The Water Dancer

It's rare I read a slavery narrative that feels fresh, but this book is truly unlike any I've read before. The same powerful, poetic voice of Between the World and Me is thick and beautiful throughout. The first-person perspective is so strong as to be immersive, and the world-building is more like reading fantasy than historical fiction. This writing demands attention, and when I lent myself to it, I found myself sucked into the narrative. Beautiful read.

I finished reading The Water-dancer but truth be told, I wish it hadn't ended. Not because it's a feel good book, it's not. But because it's a book where the imagery is strong enough for me to stay with it for a long time and to visualise it almost as if I were there. The story of a slave and his journey to learn about himself and the special power that he has. It's the story of a burning need to create connections with the past in order to understand the present and live the future.

The story revolves around slavers and the enslaved. There is the Underground which helps the slaves become free and find a new life. Hiram, the protagonist, has special powers which he uses to help the Underground in their quest. The torture of the separation of the families that slavery and the masters takes on the slaves is rampant. Few are untouched by it. The author has brought the pain, of the slaves, out vividly. It is a story of slavery and of deep humanity written with much sensitivity.

One sentence synopsis... Born into bondage but gifted with mystic abilities, Hiram Walker is reluctantly drawn deeper and deeper into an underground war between slavers and freedom fighters.

Read it if you liked... Toni Morrison, who wrote, “the stress of remembering, its inevitability, but the chances for liberation that lie within the process.” Coates seems to be taking that idea to its furthest point, imagining a world in which memory is the path to freedom. If you expect this novel to be like ‘Between the World and Me' you'll be disappointed but if you prefer Coates' more fantastical work on Black Panther this book is for you.

Dream casting... Logan Browning as the fiercely independent Sofia and Jessica Brown Findlay as the duplicitous Corrine Quinn.

This was a hard one to start. The reality of slavery is not a pleasant one. As I went along, the characters came to life and took hold of me. The characters feel so real with their individual views and flaws.

Slavery. Racism. It's not unique to white people, but we held that power in my country of the USA. It is a sin I feel we can never fully make right. Reading about these topics hurts. I say this book is very much worth reading. Especially if it hurts to see someone that looks like you as the antagonist. I say it's worth taking time to contemplate why this hurts. Then look for ways to bring healing.

Freedom isn't just about being allowed to go and do as we please. It's a state of mind. The cruelest taskmaster of all is hate. The mind that hates is never free, especially when it thinks it is the master.

I don't feel qualified to properly review this book in my position, so I'll keep this short. I thought this was a beautiful book about a terrible subject. It made the characters real to me in a way I wasn't expecting, and while the cast does get a bit large and unwieldy later in the book, I still enjoyed what was shown to me. The story is simple – a boy growing up in slavery, grown into a man who rescues others in slavery – and also complex as he considers how he fits into the larger picture and experiences the stories that his fellow Underground compatriots tell. While the added layer of magical realism added to the beauty of the storytelling, tonally I'm not sure adding it to such a heavy subject worked all the time. Mood whiplash was a thing I experienced, where the beauty of the magical realism would be bookended with terrible things. Maybe that was by design, I'm not sure.Much like [b:Between the World and Me 25489625 Between the World and Me Ta-Nehisi Coates https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1451435027l/25489625.SY75.jpg 44848425], I think this would make for some good required reading. There's lots to unpack here, both in the words and in the history of the topic.

I loved Hiram and “Moses” Harriet and the magical realism addition to the history of the Underground Railroad. I recently finished Babel and my biggest complaint was how unnecessary the magical addition was and that the characters were one dimensional. This book is the complete opposite. The “Conduction” was intentionally beautiful and all of the characters were complex. I have read several books about this historical period, specifically escaping slavery and making it north, but this is the first book with any real mention of the Underground. The secret society feel about it kept me anxious and the pages just flew by. I love the lyrical way that Coates writes and the dialogue in this book plucked me from the present time and dropped right into the story.

This was just ok. I'm reading a lot about white privilege which has led me to read more about our history from other viewpoints. Not just from the “winners”. This book added to it and it was an interesting take on the underground railroad but just not my style. There was a lot of imagery and poetry in the writing but nothing that grabbed me as far as the storyline. Although books like this tend to stay with me so we'll see.

(This is an excerpt from a longer blog post originally posted on inthemargins.ca)

In the first few pages of Jacqueline Woodson's Red At the Bone, Melody comes down the stairs to the music of Prince's Darling Nikki. Immediately, I was transported to my first memories of hearing that song, of being scandalized and titillated and enthralled all at the same time. It was music like I had never heard before—every song by Prince was a revelation for me—and the memory of the first time I heard that song is imprinted in my mind.

It is perhaps perfect that my first reaction of reading that passage of Red At the Bone was the recalling of a memory, especially since the novel is itself a rumination on remembrance, and how our memories—and the intergenerational memories passed on to us through those that came before—shape who we are, who we become, and how we live in the world. Throughout Ms. Woodson's poetic and entrancing prose, we are reminded that our histories, that our intergenerational traumas, are part of who we are, and that we must remember those histories in order to be truly ourselves.

The idea of being shaped by intergenerational trauma is also at the core of Watchmen, Damon Lindelof's (very loose) television sequel of the comic by the same name. Set in an era of Redfordations and racial unrest, Watchmen explores how we can not, try as we might, escape the decisions of those who came before us. Instead of running from the trauma of the past, we must remember it; to remember, to acknowledge the trauma, is to allow us to become who are meant to be.

Our memories are not just our traumas, intergenerational or our own: they are also beacons that guide us and buoy us through hard times. Our protagonist in Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Water Dancer, Hiram Walker, is both freed and burdened by his memory. He can remember everything with a photographic recall, but it is only when he chooses to open his memory and remember his mother—to see her as she was before she was taken away and sold to another plantation—that he is able to embrace his real gift: to use memory, to use remembrance to move across space and time. Like Ms. Woodson's Red At the Bone, Mr. Coates' The Water Dancer is a poetic rumination that reminds us that as hard as it may be, we will only realize our full selves if we remember.

(This is an excerpt from a longer blog post originally posted on inthemargins.ca. Read the entire blog post here.)

4/5 stars. Really amazing, well written novel. I did not expect to love it so much. The range of characters and depth of character for each character was a unique coming together of unity. Everything seemed to be incredible tense and all events left you at the edge of your seat. So much was at stake for the characters and their lives that it made their experiences incredibly heartbreaking. Each substory was endearing and filled with so much hope. The difference between this novel and other Underground Railroad historical fiction was the main character and his internal processing. Many of those historical fiction novels were written from the perspective of a woman. Seeing these events from a man's perspective and watching the wheel turn to understand his relationship to the hardships of the women in the story was hard, but really essential. Also, the culture and history turned semi fantasy was fantasic, like there was an extra layer to the events that was alreading happening and that so many who know of the Underground Railroad are familiar with. I especially loved the humanizing of Harriet Tubman and how the author dove into her background a little. I feel like it really encaptured a spirit. I would read this book again and again because I feel like there is so much to unpack in this novel, I have surely missed something.

My direct exposure to the slavery that has been suffered by Africans naturally is none. Even cultural exposure is a remote thing, only through books and movies. The first book I read about slavery is the classic [b:Uncle Tom's Cabin 46787 Uncle Tom's Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1414349231l/46787.SY75.jpg 2478635]. Now, Uncle Tom's cabin, follows mostly the journey of Uncle Tom and gives us quite a picture of how cruel slavery is. It is focused and intense. To understand the landscape of centuries of slavery, it is not quite enough. Then came some movies and other books. Only after reading [a:Howard Zinn 1899 Howard Zinn https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1245211489p2/1899.jpg]'s [b:A People's History of the United States 2767 A People's History of the United States Howard Zinn https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1494279423l/2767.SY75.jpg 2185591] I got the grasp of the big picture of slavery in the United States. I read some of Du Bois, and in the last summer, I read my first [a:Ta-Nehisi Coates 1214964 Ta-Nehisi Coates https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/m_50x66-82093808bca726cb3249a493fbd3bd0f.png], [b:Between the World and Me 25489625 Between the World and Me Ta-Nehisi Coates https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1451435027l/25489625.SY75.jpg 44848425].Now, Between the World and Me is a book of whole another level. The time is of our own, slavery has vanished but the trauma, distrust and violence didn't. Coates, in a monologue to his son, in the form of a letter expressed the African-American life which I believe no one had done with this much psychological insight.Naturally, I've started reading this book with high expectation. Of course, this book is not as good as the aforementioned one of Coates, but it is a good book. Coates blended a pre-civil war America, the race-wide trauma and melancholy, suffering, faith and redemption and magic realism in a coherent manner. Characters are dynamic, details are adequate, and many smaller stories intertwined to tell a bigger story, a story of love, parting, longing, pain and most of all remembrance. Enjoyed the book.A considerable amount of time spent in this book on some sort of magic, a mean of salvation, prophetic in characteristic. However, I always felt that this magic is just a small detail. The more important part is what triggers this magic, i.e. memory. To be specific, the memory of suffering. Now, what I find amazing is this emphasis on memory, remembering is a common thing to the whole African-American community. Cudjo Lewis (in [b:Barracoon: The Story of the Last Slave 39693605 Barracoon The Story of the Last Slave Zora Neale Hurston https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1522537216l/39693605.SY75.jpg 2108582]) never forgot Africa, he carried Africa within him, neither did [a:W.E.B. Du Bois 10710 W.E.B. Du Bois https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1211293877p2/10710.jpg], nor the faithful coloured Christians, who sang church songs, for generations, in the melody of their long lost motherland. The same communal memory, also allowed the water dancers to do the magic, made them powerful and prophetic.Next comes, I think, The underground, an organization where people of all colour and races are trying to free as many slaves as they can. This gave the context to tell more stories and expound on ideas like freedom, revolution, radicalism and all.I finished the book on a sleepless night. The melancholy seeped into me, and when I've finished it, it was no ‘happily ever after', but a mix of many things, and especially with a dualism of pragmatism and emotion.