[24/05/19] Tentang Long Way Down Karya Jason Reynolds

A cannon. A strap.
A piece. A biscuit.
A burner. A heater.
A chopper. A gat.
A hammer
A tool
for RULE

Or, you can call it a gun. That’s what fifteen-year-old Will has shoved in the back waistband of his jeans. See, his brother Shawn was just murdered. And Will knows the rules. No crying. No snitching. Revenge. That’s where Will’s now heading, with that gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, the gun that was his brother’s gun. He gets on the elevator, seventh floor, stoked. He knows who he’s after. Or does he?

As the elevator stops on the sixth floor, on comes Buck. Buck, Will finds out, is who gave Shawn the gun before Will took the gun. Buck tells Will to check that the gun is even loaded. And that’s when Will sees that one bullet is missing. And the only one who could have fired Shawn’s gun was Shawn. Huh. Will didn’t know that Shawn had ever actually USED his gun. Bigger huh. BUCK IS DEAD. But Buck’s in the elevator?

Just as Will’s trying to think this through, the door to the next floor opens. A teenage girl gets on, waves away the smoke from Dead Buck’s cigarette. Will doesn’t know her, but she knew him. Knew. When they were eight. And stray bullets had cut through the playground, and Will had tried to cover her, but she was hit anyway, and so what she wants to know, on that fifth floor elevator stop, is, what if Will, Will with the gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, MISSES.

And so it goes, the whole long way down, as the elevator stops on each floor, and at each stop someone connected to his brother gets on to give Will a piece to a bigger story than the one he thinks he knows. A story that might never know an END…if Will gets off that elevator.

Told in short, fierce staccato narrative verse, Long Way Down is a fast and furious, dazzlingly brilliant look at teenage gun violence, as could only be told by Jason Reynolds.

 "I'm grateful that we didn't do the thing that we thought we were going to do," Reynolds says. "When you start to sort of work through those things and you come back to reality ... you're, like, 'Whoa, my entire life could have changed.' "

        The Rules
No.1: Crying
Don’t.
No matter what.
Don’t.
No. 2: Snitching
Don’t.
No matter what.
Don’t.
No. 3: Revenge
Do.
No matter what.
Do.

I am a consummate metaphor addict. In this book, because I chose to write it in verse, the natural inclination is to layer it. You can create all kinds of symbolism and metaphors that poetry and verse leans towards. So I wanted it to mimic what it feels like to be angry. What it feels like to be traumatized and pained. What it feels like is claustrophobia. It feels like is tightness and coldness, steel, jagged movements and vertigo. All the things that an elevator brings is what it feels like to be that angry.

I need my young brothers who are living in these environments, I need the kids who are not living in these environments to have no excuses not to read the book. The truth of the matter is that I recognize that I write prose, and I love prose, and I want everybody to read prose, but I'm also not — I would never, sort of, deny the fact that like, literacy in America is not the highest, especially amongst young men, especially amongst young men of color. It's something that we've all been working very hard on, and my job is not to sort of critique or judge that. My job is to do something to help that, and to know you can finish this in 45 minutes means the world to me, so that we can get more young people reading it and thinking and having discussion about what this book is actually about.