The Autobiography of Malcolm X - Foreshadowing Evil

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Author: Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley

The main thing you got to remember is that everything in the world is a hustle. –Freddie, the shoeshine boy

As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. –Narrator

I wouldn't have considered it possible for me to love any woman. I'd had too much experience that women were only tricky, deceitful, untrustworthy flesh. I had seen too many men ruined, or at least tied down, or in some other way messed up by women. Women talked too much. To tell a woman not to talk too much was like telling Jesse James not to carry a gun, or telling a hen not to cackle. –Narrator

Awareness came surging up in me – how deeply the religion of Islam had reached down into the mud to lift me up, to save me from being what I inevitably would have been: a dead criminal in a grave, or, if still alive, a flint-hard, bitter, thirty-seven-year-old convict in some penitentiary, or insane asylum. –Narrator

First, let's get the book description out of the way (copied from the back of the copy I borrowed from the library):

If there was any one man who articulated the anger, the struggle, and the beliefs of African Americans in the 1960s, that man was Malcolm X. His Autobiography is now an established classic of modern America, a book that expresses like none other the crucial truth about our violent times.

Second, let's establish the fact that I'm white; I am not African American… and I'm a woman. Those two facts should tell you something about my reaction to the first two thirds of this book if you've read it. Malcolm X, until his trip to Mecca, preached on the evils of the white man. And not just SOME white men, but ALL white men. Being born white meant that I was evil before I had my first thought, shed my first tear or screamed that first scream. And my being a woman… well, see his quote above about how all we do is bring down any man we get our hooks into.

I want to break this book down into three (uneven in length) sections: Detroit Red, Malcolm X and El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. The first section focuses on Malcolm's delinquent and drug-fueled adolescence. This part of the story was surprising and fairly enjoyable despite the unending foreshadowing, which I'll address later in this post. I knew very little about Malcolm X going into this reading and I learned that he was fully immersed into the Harlem drug and music culture. He gambled and thieved; cops hated him and he hated them. He survived on marijuana, cocaine and alcohol. I'll admit to being impressed that someone with such a seedy background grew to be such a prominent figure in an entire culture's history.

From Detroit Red, we move on to Malcolm X. This is where I started to get peeved at the book. I realize that it wasn't really written for a 30-year-old white woman in the 2010s to read; remembering this is what got me through the pages. Because in this section, Malcolm X expounds on the evil of the white man, the "history" of the white man's initial existence on the planet and the insignificance of the woman. His turn to Islam while in prison is clearly what saved his life – religion is powerful that way – and for this, I applaud his family for introducing it to him. However, as a human being, I do wish the religion hadn't been so hateful in its doctrine where non-African American people were concerned. I can't imagine the turmoil of those times when Malcolm X's preaching was at a controversial high, but I can understand why so many people were appalled at what he had to say.

I was near the end of my patience with his hatred by the time I got to the section I call El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. In this section, Malcolm takes his trip to Mecca, and – hallelujah – learns the truths about the Islamic religion. It is a religion more of peace than hatred, of brotherhood than segregation, of spiritualism than war. In Egypt and Jeddah and Mecca itself, Malcolm is met with and welcomed by people of all colors, races and languages, and he begins to understand the differences in between Sunni Islam (which he came to know overseas) and The Nation of Islam (which he left behind in America). He returns from his Hajj with a better sense of internal peace, though he faced a tough crowd of confused and angry followers. The leader of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad, was none too happy to be opposed and many men were tasked with taking Malcolm's life at his command.

In the end, I'm glad I finished reading… if I'd given up during the Malcolm X section, I never would have learned how he became a great leader and a civil rights activist, working with – instead of in opposition to – other activists of his day. I would have continued thinking that he was a hateful man preaching black supremacy and the evil of the white man. 

Before I conclude this post, I can't help but write about the thing that annoyed me more than the  Malcolm X's hate preaching. Nearly one out of every three paragraphs in this book used a very elementary and obvious form of foreshadowing. I can't tell you how many times I read things like, "I'd soon find out how wrong I was" or "Little did I know how true those words were" or "I didn't know then how important that moment would be." And it just got old. I like foreshadowing as much as the next literature lover, but subtlety is the key to effective foreshadowing. All this served to do was add ammunition to the argument that I should stop reading the book immediately. I don't know whether this was Malcolm X's storytelling style or a technique employed by Alex Haley. All I know is that I did not like it.

My takeaway: Religion – even if it's not the religion in which I've chosen to put my faith – has the power to save a life otherwise destined for prison or death on the streets and turn it into a life dedicated to human rights and civil liberties. And overusing a literary device lessens its effectiveness and annoys the reader, a fact which I'd soon find out to be truer than I'd ever thought before.