Stay with Me

Stay with Me by Ayòbámi Adébáyò

This is a book that I had been wanting to pick up for a few months now, and it was also super great to purchase it from one of my new favorite local book stores. It’s a a cozy little spot complete with a resident cat, and every time I go there it lifts my spirit. I feel at home. So there were already great vibes surrounding this title before I even opened it to read. But when I did… I was wrapped into a complicated and intimate portrayal of a marriage that was full of unexpected surprises. Sorry folks — spoilers ahead.

Set in Nigeria and spanning several decades, this is a love story that becomes distended with depths of deceit, betrayal, and loss while also interrogating the patriarchal concept that places the full weight of fertility on women within traditional African communities. Yejide and Akin met and fell in love while Yejide was still in univeristy. One of the immediate non-negotiable factors of their relationship is that Yejide refuses to be a part of a polygamist household; she was the only child of her father’s third wife, and she suffered because of the complicated dynamics of her family. But after four years of childless marriage, she finds that a second wife named Funmi has been forced on her by Akin and their conniving extended family. Yejide is livid and enraged. The pressure to get pregnant ascends to a new level as Yejide knows that the only way to get rid of this other woman is to become pregnant before her. She eventually succeeds in this, but the price of each pregnancy is greater than the last. Each of her children are born with sickle cell disease, which in the 1980s was almost always a childhood death sentence.

An aspect that I particularly enjoyed about this story is that husband and wife each tell this tale, and we receive a much fuller picture of their life together as a result. Through Akin’s eyes we discover that he has laid a precarious plot with his brother, Dotun, to get Yejide pregnant when he becomes privately aware that it is he who is the reason they cannot conceive. Akin convinces Dotun to seduce his own wife so that she might get pregnant by him rather than be honest about his own incompetence. Yejide bears three children in this manner, but there is a grave, fatal flaw in Akin’s plan. It is his brother, Dotun, that carries the active sickle cell trait. Because of sickle cell, two of Yejide and Akin’s children die in early childhood, and Yejide is so certain of the eventual death of the third that she is reluctant to exert the same motherly energy and love that she did on the others on a child she will eventually lose as well. She names her, Rotimi, meaning stay with me.

When Yejide finally learns the truth of Akin’s deception, she withdraws from their marriage, but remains in their home for Rotimi. She makes a bold decision and shifts much of the responsibility of caring for the child onto Akin. Considering the weight that tradition carries in the their relationship, it is very significant that she choses to “neglect” some of her motherly duties and force her husband to meanfully engage in childcare. Rotimi eventually falls gravely ill while on a trip with Akin, and when Yejide finds out, she decides to leave and not return to her home with Akin.

I mentioned at the top that this book interrogates the patriarchy in traditional African communities. Akin has known since before he married Yejide that he has a genital issue. His infertility was confirmed by a doctor when they were both tested, and yet he concealed this information from Yejide and his family because it was an unfathomable shame for a man to be unable to produce children. Instead of upholding the partnership of his marriage, he allowed the weight of their childlessness to rest squarely on Yejide’s naive shoulders. I use the world naive specifically because, Yejide was intentional about maintaining her virginity until marriage in order to combat her step-mothers’ belief that she would end up a common whore like they considered her mother. It’s probably an overreach to say she knew nothing about sex, but she was ignorant enough to be fooled by Akin for a very long time. Funmi, Akin’s second wife, was not so easily fooled. She was not a virgin as Yejide had been. (Read the book to find out the depths to which Akin was willing to go to conceal his truth!) The idea (that persists in America today as well) that sex is something that is done to women instead of something in which we are active participants is what drove Yejide to remain silent about what even she knew was strange about she and Akin’s sex life. Honestly, for me, it’s a hole in her character development that she doesn’t begin to have questions about how she spends one weekend with Dotun and becomes pregnant after years of sleeping with her husband and no pregnancy.

Regardless, the end of the book though, is my favorite part. It was truly unexpected, and I enjoyed that the author was able to thwart my intuition and surprise me. You should read Stay with Me not simply to find out how the story ends, but to discover a story that shocked me with it’s complexity and depth and will leave you pondering it long after you’ve read the last page.

Have you read this book? If so, what did you think of it? Let’s chat in the comments below!

 

Children of Blood and Bone

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

This is one of those books that you accidentally stay up until 3 am reading because you can’t put it down so I’m going to do my best to review it without too many spoilers.

Tomi Adeyemi has crafted an incredible work of Afro-centric science fiction the likes of which I have never encountered before. She weaves West African deities and traditions into an incredible story about magic weilding Magi and a world that has rejected magic out of fear of it’s limitless power. The King of Orisha, Saran, saw his first family killed by magic because his father sought to bring together kosidian (people who do not have magic) and Magi, and led an bloodlust Reaping of all those Magi whose powers had already manifested. Saran’s reaping seems to sever Orisha’s ties with the gods and leaves the land purged of magic. Our story begins many years after the reaping with Zélie, whose mother was a Reaper Magi who was killed by Saran’s soldiers. She carries the white hair that marks those with Magi potential, but her powers are not present.

Zélie is a fierce and competitive girl. She strives to be the best at everything she does, and yet she’s constantly plagued by feeling out of place. She makes a lot of mistakes that sometimes put the people she loves in danger, and she carries a lot of guilt and fear throughout the piece. After a near fatal incident, her father sends her and her brother Tzain to Lagos to sell some rare fish so that they can pay their taxes, and her world is changed forever when she is called to help a stranger escape from danger. That stranger turns out to be Amari, Princess of Orisha. From there, launches an incredible journey to restore magic to Orisha.

What I love about this book is that Adeyemi switches perspectives between Zélie, Amari, and Inan, the Prince of Orisha who is chasing them. In this way she is able to develop fully embodied, unique characters with their own motivations and internal motivators. We get a much fuller story because we get input from the major characters. We see how Princess Amari is drawn to the purpose of their journey to avenge the death of her friend and servant, Bintu, after she dies at Saran’s hands. She firmly believes in the power of magic and how the magi have been mercilessly wronged by her father. We also see how Inan is plagued when he suddenly discovers his own magic abilities  — he is torn betwee his duty to keep Orisha “safe” from magic and the maji and the fact that to do so would be to kill off a part of himself. We follow each character as they grow into their strengths and  overcome obstacles that finally bring them all face to face in one penultimate battle for the last chance that Zélie has to return magic to Orisha.

This book has a beautiful sense of place. What makes J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings series so enrapturing is that this world is so well-crafted it feels like you can fall through the pages and find yourself in a Hobbit hole. Adeyemi does this well in Children of Blood and Bone also. I see in my mind’s eye the bustling market in Lagos, the desperation of the slaves in Gombe, and the sparkling of the water in Ilorin where Zélie is from. These details shore up my belief in the story that I am reading, and that’s why I found myself up in the middle of the night having to coax myself away from reading just one more chapter.

Rumor has it that the rights to make this book a film have already been purchased; if so, I cannot wait to see this kind of Afro-centric science fiction on the big screen. It’ll be like Black Panther, only better because I’ll have actually read the book that goes along with it! We need more books like this where we see Black girls and boys weilding magic, defying the odds, and going on fantastical adventures into realms unknown. Adeyemi wrote this children for the Black men, women, and children who won’t have an opportunity to imagine the world a better place because racist American institutions took it away from them. She writes in her Author’s Note:

“We are all children of blood and bone.

And just like Zélie and Amari, we have the power to change the evils in the world.

We’ve been knocked down for far too long.

Now let’s rise.” (pg. 527)

You should read this book (and give it to the children in your life to read!) because it opens your eyes to what Black imagination looks like. We should have the space to imagine ourselves in every way possible. Science fiction is not a genre reserved for people who do not look like us; I’ve never considered any of the faeries or wizards I’ve read about in my youth could have been Black like me. In Children of Blood and Bone, Tomi Adeyemi reminds us that we can be anything.

Have you read this book yet? Are you excited for the release of the sequel in 2019? (YES A SEQUEL!!!) Let’s chat in the comments below!

White Teeth

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

It took me a really long time to read this book… or should I say “tome.” My copy of it is 448 pages long in what has to be 10 point font. I think I picked it up for the first time about a month ago, and then had to start over again when I decided to really read it. Plodding is a great way to describe my interaction with this book. It was nothing like what I expected it to be after reading and immensely enjoying Swing Time but I shouldn’t be suprised by that because it was published first. White Teeth follows the lives of two families (and their family’s families) in both the past and the present, and, set in London, ponders the unique experiences of immigrant families, race, class, religion, and identity. What begins as the sordid ordeal of a man named Archie Jones who is so unhappy and at a loss for direction and fulfillment that he very nearly commits suicide on New Years Eve unravels into a many threaded story of family that leaves you wondering what it is that makes us believe that we’re all so different from each other after all.

The night after his suicide attempt, Archie meets a beautiful (and toothless) Jamaican woman named Clara who is several years his junior, and under the influence of his only friend, a Bangladeshi man named Samad Iqbal who has just taken his own much younger wife, Alsana, he falls for her and they marry. Archie and Clara give birth to a girl named Irie; Samad and Alsana have twin boys named Magid and Millat.

I think a lot about how I believe that we are the sum of our experiences both past and present, ancestral and lived. That is central to this work; Smith devotes several chapters to outlining to the details of Irie, Magid, and Millat’s ancestors — Archie and Samad’s time in the Great War; Clara’s ordeals with her first love who was converted to Jehovah’s Witness by her mother, Hortense, after converting her away; Hortense’s birthing story in the midst of an earthquake; Samad’s brief but intense affair with one of his children’s teachers. Somehow, all of these things have an impact on the kids. Their struggle is with sorting through their own sense of identity and belonging while being a part of this big, messy, jumble of lifetimes. Near the end of the novel, this comes to a head for Irie as she rants about other families that are quieter and less dramatic:

“What a peaceful existence. What a joy their lives must be. They open a door and all they’ve got behind it is a bathroom or a living room. Just neutral spaces. And not this endless maze of present rooms and past rooms and the things said in them years ago and everybody’s old historical shit all over the place” (pg. 426).

Both Clara’s and Samad and Alsana’s families immigrated to London from Jamaica and Bangladesh, respectively, and Smith remarks a few times without the story how much immigrants keep. They carry the history of their past lives in thier attics and kitchen cabinets. Samad never gets rid of anything. As parents, these characters pressure their children to live up to the ideas that they have of them. Caught between the insecurity of adolesence and a never ending cloud of the past, it’s not suprising there’s a great deal of conflict here.

I put this quote up on my Instagram page a while ago, but to read it in context here gives it increased weight:

“But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to spread the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect” (pg. 448).

The story comes full circle because it ends as it began with Archie facing death on New Years Eve, stepping in front of one of Samad’s son’s bullets. We get a fast-forwarded dream sequence of what the future could be from Archie’s imagination. If you read the whole book, you’ll see how it most certainly is a tall tale. But it also illuminates the idea that these parents have of their children being their opportunity to correct all their past mistakes and usher in new future.

I want to say that the book is titled White Teeth as a signifier to the one thing that all people have in common — teeth. But that seems a but to trite and on the nose… So, I’ll be honest and say I don’t really know. Teeth do come up here and there throughout the text, I mean Clara has no top teeth and eventually uses dentures to hide this fact, but it’s not immediately apparent what this means as a motif in the story. Perhaps you can tell me what you think?

Past and present are tethered to us all. White Teeth unravels the history of the Jones and Iqbal families and leaves you pondering the baggage you may be carrying from your own bloodlines. I may have plodded through, but at it’s conclusion, I think all the history and context were necessary. It frames the present more clearly.

Have you read this book? If so, tell me what you thought! I want to know if everyone else struggled to keep pace like me. Let’s chat in the comments below!

 

Reading and Discussion Guide: What We Lose

What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons

Wow. This is Clemmons’ debut novel, and if this is her just getting started, I can’t wait to see what the future holds for her. Told through a series of short vignettes, this story is aptly titled. I felt the entire time that I was reading that I had been dropped into the middle of something, and that something important had been left out. I don’t mean this in a negative sense, rather, it adds to the overall emotion of the book. Thandi, the main character, loses her mother to cancer, and we are taken with her as she struggles with the depth of that loss. Grief is a tricky thing, and her grieving process is long and ever-changing. She finds herself in an precarious situation with Peter, her “lover,” as she introduces him in the text, and the outcomes of that relationship are forever marked by it and their response to it. After the death of her mother, her relationships with friends and family are different; her life goals and drive are called into question. Throughout the novel,Thandi also grapples with questions of identity and belonging. She identifies one way in America and another in South Africa where her mother is from. She’s really the same thing — a light skinned black woman — in either place but that carries a different social and cultural weight in South Africa than it does in the US. In this book, Zinzi Clemmons challenges us to consider: What do we lose when we lose a loved one? It’s more than simply that person’s physical presence in our lives… it’s everything as we had come to know it.

Reading and Discussion Guide 

• Consider your own experiences with loss. What does loss feel like? How do process grief? Do you relate to Thandi’s reaction to the loss of her mother?
• Storytelling is an art. Clemmons’ choice to unfold this one via vignettes that span time without always clueing the reader in to as when they take place was a particularly potent one. Some vignettes are only a single line and almost as if they were lines from Thandi’s journal; others are longer tellings of a trip back to South Africa or how she met Peter. Sometimes there are pictures and graphs or diagrams. What was that experience like for you? I found it to be destablizing much like the way that a major loss is destabalizing so it worked for me.
• While this book might seem slim and unassuming at first glance, as we read, we find that Clemmons wraps a great deal around the central question of loss: friendship, racial identity, racism, family, community, love and relationships, and pregnancy to name a few. Were you able to follow the many threads of the story? Or did you feel that you were left unable to connect the threads into one continuous story?
• Thandi poses this question:
  

  “But why do ‘African’ and ‘contemporary’ have to be incomensurate? Why (and to whom) is it appealing to think you are in another city besides the one, in Africa, that you are in?” (pg. 131)

  How would you answer this? I think about the way in which the only image that still to many Americans have of Africa is that of naked people living in huts. But I also wonder how colonization and the encroaching of Western ideals on the continent has impacted the way in which countries like South Africa have tried to advance.

• Racial identity is a large concept that that Thandi wrestles with throughout the story. Light-skinnedness is to esteemed in South Africa; her cousins tell her not to call herself “black.” Her school friends don’t think of her as a “real” black person. Her mother warns her that dark-skinned black women will always be jealous of her. Thandi says:
  

  “I’ve often thought that being a light-skinned black owman is like being a well-dressed person who is also homeless. You may be able to pass in mainstream society, appearing acceptable to others, even desired. But in reality you have nowhere to rest, nowhere to feel safe.” (pg. 31).

  I’ve never considered this as an idea. It seems to not take into account the way that colorism has functioned in the US for centuries now. Even today, as dark-skinned black women have made some inroads to being seen as equally beautiful and desirable, the damage has already been done and will take many years of intentional work to repair. What do you think of Thandi’s statement? Does this align with your own lived experiences if you are a light-skinned black woman?

I hope you find this guide helpful in taking in What We Lose. Grab a friend and talk about it! I really enjoyed this book, and I hope you will too! Let me know what you think in the comments below!

 

 

 

Reading and Discussion Guide: When They Call You a Terrorist

When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele

This was such a spectacular read. I don’t mean that in the flippant casual sense…  it was a book that hurt me to read, that triggered my own sense of fear for the folks that I could lose at the hands of police violence. There were moments that were beautiful and tender, juxtaposed by the stories of what should be unconsciounable and unimaginable harm and neglect being done to the people whom Patrisse loved most in the world.  Neglect — that is the overwhelming sense I  gathered from this book. Patrisse, her brothers, and the community all around them in Los Angeles were simultaneously left to find their own way in a world that was built to destroy them. This is a country that does not allow room for black folks, and Black men in particular, to be anything less than perfect. There is no room for mental illness or instability or youthfulness or mistakes.

It is spot on to call this book a memoir; I did not expect such personal details from Patrisse’s life. She brings us into her story at early childhood, and we follow her to present day. It was insightful to see how closely Black Lives Matter as a political network is an outgrowth of her own lived experiences and is thus even more necessary. I expected it to be wholly a book about the creation of BLM… and in a sense, I suppose that it was. Her life is what led her to create this network alongside Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi.

Reading and Discussion Guide:

• Consider your own history with the police. Have they occupied a space of protecting and serving in your community? Or, did they incite terror and fear in your life and the lives of your loved ones? This line from the text rocked me to my core:

…torture is always intentional. It is always premeditated. It is planned out and its purpose is to deliberately and systematically dismantle a person’s identity and humanity. It is designed to destroy a sense of community and eliminate leaders and create a climate of fear. This is the definition used by the Center of Victims of Torture. In a sentence, torture is terrorism. (pg. 157)

• Patrisse returns time and time again to the issue of the American prison system being set up solely to punish, not to rehabilitate. Her biological father, Gabriel, was in and out of prison the entirety of their relationship as a result of his struggles with drug addiction. Monte, her brother was in and out of prison as he struggled with an undiagnosed schizoaffective disorder. The attrocities that Monte endured are inhumane and terrifying to consider. I can’t imagine how I would react to learn that a loved one had been forced to drink toilet water.
• Patrisse gives us a very intimate look at all facets of her life. The book is titled as a memoir after all, but sometimes I wondered if that perhaps took away from the overall impact of her work. But I’m simultaneously aware of that the whole of her lived experiences form the person she is today. What did you think about reading all of the intimate details of Patrise’s life? Did it add or take away from your reading experience?
  

  “Come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed.” — Lucille Clifton.

• The most powerful parts of the book for me was the opening. “I am a survivor. I am startdust.” I’ll leave you with that. You, Black woman, have stardust in your bones. That is our magic.

I’d love to know what you thought of this read. Let’s chat in the comments below! I hope you enjoyed June’s books! We’re going to get going next month with What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons and So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo. Get your books now!

 

 

Reading and Discussion Guide: Barracoon

Barracon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo by Zora Neale Hurston

What an incredible read. I was so excited to dive into this book, and Ms. Hurston did not let me down! In her foreward, Alice Walker calls it a “maestrapiece,” defined as “the feminine perspective or part of the structure, whether in stone or fancy, without which the entire edifice is a lie.” Walker writes an opening blessing over this work that primes you for the breadth and depth of the experience you are about to embark upon. Do not skip over it.

I feel as though this is a text that you need to sit with for some time. Even now, I find myself wanting to pick it back up again to dig through the pages for the things that I know I missed.

Below you’ll find a reading and discussion guide with some points from the text that especially stood out to me.

Reading and Discussion Guide

• Oral history is an important facet of maintaining and passing on African history. Hurtson positions Cudjo Lewis as a griot throughout the text. His recollection of the events of his life and those following his being sold into slavery are verified by other historical texts, and Hurston is quite confident in the veracity of his stories. Consider the way history is preserved within your own family context.
• As is pointed out in the book, one of the most important things about printing and distributing Cudjo’s story is the fact that at the time of its writing, the world was inundated with stories from every perspective but that of the slave.  Hurston writes in her original introduction:

“All these words from the seller, but not one word from the sold. The Kings and Captains whose words moved ships. But not one word from the cargo. The thoughts of the ‘black ivory,’ the ‘coin of Africa,’ had no market value. Africa’s ambassadors to the New World have come and worked and died, and left their spoor, but no recorded thought” (pg. 6). 

Does this consideration make the experience of reading Cudjo Lewis’ story even more powerful for you?

• Cudjo spares no feelings in sharing that the events that brought him under bondage were done by his fellow Africans — the powerful Dahomey nation had made quite the business out of attacking other tribes who had slighted them, killing many and selling those who they let survive to the white men. This is a complicated and uncomfortable history for some Black Americans to accept. Alice Walker struggles with this in her foreward. Was this a painful history to read about for you? Have you heard about the practice of some African nations selling their captives to American and European slavers?
• Hurston returns time and time again to Cudjo’s loneliness. He had lost essentially his entire immediate family and his homeland, and the toll this has taken on him is quite evident. One of the most touching lines of the book was him describing how he felt without his wife.

De wife she de eyes to de man’s soul. How kin I see now, when I ain’ gottee de eyes no mo’?” (pg. 93).

• Part of the reason why the book was never published while Hurston was alive was because editors wanted her to rewrite the text “in language not in dialect” (pg. xxii). She refused, feeling that the story must be told in Cudjo’s own words and tone. Was the experience of reading in dialect difficult for you? Did it make Cudjo feel more or less believable to you? Why?

Barracoon was an incredibly powerful and important read. As someone who was raised to value and understand my own family history with slavery and white supremacy, it was amazing to hear the voice of someone who had the opportunity to be recorded unlike my ancestors. Hurston did a remarkable job of not overly projecting her thoughts and opinions onto Cudjo’s story, and Deborah G. Plant provides excellent supplementary information and materials. I am incredibly grateful for her editorial insight. You should read this book if you care to go back further than any of our school history books ever will and learn more about the history that America would prefer to forget.

Comment below with your thoughts and impressions! I can’t wait to hear from yall!

@LitBlkGrl Summer Reading Community

Hey ya’ll!

I am super excited to announce Literary Black Girl’s first ever reading community! Over the next three months, June through August, I invite you (and your friends!) to join me as we read and come together over two books monthly. We are going to read one fiction book and one nonfiction book each month, and I will develop a reading and discussion guide for you to use as you read. I’ll be posting here and on Instagram over the course of each month, and we can gather in the comments sections to share thoughts and takeaways.

Please join the official Summer Reading Challenge mailing list to have the reading and discussion guides sent to you via email. Subscribe here.

June’s books are Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neal Hurston and When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele.

I can’t wait to hear what you all gain from this summer’s reads! Let’s get to reading, ya’ll!

 

Sister Outsider

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde

We’re throwing it wayyyy back this week. If I’m honest, it’s mostly because I haven’t read anything new besides articles in the New Yorker and part of Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan (not by a woman of color, but I highly recommend it! It’s not at all what I expected it to be, and I’m super pumped to finish it before the movie comes out.) So I had to look over my bookshelf and landed upon one of my faves — thank the Lord for Audre, right?

This book is a compilation of essays, speeches and interviews, and really is a great primer on Black feminist theory and action as presented by Audre Lorde. If you read my review of How We Get Free edited by Kimberly Yemahtta-Taylor, you’ll know that Black feminist theory is something that I’m personally very interested in, and I was introduced to Audre Lorde in the same college course that brought me the Combahee River Collective Statement. I read several of her essays individually before I discovered this collection. The whole book is rich, but if I had to choose a few essays to pick out as favorite, there are two that have especially stood out to me as I have reread them over and over.

“The Master/s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” was originally comments made by Lorde at the “Personal and the Political Panel” at the Second Sex Conference in New York City in September of 1979. The title of the essay isn’t unfamiliar language to me, and you can probably use your critical thinking skills to parse out its meaning, but there are a few passages that are especially striking to me here where Lorde actually comes for some necks. For example:

“For the masters tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.” (pg. 112)

That last sentence is what grabs me. Lorde basically tells us that the only women who are going to be bothered by abandoning the master’s tools is the women who are actually trying to end up in the master’s house. The women who think that the goal of feminism is to achieving manhood.

My absolute favorite Audre Lorde piece is “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” At the time that I first read it, it completely revolutionized my understanding of my artistic purpose. She uses the word poetry, but I extrapolate that out to include all art.

The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us — the poet — whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom. (pg. 38).

It’s a commentary on the age old heart versus head argument, but what is most exciting to me here is that Lorde connects liberation to feeling, to fully allowing Black women to feel and express ourselves from that gut place of intuition that necessitates action.

You should read Sister Outsider because Audre Lorde is critical reading for understanding Black feminism broadly, but also because her way of writing and speaking is incredibly insightful, sharp and articulate. Much of her work was originally delivered in the 70s and 80s, but it just as timely and applicable now as it was then.

Have you heard of Audre Lorde before or read any of her work? Let me know what you think in the comments below!

 

My Soul Looks Back

My Soul Looks Back: A Memoir by Jessica B. Harris

James Baldwin has recently seen a resurgence in popularity thanks to young folks like Yara Shahidi who openly tout their love for him and his works as well as the most recent documentary about him called I Am Not Your Negro (10/10 would recommend, btw). Jessica B. Harris was a part of Baldwin’s New York circle in the 1970s, and while this book is about her life as a part (and outsider) of that circle, I was initially intrigued by the opportunity to gain another perspective on the great James Baldwin — and from a Black woman at that. Harris offers much more.

At the center of this book is friends and food. Harris shapes the text by following her relationship with Sam Clemens Floyd III, Baldwin’s best friend and, in many ways, the secondary centrifugal force that drives the group. As Harris finds herself enveloped in this group of friends that includes forces such as Maya Angelou and Nina Simone, she seems also to be navigating her own growth and transition into adulthood. She was quite young when she met Sam Floyd, and he was several years her senior.  She was also several years junior to almost all the members of the friend group, and in some ways, her youth distanced her from the others. They doubted her naiveté and how she got to be there. Clemens was popular among the ladies both in and out of their circle (and SPOILER ALERT — men, it comes to later be revealed), so Harris also found herself having the parse the competitive nature of being involved with him.

This is also a story of place. Harris describes New York City of the 70s as “the hub-over-the-universe city” (pg. 3). She goes on, “…the vitality of the friendships, the commitment to activism, and the joie de vivre of those heady days remain as palpable as the intertwined connective tissue of the lives that were lived then” (pg. 4). Of course this is a world traveling crew, so Harris’ story takes us to Paris and Haiti and throughout America, but she always lands back in New York. The city is central to the way that Harris and her friends exist — they have bars and restaurants that they frequent, expectations for weekend events, certain homes that often host dinner parties. The city is truly their oyster, and I can only imagine how exciting it must have been to be in James Baldwin and Maya Angelou’s court in the midst of thier heyday. She experienced a live reading of what would become If Beale Street Could Talk in a little cottage in the South of France with Jimmy, as she called him, and Sam, and once had a chance encounter with the already legendary Nina Simone.

Jessica Harris has gone on to become an accomplished chef and writer in her own rite, and at the conclusion of every chapter is a recipe for a dish that was either talked about or actually made in the story that Harris lays out. Food, what they ate where and when, and the atmosphere of the location serve as one of the driving factors of the text. She talks about how cooking brought her and Sam together, and the times that Maya Angelou cooked for huge dinner parties, and once, more intimately, just for her, at her home. In many ways the recipes tell a story as well, of the foods that remind Harris of her childhood home and their traditions; of the flavor of her young, complicated relationship with Sam; the taste of loss once the AIDS epidemic lay wreckage among her friends; of the fullness of coming into yourself; of the familiarity of returning home or to an old friend. I imagine if you cooked your way through them all as you read the book, you would have the most complete understanding and experience of this glimpse into Harris’ life.

I deeply enjoyed My Soul Looks Back because it remembers a time of Black life and imagination that gave us some of our greatest thinkers, artists and leaders. Jessica Harris is one of those; don’t let James Baldwin or Maya Angelou overshadow her. She deserves to be recognized and stand on her own merit. She has published twelve cookbooks that highlight the food and breadth of the African diaspora, and has numerous awards and accolades for her work in food history. You should read this book if you want to see a side of the life of Black New York’s finest and most esteemed that you’ve never seen before, and if you want to check out some amazing recipes that were cooked and enjoyed by those same folks.

Have you read My Soul Looks Back? What did you think? Let me know in the comments below!

 

Swing Time

Swing Time by Zadie Smith

I’ve been hearing about Zadie Smith for some time now, and Swing Time in particular over the last few months. She’s one of England’s premier authors, and I’m not quite sure how she escaped my voracious high school book appetite. I’m elated to have finally found her. I was pleasantly suprised when my local library had it (I live in an ultra-white, ultra-suburban part of America currently), and I was able to put it on hold and pick it up all in the same day. The feel and look of the book in my hand put me back in the mindset of my middle and high school summers where I would spend an hour at the libary weekly, scouring the shelves for books to add to the stack that was too big for my arms to carry. It’s a big book, over 400 pages, and I was so excited to dig into a nice lengthy read for the first time in a long time.

As a dancer, I was so excited when I opened the cover, and read on the inside flap, “Two brown girls dream of being dancers…” I don’t read many books about brown girls who do what I do, and I looked forward to seeing how this story unfolded. One thing I especially loved was how Zadie Smith included so much dance history in the text — she reached back to the beginnings of tap dancing by the Irish and the Black slave boys who were forced to dance on harbors, tracing it to the start of Black hoofers in the early 1920s, to Cab Calloway and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and even delves into minstrelsy with Fred Astaire blacking up in the movie Swing Time. I didn’t learn about the Black roots of tap dancing until I was in college, and it was apparent that Smith did her work here. She also puts my two dual interests — choreography/performance and Black dance theory — into two discreet bodies. Tracey is the dancer with talent and her friend, the nameless narrator of the book, is the one who lacks talent but has all the ideas about dance and how it fits into the rest of the world.

I sat down to write this review, and suddenly realized that I didn’t know the narrator’s name. I flipped through the book, wondering if I had been careless in my reading, but no, she’s not named anywhere. This is such an interesting choice when you consider how much naming a thing (or person) defines it, grounds it, gives it finite feeling and limits. So much of the narrator is undefined, and we can only try to understand her motivations or her actions as we see how they impact the acutely defined people around her — Tracey, the narrator’s childhood friend, is boistrous, willful and deviant; Aimee is the mega popstar for whom the narrator finds herself working; and her mother is an Afro-Carribean feminist, scholar, activist and politician who’s influence has a profound impact on her daughter’s point of view — who are all named and given solid places in the text.

So much of this book is about identity and how growing up seems to be a life long process. Our narrator struggles with questions about her blackness as a biracial person of Jamaican heritage; she marvels at the similarities in her and Tracey’s complexions, but the complete difference in every other aspect of their lives. Even as she leaves her childhood neighborhood and takes off all over the world with Aimee, the narrator is often short sighted in how her actions affect others and in her perception of the world. She seems to lose herself in the world of working for Aimee, as her mother warned she would, and when things don’t turn out the way she wants them too, she makes brash, childish decisions. Despite that, I spent the whole time rooting for her; I genuinely wanted her to figure her life out… some therapy probably would have been extremely helpful for her.

Time itself is quite fluid throughout the novel as well. The author swings (hehe) back and forth between the narrators present and her past. In many ways, the trips back into the past seem to help provide a frame work in which to understand the present. Throughout, the narrator seems to be connecting her present day circumstances — her job, her love life (or lack thereof), her relationship with her mother — to her childhood relationship with Tracey. Really, the comparison she makes between the two of them starts from the very beginning of the text.

I read the final pages in a frenzy, hoping for a resolution that would help me understand our narrator just a bit more, and I was not to be rewarded. I think that Smith asks us to understand the meaning that lies just below the surface of the final scene, but I haven’t quite figured it out yet. Nonetheless, something about finishing a book feeling like I haven’t put together all the pieces is actually a satifying feeling for me. In a way, it seems like the book lives on beyond the final page, and I can parse out its meaning for myself. To me, the best books aren’t always the ones tied up in nice, pretty little bows for you.

I love this book because I deeply respect the work the author put into crafting the story. You should read it because it’s historical and sharp and asks you to look beyond the surface. It requires you to actually read.

Have you read Swing Time? Or any other of Zadie Smith’s work? What did you think? Let me know in the comments below!