“Then Her World Exploded”: Science-Fictional Reading and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me

Abstract

In his extended epistolary essay Between the World and Me (2015), Ta-Nehisi Coates describes the segregation and disenfranchisement that shaped his West Baltimore childhood using language that one might describe as science-fictional: I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape. (20–21; emphasis added)