How to Blow Up a Wall with a Heartbeat

• Published date: 01 May 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12248
• Author: Nicholas Powers
• Date: 01 May 2018

How to Blow Up a Wall with a Heartbeat

By Nicholas Powers*

abstract. A manifesto written in the form of a letter is a tradition in the

African American canon, one that undergoes a radical revision in this

essay. Whether in My Dungeon Shook, the first section of James Baldwin’s

1963 classic The Fire Next Time or Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2015 Between the

World and Me, the strategy was a pedagogical one. The double work

being done in these texts was to use a stated reader, in each case a

family member, to grant the writer an intimacy that guaranteed the

larger claims made on racism in America. Yet both writers seemed

ultimately to elude that stated reader for a not too implicit, liberal white

reader. In “How to Blow Up a Wall with a Heartbeat,” the text reverses

this tactic to ask what a new life teaches us about racism and the desire

for human connection it frustrates. The time frame is the end of the

Obama presidency, where there was a hint of hope, even if it was

betrayed. It ends shortly after November 2016 when white Americans

chose a president who threatened to initiate a new neo-Jim-Crow era

and asks: How does the endless, generative power of life teach a man

of color to love during a politically reactionary time?

Son,

I just changed your diaper. I sang to you as I cleaned your shit. You

are so perfect. Your smile is perfect. You laugh is perfect. Your smell

is perfect. I kissed you all over your pudgy, new baby body.

I held your tiny feet and thumbed your soft new skin. You studied

my face as I fed you. I rocked you to sleep on my chest. Our hearts,

drummed a rhythm, back and forth between our bodies. I am in love

with you.`

Now that you’re old enough to read these words, I want you to

know that in the first year of your life, you taught me. I saw in your

American Jour nal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 77, Nos. 3-4 (May-Septe mber, 2018).

DOI: 10 .1111/ajes.122 48

© 2018 American Journ al of Economics and Sociology, Inc

*Assistant Professor in the English Department of State University of New York, Old

Westbury. Research interests include African American literature and rhetoric, New

Journalism and Literary Theory. Email: powersn@oldwestbury.edu