Between the World and the Addressee: Epistolary Nonfiction by Ta-Nehisi Coates and His Peers

Abstract

434 CLA JOURNAL Between the World and the Addressee: Epistolary Nonfiction by Ta-Nehisi Coates and His Peers Emily J. Lordi When Toni Morrison, in a book-cover endorsement of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015), stated that Coates was “clearly” the writer who could at last “fill the intellectual void after James Baldwin died,” she bestowed the younger writer with what Coates himself might have called both a “garland” and an “albatross”(“Deeper”). Several public intellectuals defended or contested the comparison, with Michael Eric noting that Coates and Baldwin shared a“forensic, analytical, cold-eyed stare-down of white moral innocence,”and Imani Perry comparing the two authors’ interpersonal and class politics in a way that clearly favored Baldwin’s. As these commentators were well aware, Morrison was validating the comparison that Coates himself had courted. By structuring Between the World and Me as a letter to his 15-year-old son, Coates paid homage to, and aligned himself with,Baldwin’s letter to his 15-year-old nephew,first published in 1962 as “My Dungeon Shook” and soon re-issued as the first part of his 1963 civil-rights opus The Fire Next Time. Whereas the contentious Baldwin comparison, along with Coates’s receipt of the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction for Between the World and Me and his exceptional degree of literary celebrity, threaten to isolate Coates from his literary peers, this essay considers his work—specifically, his use of the epistolary form—within a broader network of writers who have recently engaged Baldwin’s legacy by writing their own intimate open letters.1 Kiese Laymon’s How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America (2013), for instance, which predates Between the World and Me, includes several letter-essays that revise Baldwin’s template. Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie writes a series of letters to a fictional poet of color named Continuum in 2015.Edwidge Danticat and Daniel José Older both contribute open letters to Jesmyn Ward’s Baldwin-inspired 2016 collection The Fire This Time. And a 2017 book of essays titled Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times—which assembles a diverse group of writers to offer what editor Carolina De Robertis terms a “multi-vocal response” to political disaster and an “antidote to despair”—features dozens of epistolary essays by writers and activists, mostly of color, including Junot Díaz, Elmaz Abinader, Jeff Chang, and Alicia Garza (10). 1 This discussion expands on my essay “The Intimate, Political Power of the Open Letter,” which was a briefer assessment of this literary phenomenon directly occasioned by the publication of Radical Hope. CLA JOURNAL 435 Insofar as these open letters are addressed to family members and cherished public figures, they are self-consciously indebted to Baldwin’s example. But they are also shaped by their immediate context: a moment when, if hardly anyone writes traditional letters anymore, countless people write open letters. Whether addressed to Barack Obama,“white people”in general, or Beyoncé, open letters are the Internet’s opinion genre of choice—a trend that the popular blog McSweeney’s has skewered with a column titled “Open Letters to People or Entities Who Are Unlikely to Respond.” While some uses of the form justify Jack Hamilton’s critique of it as “the most overused mode of contemporary writing, a one-sided conversation with someone famous in which the performative bypass of audience creates an aloof sort of anti-intimacy,” many others eschew these pitfalls to achieve quite different ends. Amid and despite their blogospheric ubiquity, open letters have become powerful forms of literary activism for writers of color who have used them to protest anti-black violence and the rise of U.S. neofascism, as well as to build community. For instance, when, in March 2017, the artist Hannah Black wrote an open letter to the Whitney Museum calling for the removal of Dana Schutz’s controversial portrait of Emmett Till, Open Casket, Black did not merely protest Schutz’s work and the Whitney’s decision to display it; she also generated a community of cosignatories, who together sought to honor and reclaim Till’s memory for a...