Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions that Grew Me Up by Remica Bingham-Risher
"This is not a remix; it's a symphony."
“Black books and Black writers showed me there was a way for me to exist in the world of words, and hence, a way for me to exist in the world,” Poet Remica Bingham-Risher writes in the lovely introduction to a valuable, unique labor of love that is the book, Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions that Grew Me Up. It’s a loving compendium of wisdom and reflection that weaves in Bingham-Risher’s questions and journey to becoming a poet, a wife and a mother with the experiences and wisdom of elder poets like Lucille Clifton, Erica Hunt, Sonia Sanchez, Forrest Hamer, E. Ethelbert Miller, Natasha Trethewey, Patricia Smith, Tim Seibels and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers.
There is wisdom throughout on revision, on making room for grief and joy. How family by blood and by ink make a tapestry of connection and safety, essentials for writing the truth for Black writers. The names we are given and the importance of getting them right in the world, as the definers of our destiny, as the embodiment of our parents’ highest aspirations for us.
I’m especially partial to every page of the chapter on Jeffers, “On Faith,” where the poet and author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois endorses with loving confidence the importance of reading in order to understand the full rhythms and scope of history:
People who are so surprised by this haven’t been reading. Yes, I’m surprised by the audacity of these violent events, but not by killings…My thing is, as Faulkner said — and I’m sure I’m butchering this — the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past. These aren’t issues that are just coming about. This is not a remix; it’s a symphony.
The truth telling and love in these pages emerges with unsurprising ease. With brief biographical touches, each artist is introduced in the context of Bingham-Risher’s becoming. She poses thoughtful, intentional questions relevant both to writing, style, the importance of community accountability in the form of belonging. Naturally, the tension of interdependence versus true independence emerges, too. Here is Tim Seibles on what freedom really is for a writer:
Ultimately, the thing that drew me to writing and sustains my love for it is the freedom it makes possible. I will never be as free in the world as I am on the page.
That traveling toward freedom that is a distinct feature of the Black experience is what makes Soul Culture such a beautiful homage to Black contemporary poetry, and American literature. It vibrates and pulses as a book with sweetness, reverence and recognition. The living and writing are hard, but we love each other through the roughest parts.