Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life And Literature
Or, Farah Jasmine Griffin Reminds Us How Black Writers Save Us
I stay in Black women scholars’ business. And writers. Artists, thinkers. OK, I stay in Black womens’ business.
Part of it is that I grew up somewhat isolated from others, one of the most damaging aspects of poverty, in my humble opinion. I was especially isolated from Black elder women, with few exceptions. In the absence of physical community, books and literature, reading about community on the page, imagining what it could feel like, what it could mean to be like the women and girls I read about, to sometimes see pieces of my life or loneliness in the work of Ntozake Shange, Maya Angelou, Terry McMillan — this was how I raised myself up.
In this perfect book, which is a hybrid of memoir and academic text, Farah Jasmine Griffin sums this sentiment up perfectly in a chapter called “Cultivating Beauty.” She is describing the exquisite Toni Morrison novel, Sula, which I re-read frequently because I always discover a new, incredible sentiment or sentence or scene. The italics are mine:
Morrison’s novel, and then works by other Black women, provided other female voices of authority, in addition to my mother’s and my aunts’, about what my life could become. My mother may have carved the path, laden with beauty and strict codes of behavior, but those works by Black women writers established the destination. Their content, indeed their very existence, gave meaning and purpose to the art of living.
I have written much over the years about my journey with my mother. (I can’t believe this essay is 10 years old, but it was edited by Kiese Laymon when he was a contributing editor to Gawker. It sums up some of the parental complications in my life nicely. ) And it feels like there will always be more to unpack and to write about that really important and challenging and formative relationship. But it was healing and good for me to read Farah Jasmine Griffin articulate what I was aiming to do by clutching on to books as life rafts, how they shaped the girl I was, and the woman I am always becoming.
There are chapters on mercy and its meaning in Griffin’s life but also in the literature of Morrison and Phillis Wheatley; on Black Freedom and Barack Obama’s soaring, plain yet complex rhetoric; the Quest for Justice and Death, looking at Song of Solomon — a true favorite of mine — and the work of Jesmyn Ward and Christina Sharpe, who is a new author to me but given the crystalline quality of the quotes Griffin selects from her, I have a feeling I’m sure to love her. For example:
In an essay titled, “Beauty Is a Method,” Christina Sharpe (whose mother also created objects of beauty, including clothing for her daughter) writes, “I’ve been revisiting what beauty as a method might mean or do; what it might break open, rupture, make possible and impossible. How we might carry beauty’s knowledge with us and make new worlds.”
I was sad when this book ended because as the Mother’s Day Marketing Machine took over my inbox, with things to do and ask of me to shield myself from it, I had, for what I think is the first time, a powerful revelation: It was my mother who fostered in me a love of reading, by taking me to libraries and letting me roam, doing the same in bookstores. She knew that there was a gap in the archive of love and nurture she could provide, so she put me in proximity. I am grateful for that transformative act, even though I still wish she were physically alive for me to tell her so.