Memory as Superpower in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer
Acclaimed author and essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates remarked in an interview that “much of the country’s history is premised on forgetting, not remembering certain things.” [i] His statement refers to the repression of the slave past and its erasure from American narratives of freedom and progress. In his debut novel, The Water Dancer, Coates underscores the centrality of remembering the painful past and the power of memory in the acquisition of freedom and liberation. Coates’s historical novel, which draws on the tradition of the slave narrative and employs many of its narrative tropes and plot devices, is part of a corpus of works that (re-)turn to the past and take up the subject matter of slavery—a literary movement that pointedly reemerged in the post-Civil Rights era and that continues into the present. Black American novelists began to confront and engage with the history of slavery and its legacies some three decades before […]