The Fire This Time

“‘You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read,’ James Baldwin wrote. Or you see. Or you weep. Or you pray. Or you speak. Or you write. Or you fight so that one day everyone will be able to walk the earth as though they, to use Baldwin’s words, have ‘a right to be here.’” – Edwidge Danticat in The Fire This Time, p 215

The Fire This Time edited by Jesmyn Ward

The essays collected by editor Jesmyn Ward in The Fire Next Time are written out of hope, fear, imagination, fury, love, and, overarchingly, as powerful witness to the various experiences of being a person of color in the United States. The essays range widely in their topics, though some through-lines include family (letters to the authors’ children; paeans to the folks who raised them), history (interrogations into how black historical figures are represented, family history, investigations into black peoples’ gravesites and how these are (mis)treated) and violence (of the state, of the police, of representation, of racism). Collected in the spirit of James Baldwin, each essay is beautifully written—the book is a literary pleasure as well as a moral exhortation—and the authors represent wide-ranging life experiences and points of view. Authors include Edwidge Danticat, Kiese Laymon, Claudia Rankine, Kevin Young, and Isabel Wilkerson, among many others. Subjects this book includes that some readers may be sensitive to (but which others will be thrilled to find discussed in their literature!): racism; gun violence; death; police brutality.