Book – The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas. First published in Great Britain by Walker Books Ltd: London, 2017
First posted on Floralia 4 December 2017
Taking its title from a tune by Tupac Shakur (‘The Hate U Give Little Infants F**ks Everybody’ – THUG LIFE), this brilliant YA novel opens with a party in the protagonist Starr’s home neighbourhood when someone starts firing off a gun. Soon after, Starr is heading up Carnation Street with her childhood friend Khalil when they are pulled over by a cop who demands to see Khalil’s documents.
Starr is caught between two worlds which she tries to keep separate – home life in Garden Heights and the school life of Williamson where most of her friends and peers are white. By the end of the novel, the two worlds have collided and Starr is ok about it. But not without a whole load of troubles in between.
At the party that opens Chapter 1, she doesn’t quite fit in – ‘girls wear their hair colored, curled, laid, and slayed. Got me feeling basic as hell with my ponytail’. In the car with Khalil, trying to stay out of trouble, they talk about Shakur’s THUG LIFE. When the cop pulls them over, Starr’s dad’s warnings snap into action: ‘Starr-Starr, you do whatever they tell you to do… keep your hands visible. Don’t make any sudden moves. Only speak when they speak to you.’
But Khalil makes a couple of moves Starr’s dad would advise against. He questions the cop’s demands – ‘What you pull us over for?’ And he reaches, again, totally innocently, to put his hair brush away and it is wrongly interpreted by the trigger happy policeman who ends up shooting Khalil dead without any provocation. This would be bad enough but is compounded by the fact that Starr has already lost another childhood friend six years ago, Natasha, killed in a drive-by shooting.
Starr is the only witness to the crime of the murder of Khalil. She knows that the cop should get life for it. Although she makes her friends and associates fully aware of her support of the Black Lives Matter campaign, her Tumblr account with ‘the petitions. The Black Panther pictures. That post on those four little girls who were killed in that church,’ she finds that she cannot (initially) speak out about what happened. There are all sorts of constraints: ‘If it’s revealed that I was in the car, what will that make me? The thug ghetto girl with the drug dealer? What will my teachers think about me? My friends? The whole f**king world, possibly?’
It’s not only the way it makes her look. Her close family and friends could come to grief if she did speak out. But many people are around to back her up and encourage her to face the music.
Angie Thomas’ narrative, written in close first person, keeps the reader glued to the page as Starr navigates her way through school life, home life and days and nights in the hood, the devoted companionship of her family and the territorial battles of the Garden Disciples and the King Lord gangs, as well as her relationship with her white boyfriend Chris.
Starr does end up finding her voice – and a taste for grass roots activism. Her dad is particularly proud of her for this, since as she mentioned at the beginning of the story, ‘Black Jesus hangs from the cross in a painting on the hallway wall, and Malcolm X holds a shotgun in a photograph next to him… Daddy believes in Black Jesus but follows the Black Panthers’ Ten Point Program more than the Ten Commandments.’
In her afterword, Angie Thomas shows how close to real life this novel is as she describes her own personal trajectory through a life a little like Starr’s. ‘I grew up in a neighborhood that’s notorious for all the wrong reasons: drug dealers, shootings, crime, insert other “ghetto” stereotypes here… A majority of the time, I was the only black student in my creative writing classes. I did everything I could so no one would label me as “the black girl from the hood”… I kept quiet whenever race came up in discussions, despite the glances I’d get because as the “token black girl”, I was expected to speak.’
The Hate U Give has a message, although it is put across in a very engaging way and doesn’t feel didactic. ‘As we witness injustice, prejudice, and racism rear their ugly heads again in this political climate both in the US and abroad,’ Angie Thomas continues,
‘I think it’s even more important to let young people know that they aren’t alone in their frustration, fear, anger and sadness… my ultimate hope is that every single person who reads The Hate U Give walks away from it understanding those feelings and sharing them in some way.’
Amen to that.
Floralia 