The Strangers by Ekow Eshun review – inside the minds of extraordinary Black men | History books

If there is one thing that all historians must make peace with, it is that it is hard, often impossible, to know how people in the past felt. Historical fiction has the upper hand in its ability to render the complex yet plausible emotions and motivations of historical figures. Categorised by the publisher as creative nonfiction, Ekow Eshun’s The Strangers is foremost a work of imagination that sits somewhere between history and fiction. In lyrical prose, it presents the lives of five Black men: Ira Aldridge, 19th-century actor and playwright; Matthew Henson, polar explorer; Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist and political philosopher; footballer Justin Fashanu; and Malcolm X. Through them, the book moves from the early-19th century to the late-20th. More connects these men than race. Eshun selects moments when each one is in an exile of some kind, geographically and emotionally far away from what they once knew, questioning their place in the world, estranged in some way from their previous life.

For all five, there is a long chapter that imagines how they experienced some of the most significant moments of their lives. These chapters are written mostly in the second person. As Eshun mentions in an author’s note, he wants to inhabit each man’s perspective – and allow us to. And it is effective. Each chapter is absorbing, no matter how much you already know. Captivated by New York theatre productions, Aldridge becomes an actor, only to be ridiculed in London by critics who believe that only white actors (in blackface) can truly perform the role of Othello. Outside the capital, though, Aldridge is hailed. From 1891, Henson travels with US naval officer Robert Peary for nearly two decades in a long quest to reach the north pole. The relationship between Henson and Peary, both similar in their refusal to let the Arctic climate defeat them, takes on the qualities of a psychodrama. In Eshun’s telling, Peary can never accept what Henson knows: the commander only survived these trips because of Henson’s skilled support and the formidable knowledge of their Inuit guides.

For Fanon, we get a glimpse of his tenure as a doctor in a psychiatric hospital in Blida, Algeria. As he develops more culturally sensitive therapies, he also comes to understand that, contrary to what he had been taught in Martinique, Frenchmen would never see him as one of them. Soon he is helping National Liberation Front fighters who are smuggled into his wards. We encounter Malcolm X in his final months, on his trip to Ghana months after his break with the Nation of Islam. Finally, Fashanu’s promising football career fizzles out under Brian Clough’s indifference toward him at Nottingham Forest and the stifling homophobia of Britain in the late-20th century.

Those accustomed to more traditional history writing may be tempted to check how closely Eshun hews to the biographies and memoirs he cites in the acknowledgments. But to fixate on the question of “truth” too much is to miss his point entirely. The historical record provides an all too limited view of Black life, especially before the 20th century. Barring enslaved people and some of their descendants from literacy kept people from cataloguing their lives in writing. When a state did not recognise Black people as entirely human, it also did not track them all that closely by name, nor did societies comfortable with excluding Black people from public life preserve their effects all that carefully. To insist, as Eshun does, that Black men’s inner lives demand our full attention requires going beyond the profound limits of the archive. The author may go further than many in his willingness to speculate, but many Black scholars and writers have long understood that creative imagining, whether in novels or in history, is an essential way to combat centuries of writing Black people out of European and American societies.

After each long chapter comes a shorter essay, where Eshun combines his own personal history with an eclectic exploration of Black history. In the essay that follows Aldridge’s chapter, for example, the author considers the Hereford Mappa Mundi, a medieval map that describes African and Asian groups as “monstrous races”, sketches out the final 20 years of David Oluwale’s life before he was found dead in Leeds’s River Aire, and recounts the time a journalist mistook him for a different Black man. Exploratory in nature, these essays at first seem like free association, and, for that alone, they are thrilling. Yet their cumulative effect is even greater. By the end, it is clear that Eshun has granted us temporary access into his own inner thoughts, in keeping with his encouragement for us to honour, through each man’s story, “the black interior”, a phrase he pulls from the Black American poet Elizabeth Alexander. It is a generous gift.

Christienna Fryar’s Entangled Lands: A Caribbean History of Britain will be published by Allen Lane next year