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Product Description
Robert Jones is a crew leader in a naval shipyard in Los Angeles in the 1940s. He should have a lot going for him, being educated, with a steady job and a steady relationship. But in the four days covered in this novel, the impossibility of life as a black man in a white world is made devastatingly clear. Jones is surrounded by prejudice, suspicion and paranoia, and his daily experiences influence his thoughts, dreams and behaviour. Immediately recognised as a masterful expose of racism in everyday life, If He Hollers Let Him Go is Chester Himes' first book, originally published in 1945.
Amazon Review
A classic of Afro-American fiction, Chester Himes' first novelIf He Hollers Let Him Go, offers powerful testimony and witness to the poisonous rage and anxieties, the frustration and despair at stunted possibilities of a black "leaderman", Bob Jones. Set in a Cleveland shipyard during the Second World War, the novel reflects the pervasive violence and devastingly perverse paradigms of American racism through the traumatic experiences of Jones who, from the moment he wakes up and drives to work until the moment he returns home and goes to sleep, is literally overwhelmed by the raw, brutal circumstances of Jim Crowism. Finding himself trapped by the unremittingly stark stereotypes of race and his own psychic internalisation of the contradictions, paradoxes and inequities of race, Jones's anguished isolation is communicated through both his strained relations with Alice--his black bourgeois girlfriend--and his illicit, perverse desire for Madge, a Southern white working class woman whose sexual demands result in him being falsely charged with rape. The latter forms the climax to the novel and shows, among other things, how palpably intermingled sex and racism have been (and are) in American society. Jones's pain, awkwardness and discomfort, revealing the price of that intermingling, here dramatised as an emasculated and petrified version of black "manhood". --David Marriott
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