Manchild - critical review

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Published in the midst of the Civil Rights movement and in the wake of the nationwide urban riots of 1964, Manchild in the Promised Land is a rare achievement: an autobiography written in clear, lucid prose without an ounce of self-pity, self-justification, or moralizing. Mr. Brown's sprawling book, almost an archetype of American urban life, tells of Claude's growing up in crime-plagued Harlem and struggling with race, poverty, sex, family, friendship, religion and education on his way to a soulful, mature independence. Focused by its personal narrative voice, ''Manchild'' has an epic reach as it depicts the journeys of a generation of black families who traded one hard life for another in their move from the South.

Brown's worldview and consequently his writing are "structured" by the ideology and language of the social sciences, disciplines that are primarily concerned with "the fakelore of black pathology". Most of all, for me, Brown's memoir is filled with regret for the many from his Harlem neighborhood who died, victims of crime, poverty, alcoholism and drug addiction. Indeed, one could say that one of the major characters of his story is heroin, which Brown describes as the scourge of his generation. The power of heroin to destroy is most poignantly described in Brown's recounting of his relationship with his younger brother. Claude took his responsibilities as an older brother seriously, but his younger brother fell victim to addiction, and Brown was forced to admit that he had lost him.

Perhaps Manchild in the Promised Land can be described best as an “autoethnography.” It is not only the author’s life story, but it is also the story of an ethnic community at a particular moment in its history. Brown’s coming-of-age narrative is embedded in the larger narrative of life in Harlem during the 1940s and 1950s. His dual objective is explicit in the book’s foreword. He says he wants “to talk about the first Northern urban generation of Negroes.” He calls them a “misplaced generation”: They are the “sons and daughters of former Southern share-croppers…the poorest people of the South, who poured into New York City during the decade following the Great Depression.” Manchild in the Promised Land , Brown insists, is “a story of their searching, their dreams, their sorrows, their small and futile rebellions, and their endless battle to establish their own place in America’s greatest metropolis—and in America itself.

The terrible disillusionment of his parents’ generation provides a grim back-drop to his own story of growing up in Harlem. His father retreats into alcohol to cope with the bleak realities and disabling disappointments of his life. His mother, deeply injured by the racism that she had endured in the South, believes in black inferiority. Religious fundamentalism becomes her sanctuary. Brown grows up on the streets of Harlem, and at an early age he is introduced to drugs and sex. Crime becomes a way of life. The environment breeds a range of pathologies in the people; those pathologies, in turn, accelerate the deterioration of the environment. With chilling realism Brown documents the nightmarish lives of individuals caught in that vicious cycle.

Brown’s depiction of Harlem in acute crisis is relentless and at times overwhelming. People live in fear and in suspicion of one another. The white world intrudes in the form of greedy merchants, extortionist landlords, and brutal police officers. People attempt to cope, but often in ways that are self-destructive. Brown talks extensively about the success of the Nation of Islam in converting a significant number of the Harlem residents to its politicized, African American version of Islam. But Brown sees those conversions as merely futile gestures against the white power structure and as desperate attempts to mask deep-rooted bitterness and alienation. By the end of the narrative, many of Brown’s friends and accomplices are either dead or in prisons.

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What remains unclear, however, is precisely how Brown extricates himself from the cycles of violence, crime, and drug abuse. How does his redemption come about? His discovery of music, especially jazz, and his own musical talent appears to be part of the explanation. But Brown does not explicitly link his music with his redemption. Certainly, his decision to leave Harlem at age sixteen and relocate in Greenwich Village is critical to the redirection of his life. However, his explanation for that decision is not entirely convincing: He says that one day he realized that he might have to murder an ...

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