Between the World and Me

Coates describes his obsession with poetry as a college student, which he would perform at open mics in local cafés. At these cafés, he met older and more experienced poets who challenged his work, asking him questions like, what he did he specifically mean by the loss of his body? Reflecting back on these times, Coates assesses, “These were notes on how to write, and thus notes on how to think” (51). He begins to understand poetry as a path to truth-seeking, mirroring his mother’s early teachings about writing as a form of investigation.

Coates’s engagement with black and African history deepens. He realizes that he does not simply need to “create a carbon copy of white claims to civilization,” which he sees as just another version of “the Dream” (51). Coates learns from his history teachers at Howard that no culture or civilization can or should be mythologized, not even his own. They counter his claims of an idealized Africa with facts about Africans who sold slaves across the Sahara over a millennia ago or questions about what blackness truly means. Coats realizes that he had been holding his cultural legacy in a “trophy case” (57).

Coates remembers all the girls he fell in love with at Howard, and how they opened him up to new worldviews and perspectives.