My first exposure to the array of Black voices that I had not been exposed to in school, including African writers and Black women, came from anthologies. One of the first I remember was Breaking Ice, an anthology of short fiction edited by Terry McMillan published when I was 12; It is the first collection I remember purchasing from a sidewalk bookseller in Harlem.
The lives our books lead when they leave us is a mysterious narrative I have always wondered about. The next anthology was not focused explicitly on the Black Diaspora, but expanded my understanding of where Black women fit in what was then called Third World Feminism, which I believe now has been reframed to center women from the Global South, though maybe even now that that has changed. All I can remember for sure is how I folded my lanky self up in the stacks of Emma Willard’s library and devoured This Bridge Called My Back when I would (often) lose myself in the stacks of my high school library. I did not understand all of what had been gathered and written by Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga, but I did realize more than I had before I read the collection that Black women were not alone in our marginalization, and that we had more company in our oppressions and our desire for liberation than maybe it was good to have.
I have been immersed in reading three recent anthologies featuring different aspects of the Diasporic experience, which has helped me see the unique beauty of reading Black anthologies. Sometimes you want a reading experience that is as rigorous as a novel or a single-author essay collection; but sometimes, when you only have a little bit of time and energy to spare, an anthology can be like a friend who calls you up in order to listen instead of talk. We need both ways of being, but sometimes one more than the other.
I also think the act of aggregating and collating our history, of piecing together a fractured, dismembered lineage has so many redeeming, healing features that fly in the face of our everyday individualism. These anthologies are a chorus of memory and acknowledgment of the enormity of what we have gained as we made beauty from history. In the pieces themselves are eulogies, and an acknowledgment of all that has been lost.
Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African-America, 1619-2019, edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, breaks up 400 years into a 10-part conversation, a cacophony of rigorous history, poetry and revelatory, short moments of witness and education. I read it digitally and now am savoring my favorite mode with a print copy, somewhere in the 1700s, learning about the more then 20,000 enslaved in New York City that none of my schooling told me about, the White Lion, the ship that brought our first ancestors here, which I should have known about before we talked about The Mayflower and much more.
African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, edited by Kevin Young, director of the National African American History and Culture museum, revisits the highlights of our most pivotal collective poetic moments, from Claude McKay and Phyllis Wheatley to Ntozake Shange, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jericho Brown and Elizabeth Alexander. It is a delight to earmark the pages of familiar poems I have not had the privilege to read recently and to discover new poets in its pages.
I have also been drawn deeply into the beauty of the forthcoming Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought which is in the edifying tradition of Words of Fire, Homegirls, and other incredible compilations of our passion and love for our own songs, joys, shared heartbreak and tools for survival.
Toni Morrison wrote that she knew of two responses to chaos: Naming and violence. We’ve had too much of the latter on too many levels, at least for my taste. It feels good to delve deeper into this incredible work of naming, which fills spaces and gaps in our lineage, along with missteps in time. It gives the pieces of us back to ourselves with each turn of the page.
For more anthology recommendations, please also see: The New Daughters of Africa, My Soul Has Grown Deep, Call and Response and Black Futures.