The last few weeks have been extremely difficult for black people are across the world, especially those of us who have been tuned in to social media. It becomes painful, yet necessary, to stand in solidarity with all resisting State violence in Jamaica, and racist carceral system in Minneapolis, USA.
We've put together a reading list of seven books that questions our positionality as black people in the world, imagines where we have been and where we can go and provides a space for much-needed healing.
This list reflects on the history of black life, politics, culture, and struggle; and reading that reminds us to engage every day with that history as we do the work of building a resistance movement.
Questioning
Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis
Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis
“The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the prison performs—it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.”
In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration", and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole. This book is pivotal, enlightening and devastating. It’s one of those short books I keep coming back to to understand that State power, and a top-down justice approach is non-existent.
Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon
Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon
“I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos -- and the white man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis Armstrong or songs from the Congo. I am black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a drop of sun under the earth.”
Warning: Fanon, despite his brilliance at race critique, is very misogynistic and homophobic so while this book is brilliant and a must-read but proceed with caution.
In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon shares his own experiences in addition to presenting a historical critique of the effects of racism and dehumanization, inherent in situations of colonial domination, on the human psyche. There is a double process that is economic and internalized through the epidermalization of inferiority. This book and the way it turned the mirror back on me and made me question some practices I’ve had in the context of my "Blackness" and how I've been conditioned to assimilate to certain European cultural practices that I can never truly be a part of by de facto.
(Re)imagining
Augustown by Kei Miller
Augustown by Kei Miller
“She knew that for people to be people, they have to be believe in something. They had to believe that something was worth believing in. And they had to carry that thing in their hearts and guard it , for once you believed in something , in anything at all, Babylon would try its damnedest to find out what that thing was, and they would try to take it from you.”
This book is the most anti-Babylon piece of fiction I’ve read. Augustown is set in August Town, Kingston - the place where freed slaves fled on emancipation morning from Mona Estate in 1838. Geographically, August Town is in the valley, Mona is middle class and right above August Town, and Beverly Hills is for the upper class and just above Mona— the physical elevations that reflect social stratification in Kingston that has been the same for years. The story is told from a unnamed dead narrator who follows Ma Taffy, a spliff smoking granny, who has raised three girls and now the child of the last, a six year old boy, Kaia. He is being raised Rastafarian by his mother, Gina, and one day his teacher becomes enraged with his appearance. On his return home, sobbing, Ma Taffy tells him the story of the Flying Preacherman, Master Bedward, whom Ma had seen levitating toward the heavens when she was a child.
This book is complex and simple, and of course, it’s Kei so it’s poetic as fuck.
A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid
A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid
“Do you know why people like me are shy about being capitalists? Well, its because we, for as long as we have known you, were capital, like bales of cotton and sacks of sugar, and you were commanding, cruel capitalists, and the memory of this so strong, the experience so recent, that we can't quite bring ourselves to embrace this idea that you think so much of. As for hat we were like before we met you, I no longer care. No periods of time over which my ancestors held sway, no documentation of complex civilisations, is any comfort to me. Even if I really came from people who were living like monkeys in trees, it was better to be that than what happened to me, what I became after I met you.”
This is a very small book dealing with very big issues, and no one is as direct and accurate as Kincaid. This book mocks your typical travel book, as Kincaid gives a guided tour to American and European tourists through Antigua and Barbuda. This book received a lot of hate from tourists, the government, and of course people in Antigua who had a vested interest in protecting tourism. This book was written over 40 years ago and is still a relevant critique of postcolonial nations whose economies are driven by tourism. Jamaica Kincaid drags everyone in this book, and it’s called for. It’s hard to tell who she hates most, the British colonizers, the corrupt elite who now rule, or the people at hotel training schools that teach staff "how to be a good nobody"? But there’s no need to rank them to understand how the postcolonial Caribbean is designed as a wheel to crush poor and black people.
Pet by Akwaeke Emezi
Pet by Akwaeke Emezi
“What does a monster look like? Jam asked.
Her mother focused on her, cupping her cheek in a chalky hand. "Monsters don't look like anything, doux-doux. That's the whole point. That's the whole problem.”
On the surface, this book may seem like a cute YA book about Jam hunting for monsters in the ‘utopian’ world of Lucille, but you soon realise this book deals with strong issues of the top-down approach justice, prison abolition, what healing and reconciliation can look like for victims of violence and a bag of other things. Akwaeke builds a world where even the utopia that we often imagine where black and queer people are free, is not possible if we are not radical and uprooting power in our systems.
Healing
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé by Morgan Parker
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé by Morgan Parker
“The only thing more beautiful than Beyoncé is God, and God is a black woman sipping rosé and drawing a lavender bath, texting her mom, belly-laughing in the therapist’s office, feeling unloved, being on display, daring to survive.”
At the intersection of vulnerability and healing, you’ll find There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé uses political and pop-cultural references as a framework to explore 21st-century black American womanhood and its complexities: performance, depression, isolation, exoticism, racism, femininity, and politics. The poems weave between personal narrative and pop-cultural criticism, examining and confronting modern media, consumption, feminism, and Blackness. This is easily one of my favourite anthologies, it’s intelligent, funny bold and comforting. Almost every poem had me feeling all kinds of feels and I felt like Morgan was a close friend talking and healing with me through her poetry.
The Stars and the Blackness Between Them by Junauda Petrus
The Stars and the Blackness Between Them by Junauda Petrus
“Let the pain leave out of you with each breath. It want to be free too,” she would say whenever I would get hurt, or if I was feeling sick. Even if I was sad, she would say these words, and through my tears and pain, I would find my center again.”
“In Junie’s love, I learned that loving on a Black girl wasn’t sinning, but something I lived to do, like painting or eating perfectly ripe plums.”
Have you ever read a story so soft and tender that you feel a deep peace in your soul? That’s how this story makes me feel. This entwines the lives of many different black characters and their realities, a dying teenage girl from Minneapolis, a queer teenage Trinidad girl exiled by her mother, an elderly queer Trinidadian woman who has afro-spiritual practices, and a New York black man on death row. The lyrical structure in this book only adds to the delicate story weaved on openness, acknowledgement and forgiveness in a world that tries to kill your spirit.