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nitishpahwa 's review for:
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
“I didn’t write too much during this election cycle. One of the reasons I didn’t is because I didn’t want to play this oracular role. There was no space to figure it out, to think about it, or go through the arguments if you’re writing. If you’re writing something critical about [Bernie] Sanders, then you necessarily want Hillary Clinton — that’s the only lens through which it’s interpreted. There’s no room to tease out, say, in my case specifically, what it means that the representative of the left tradition in the Democratic Party rejects reparations. No room to tease out what that means. But then what am I doing? I’m just making pronouncements. I’ve become, in the most vulgar sense, a pundit. I’m not open to having my mind changed, I’m not trying to figure it out; I’m not out here curious and exploring. I am standing on a rock, sitting on a throne, making pronouncements about what the world is. And that is so boring. It bores me to tears.”—Ta-Nehisi Coates, in conversation with Ezra Klein, Vox.
I have rarely read a writer so self-aware, so careful about parsing his standing in the world as an examiner, an interpreter, a citizen, a thinker, and, above all, a student, as Coates. Writing, as with any mode of self-expression, naturally carries the dint of hubris—you have to think of yourself as somewhat important, somewhat learned, more so than any who even slightly share your realm of interest. Those who write may think themselves as teachers, delivering a prosaic lesson plan, a transcribed lecture with eyewitness detail and no shortage of metaphor. But Coates insists on his writing as an act of studying, of learning, of urgently figuring out the world for himself alone. All good writers realize this, that their craft is as much about learning for themselves as it is whatever role they imagine themselves serving in the world.
Thus, any writer knows that looking back at past work is yet another form of learning as well, one that likely induces more wincing than the already painful process of writing. Coates does this for himself excellently and humbly in We Were Eight Years in Power chronicling his personal and professional development throughout the Obama era while exhibiting the unvarnished paper trail of his most famous essays in a natural, perhaps all-too-inevitable arc. The manner reminded me of an old collection of Gandhi’s religious writings I previously owned (ugh); an introduction to the set by the man himself noted that there would be inconsistencies in the views expressed throughout the series of writings, explained by the development of ideas over time.
Little of the material in We Were Eight Years in Power is new—even some of the supplementary notes were published online in various forms before they enclosed within the hardbound. But what Coates provides here is eminently valuable, not in the least because it offers up a bit of a dare in the virtual 21st century (what if you … paid for important journalism!), but because it looks back at several important essays from the retrospective context of our current national nightmare, also recounting Coates’ development as a writer and ultimately public figure, as it progressed throughout the two terms of the first black president. His retrospection is important in fitting these eight stories into an arc, into an overarching narrative that only confirms America's tragic history of embedded mythical exception premised on the denigration of black people, a hubris that will lead to its inevitable, all too tragic downfall, one that may already have been jumpstarted at this awful moment.
In giving additional context to his now-legendary essays, both through his personal life and the contours of the era, Coates helps us to understand his work even further, and by extension, the ever-relevant subjects he urgently discusses. This may seem like navel-gazing, and Coates admits as much. But the truth is that no piece of journalism, no matter how objective or distantly observed, can avoid being entrenched with the personal identity of the author. Coates understands this and is not shy in admitting how his life’s circumstances fleshed out and illustrated his work. Ultimately, the self-explanatory notes that accompany the essays are all the more enlightening because they are bleakly honest—much like Coates’ devastatingly written portraits of America.
Reading back through the essays in their order of publication should serve as an informative and reassuring exercise for writers of all ages and levels of experience. To go back through how Coates approached and chronicled events and figures of hefty sociological import when he first began writing for the Atlantic is to be momentarily startled at how much this exalted figure grew and improved over this eight-year span. If the first four essays—the early bookmarks of Coates’ Atlantic career—were him finding his footing and his place as an inquisitor of the world, the next four essays are the firm grounding, the unendingly curious college dropout turning his inquiry into an indictment of the ways this country has continued to treat those who the slaveholding Founding Fathers implicitly deemed unworthy. A couple of the early essays have certainly not aged well and read as clunky in retrospect, but Coates owns up to his flaws and includes the unedited essays as important steps in his process.
The last essays, of course, are the most harrowing and are difficult to revisit. It’s impossible to extricate their accounts from the detritus left as more people find their lens of American exceptionalism ground into brittle powder. To revisit the injustices that Coates so blew up for public view in his best essays is essential for remembering how behind we still are, and where we may perpetually remain. Coates is far from the only potent scholar interpreting the American situation for the ignorant yet curious—and he’s not even the best—but as one of the few with a highly prominent public status (a truth about himself he finds uncomfortable) it’s useful for us to revisit and reread the investigations that still play a not insignificant role in our modern sociopolitical discourse.
I have rarely read a writer so self-aware, so careful about parsing his standing in the world as an examiner, an interpreter, a citizen, a thinker, and, above all, a student, as Coates. Writing, as with any mode of self-expression, naturally carries the dint of hubris—you have to think of yourself as somewhat important, somewhat learned, more so than any who even slightly share your realm of interest. Those who write may think themselves as teachers, delivering a prosaic lesson plan, a transcribed lecture with eyewitness detail and no shortage of metaphor. But Coates insists on his writing as an act of studying, of learning, of urgently figuring out the world for himself alone. All good writers realize this, that their craft is as much about learning for themselves as it is whatever role they imagine themselves serving in the world.
Thus, any writer knows that looking back at past work is yet another form of learning as well, one that likely induces more wincing than the already painful process of writing. Coates does this for himself excellently and humbly in We Were Eight Years in Power chronicling his personal and professional development throughout the Obama era while exhibiting the unvarnished paper trail of his most famous essays in a natural, perhaps all-too-inevitable arc. The manner reminded me of an old collection of Gandhi’s religious writings I previously owned (ugh); an introduction to the set by the man himself noted that there would be inconsistencies in the views expressed throughout the series of writings, explained by the development of ideas over time.
Little of the material in We Were Eight Years in Power is new—even some of the supplementary notes were published online in various forms before they enclosed within the hardbound. But what Coates provides here is eminently valuable, not in the least because it offers up a bit of a dare in the virtual 21st century (what if you … paid for important journalism!), but because it looks back at several important essays from the retrospective context of our current national nightmare, also recounting Coates’ development as a writer and ultimately public figure, as it progressed throughout the two terms of the first black president. His retrospection is important in fitting these eight stories into an arc, into an overarching narrative that only confirms America's tragic history of embedded mythical exception premised on the denigration of black people, a hubris that will lead to its inevitable, all too tragic downfall, one that may already have been jumpstarted at this awful moment.
In giving additional context to his now-legendary essays, both through his personal life and the contours of the era, Coates helps us to understand his work even further, and by extension, the ever-relevant subjects he urgently discusses. This may seem like navel-gazing, and Coates admits as much. But the truth is that no piece of journalism, no matter how objective or distantly observed, can avoid being entrenched with the personal identity of the author. Coates understands this and is not shy in admitting how his life’s circumstances fleshed out and illustrated his work. Ultimately, the self-explanatory notes that accompany the essays are all the more enlightening because they are bleakly honest—much like Coates’ devastatingly written portraits of America.
Reading back through the essays in their order of publication should serve as an informative and reassuring exercise for writers of all ages and levels of experience. To go back through how Coates approached and chronicled events and figures of hefty sociological import when he first began writing for the Atlantic is to be momentarily startled at how much this exalted figure grew and improved over this eight-year span. If the first four essays—the early bookmarks of Coates’ Atlantic career—were him finding his footing and his place as an inquisitor of the world, the next four essays are the firm grounding, the unendingly curious college dropout turning his inquiry into an indictment of the ways this country has continued to treat those who the slaveholding Founding Fathers implicitly deemed unworthy. A couple of the early essays have certainly not aged well and read as clunky in retrospect, but Coates owns up to his flaws and includes the unedited essays as important steps in his process.
The last essays, of course, are the most harrowing and are difficult to revisit. It’s impossible to extricate their accounts from the detritus left as more people find their lens of American exceptionalism ground into brittle powder. To revisit the injustices that Coates so blew up for public view in his best essays is essential for remembering how behind we still are, and where we may perpetually remain. Coates is far from the only potent scholar interpreting the American situation for the ignorant yet curious—and he’s not even the best—but as one of the few with a highly prominent public status (a truth about himself he finds uncomfortable) it’s useful for us to revisit and reread the investigations that still play a not insignificant role in our modern sociopolitical discourse.