We Cast a Shadow

We Cast a Shadow by Maurice Ruffin

The present reality in Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s exquisite We Cast a Shadow is some 60 years from 2019. It’s futuristically dystopic and drearily mundane at once—black residents of the City’s projects, the Tiko, are shut in at night; in some cases, they can get skin-lightening, nose-tightening, “demelanization” procedures subsidized by their employers; racism is couched in the language of color blindness and even social justice; cops are just as ubiquitous as people’s “devices.” A book of the future, We Cast a Shadow is simultaneously of the present and earlier. Instead of wasting narrative energy imagining and explaining every detail and logic of this future society, Ruffin instead speculates about what a reality would look like and feel like if many of the racist injustices, oppressions, and cruelties of our present reality were simply called and shown for what they were. Unfortunately, none of what Ruffin imagines is unimaginable.

The City here is a subtle transmogrification of New Orleans, rendered as something both other than and beyond its stereotypical streetcar-beignet-gumbo shorthand through Ruffin’s imaginative work of drawing on the actual city he grew up in and considering it 60 years forward in all its everyday spectacle and struggle. Within this almost cornucopically fraught and fertile setting he places his unnamed narrator.

An astounding jewel simultaneously deceptive and magnetic in his glimmer, I haven’t encountered a more temptingly unreliable narrator since Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert—a kinship not at all coincidental but instead carefully drawn by Ruffin.This narrator has a single-minded obsession: subjecting his son, Nigel, to an experimental demelanization technique with the goal of stymying the spread of Nigel’s dark-colored birthmarks. A black man, the narrator has witnessed countless instances of black friends, family, and community members being abused, demeaned, and institutionally controlled on account of their race. These memories surface as hazy, hate-filled revelations throughout the novel, arising from the quagmire of the narrator’s internalized racial inferiority like pitiable children, wounded and stranded in the midst of a seething sea of trauma and self-loathing. Perhaps in response, the narrator spends a majority of the time with his son and his wife, a white woman named Penelope, under the influence of pills called Plums. He similarly self-medicates when at work as an elite lawyer and everywhere else he contemplates and strategizes towards the achievement of the demel dream he cherishes on Nigel’s behalf.

Ruffin constructs a masterfully woozy narrative, one which sheers about from scene to scene, between settings, sense, and nonsense. The plot is gripping and vast, encompassing various elements of contemporary political and social reality without feeling dull or forced. The line Ruffin maintains between humor and terror is razor thin and sharp, and always shaded by a heartrending pathos as it’s made clear that the narrator’s dogged pursuit—while cowardly, while self-hating, while cruel—is fueled by a wholly realistic fear of what might befall his cherished son should Nigel be seen for what he is: a black man in US America.

Subjects this book includes that some readers may be sensitive to: racism, death, drug use.