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DARNELL L. MOORE, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black & Free in America. Bold Type Books, 2019. vii + 247 pp. ISBN 1568589409.
Darnell L Moores No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black & Free in America is a noteworthy intervention within the discourse of Black liberation and contributes to the knowledge production of Black masculinities, transgenerational trauma, hope, and possibilities of healing. The debut memoir by the activist-author engages storytelling, outlined by Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012), as a decolonized methodology that articulates the diversities of truth" (p. 145). Moore complicates memoir through his interdisciplinary modality of pairing personal narrative with sociocultural histories that inform the individual. Specifically, Darnell L. Moore explores the intricacies of coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s in Camden, New Jersey, as Black, male, and queer. In doing so, Moore writes to a body of literature that challenges static delineations of Black abjection and subverts literary traditions centered solely on cis-heteronormative experiences.
No Ashes in the Fire locates itself within a collective of memoirs released in 2018-2019 that details the ruminations of Black existence within assemblies of racial and gendered domination (e.g., Heavy by Kiese Laymon, When They Call You a Terrorist by Patrisse Khan-Cullors, and How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones). Moore's narrative uncovers its originality among the sea of memoirs with self-accountability, accessibility, and Black liberation in mind. Comprised of eight chapters, not including the prologue and epilogue, Moore's memoir inquires in what way do we verbalize freedom for "every day, ordinary folks who learn to create life amid death-dealing cultures...