We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (Volumes 1 & 2) by Ta-Nehisi Coates

2021/02/23

It was during a hot summer while I was refining the translation of this book. Fumiko Nishizaki contributed an article about the BLM movement to the Asahi Shimbun, and Ta-Nehisi Coates's "Between the World and Me" was listed as one of the three books to read. This work (winner of the National Book Award) led Toni Morrison to call Coates "the successor to James Baldwin." My translation served as an introduction to Coates in Japan.

Additionally, in an article about white nationalism contributed by Yasushi Watanabe to this magazine's "Enzetsukan (Public Speaking Hall)" section, there was the following sentence: "He [Trump] also frequently used coded language intended to inspire white conservatives, such as 'the forgotten people' and 'law and order.' Renowned Black author Ta-Nehisi Coates referred to him as 'America's First White President.'" "The First White President" was also the title of the article used as the epilogue of this book. Why he specifically calls him the *first* is revealed there.

This book is structured by chronologically arranging nine articles Coates contributed to "The Atlantic" (most of which were written during the Obama administration), with Coates himself providing commentary for each article. Among them is "The Case for Reparations" (2014), which brought Coates various awards. Regarding these reparations: "The reparations Coates envisions must aim for something collective for 'all African Americans who experienced 250 years of slavery, 90 years of Jim Crow, and 60 years of "separate but equal"'" (from the "Translator's Afterword").

This book is a collection of articles handpicked by Coates himself. In a book review for the Asahi Shimbun, Hidetaka Namai commented, "None of them have aged; they uniquely depict the hope, confusion, disappointment, and anger of each moment." Please feel free to read from any chapter you like.

Coates is not a militant anti-racist. For that very reason, I want to take his message seriously: "After all, the most important of all the individual rights granted to Americans is the right to be mediocre, to be stupid, to be immature—in other words, the right to be human" (Chapter 1 of this book).

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (Vol. 1) by Ta-Nehisi Coates

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (Vol. 2) by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Toshiho Ikeda (Co-translator)

Keio University Press

Vol. 1: 272 pages, Vol. 2: 240 pages, 2,500 yen each (plus tax)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.