It is the subject of family that Brinkley returns to again and again to remind us that we are products of our upbringing. But isn’t the family the first arena of such knowledge? Isn’t it family that, in so many ways, determines our approach to life’s deceptions? Part of entering the world of capoeira angola is a constant training in vigilance….I realize now how strange it is to exist otherwise, especially in a big city, and I marvel at people rushing, rushing, headlong into things, how full of trust they are, how they can’t see what often lurks behind the floating vapor of a smile. In the collection’s standout, “Everything the Mouth Eats” Brinkley’s description of capoeira is perhaps also an instruction and meditation for how A Lucky Man begs to be read: These masterful stories build gradually they compel us to slow down, to give ourselves over to them. It vibrates underneath the surface, it threatens to erupt, to dismantle the construction of normalcy that we cling to, to retain order to avoid confronting our demons. The unsaid is perhaps what is coursing most vigorously through the veins of this collection.
Brinkley uses his profound gift of language to speak for characters who themselves do not have the words to express their pain. A collection about navigating the space between adolescence and adulthood, about understanding the powers and limitations of the body, about the ways in which we let traumas fester when we leave them unattended. This is a false narrative built upon a history of racism which perpetuates mass incarceration and violence.Ī Lucky Man is not a book about race, it is a book about longing, about intimacy. Men of color are most often portrayed in popular culture as evil, as aggressor. This becomes even more salient when we add the dimension of race. We are living in a time where the narrative around men can feel singular or reductive: A man is either a savior or a villain.
In the age of the #MeToo Movement and the worldwide cultural shift, at least in awareness, to the ways in which gender and sexuality inform our experience of living in the world, Jamel Brinkley’s debut collection, A Lucky Man, comprised of tenderly poignant narratives of boys becoming men, of fractured intimacy, of masculinity as learned performance, is vital and necessary.īrinkley’s brilliant interrogation of what it means to be a man, specifically in the context of the lives of young men separated from their fathers, points to an essential blind spot in our current discourse.
0 kommentar(er)
