Less honorably, the demand for “hope” was little more than a demand to bleach the past. I began to take note of the unique pressures that the world puts on “prominent” Black writers-specifically the demand that one write in a way that necessarily and explicitly provides “hope.” In its benevolent manifestation, the request originated in the very real inspiration that people took from the Black struggle in America. I found the former a better fit than the latter. I was then a writer in my mid-30s, experiencing a period of novel stability and unlikely prominence.
But as much as the contents of Postwar ultimately influenced me, it was Tony’s style that left a mark. That road necessarily led to Europe, where the idea of race was invented. I had taken the idea of race in American life as my field of study. Postwar-Tony’s much-lauded synthesis of European history after World War II-felt like a natural starting place. Maybe that’s why I didn’t read a book by Tony until after he’d died. I’ve always been skeptical of writers who are spoken of in this way, intellectuals praised for violating the dictums of both “the left and the right” as though the best answer somehow lay unerringly in between. Having, at that time, read very little of Tony, I was left with the impression of an intellectual monk who eschewed the dictates of party or crowd. I first encountered Tony in a swirl of legend and myth, an intellectual hero who, in the dark post-9/11 years, inveighed against the Israeli occupation and filleted the “ useful idiots” who sanctified the War on Terror. Still, on that changing list there are a few mainstays.
And then there’s the fact that any list of books that I feel made me, as both a writer and a human, changes with the day and feeling.
Moreover, people who set as their job the task of judging what others do, and why, are not always reliable when turning the lens upon themselves. Memory is tricky, and a work can assert its influences over my thinking long after I’ve forgotten its particular details, or even its title. I always find it hard to list the books that have influenced me the most.
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