The Strangers by Ekow Eshun review – five Black pioneers

By Colin Grant, The Guardian

From Malcolm X to Justin Fashanu, Eshun uses historical figures to illuminate contemporary struggles – and his own alienation

“All blacks in this country are condemned to be performers.” This is the thought, allegedly, of Ira Aldridge, a 19th-century black Shakespearean actor, who features in Ekow Eshun’s The Strangers. Why “allegedly”? Because there’s no record of Aldridge’s assertion. Eshun’s book, though, is not a novel; it’s “creative nonfiction”. This innovative approach, while successful, will nonetheless vex historians who wince at the use of speculation, rather than verifiable fact, in presenting the past.

Toni Morrison argued that black lives are “spoken of and written about as objects of history, not subjects within it”. How then to humanise and investigate the interior lives of historical figures in the absence of source material? It’s a dilemma addressed in Eshun’s hybrid of biography and memoir through an extraordinary feat of empathy. Along with Aldridge, Eshun takes four other black pioneers – Matthew Henson (an explorer), Frantz Fanon (a psychiatrist and thinker), Malcolm X (an activist) and Justin Fashanu (a footballer) – and writes about them using the second person. But he does it so intimately that “you” becomes a proxy for “I”.

In the chapter on Aldridge, his 1830s portrayal of Othello “causes only revulsion” in the mind of audiences who cannot accept “a full-blooded Negro, incarnating the profoundest creation of Shakespeare’s art”.

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It’s surprising to learn that for much of his life Eshun, too, has felt misperceived. In decades past, as a cultural commentator – a favourite on the BBC’s Late Review, editor of Arena magazine and director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts – Eshun seemed to transcend race. But, lately, he has addressed it more directly as curator of exhibitions such as In the Black Fantastic and The Time Is Always Now. He is alive to the way in which every Black man is “heir to [a] legacy of caricature, which renders him simultaneously invisible and hypervisible”.

The review explains how Eshun’s book ensures author and subjects won’t be invisible.

Our online exhibits show how Black men have faced racism through the ages.

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