{"id":1896,"date":"2020-05-12T15:21:55","date_gmt":"2020-05-12T14:21:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/?p=1896"},"modified":"2020-05-12T15:23:31","modified_gmt":"2020-05-12T14:23:31","slug":"review-the-water-dancer-by-ta-nehisi-coates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/review-the-water-dancer-by-ta-nehisi-coates\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I&#8217;ve thought for a while that one of the most honest films ever made about the subject of slavery in America is Quentin Tarantino&#8217;s <em>Django.<\/em>  Even though the film is a fantasy (much like <em>Inglourious Basterds<\/em> was), the over-the-top depiction of the brutality of the slave system was, in its essence, completely true.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Having recently re-viewed <em>Gone With The Wind<\/em>, which President Trump clearly adores, I&#8217;m convinced that we need more movies &#8212; and more books &#8212; that present slavery as it actually was, and not as apologists for the Confederacy want us to see it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ta-Nehisi Coates new novel is nothing at all like <em>Django<\/em>, in the sense that it does not harp on the violence and brutality of plantation life in Virginia.  The lead character, Hiram Walker, is the son of the plantation&#8217;s white owner and one of his slaves.  Throughout the book, which Walker narrates, he refers to the slave-owner (and his owner) as &#8216;my father&#8217;.  Much of the story revolves around the destruction of Black families, who were sold off individually as property by slave owners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While there is little of the blood-letting which Tarantino showed, slavery is presented here as a slow-burning horror.  In the end, one feels in addition to rage, a very deep sense of sadness at the pointless cruelty of everyday live in the pre-Civil War American South.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve thought for a while that one of the most honest films ever made about the subject of slavery in America is Quentin Tarantino&#8217;s Django. Even though the film is a fantasy (much like Inglourious&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1897,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1896"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1896\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1899,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1896\/revisions\/1899"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}