The two party crasher in the story “How tingly” clearly have something. Anyway, you don’t want to give some sort of “dry exercises” satisfied as with the usual College parties on the Upper West Side. In Brooklyn once, the “stricter consequences” of the night life should be experienced. The two want to close to a cliff that could be in doubt, undaunted by death, jumping down. What do you mean in particular: they would prefer the next Morning not in my own bed to Wake up, but rather about a foreign bed edge to a exciting experience to look back.
the first starts of the nine stories in Jamel Brinkley’s debut album “lucky” – a pretty exciting book, because it is the Form of the classic Short Story usually is used to tell the life of young black men in the big cities of the USA. The stories play in the Bronx, New York and in Brooklyn, and the present is quite a bit more. In the case of the uninvited Party-goers, we are talking about the year 1995. What, however, makes no big difference to the year 2019. Because the stories are that there is a continuity in the African-American perception of the world and the male body, inherited in some way, and of a racially-structured society is shaped.
“since we at the Party were pitched, I was my friend with the tragic stuff about my father in the ears.” All the tragic stuff that can happen between fathers and sons, the families and relationships burst can be determined every single one of Brinkley’s stories.
The story from the Dad’s a mood killer
in “How sparkling”, it plays a major role. The I-narrator and his friend Claudius have it apart on the Iris and Sibyl, the one from Belize, the other Dominican. “We moved both rather voluptuous, curvy women – partly, I suspect, because black guys do the supposedly. The preference is, as it were, the confirmation of a black origin, our nature, to some of us, authenticity dam.”
The I-narrator does not succeed, it is easy to keep up with the sad story of his Dad behind the mountain: a major mood killer. Amazingly, they manage, however, to be of the girls taken home. And since the start of the oddities: On the way to their apartment a more aggressive, attack-ready dog is to oppose them. Claudius and the narrator back soft scared, while Sibyl and Iris bring the mutt with a well-aimed blow against the snout and with kicks against the tumbling body to the track.
As you land, finally, to the fourth in the bed, forced the boys to each other, undress and look at each other, which leads to a strange shift of the gaze. The awareness of one’s own body, mirrored in the other, the learned male posturing to collapse in on itself. In the Morning, Claudius and the narrator lying side by side on the mattress, and all this “tragic” stuff you carry around with you in front of eyes.
what’s it Like living in a black body, runs constantly in danger of extinguished, to be used by police bullets?
“all of a sudden an extreme ugliness came to light, revealed itself in his face a different face, and the Same he must have seen me. So it has been with people in my life, with people I’ve loved: Something disappear quietly, there is a crack to do so imperceptibly, like two lips open a little in the morning is different, so suddenly and softly that you wonder how you could ever be ever beautiful.”
It is an interesting deconstruction, which is taking place here and in the last few years in the United States again and again, the burgeoning debate about the black man’s body, to “Black Masculinity” to connect. To be the essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates, interested in his celebrated letter to his son, “Between me and the world,” the question of how to in a black body – a body that is constantly in danger, violence wiped out by the police, and, therefore, unapproachable and strong power, armor against arbitrariness, and racism. Anxiety be it in the poses of the hard Ghetto-Kids appearing, writes Coates.
Some of this fear also sits in the young heroes, the Brinkleys Brooklyn strip. Would you like to learn to be in this confusing world of men and are made in the process, disoriented and alone.
The social reality, shaping the figures
Sixty percent of all young black men without a high school diploma, can you read Ta-Nehisi Coates, to land in the United States in prison. You have to think for themselves such a number also, if you read Brinkley’s texts. Although these stories are anything other than sociological Courses, is the social reality is always present. It shapes the characters. And at the same time it is punctuated by surprising twists and turns. As in the opening story of women – women of color – men, something about their Fragility to teach.
again and again, irritation creeping into Jamel Brinkley’s subtle, absolutely contemporary and at the same time, history-conscious stories, all of which were brought by Uda Strätling is rich in nuances into German. The fickle relationship between the two half-brothers, shows how impossible it is, in the face of a time of abuse by the father staggered to find a common language. This Silence, in turn, is overcome physically; the Capoeira, the Brazilian Martial art, in which the protagonists perform their ritualized combat dance, while the music and the words trance-like moods generate.
“Glad” to be carted a couple of black guys from the poorer areas of the city in the holidays to New Jersey, where in the case of wealthy, philanthropist have to spend-minded White a day in Paradise, in a huge garden with a swimming Pool, slides for children and Pets. What a disappointment, as the children end up this time in a rumbling black woman who made it from the elenderen quarters in a white Suburb.
The images of black host boys are still impregnated by the paternalistic Pride of the former slave owner class.
Subtle be taken apart, the Disillusionment and dreams, and at the end of a lesson to the hostess about the white neighbors, which will probably seep slowly into the small narrator one: “The Johnsons … Well, have. in your Salon louder photos, snapshots of all the Kids from summer camps, such as St. Rita’s, which had over the years in your Pool So many boy – brown boy like you – with a wide Grin, always on command, the thumbs-up.” These images are still impregnated by the paternalistic Pride of the former slave owner class.
It is great, as Brinkley is advancing a short distance in the misunderstood memories of his characters, through hints, Gestures, interrelated motives. And so the Consternation and the loneliness, loss and despair do not dissolve after a while, but to make visible.
The “outrageous fortune”, from which the title of his 2018 for the National Book Award-nominated volume speaks, is not found in the eponymous story. But maybe in the last Story of the book. She is a totally unlikely relationship between a young man and an old, demented woman who is not looking for each other and yet in its lostness to find a time when your Community was gentrifi is specied and the wealthy, the white Kids occupied. That is, at the very end, almost a love story.
Jamel Brinkley: so fucking lucky. Stories. From the English by Uda Strätling. Kein & Aber, Zurich In 2019. 330 S. ca, 28 Fr.
Created: 26.11.2019, 06:18 PM
