FROM: Jennifer McCarthy, French & German Instructor
BOOK: The Water Dancer
AUTHOR: Ta-Nahisi Coates
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Literary criticism uses the word defamiliarization to describe the author’s ability to render the familiar unfamiliar, and the normal strange, by simultaneously interpreting, re-imagining and re-presenting the world to the reader. Ta-Nahisi Coates’ wondrous 2019 novel The Water Dancer presents the hopes, memories, dreams, and aspirations of Hiram Walker in gloriously lyrical language that has been freed of conventional meaning through defamiliarization and a touch of magical realism. The people enslaved are the “Tasked.” The white owners are the “Quality.” Hiram possesses the supernatural gift of “Conduction” just as his great-grandmother Santi Bess also possessed and which legend says she used to ferry a number of the Tasked to their freedom across the ocean and to the continent of Africa. Coates’ vocabulary seems at the same time as the 19th century and apart from it: it exists only within and throughout the novel itself. -- Jennifer McCarthy |
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