The City Born (N.K. Jemisin)

Summary

• BIPOC
• Urban
• Black Art
• Graffiti
  • Alive
• Kicked out
• Life cycles
• Gentrification
• Wrongly accuses
• Time lapse/travel
• Ends 50 yrs later looking for the

Monsters/Other Beings

• City as an entity

  • City gives life AND people give city life → interdependency between the city and people
  • People who bring culture and those who stamp out culture (gentrification)
  • CITY SHAPESHIFTS
  • Seeing the city for what it truly is → character has a larger vision of the city
  • FDR/Westside High way → arteries running through the city
  • Ancestral bones under Wall st → stocks based off selling people/no city w/o Black people & African Americans

• Shape shifting

  • Shadows

• Police Officers

  • Shape shifters

Life Cycles

• People hat make/create the city
• How do cities go through cycles?
  • (1890s)Before the five boroughs, NYC was NOT a full city there was NO CONNECTION
  • 1970s → bankruptcy
  • City→ boroughs→ neighborhoods→ individual people

Passage of Interest

• “There’re cops in body armor over by the subway entrance, showing off their guns to the tourists so they’ll feel safe from New York.”

  • Oliver’s Comment → I recognize the irony in this quote as the narrator says that the police are there to protect tourists from New York while many of those who live in New York City want to be protected from the cops. This also goes with the theme of the abuse of law enforcement we see throughout the story. The narrator constantly mentions the police throughout the story and how he is always singled out for being black as it seems the police are only there to protect certain groups of people.

  </p>

• "As more and more people come in and deposit their strangeness and leave and get replaced by others, the tear widens. Eventually it gets so deep that it forms a pocket, connected only by the thinnest thread of . . . something to . . . something. Whatever cities are made of"

  • Oliver’s comment → I thought the "strangeness" the narrator refers to is a sort of metaphor for the different customs and traditions people from other cultures lave behind as they come to the city. And how as more people leave behind their customs the city continues to grow culturally.

\