Breaking Bread with the Dead by Alan Jacobs

Author:Alan Jacobs [Jacobs, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

In 1939 Abrahams made his way to London, and lived in England, writing fiction and journalism, until 1956, when he moved to Jamaica, his home for the rest of his life.

“My mind was divided.” We observed a similar condition in the previous chapter, where we saw readerly minds divided between skepticism and hope, between critical incision and the quest for a “utopian moment.” But this is a rather different kind of division. Whether holding his three books or a copy of The Souls of Black Folk, Abrahams seeks encouragement—encouragement to pursue something higher and better than a life of serving white Johannesburg women for pennies and going home at night to the slums. But as compelling as Du Bois’s voice was to him—after all, his reading of “American Negro literature” did make him a “colour nationalist”—the voices of the dead English poets were more compelling still: “the dead men who called were, for me, more alive than the most vitally living.” What they offered him was the temporal bandwidth that increased his personal density in ways he could not define but that he came to feel essential to his well-being. Perhaps at another stage of his life he would need to hear a different message, drink from a different well. But at that moment it was the English poets who commanded his allegiance. And so he made his way to England.

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