A Haunting Study of Five Remarkable Black Men Who Soared Despite Societal Challenges

‘The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds They Made’By Ekow EshunHarper, 400 pagesIra Aldridge, a 19th century actor ridiculed as a primitive who had no business playing Othello, whom some critics tried to say was not black; Matthew Henson, the resourceful, dogged companion of Robert Peary on his expeditions to the North Pole, maligned by Peary and in the press as no more than a servant; Frantz Fanon, a Martinican psychiatrist who had to disabuse himself of his francophilia to become the proponent of anticolonialist black freedom movements; Malcolm X, who abjured the separatist principles of the Black Muslims and died because of his dissent; and Justin Fashanu, Britain’s first openly gay professional footballer who had to overcome his fear of rejection and self-denial—all are subsumed in Ekow Eshun’s mission to recover his own black identity so that he would no longer be a stranger to himself.Each of the figures in this haunting book seem to be running away from themselves. Aldridge, to begin with, wanted to be the next Edmund Kean, the great tragedian of the English stage, and even behaved in the same louche fashion as his hero, bedding white women and behaving in a flamboyant fashion, even though racist taunts made his life traumatic. He triumphed, however, honored in continental Europe and posthumously in Britain.Mr. Eshun’s Justin Fashanu has much in common with Aldridge, including a penchant for the ostentation that aroused the ire not only of bigots but of his own white football manager and the tabloid press that eventually cornered him into contributing to an exposé of his gay life. Unlike Aldridge, however, who never allowed public controversy to attenuate his stage performances, Fashanu’s,soccer playing clearly suffered from the vicious attacks that undermined his time in the top flight of English football.Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X are shrewd choices because they play off one another — the former brought up to take pride in his French identity and the latter angry about his early years in a black underworld that led to his imprisonment that led to his latching on to the Black Muslims as a way to recover a race pride. As both men matured, however, they abandoned sectarian points of view. They were still part of liberation struggles but on more universal terms that repudiated chauvinism.The most moving story in this book is Matthew Henson’s. His Arctic treks are not only expressions of his extraordinary courage and stamina but of a devotion to a common heroic task that transcended that of his leader, Robert Peary, who could never bring himself to acknowledge Henson’s key role in their explorations. Never able to receive the recognition of the society that celebrated Peary, Henson had to make do with low level jobs and employment incommensurate with his intelligence and dedication. Yet he persevered and after his death has become recognized as one of the central figures in the Peary expedition.“The Strangers” is a hybrid work—on the one hand, carefully researched; on the other hand, verging on fiction in those moments when Mr. Eshun’s subjects are communing with themselves. Unlike a biographical novel, however, “The Strangers” is not asking for a suspension of disbelief. Instead, by using the second person, Mr. Eshun expresses all of the emotions of his subjects that he has also experienced: fear, self-doubt, and even self-loathing and nightmares of being pursued by a stranger whom his therapist encourages him to confront, which he does in reckoning with his life as a black man.This talking to his subjects, addressing them as “you”, is something people do while talking to themselves, which is a way of objectifying the self, of coming to some self-understanding even as, in Mr. Eshun’s case, he is acknowledging the reciprocal nature of biography: using one’s own experience to illuminate that of others which, in turn, illuminates the biographer’s.It is often said that biographers cannot penetrate to the inner core of their subjects. But the same might be said for the subjects themselves, as Herman Melville suggested in“Mardi”: “It is because we ourselves are in ourselves, that we know ourselves not.” Mr. Eshun is looking for a way out of that dilemma.Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Biography” and is working on a biography of Herman Melville.

A Haunting Study of Five Remarkable Black Men Who Soared Despite Societal Challenges

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