Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel “A Mercy” seems to start with a promising vision of America before everything goes wrong. It’s as though she starts with the optimism of the Obama years and then predicts the Trump backlash.
In “The Divine Image,” Blake gives us a poem for our time, a call to pray for mercy, pity, peace, and love and to recognize the human form in diversity. In “The Human Abstract” he adds that prayer is not enough. It must be accompanied by human justice.
In his novel “Snow,” Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk captures what it is like for Turks to see themselves through the eyes of Germans. In Trump’s election, my students of color saw themselves through the eyes of white America and didn’t like what they saw.
As Toni Morrison sees it, William Faulkner’s observations about white panic go a long way toward explaining Trump’s victory.
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that literature is essential for creating good citizens in a diverse society, turning to Sophocles’s “Philoctetes” and Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” to make her point.
After attending some remarkable reconciliation events dealing with America’s history of slavery, I now have a better understanding of Octavia Butler’s time travel novel about slavery–and about why the protagonist doesn’t escape back to the present unharmed.
Reginald Dwayne Betts’s life was turned around when he encounter an anthology of African American poetry in prison. Today he is a graduate of Yale Law School and an accomplished poet in his own right. I share a poem written about Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old shot by Cleveland police.
Donald Trump has an uncanny resemblance to the villain Noboru Wataya in Haruki Murakami’s masterful novel “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” (1998). Both have a similar hollowness and both have the ability to separate people from the higher instincts and put them in thrall to their lower ones.
