THE STRANGERS

An agile group biography of five remarkable figures in world history, some famous and some comparatively unknown.

British writer and curator Eshun delivers engaging lives of five Black men who each “strove to reach beyond the constraints of race to assert himself as fully human, fully alive.” Perhaps the best known is Matthew Henson, the Arctic explorer, whom, as with his other subjects, Eshun addresses directly: “You were working at Steinmetz and Sons, a haberdasher’s on G Street in Washington DC, when Lieutenant Peary came into the store.” It was to Robert Peary’s great fortune that the level-headed Henson was alongside, for Peary himself, Eshun notes, was given to jealousy, craved recognition to the point of narcissism, and sought fame—all qualities that Henson lacked, ending his days “working in obscurity as a clerk at the US Customs House in New York.” Much less known is the actor Ira Aldridge, among the foremost interpreters of Shakespeare on the early-19th-century stage. “Maybe acting is not like winning a prize at school for declaiming the loudest,” Eshun writes of his subtle work. “Perhaps it is more like silencing the room with your whispering voice.” Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X come in for fresh examination, as does Justin Fashanu, a brilliant footballer who was the first openly gay soccer player in British sport and who, tragically, took his own life in 1998, having endured indignities such as having to dress in a separate room from the rest of his club. Eshun examines these men with an eye toward placing them, in Toni Morrison’s formulation, as subjects and not objects of history, “to move from looking at the Black male figure to seeing as him.” Plenty of other historical figures populate his pages along the way, from James Baldwin and Henry “Box” Brown to Tupac Shakur and Olaudah Equiano.

An inventive approach to Black lives that brings five—and many more—figures out of the shadows.