I read this book earlier in the year and found it searingly emotional. Beautifully poetic, making both linguistic and visual art of its words, displaying the exquisite spark that remains in a soul even after it’s been beaten down by injustice (premise spoilers.)
Before, people might have called Amal one of the lucky ones. A Black kid from the projects going to a private art school, a teenager with an opportunity to be going places. By their estimation, he threw all that good fortune away the night he got into a fight with a white boy from a respectable family. Now Amal is in juvie, his life contained in a series of boxes. As he navigates his new surroundings, he reckons with how the world sees him and the place it’s made for him. He struggles to process this the only way he knows how, through poetry and art.
This YA poetic narrative was co-written by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam, the latter of whom is one of the Exonerated Five. Together, they’ve crafted a raw, emotional portrayal of a boy who’s been let down by the world around him at every turn and then discarded. Amal’s poems are nakedly vulnerable in a way that he doesn’t allow himself to be face-to-face. I really appreciate the recurring motif in which he shares snapshots from his past and present, framing each with “what I want to say” and expressing his honest feelings before retreating into “what I really say,” shrugging everything off with a tough mask of indifference.
Amal takes us through each stage of the corrupt criminal justice system: his lawyer who barely knows him, the pitiful lack of evidence for the trumped-up charges against him, the indiginity of being herded like an animal, the sorry excuse for an education he’s offered in juvie, the guard who takes care to make sure Amal gets a good look at his tattoo of a hanged Black baby. Another amazing thematic throughline comes from the sharp parallels he draws between slavery and mass incarceration. There are poems in which he describes the bus ride to juvie as the Middle Passage, intake as the auction block. There are plenty of adults who think that slavery is long over and dealt with, so it’s powerful to see these comparisons laid out so plainly in a YA book.
And I also like that Amal’s story takes care to show how things were stacked against him long before his arrest. How they only study dead white guys in his art class at school, and when he points that out, his teacher takes that as a sign of him being difficult, insubordinate. About how those white boys came into his neighborhood picking fights with his friends, how there’s an invisible line between their neighborhood and his, and while he and his friends are never allowed to cross it, the white boys are free to act as if they own his home as well as theirs. It’s really sophisticated in how it gradually rolls out all these racial, socio-economic, and political aspects that govern and limit Amal’s world, everything that was already boxing him in.
But for all of that, all the horror, all the injustice, and all the pain, I’m grateful for the glimmers of light. The small things that give Amal hope, the tiny ways he’s able to assert his dignity. Even the bare basics, the way that there’s no box they can put on his thoughts as he expresses his anger and despair in poetry. It has a slight but undeniable “‘hope’ is the thing with feathers” feel to it, and that’s so crucial.
Warnings
Strong thematic elements (including racism and mass incarceration of minors,) violence, and language (including the N-word.)
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