemming from some identity that he is desperately trying to cling to in those times of upheaval when history is being made. At the same time, he starkly recognises the much known fear of oblivion which consumes those who get trodden under the destruction and revamping of civilisations. History, like a careless unstoppable force, pushes aside the identities of innumerable those who get aggregated in anonymity and statistics. Ultimately, we see the character resigning with an awareness of helplessness and accepting his invisibility - like the inescapable fate of many others of his kind. Because at the other side of this inseparable duality lies the "blindness" of those who refuse to see the "invisible" for whatever power they hold or whatever self-interest they are trying to serve. It becomes a callout for the universal situation of minorities or the ones herded under any totalitarian power where the identity of individuals gets dominated and ultimately consumed in their suffering and abstraction of right versus wrong or one side against the other. The central character's anguish over getting lost amidst the confusion and collateral from the tectonics of social change gives the readers some degree of understanding about the feeling of loss that minorities from everywhere face - losing that integral feeling of being recognised purely for oneself and not as a sample of some unfortunate/under-privileged group.

"I stood there, knowing that by dying, that by being hanged by Ras on this street in this destructive night, I would perhaps move them one fraction of a bloody step closer to a definition of who they were and of what I was and had been. But the definition would have been too narrow; I was invisible, and hanging would not bring me to visibility, even to their eyes, since they wanted my death not for myself alone but for the chase I’d been on all my life; because of the way I’d run, been run, chased, operated, purged – although to a great extent I could have done nothing else, given their blindness (didn’t they tolerate both Rinehart and Bledsoe?) and my invisibility. And that I, a little black man with an assumed name should die because a big black man in his hatred and confusion over the nature of a reality that seemed controlled solely by white men whom I knew to be as blind as he, was just too much, too outrageously absurd. And I knew that it was better to live out one’s own absurdity than to die for that of others, whether for Ras’s or Jack’s."

With this struggle of the individual versus the society at its core, the story is really powerful and passionate consistently. I think we all universally recognise the different, terrible forms which the extremes of prejudice, belief and a dominance of any kind of collective identity has caused and been recorded with tragic outcomes in our shared history. This primitive one based on race and the skin of someone's colour has gone on for so long that it resonates still with the state of affairs that we hear about even now, without coming out as outdated or the present society any modern than it has been in this respect. My only cribbing is that I failed to be captured by the story at times as it got diluted in terms of its content and consistency at places and there I unfortunately lost interest. It sometimes stayed at an abstract stratosphere, especially with respect to the Brotherhood, which I would have liked to know more about. Nevertheless, it compensated more than expected with the force that makes its thematic message hard to ignore.

maimoonarahman's review against another edition

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2.0

It's lyrical. It's a classic. It's a mix of all good story-telling elements. But, it's painfully long, while the action is not.And ploughing through it leaves a bitter aftertaste like artificial sweetener.

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