The Beautiful Struggle

Books by Acklyn Lynch

Nightmare Overhanging Darkly: Essays on Black Culture and Resistance / Blueprint for Change

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A Father, Two Sons, and Unlikely Road to Manhood

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

Reviewed by Acklyn Lynch

This is a very moving autobiographical statement . . . a father-son exchange which is both contemporary and complex . . . the struggle is beautiful because it ends at the right place with integrity and love . . . a blues experience . . . deep in its pathos . . . but easy like a Sunday morning . . .

It is interesting that both father and son remained perched on the precipice of chaotic dissonance . . . perhaps, they are reflected as standing at the water’s edge . . . as one aspect of the legendary historic journey . . . the question remains . . . where will it take them?

This book has its roots in Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land and George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin . . . Even Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father manifests a certain relevancy to this youthful voice

. . . The generation speaks . . . and engages us in a new discourse . . . granted that the world has changed fundamentally from the 20th Century, the construction of a young man’s life and its relationship to the father’s journey must be seriously examined . . .

Ta-Nehisi Coates invoked his Africanity by immersing himself in Djembe rhythms . . . but his authenticity emerges out of a “spoken-word” and “hip hop” consciousness rooted in the reality of poverty and oppression . . .

While glittering in the illusion of consumption and crass materialism . . . He is attuned to the style, vocabulary and language of his generation . . . but this blues sensibility evidenced in earlier poets and writers like Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Ted Joans, Sonia Sanchez, Toni Morrison, John Oliver Killens, Kalamu ya Salaam, Alice Walker, etc. . . . , remain decidedly engrained in the richness of his work . . . Furthermore, he has found contemporary compatriots in Sunni Patterson, Taalam Acey and Chuck D . . .

Ta-Nehisi is deeply respectful of his parents and their commitment to family . . . community as well as historic legacy . . . he preserves the deep intelligence . . . profound patience and uncompromising discipline, which are essential characteristics in the socialization process of young adults in metropolitan America . . . There can be no compromise in the discipline which is important in the shaping of character, courage and integrity . . .

One’s will to succeed . . . to achieve or to pursue excellence must remain the direct pathway to any accomplishment . . . there can be no short-cuts to tomorrow . . . no slipping and sliding . . . shucking and jiving . . . because urban life in America can be brutally short for young Black men . . . This book, therefore, remains a testament to that spirit of resistance, which manifests itself . . . not only in a commitment to the Black Panther Party or to the nationalistic urgency for the awakening of an African consciousness among young people at Nation House . . . but also a transformative voice which can be discovered in literature, history, dance, music, painting, sculpture, film, etc. .. . as we attempt to reshape visions of our people’s struggle beyond the shackles of yesterday’s deficits and tomorrow’s challenges . . .

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Beautiful Struggle has provided us with the clarity between illusion and reality as he recognizes his parents’ exemplary role in confronting the issues on tomorrow’s battleground . . . It opens the space for an intense intergenerational dialogue . . .

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Dr. Acklyn Lynch, Former Chair and Professor, Department of Africana Studies—Over the course of his quarter-century tenure at UMBC, Acklyn Lynch taught each class offered by the Africana studies department at least once.

Considered an expert on African American political thought, philosophy, popular culture, and Caribbean history and politics, Lynch is the author of two books: Nightmare Overhanging Darkly: Essays on Black Culture and Resistance, and Blueprint for Change. UMBC

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More About This Book

An exceptional father-son story about the reality that tests us, the myths that sustain us, and the love that saves us.

Paul Coates was an enigmatic god to his sons: a Vietnam vet who rolled with the Black Panthers, an old-school disciplinarian and new-age believer in free love, an autodidact who launched a publishing company in his basement dedicated to telling the true history of African civilization. Most of all, he was a wily tactician whose mission was to carry his sons across the shoals of inner-city adolescence—and through the collapsing civilization of Baltimore in the Age of Crack—and into the safe arms of Howard University, where he worked so his children could attend for free.

Among his brood of seven, his main challenges were Ta-Nehisi, spacey and sensitive and almost comically miscalibrated for his environment, and Big Bill, charismatic and all-too-ready for the challenges of the streets. The Beautiful Struggle follows their divergent paths through this turbulent period, and their father’s steadfast efforts—assisted by mothers, teachers, and a body of myths, histories, and rituals conjured from the past to meet the needs of a troubled present—to keep them whole in a world that seemed bent on their destruction.

With a remarkable ability to reimagine both the lost world of his father’s generation and the terrors and wonders of his own youth, Coates offers readers a small and beautiful epic about boys trying to become men in black America and beyond.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates is a former staff writer at The Village Voice and Time and has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, O, and numerous other publications. He lives in New York City.

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posted 30 June 2008