In her muscular, searing novel “Kingdom of No Tomorrow,” the poet and fiction writer Fabienne Josaphat fixes her lens on the late 1960s, a time of turmoil and transformation for Black people the world over. Her protagonist, Nettie Boileau, emerges from the Haiti of Josaphat’s debut, “Dancing in the Baron’s Shadow” — where the brutal Duvalier dictatorship murdered as many as 60,000 people — into 1968 Oakland, Calif., and Chicago, where the Black Panther Party is fighting for Black liberation.
Tracking the political and romantic awakening of 20-year-old Nettie, a Black public health student who becomes increasingly entangled in a radical arm of the movement as she falls for one of its leaders, Josaphat erects a kind of love triangle as a scaffolding for the novel’s central concerns. Amid revolution, how do you reconcile private needs with public struggle?
With this tension in mind the novel casts the family home as a site not just of solace and refuge but of fracture wrought by external injustice. Nettie and her best friend, Clia, are collecting field data for a sickle cell study run by a Black Panther Party clinic in Oakland when they meet Melvin Mosley, a handsome but inscrutable party leader, in the home of a Black family that’s being harassed by their white neighbors. Clia is ready to take up arms to defend them, but Nettie is reluctant to engage in the kind of violence that got her father killed when he joined efforts to overthrow Duvalier’s regime. When a rock crashes through the family’s window, however, “something inside her snapped,” and she can’t help hurling it back.
Josaphat’s assured prose often pauses to linger on exquisite moments of awe that drive Nettie’s internal evolution. Under the lights of a party event, she thinks, “everyone seemed more brilliant, more resplendent, like a gathering of gods by the hundreds”; later, Melvin’s “brown skin was almost lit from the inside, splendid, like smoked quartz.” In the opening scene, both Melvin’s shotgun and his imperturbable cool shake her out of her fantasies of nonviolence. “It was as if she’d been asleep her whole life and awakened tonight to the fact that the entire country was quickly tipping over,” Josaphat writes. “It was becoming clear that marching and sitting in were not enough.”
This episode kicks off a propulsive plot that asks tough questions about the sidelining of Black women in the hypermasculine world of social justice. When a different male party leader behaves aggressively toward Clia, Nettie tries to embolden her: “You don’t have to put up with it,” she says. “You are not a thing God made to satisfy a man’s hunger.”
But Nettie frustratingly fails to heed her own advice when it comes to her growing fascination with Melvin, who brings her along to weapons pickups and target practice but who can be belittling, unreliable and even cruel. Meanwhile, grieving her father while living in California with her aunt, Nettie battles her feelings of dislocation with the help of Clia’s friendship — though Clia wants it to be something more.
As these relationships and the movement progress, the three revolutionaries offer divergent paths to self-determination. As her boss’s harassment worsens, Clia, a party faithful, daydreams about an alternative version of freedom on a friend’s orange grove in Florida. Melvin remains dedicated to the cause: “Until the pigs decide to put their guns down,” he says, “I have no reason to put mine down.” Nettie wants to save lives the way her father did and follow her aunt’s advice to finish her studies.
The novel occasionally falters as the urgency of the historical moment sometimes eclipses the romance, and the very real political violence leaves less space to root for love. Still, when Melvin finally admits his feelings for Nettie, the pages practically turn themselves.
As traitors, phone taps and assassinations further complicate Nettie’s feelings for Melvin and Clia, Nettie must ask herself whether “having a common sense of purpose,” in a relationship, truly “makes you stronger,” as a fellow activist suggests.
With a poet’s lyrical flair, Josaphat delivers a novel for our times, exploring how individuals in an unjust society can manage both political upheaval and meaningful personal connection, both oppression and intimacy.
The post Lust and Loss in the Upper Ranks of the Black Panther Party appeared first on New York Times.
