Imani Perry teaches at Harvard University and is the author of “South to America“, an exploration of the blending of genres in the American South and, more recently, “Black in blues“, a critical assessment of the role of the color blue in the black imagination. She recently joined us to discuss a selection of historical, experimental books about black life, books that teach us “how to create something beautiful and sustainable, and to never give up a sense of the value of our existence in society, or in everything.” Intimate relationships that are so important to life, even when they can be easily torn apart, have been edited and intensified.
Start again
Written by Eddie S. son skins.
There is a conventional wisdom that the James Baldwin of the 1970s and 1980s Baldwin was in decline, that the peak of his literary abilities had ended, and that he was on the verge of collapse. What this book does is say: No, something else happened. Baldwin faced the deaths of some people—including Medgar Evers, Malcolm This produced a kind of fragmentation – a sense of wound – that made its way into his compositions.
Part of the reason I love this book is that a lot of the takes on James Baldwin treat him as just an icon. Like Octavia Butler, Baldwin is someone who is often quoted in a diagnostic manner. But here, Baldwin is seen as a kind of walking partner, someone who accompanies you across the contemporary landscape, to think alongside you while confronting questions like, well, what do we do? How do we confront the constant heartbreak that is part of what it means to live as a Black American?
To achieve complete disability
By Robin Cost Lewis
This book came about after Lois found a bag of photographs under her grandmother’s bed – some photographs scattered throughout the text, which is mostly poetry, with some prose. The book is actually a document about the migration of her family, who were part of the migration of blacks from Louisiana to Los Angeles.
The way Lewis writes about bodies and selves and brings up people who were absent or lost along the way is really profound for me. The other reason I find this book so powerful is that it is, of course, a story of displacement and horror and violence, but it’s also a story of homemaking in the face of those things. In the middle, there’s a poem about Arctic explorer Matthew Henson. I read it as an analogy, portraying Henson as a black explorer who sets out into the frozen landscape to try to make a life there. The book truly portrays movement as something terrifying, sublime, and hopeful.
Rooted
By Priya Baker
In some ways, this book is a primer on the history of land theft and its relationship to both Black and Native Americans. Becker thinks about it in the context of settler colonialism, legal tactics such as adverse possession — through which the government essentially seized land owned by black families — failed Reconstruction-era promises, and deception. Baker also turns to Southern black culture, which places great value on land ownership, not because of some desire for accumulation or control, but because of the way land makes possible relationships, homes, and families. She talks about the history of her ancestors in North Carolina, who lost their land, and then follows her story with her wife and their family. I think the book balances itself very well between criticizing Western notions of property, on the one hand, and thinking about how owning property, in a society organized around property, allows you to imagine your life differently. .
Standing at my window
By Latonya Yvette
This is a kind of hybrid diary, which contains beautiful pictures. Much of it is about Yvette building a house on the Hudson that will serve as a haven for artists at the same time as she is receiving an eviction notice — which she is fighting — at her home in New York. It also includes reflections on the sense of home she inherited from her family. As a child, her family was very transient, due to poverty, but she talks about how she watched her parents create beauty in their homes even when those homes weren’t necessarily stable.
One thing that catches my attention in this book is how she talks about things like decorating the table, and at what time to gather people around to eat. It reminded me of the rituals my grandmother maintained in the face of Jim Crow. We still need this kind of ritual. In a way, I feel like that’s the perpetual question for me: What is the usable past, in terms of these rituals? In terms of ways of thinking and ways of being?
