Review: ‘The Trayvon Generation’ by Elizabeth Alexander


Alexander does not dwell on the details of Trayvon’s death or the founding of the BLM, allowing his rough drafts to conjure up a number of other related images in the reader’s mind: Trayvon’s hoodie, Ferguson, Mo. A bridge in Portland, Ore.

The title section that makes up Part II first appeared as an article in The New Yorker in summer 2020 and went on to win a National Magazine Award. Here comes “Martina and Rhonda” (1993), six large-format Polaroids depicting two young Black women side by side with photographer Dawoud Bey’s arms folded. The portrait evokes the precariousness of Black youth, as in Alexander’s striking opening paragraph: “This was taken in his grandmother’s garden. This one was carrying a bag of Skittles. This one was playing with a toy gun in front of a gazebo. Black girl in a shiny bikini. Black boy holding mobile phone. It danced like a puppet when it was shot at a Chicago crossroads. Words, nouns: Trayvon, Laquan, bikini, gazebo, loosies, Skittles. … His body was left on the street for four hours in the August heat.” Its anaphoric refrain, its masterful repetition, its timbre reminds us that we are in the hands of a talented poet.

The dynamic trial also showcases Alexander’s extraordinary expressive power in three of his music videos: Flying Lotus’s “Until the Quiet Comes” and “Never Catch Me” and Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” – each into the particular struggles and salves of the Trayvon generation. using it to shed light.

In his 2015 memoirs, “Light of the WorldPulitzer Prize finalist Alexander painted a beautiful portrait of grief and motherhood for her husband, who died in 2012. In the new book, her sons are 22 and 23, and one of the most intimate and poignant parts of the book expresses her fear for their safety as members of the generation she baptized. “Let’s be clear about what motherhood is,” she writes. “A being comes into this world and you are tasked with keeping it alive. If you don’t bend, it dies. It’s that simple.”

He is currently president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (the largest arts fundraiser in the country); She is the third Black woman to hold a position in the arts and sciences at Yale and heads the African-American studies department; He holds distinguished professorships at Columbia and Smith; As his father’s special adviser to President Lyndon Johnson, Dr. That he brought Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders to the White House: Alexander’s sons of no success, prestige, or lineage, or even the greatest parental love, or any other Black who survived the perils of white supremacy, as the vital pulse of the last half of the book. works.

Chapter III opens with a black and white portrait of photographer Chandra McCormick entitled “Daddy’O, the Oldest Inmate in Angola State Prison” (2004). Alexander’s sharp analysis shifts from the 75-year-old man’s “experiences with knitted forehead, hand on heart, face” to mass incarceration. “Angola is home to the largest population of lifeboats on planet Earth,” he writes, and with the plantation’s history clearly preserved, it still forces Black men to pick cotton while white guards on horseback work as overseers. It also shares the almost mind-blowing saga of the Angola Three: Black men have been held in solitary confinement for more than forty years, the longest in the history of American prisons.

The next section deftly examines white attempts to deny Black humanity, citing the little-known story of a white researcher who in 1905 asked WEB Du Bois without irony if Black people shed tears. The book’s hopeful final chapter, “There Are Black People in the Future,” distorts the idea of ​​Black freedom, insists on the future of Blacks, and offers the wisdom of separation to members of the Trayvon Generation. “Perhaps the greatest triumph is to live to tell and witness the struggles of others,” he writes.



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