We Were Eight Years in Power

Essential points: These powerfully-written essays from the years of the Obama presidency cover everything from Bill Cosby, Michelle Obama, the Civil War, reparations, and more. United by reflective essays that consider the content, context, and technique of each collected work, the book taken as a whole analyzes the cultural impact of the first black presidency. Subjects this book includes that some readers may be sensitive to (but which others will be thrilled to find sensitively discussed in their literature): racism, incarceration, police brutality, lynching, sexual assault.

“There’s something inherently beautiful about a story, in its ability to make more powerful arguments than an explicit polemic. And there is something demeaning about repeatedly yelling ‘I am a human’ in a world premised on denying that fact.” --289

The space between the present and the past shifts evocatively and eerily when reading Ta-nehisi Coates’ We Were Eight Years in Power. As soon as the book is opened, the endpapers provide an example, catching the eye with old-timey woodcut illustrations that show a subverted toile: an image of Michelle Obama in a billowing, “lady liberty” dress backgrounded by South Side Chicago radiates beside an image of black Civil War soldiers with their cannon trained on a “Neighborhood Watch” sign, itself anchored by a memorial of teddy bears, candles, and flowers. Collectively, the images create a familiar pattern, distinctly stuffy and old-fashioned. Viewed individually, they reveal themselves to be current political commentary, of today much more than yesteryear.

These illustrations by artist Dan Funderburgh appropriately bookend Coates’ collected essays from the years of the Obama presidency, which are current, nostalgic, dated, historical, and timeless at various turns. Each essay is introduced by a further essay (somewhat confusingly titled “Notes from the 1st year,” “…2nd year” and so on, despite all of these introductory essays having been written after their titular year), providing context for and reflection on the collected work. These reflective essays unify the book, positioning Coates’ as the Virgil guiding the reader through the heavens and hells of his own observations. This guiding Coates is vulnerable, proud, humble all at once. He is quick to point out flaws in his earlier works—places where they fell short conceptually or rhetorically, or where Coates flinched as a writer (i.e. failing to dig into the sexual assault charges against Bill Cosby in an essay devoted to analyzing Cosby). While it could have been still more transformative and productive had Coates actually revised these original mistakes in his reflective essays, thereby showing his own growth as a writer and thinker instead of almost glibly telling the reader about it, the admittance alone is certainly helpful and brave. Coates has reminded the reader that it is possible to question, critique, and interact with his text, an openness which is truly a gift considering Coates’ intimidating style.

For Coates’ style is mettlesome and meddlesome, monumental and ruinous. Tempered over time, revised and practiced closer and closer to his ultimate vision, Coates describes the evolution of his style in his reflective essays as well, with the collected essays again showing the real-life outcomes of a writer’s painstaking, devoted, skillful passion. Without the meta discussion of the writing process included so close to these essays, they could come off as almost insurmountable. The language is so thundering and luminous as to turn the heartbeat into drums and the mind into honey. Consciously attempting to write as powerfully and evocatively as James Baldwin wrote, style is another arena in which the past and present almost eclipse one another in We Were Eight Years in Power.

Returning yet again to this through-line, it is crucial to point out that the essays collected essays here were written of the culture in the United States and its White House contemporaneously to this culture’s actual happening and evolution, in “real time.” These essays aren’t about analyzing everything President Obama did during his term in office. Coates glosses over sticky bits of Obama’s presidency, largely ignoring his foreign policy and choosing to home his critique in around Obama’s respectability politics. While readers searching for a robust critique of Obama’s presidency, its policies, actions, and outcomes, might be disappointed to find this so ultimately lacking from We Were Eight Years in Power, this is less because the book wasn’t done right and more because these readers weren’t reading the right book. This book is about analyzing what Obama meant, Obama—and, crucially, President Obama as a cultural symbol. This book is about asking what the reality of President Obama made possible—not what President Obama did himself so much as what his existence as a black male President opened the doors for. Which is everything, Coates argues, from raising again the case for reparations, to questioning and destroying the system of mass incarceration, to, ultimately, President Trump. While Coates does of course write about Obama and his actions, he focuses primarily on the aspects of Obama’s biography and outlook that allowed him to become president, an achievement both triumphant and flawed: “There are no clean victories for black people, nor, perhaps, for any people. The presidency of Barack Obama is no different” (334).