Follower

Freitag, 1. Dezember 2017

The Other Invisibles of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man / Gabrielle Bellot

The first time I read Invisible Man, I was entranced by its black-white symbolism, which seemed to never end, but instead simply became smaller and subtler, like a reflection in an elevator’s facing mirrors. When I reread it, I still felt that pull of someone who yearns to solve a labyrinth, but I also saw myself, more clearly, in it: I understood its contours in a deeper way, the way one can at once be forgotten and feared by a society, invisible and incandescent, hated either way. An invisible-visible woman, a trans woman with a foot in two countries, two shifting realities.

The title, in its semblance to Wells’ fantastical novel, captured a country’s contradictions. I loved it. It wasn’t just that Ellison was a brilliant stylist, with an obsessive but efficacious eye for showing, through those repeating mirrors, America’s wondrous and terrible symmetries, how blackness was inextricably intertwined with almost every facet of American history, as he would venture into more detail in an essay for TIME, in which he argued, rightly, that America would be unthinkable without black people, despite the quixotic fantasies of certain white Americans. ... [mehr] http://lithub.com/the-other-invisibles-of-ralph-ellisons-invisible-man/

Keine Kommentare: