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Stories
by Jamel Brinkley
Book Reviewed by:From National Book Award finalist Jamel Brinkley, Witness is an elegant, insistent narrative of actions taken and not taken.
What does it mean to take action? To bear witness? What does it cost?
In these ten stories, each set in the changing landscapes of contemporary New York City, a range of characters―from children to grandmothers to ghosts―live through the responsibility of perceiving and the moral challenge of speaking up or taking action. Though they strive to connect, to remember, to stand up for, and to really see each other, they often fall short, and the structures they build around these ambitions and failures shape not only their own futures but the legacies and prospects of their families and their city.
In its portraits of families and friendships lost and found, the paradox of intimacy, the long shadow of grief, the meaning of home, Witness enacts its own testimony. Here is a world where fortunes can be made and stolen in just a few generations, where strangers might sometimes show kindness while those we trust―doctors, employers, siblings―too often turn away, where joy comes in snatches: flowers on a windowsill, dancing in the street, glimpsing your purpose, change on the horizon.
With prose as upendingly beautiful as it is artfully, seamlessly crafted, Jamel Brinkley offers nothing less than the full scope of life and death and change in the great, unending drama of the city.
While individual moments are well-observed and full of empathy and life—like the description of the high schoolers walking side by side down the street "incandescent with jokes and laughter, five lit bulbs on a string"—each story is greater than the sum of its parts. They build and build to the point that they defy categorization. Brinkley's style is a worthy vehicle for his wide-ranging sensibility, sliding from conversational play ("headassery" describes Headass' awkward behavior) to casual insight ("she was playing dumb by playing smart") to nerdy logophilia: when his mother dismisses a houseplant as artificial, the child in "That Particular Sunday" understands the word "in Latin sense, a way of praising the tree as a work of art."..continued
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(Reviewed by Jacob Lenz-Avila).
One story in Jamel Brinkley's collection Witness is about a woman who keeps receiving friendly notes from the same food delivery person and drafts long, personal letters in reply. In her letters, Gloria, a room service server at a hotel, reflects that food delivery apps are responsible for eliminating jobs like hers, but expresses solidarity with and sympathy for her courier: "As if we didn't know how inadequately your people get paid. As if we couldn't imagine how your people must hope and pray never to fall seriously ill."
The situation of food delivery workers on internet platforms is one of "systematic exploitation and dismal working conditions," according to a 2022 study of couriers in India published in the National Library of ...
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If you liked Witness, try these:
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Angela Flournoy, author of The Turner House
In Witness, Jamel Brinkley explores the longings and fears of his characters with a tenderness and generosity of spirit that makes the reader hurt when they hurt, and rejoice in life's surprising moments of joy alongside them. He renders worlds both familiar and new with precision and clarity, showing the many ways that place has the power to mark people, whether they be young boys, old men or the people society pushes to its margins. Read Witness and allow yourself the pleasure of seeing the world as Brinkley sees it.
