Comparing The Body In 'Between The World And Me'

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In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates describes not merely the precarious position his body occupies within American society, but how he senses the vulnerability of his own body through various relationships. Specifically, he describes a time his son Somari was pushed by an older white woman at the theatre. At this moment, Coates writes, I felt “my own insecurity in my ability to protect your black body.” In this sense, Coates not only fears for his son, but sees in his son a reflection of his own body’s precarity in a white world which often regards black bodies as disposable. Similarly, when describing the murder of Prince Jones by a policeman, Coates writes that “Jones was the superlative of all my fears.” Despite Jones’s piety, despite his intelligence, despite “all the love poured into him,” the white world could erase his body in a second. …show more content…

As a result, when Jones’s body was snuffed out, everything Coates invested in the body was taken as well. This insight made be think about mourning, and called to mind a passage from Judith Butler’s Precarious Life. In it, Butler writes that “when we lose certain people...we may simply feel that we are undergoing something temporary.” However, our body does not exist independently of one another and when another body dies, it takes with them an unrecoverable piece of what constitutes the “I.” Both of these meditations on death and mourning served as the inspiration for my triptych. I wanted to demonstrate that the mourning that Butler describes, the losing of the piece of “I” stowed in “you,” can occur prior to the death of that “you.” Because we store pieces of ourselves in the individuals around us constantly, in many cases, the fear of losing that piece is often as taxing as the death of the body would

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