The Water Dancer

(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.)