Review by audacityspork - The Autobiography of Malcolm X

audacityspork 's review for:

The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X, Alex Haley

4.0

challenging dark informative inspiring reflective sad tense slow-paced

This has been the hardest book review I’ve written yet. How do you even review something like this? This book is so massively important and influential that giving it a numerical value feels insulting.

Oh well! Here I go doing that anyway.

tl;dr

There are so many profound teachings in this book, and also so many problematic takes, and it’s all historically placed in a way that makes this book a rich primary resource and a questionable secondary one. Absolutely everyone should read it – but please, read it with a grain of salt.

“Mankind's history has proved from one era to another that the true criterion of leadership is spiritual. Men are attracted by spirit. By power, men are forced. Love is engendered by spirit. By power, anxieties are created.”

The writing craft is…

Simply beautiful. You can tell the book was made (in part) by a man who gave sermons. Some of my favorite bits were X’s philosophical musings.

If you can, I highly recommend listening to the audiobook as read by Laurence Fishburne. He performs the confident swagger, the dire seriousness, the righteous anger, the strife that encapsulates the evolving voice of Malcolm X. I was totally immersed, sometimes forgetting the narrator wasn’t X himself. The only downside to this edition is that it lacks the epilogue, which is a must-read.

The narrative coherency is…

Questionable. Each chapter feels like its own world, with meagre bridges between them.

What is the “plot” of a person’s life? What facets do you attend to, and which do you ignore? Turning a life into a story necessarily reduces it, and this is no exception. That tension and its loud silences live vibrantly in this book.

This book attempts to capture Malcolm X’s life through the theme of conversion. And X did undergo many transformations through his many eras. But since he ultimately lands at a place of dislocation, the power of this theme turns problematic — but more on that later.

Additionally, making conversion the central theme of X’s experiences means that this is a book fundamentally exploring the validity of ideologies. X’s life becomes a story of reflection and reevaluation, rather than action. This is the limitation of an autobiography crafted through interviews between strangers — the focus narrows through the interviewer’s interests, and through the truths withheld by the skeptical interviewee. Ultimately, I was surprised by how little Malcolm X discusses his strategies for organizing on a mass scale. This is not a book I would read to learn how to effectively organize.

Had Malcolm X survived, it’s possible this entire book would be quite different. But I’ll get to that.

The views of its authors are…

An onion of contradictions.

Is this an autobiography? Was Malcolm X the subject of a self-study, or the object of Haley’s story? And is Haley a co-author, a ghostwriter, or the book’s central creator? To truly understand this book, you need to struggle with these questions.

I have never said this before about a book, but if you read any one thing after reading this book (including the epilogue), read the wikipedia page about it — specifically the sections titled “Construction” and “Legacy and Influence.” They give a great overview of the disagreements people have over the authenticity of this book as a true representation of Malcolm X’s life and beliefs.

By his own admission in the epilogue, Haley is more a co-author than a ghostwriter. Ultimately, the struggle between Haley’s and X’s voices dislocates the voice of the story from either man.

It’s incredibly sad that Malcolm X died when he did. By this book’s account, X died amidst a crisis of faith, at a time when he was questioning his practices as a leftist and as a Muslim. He entered the dark night of the soul, but he never made it to the morning. It’s precisely because of this unfinished transformation that the book appears untethered from a defined ideology. This allows the reader to draw their own conclusions on what Malcolm X might have come to believe, had he survived. He becomes a flexible symbol.

Nowhere is this crisis of faith more evidently, jarringly unfinished than in X’s descriptions of Elijah Muhammad — the man ultimately responsible for X’s murder. Haley admits that, despite X’s soured feelings toward Elijah Muhammad later in life, Haley urged X to maintain his praises of Elijah Muhammad in early chapters, in order to build narrative tension.

This choice feels especially wrong considering Elijah Muhammad’s admittance to raping underage girls, and Malcolm X’s central role in exposing this information to the public. Somehow, despite the narrative gesturing to X’s role as a whistleblower, his internal experience and even his external actions on this point remain vague.

Rather than Malcolm X appearing as the righteous man standing against a misogynistic and sexually violent leader, in this text, X acts as an apologist. Case and point: X mentions a private conversation wherein Elijah Muhammad admits that he will, like other prophets, have to sexually assault his daughters. X’s retrospective on this interaction is respectful, compassionate, and seemingly detached from the reality of what was said. Time and again, the book reifies X’s unending love and respect toward Elijah Muhammad.

This endorsement of a sexually violent man was all the more unsettling considering the marginal and submissive role women played in the narrative. X lived and traveled through a male-centric world, though there doesn’t appear to be self-awareness of this fact. X goes so far as to make sweeping statements about how to charm any woman and the specific ways he thinks all women operate. I can understand that historical figures have dumb ideas, but that won’t stop me from being extremely turned off by them.

The historical importance of this book is…

Incalculable. The fact it was published the year after Malcolm X’s death undoubtedly solidified X’s legacy, and ensured that his life story would inspire generations to come. With its definitive unreliability of its two blended narrators, this book functions beyond an autobiography and becomes a defining American myth.

Content Warnings