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| Taiyon J. Coleman, Ph.D. |
The personal is sociopolitical. Taiyon J. Coleman’s “Traveling Without Moving” is a collection of first-person essays that provides an intricate portrait of a Black woman’s experience of survival in interrelated spheres of oppression in American institutions. Coleman is a first-generation college graduate, the first in her family to become a professor. She draws from her lived experiences as a child growing up with a single parent in the South side of Chicago, her journey through White academic spaces, and finding community as an educator and writer in Minnesota. Throughout the book, Coleman weaves in a perceptive critique of the societal marginalization she endured as a Black woman who grew up in poverty. As she writes earnestly about her will and desperation to survive, Coleman also offers a broad view of the persistence of oppression in various systems such as healthcare, education, and housing.
Coleman writes in a voice rooted in an awareness of intergenerational wounds and learnings, invoking her immediate kin and ancestors who sought and found freedom from bondage. Her testimonies are sometimes self-deprecating, yet always viscerally striking and wide-eyed. Coleman’s calling as a poet and educator shines through in her intelligent probing of her lived realities as they collide with structural racism, classism, and gender biases.
I read the essays from the lens of a non-Black woman of color. Although we grew up an entire ocean and continents apart, Coleman brought me back to my own childhood as she invited readers to her grandmother’s living room. The elder eagerly shared advice that may be above the emotional capacity of a pre-pubescent girl, but I understood that is how Grandmother best showed love. I was gripped by Coleman’s account of her heartbreak over miscarriage and the matter-of-factly way she described the bouts with hospitals and clinics that were largely dismissive of her plight. Racial harms encountered in a graduate studies classroom by a professor who is disparaging of the Black experience are contrasted with her own awakening to the different ways her Liberian refugee students are confronting their shifting knowledge of self-identity in the United States.
“Traveling Without Moving: Essays from a Black Woman Trying to Survive in America” is a memorable read for anyone who seeks to dive deeply into how a Black woman experienced and witnessed both active and passive violence. Intimate essays invite readers to reflect on their journeys of privilege and persistence. Coleman writes with genuineness and openness about important learnings about navigating – and surviving – America and its many contradictions.
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