We Cast a Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
“You can be beautiful, even more beautiful than before.” This is the seductive promise of Dr. Nzinga’s clinic, where anyone can get their lips thinned, their skin bleached, and their nose narrowed. A complete demelanization will liberate you from the confines of being born in a Black body – if you can afford it.
In this near-future Southern city plagued by fenced-in ghettos and police violence, more and more residents are turning to this experimental medical procedure. Like any father, our narrator just wants the best for his son, Nigel, a biracial boy whose black birthmark is getting bigger by the day. The darker Nigel becomes, the more frightened his father feels. But how far will he go to protect his son? And will he destroy his family in the process?
This electrifying, hallucinatory novel is at once a keen satire of surviving racism in America and a profoundly moving family story. At its center is a father who just wants his son to thrive in a broken world. Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s work evokes the clear vision of Ralph Ellison, the dizzying menace of Franz Kafka, and the crackling prose of Vladimir Nabokov. We Cast a Shadow fearlessly shines a light on the violence we inherit, and on the desperate things we do for the ones we love.
“Stunning and audacious…at once a pitch-black comedy, a chilling horror story and an endlessly perceptive novel about the possible future of race in America.” (NPR)
Those first few sentences of the book summary just stopped me dead in my tracks and I KNEW this book would be a brain SPINNING read.
Oh boy, yall….I was NOT WRONG at all.
It gave me so many things to think about and addressed SO many ginormous topics regarding race in America that I literally have sat on typing this review for two days because I just don’t even know where to start.
Let me try by just using some emojis first:
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YALL. There is a LOT to unpack here.
Internalized racism, body dysmorphia, self hatred, family trauma, abuse, untreated mental health and addiction issues, societal racial inequities and injustices, implicit bias, and colorism….just to name a FEW.
The setting for this book is a not too distant future of America, where racial progress and cultural acceptance have taken a HUGE backslide….our country is a dystopian society where extreme racism has become the accepted cultural norm….AGAIN.
The very first chapter is the main character (who remains unnamed throughout…which I didn’t even realize until the VERY END) at a promotion party for the employees of his mostly white law firm.
Him and several other BIPOC employees are all vying for the same level up…and are dressed in racialized costumes as a type of “lighthearted” contest (says the white higher ups)
He ends up in a Zulu king costume…because he wanted to best fit into whatever Black man stereotype the corporate big wigs would be most impressed with.
In this chapter, he also tells the reader early on that most of the reason he WANTS the promotion at all is to save enough money for his young son (who is biracial) to have surgery on his birthmarked body so he can appear more white.
His reasoning for desiring this for his son?
So he can “pass.”
To make his life easier.
To give him privilege.
To give him power.
To prevent him from worrying about being killed by police
To help him avoid abuse, trauma, prejudice and struggle.
And also to make him “more handsome.”
Like I said….SO MUCH TO UNPACK HERE.
The father’s own self hatred he imposes on his son….which was engrained in his own mind by a disgusting white supremacist society that does everything it can to make any body that is not in a white body feel ugly, unworthy, and “less than”.
How can one person teach another to love who they are if they do not know how to do it for themselves? And if every voice they are listening to tells them they are not enough…and can never be?
The horrific and terrifying thing is that with the way things have been going here, a society that operates like that in modern times doesn’t THAT far fetched from a not too distant reality.
Which is awful and scary on a multitude of levels.
I want to warn my Black and brown friends that there are things in this novel that may really trigger you and have you remembering your own traumatic experiences…so please take care of yourself and your spirit if you do decide to read this book.
But my white friends…I highly encourage you to read this. It needs to dig into your brain and heart, make you examine your own deeply held biases that you may not even be aware you have.
Read it, absorb it, dissect the thoughts it reveals to you….and then work hard to unlearn and undo your own toxic narratives regarding race and injustice…so this book remains a work of fiction and not one of future telling.
The narrator of this audiobook is Dion Graham, who’ve yall heard me compliment a few times before. He really is one of the greatest audiobook narrators of our day and age. SO SO SO GOOD.
Also, I read up on the author and realized he is a New Orleans native…and teaches creative writing at LSU!
The book’s setting is an unnamed Southern city but I can DEFINITELY feel some New Orleans/South Louisiana similarities in all the descriptions.
(I also found out that his 2021 book “The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You” is a book of stories that most definitely ARE set in New Orleans, so I MUST check it out soon)
Absolutely recommend this read…but get ready to think, process and check yourself as you do it.