Cell 2 Soul: The Humane Health Care Blog

A Conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coats

A Conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coats (TNC)
Massachusetts College for Liberal Arts
November 8, 2018

The moderator, Professor Frances Jones-Sneed, did a great job. She was respectful, almost motherly and knowledgeable.

TNC was a brilliant, honest, articulate story teller. He came across as humble and spent the first few minutes thanking everyone for coming to the event. (There were ~ 2000 people in the Amsler Gymnasium.)

Here are some excerpts from his dialogue.

With politics, there are no rules anymore. 

POTUS, and other politicians can get away with anything today.

He quoted a lot from his article on The Case for Reparations (The Atlantic 2014).

When you talk about people as statistics, you lose sight of their humanity. 

With his book Between the World and Me he told us that his editor sent it back to him four or five times and he had to sit down and rewrite it each time. He said when you are writing you don’t appreicate what danger you are in. Every first draft is terrible. If you want to be a writer you have to accept that and just go back and do the rewrites. 

Writing is about endurance. When you start you are really terrible and you have to accept that. If you can’t acknowledge this you won’t ever be a writer.

He was asked who his favorite black poet was and he said “Sonia Sanchez.” 

 He was asked by a student what he reads for hope and he said literature is not the place to go for hope - it is the place one goes for understanding. Just to understand is enough of an ambition. 

Things to follow up on

1. The name of Frederick Douglas came up a lot. (There is a new biography of Frederick Douglass)
2. Get to see the movie The Black Panther and maybe read the comic Captain America

There is a web page called 25 Quotes from TNC. Here is # 11

Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made. That is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing…

Jelena Dokic's Soaring and Turbulent Career

https://nyti.ms/2G24ZdI

At one point, Jelena Dokic, now 34, was the number 4 ranked female tennis player in the world.  Her father drove her to achieve tennis greatness cruelly and relentlessly from the time she was a young child.

Dokic recounts her journey in exhaustive detail in “Unbreakable,” a book written with Jessica Halloran, an Australian journalist, and set to be released in paperback in the United States on Feb. 1. It’s a chilling account of the harsh physical, verbal and emotional abuse Dokic says she suffered from her father as she ascended the ranks of junior and professional tennis.

Her story is poignantly oresented in a recent NY Times article.

The effects of childhood abuse are often hidden.  They are discusssed in great detail by Dr. Anna Louise Kirkengen in her book (available for the Kindle), “The Lived Experience of Violation: How Abused Children Become Unhealthy Adults.”  Kirkengen summarized the subject in an article "How Abused Children Become Unhealthy Adults." Download Kirkengen Negative Alchemy.

 

Strangely, in Jelena’s case, the abuse was hidden in plain sight and went on for many years before she fled her father. This is similar to some degree in the way Dr. Nassar’s abuse of the young gymnasts was allowed to continue. Maybe, success at sport (or some other endeavor) allows the abuse to proceed.