I’m trying to veer away from list blog posts like this and into more stream-of-consciousness discourse but I think that it’s important that I share what I’ve read this past month give or take a few days) because I don’t believe there’s always a genre diverse array of reading resources that are shared during or after Black History Month – often I see the same five books that are either YA or centered on Black Pain. While one or two of these books cover or struggle with Black Pain, the focus in the books I read tends toward hope, discovering black voices, or building a ‘black’ future. Quite a few of them also tend toward the histories, which was a neat but unintentional tie into Black History Month.

I haven’t intentionally chosen books that are obscure or something of the sort, these are books that drew me because of their covers, names, recommendations from other black readers, or because I stumbled onto from some other miscellaneous source. Within these books there are a few classics, as well as some nonfiction, fiction, graphic novels, essays, and speeches. Some I read for pleasure, others for education, and though my reasons for reading them may’ve been different, I came out of these books a wiser reader, writer and companion.

This month I focused on the lived experiences of other black women, a trend that I will probably continue in the rest of the year, and these books reflect that, but among these books are also a few that I read because I wouldn’t’ve normally chosen to or because I liked the authors’ other works. I know my lived experience, and the lived experience of some of my contemporaries but to reach back into the Black American past (as I attempt to do in some of my analysis or stories as a writer) is a realm in which a vast majority of my education over my lifetime was not focused – though not for lack of trying on my mother’s part. The films and the stories I want to make and that I currently make not only rely on my openness to the past but also to varied experiences and POVs.

I hope you enjoy hearing my thoughts on a few of these books and support a few (or all) of the authors I’ve featured in my list below.

Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture by Ytasha L. Womack

FINISHED | ★★★★★ | NON FICTION

This book was phenomenal and thought provoking. Womack explored the ideas and reaches of Afrofuturism across multiple mediums from music to comic books to books.

The idea of using sci-fi and speculative fiction to spur social change, to reexamine race, and to explore self-expression for people of color, then, is clearly nothing new. The black visionaries of the past who sought to alleviate the debilitating system and end the racial divide used these genres as devices to articulate their issues and visions.

YTASHA L. WOMACK
[Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture]

Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation by Damian Duffy (Adapted by), Octavia E. Butler, John Jennings

FINISHED | ★★★★★ | FICTION, GRAPHIC NOVEL

This book broke my heart. I think it would do me well to read it in it’s original medium as the graphic novel format disconnected me a bit from the story (because of how I visualize as I read), but the story was still heartbreaking and scary.

I don’t have much more to say on this book that won’t spoil the story but I highly recommend reading this book – make sure you’re in a decent headspace beforehand, though.

Dear Ijeawele; or, A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

FINISHED | ★★★★★ | NON FICTION

I technically finished Dear Ijeawele right before Black History Month because I read it in one sitting – but I’m still including it because I intended to finish it this month. As you may surmise from my having finished this book so quickly: it was not only phenomenal but also easy to digest. I found myself agreeing with and engaging well with a lot of points and commentary that Adichie made as she wrote, some she boiled down in ways I’d never thought of before and brought in a perspective I’ve never heard before.

Tell Chizalum that women actually don’t need to be championed and revered; they just need to be treated as equal human beings.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [DEAR IJEAWELE; OR, A FEMINIST MANIFESTO IN FIFTEEN SUGGESTIONS]

Overall, this book is another book I would recommend to someone just entering the space of feminism or womanism as an easy yet challenging primer to some talking points and what feminists seek to be.

Passing by Nella Larson

FINISHED | ★★★★☆ | CLASSIC

This story was a fascinating glimpse into the past and the phenomenon of passing and how being able to pass can affect the people who operate within it. The story was interesting to read, though I found the ending a bit odd (I definitely need to reread it I think to fully understand what happened there.). The power dynamics in color that I witnessed through this story were complicated and nuanced, yes they could pass but they were also often placed in dangerous circumstances because they were so ‘white’. It complicates the ways we think of white supremacy and racism moving and interacting through culture and with people without affecting colorism onto others of other skintones, something that can be hard to do outside of fiction and even within it.

She wished to find out about this hazardous business of “passing,” this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one’s chance in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly.

Nella Larson [Passing]

I also loved the techniques that Larson used to handle passing conversation and in that the passing of time. I don’t think I’ve seen before her unique usage of ellipses in paragraphs of dialogue, outside of maybe phone calls in more contemporary fiction. Often these techniques are instead used in quoting or paraphrasing other work and shortening it to fit an argument or for clarity.

The End of White World Supremacy: Four Speeches by Malcolm X, Imam Benjamin Karim

FINISHED | UNRATED | SPEECHES

I have a lot of thoughts about these speeches now and I had even more as I was reading this book. There’s a lot of conflict within me, though they hold each other in tension – I agree with some of X’s words, perhaps a majority, but there’s also his cult that saturates his speeches (of which he was a spokes person) and there’s vivid antisemitism that clings to some of his words.

I also read his speeches as a woman far outside of his time, having lived in the present wherein which the past holds two more drug wars, recessions, and our first black president (against whom the blowback was intense, hello trump and the tea party/republican party, and full of racist vitriol). I also view his words through the eyes of some modern race and womanist academia. When I first saw his words on black supremacy, I assumed in my viewpoint of his words, the sliding american social scale between whiteness and blackness and contemplated how the creation of ‘black supremacy’ may balance out the ravaging white supremacy, but I also asked myself how would that affect those in between.¹ In his speeches I was also able to note some of the same logical fallacies that I see many religious leaders fall into – they look ludicrous through some of his words but yet he is making the very faulty same arguments, and at times I laughed at the irony of him making those very arguments to argue against chief religions and social hierarchies that use them. Was that intentional or did he not even realize? Was he arguing to extend the banner of what/who is considered black and what does that mean for how we view blackness’ construct in America in the present and the future?

If God’s unchanging laws of justice caught up with every one of the slave empires of the past, how dare you think White America can escape the harvest of unjust seeds planted by her white forefathers against our black forefathers here in this land of slavery

MALCOM X

As I parsed through his words I found chief areas of agreement but as I said on twitter, as I was reading the speeches, I also found a lot of moments where I was genuinely just like ‘what the fuck’.

Ain’t I a Womanist, Too? Third Wave Womanist Religious Thought by Monica A Coleman

FINISHED |★★★★★ | NON FICTION, ESSAYS

As womanist thought flourishes under the hands of its caretakers it expands in its meanings and its application for persons reading, writing and utilizing it. In ‘Ain’t I a Womanist, Too?’ Coleman ponders what it meant to be a womanist through the question ‘ain’t I a Womanist, Too?’ and how the meaning is changing. She then brings in various thinkers and writers who expand on what womanism means to them, their communities and the wider world.

The books holds within it an eclectic variety of essays that discuss, deconstruct and reconstruct topics from modern Muslim plural marriage to ‘monolithic’ black culture to rap and house music.

Third wave womanist religious thought bridges religious studies, women’s studies, queer studies, ethnic studies, theory, media studies, peace studies, ecology, sustainability studies, even futurism, and brings together divergent thought communities in an artful and alchemical act of synthesis. But, stated differently, what it really does is just talk about life with a candor and realness that one only finds when one lets down the guard of the academic walls…

Layli Maparyan [AIn’t I a Womanist, too? , Foreword]

This book took a little longer to read than I thought it would as some essays were easier to understand or read than others but I enjoyed the variety of contemplation that I saw within the book and the contemplations it has fostered within me. It was interesting to note the similarities between ‘queering’ theory and thought, and womanist thought as well as their differences in handling subjects and advancing discourse.

Highly recommend so long as you have prior understanding of or knowledge within womanism in particular.

An Introduction to Womanist Biblical Interpretation by Nyasha Junior

CURRENTLY-READING | NON FICTION

I expected to be much further through An Introduction to Womanist Biblical Interpretation as I’m polishing up this blog post, but time is what it is and the past has unfolded differently than I planned. As I have not yet finished the book I don’t yet have comprehensive and pondered thoughts to toss your way but, so far the knowledge I had gleaned from this introductory book has been priceless, especially as I stumbled into womanism and womanist thought in a bit of a backwards manner (through an intensive biblical commentary). There are blanks that I knew of and some that I wasn’t that are being filled in under Junior’s thorough exposition.

I also enjoy the manner through which she first brings the reader back through history to explore the roots of a movement that only recently gained a name and some of her gentle rebukes and queries of language and thought surrounding social justice and political history that we sometimes take for granted.

Light Ahead for the Negro by Edward Austin Johnson

FINISHED | ★★★☆☆ | CLASSIC

I went back in forth in deliberation over how to rate this novel. The story is fascinating in the political and socioeconomic issues it discusses and theorizes, for a quick example that comes to mind: Johnson seems to think that 3 year post high-school equitably funded government boarding schools (essentially, colleges) would be a wonderful investment of the government’s money rather than prison systems and he supposes that they’ll make a far greater positive impact. However Johnsons characters are all one dimensional, seemingly there to state and introduce his beliefs instead of follow or advance any sort of plot. The books pacing veers wildly back and forth from long dialogues, essays, and small bits of narrative. It’s fascinating but not good. He also tacked on a random odd romance with his only female character and has appeared to have forgotten women in general in his book and the designs it exhorts for the advancement of the ‘negro problem’ and the future of the US government.

“It is wonderful how tolerant the people of the world have been in respect to bad government. No group of business men would have allowed its directors to spend the company’s earnings in the way the rulers of the world have done from time immemorial. America has overlooked many of these points because of the unlimited opportunities here for money making—let the high tide of prosperity once ebb and then these defects become apparent!”

Edward Austin Johnson [LIGHT AHEAD FOR THE NEGRO]

If I could, I think I would rate this book three and a half stars. It’s by no means good by modern standards however he posits fascinating political theories and makes excellent points on partisanship and politicians.

All Labor Has Dignity by Martin Luther King Jr

CURRENTLY-READING | NON FICTION

All Labor Has Dignity is another of the handful of books in this post that I’m still in the processes of finishing, but unlike others my thought are a little more collected as I knew what I wanted to receive and piece together from this book.

I wanted to meet the whitewashed Martin Luther King Jr who had more to say than ‘I had a dream…’. I wanted to hear his thoughts on reform, unionization and government programs. I wanted to analyze the similarities and the ebb and flow of his speeches, like – as I’m coming to learn – the way that he begins and ends many of his labor speeches in this book in a similar manner.

But there are some things in our social system to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I suggest that you, too, ought to be maladjusted. I never intend to adjust myself to the viciousness of mob rule. I never intend to adjust myself to the evils of segregation and the crippling effects of discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic inequalities of an economic system which takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. I never intend to become adjusted to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating method of physical violence. I call upon you to be maladjusted.

… It may be that the salvation of the world lies in the hands of the maladjusted.

MARTin Luther Kind Jr

In the process I’ve gleaned truths, insights, excellent quotes to memorize and facets of rhetoric and politic to ponder in contrast with how far we’ve come and how far we’ve fallen short or behind since the days that King stood before labor unions and advanced the efforts of labor movements and racial justice movements to move together in one voice for the betterment of all persons. It was interesting to hear his fears – different and similar to ours – how they’ve come to past many times and how we failed to work through them as a nation, instead leaving people in the dust to fend wildly for themselves while proclaiming that it’s their faults that they’re where they are. I’m reminded of how every time we see broad movements for change and an unset of power in the US we also see a rise in hate groups (often under inconspicuous innocent sounding names) that in opposition hope to silence us through tactics of terror. And as I note that I wonder if he too noticed the pattern we’re witnessing again today. I wonder because he, unlike many of us today, seemed sure that the utter shamefulness of the oppressors actions would compel him to reverse his behaviors and change.

There’s sadness as I realize we’re still fighting the same fight. The rules have changed. Some things are different. Some things are worse. Some (perhaps even many) things are better. But we are still fighting for adequate housing, accessible and improved medical care, and better educational opportunities, among many other things. And the fight has exhausted us – it has exhausted generations. So it is hard to find the hope for justice served that he has seemed to found in himself and seeks to witness to others.

Women, Race, and Class by Angela Y Davis

CURRENTLY-READING | NON FICTION

Women, Race and Class has been a really helpful survey over the unique ways that race, class, and gender have compounded over history their effect on black women. I’ve been reading this book alongside Ain’t I a Womanist, Too? and Introduction to Womanist Biblical Interpretation which within them each carry small purviews of history from different perspectives.

When I finish this book I’m likely to have more thoughts, which you’ll probably be able to find on my Goodreads in a week or so, but so far I’m learning a lot from this book and enjoying the process. It’s not quite as emotionally wrenching as other historical surveys, though the content is at times just as terrifying, I believe because of Davis’ calm at times matter of fact manner of writing.

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Originally I had a few other books strew across this blog post, but as the days waned on I either didn’t have time to continue my readings or I didn’t have constructive thoughts on the pieces, so I hope you enjoyed my scaled down offerings – a few thoughts on a few books.

Note: I recommend reading Women, Race and Class, Introduction to Womanist Biblical Interpretation, and Ain’t I a Womanist, Too? Third Wave Womanist Religious Thought together. Compare notes and let the voices speak to each other and inform each other.