Analysis Of Robert Coates 'Black Body'

1. For Coates, the body is a leitmotif.
a) The “body” is “the physical or mortal nature, state, or aspect of man…sometimes contrasted with [in] spirit” (OED). A body exists in the physical and allows humans to be connected with the world, to interact with the world, and to be present in it, and this is in contrast with the spirit, or soul, which is the abstract collection of these connections and interactions. Coates uses the word body, or often the phrase “black body”, or bodies, as a leading motif in order to draw attention to the existence of black bodies in the world and often, this phrase is preceded or followed by his assertion that in American society, some “have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body” (9). So, Coates asserts

that the black body and all its suffering requires active acknowledgement in the world. Therefore, the body signifies the physical, yet suppressed, presence of black people in society, rather than the spirit, or the culture, of black people, or as Coates writes, the “black power” that “even the Dreamers—lost in their reverie—feel” (149).
b) In this passage, Coates uses words that emphasize the importance of oneness, such as “singular” or “particular, specific enslaved woman” (69).

“Singular” and “particular” means “denoting or expressing one person or thing” and these words surround the phrase, “slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh”, because Coates maintains that a black body is a singular person, just as white body is, and they should be defined by more than their suffering. By using these words and forming the “definition” of an enslaved woman “whose range of feeling is as vast your own”, he emphasizes that black bodies were more than a “mass” of slaves, but an enslaved people with “singular” human bodies that interacted with the world in a “particular”

way.
c) Coates, when writing about Prince, focuses on words of emotion and feelings. He describes Prince as “tall and brown” and that “generosity radiated off of him”, but then concludes this description with the phrase, “I can only say what I saw, what I felt” (64). When writing again about Prince, this time his death, Coates is only able to recall what he “felt”, “believed”, and “remember[ed]”. I would characterize his language as emotional, passionate, or human. As Coates has stressed throughout the novel, each black body is “one of one” and should be treated as such. And it is anecdotes like these that, rather than just saying each body is one of one, Coates uses to identify the specific human emotions that black bodies feel.
2. Conceptions of history are very important to Coates
a) In talking about his preconceptions about history, Coates takes on a descriptive style.

He uses numerous details to describe the information he was taking in and his thoughts on it. Each sentence contains a deluge of details, anything from places to facts to names, that emphasizes Coates struggle to discern an answer from what he was reading. For example, he writes, “and all of these areas had histories, sprawling literary canons, fieldwork, ethnographies. Where should I begin?” These two sentences sit at the end of a paragraph, which is a place of emphasis. The first sentence begins with a contraction, specifically “and”, which signifies a continuation of thought. This thought is Coates’s discovery of all the information hidden in history. All of this information builds up in the paragraph and he finishes it with a short, four-word question, rather than a

sentence.
b) A Mecca, in simple use, is “a place regarded as supremely sacred or valuable, or where a faith, policy, truth, etc., originates” (OED). For Coates, The Mecca is both “supremely sacred” and “where a truth originates”, where he was presented with “the black diaspora” for the first time. He describes the Mecca as “a machine” of great power where “dark energy of an African peoples” (40) comes together. He writes about the clothes people wore, the things they talked about. He describes the sounds of “saxophones, trumpets, and drums” and “chanting, singing, stomping” (41). In the context of this book, this world within a world, serves as an example of black bodies outside of “white America”. Often, Coates draws on the suffering within black history and modern society, but the Mecca exists as the center, the sacred place, of “the crossroads of the black diaspora” (40).