In contrast to material memorials and monuments that manifest canonical representations of historical narratives and events (but which are by no means uncontroversial or contested as the controversy over the removal of Confederate statues demonstrates), literature as a textual memorial has arguably greater potential for engaging with the past in nuanced and complex ways. As Toni Morrison outlined in her 1987 essay “The Site of Memory,” writing fiction is an act of remembering the past and shaping the cultural memory thereof, thus literature is a site of memory of slavery.

Black American novelists began to confront and engage with the history of slavery and its legacies some three decades before official markers memorializing slavery, such as monuments, memorials, and museum exhibitions, started to materialize in public spaces in the 1990s. In his debut novel, The Water Dancer, Coates underscores the centrality of remembering the painful past and the power of memory in the acquisition of freedom and liberation.Ĭoates’s historical novel, which draws on the tradition of the slave narrative and employs many of its narrative tropes and plot devices, is part of a corpus of works that (re-)turn to the past and take up the subject matter of slavery-a literary movement that pointedly reemerged in the post-Civil Rights era and that continues into the present.

Acclaimed author and essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates remarked in an interview that “much of the country’s history is premised on forgetting, not remembering certain things.” His statement refers to the repression of the slave past and its erasure from American narratives of freedom and progress.

Book review the water dancer