May: some lists
This month’s newsletter will be a departure—I’ll go back to my reviews next month, including the books I read this May.
I have seen so many wonderful lists of book recommendations circulating on social media—lists of books about racism and abolitionism and Black Lives Matter and black history, lists of black-owned bookstores. My own newsletter has little to add that isn’t better covered by those lists and their creators. So I encourage you to click the links above and to prioritize those recommendations. And for this month, I’ll just list some—a few—of the novels I’ve read that have helped me (in various ways and voices and worlds) begin, as a white woman, to comprehend the urgency of this moment.
N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy
These books are hard science fiction, the real stuff: a world not apparently our own, a universe not our own, a people with culture and magic not our own. Science fiction as a genre does not have a great track record when it comes to race. Too many of the authors are old white men, and even more use science fiction’s get-out-of-Earth-free card as an excuse to ignore the existence of racism or, worse and more commonly, non-white races entirely.
Jemisin takes what science fiction offers and does the opposite: she creates a world full of black and brown people who are, in turn, full of their own power to change that world’s very shape, to re-mold its mountains and valleys. Even, should they be angry enough, to tear a planet apart at the seams. A series about the origins and power of rage and re-making, the Broken Earth trilogy tells us more about the world we live in now than most books do.
The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas
The brilliance of this book lies in how Thomas lets us see the confusion of racism through the eyes of a sixteen year old, so that the excitement and commotion and identity-finding of being sixteen meld with the confusion and complexity of systemic racism and injustice; so that Starr is finding herself at the same time she's sorting through the tangled strands of privilege and power in the world around her. It just makes so much sense to write this story, and Thomas does it so, so wonderfully.
Half Blood Blues, Esi Edugyan
In Half Blood Blues, Esi Edugyan looks at racism outside of a purely American context, instead following her black musician protagonists into Nazi Germany. Thrumming and mournful, this book tells one story of what it means to be criminalized, pushed underground, silenced; and what it might take to return to that story, if it was your own.
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Who hasn’t read Beloved? I hadn’t, actually, until I was in my twenties—having somehow made my way out of both high school and college without ever having taken an American literature class. When the lacuna got too glaring to be ignored, I made my own small syllabus, and Beloved was the first book on it. For good reason. What is there to say about this, the book that does more than any other that I’ve read or heard of to make visible the plain unbearable, impossible injustice of slavery? How can a white person begin to try to think about slavery without confronting Beloved’s horror and its love?
Don’t Call Us Dead, Danez Smith
A slim book of poems that set mourning to music—not the gentle mourning of a silent church or a tear slipping down a cheek, but the clothes-rending, screaming mourning of inchoate sadness. From Smith’s not an elegy for Mike Brown:
think: once, a white girl
was kidnapped & that’s the Trojan war.
later, up the block, Troy got shot
& that was Tuesday. are we not worthyof a city of ash? of 1000 ships
launched because we are missed?
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
I was assigned this book in class twice in high school and once again in college, as many people probably were—it’s a real classic. But that’s for a reason: Things Fall Apart is a moving, elegant, brutal primer on the impacts of colonialism. It’s a novel that helps explain so many other stories, that looks not just at what it means for a people to be stolen from their homes and enslaved and subjugated for generations in a foreign land, but at what it means for a people to be invaded in their own land by the insidious, belittling self-confidence of white supremacy. It is inadequate to try to understand American racism without also trying to understand the destructive force and legacy of colonialism. Things Fall Apart isn’t a textbook on postcolonial studies, but Okonkwo’s story is a devastating starting point.
The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
A book that introduces just enough of the fantastical—the underground railroad is literalized as a real, working underground train that brings escaped slaves north—to make the “real” history that surrounds it all the more inescapable: this may not have happened, or may not have happened this way, but this did, and does. Freedom, here—as in freedom from fear, from exploitation, from physical danger, from the looming threat of re-enslavement—is an ever-receding mirage. There is no safety in America, not even with a magical train to take you there. There is only the push onwards, in hope.
Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward
In Salvage the Bones, Ward tackles a story about poverty, coming of age, race, familial love, environmental disaster, black womanhood—and all of their many inescapable interconnections. I could not put this book down: its warmth, its empathy, its tragedy were such that it almost felt, sometimes, like the book was actually pulsating in my hands, a live and precious thing. This book felt to me like a true American bildungsroman—like this story of a black girl growing up in the shadow of Hurricane Katrina, of her quest to find something worthy of her capacity for love—is what everyone should be reading in tenth grade literature instead of Catcher in the Rye.
This list is not a comprehensive or even very original list of books about race and racism. In the spirit of this newsletter, it’s a list of books I’ve read. But in the spirit of this political and national moment, here is the beginning of a list of books that I would like to read over the coming weeks, months, and years, some of which I’ve been meaning to read for a while now, some of which I’ve discovered in the last few days—yes, non-fiction too.
The End of Policing, Alex S. Vitale
Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Davis
Assata: An Autobiography, Assata Shakur
If Beale Street Could Talk, James Baldwin
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander
Citizen, Claudia Rankine
If you have any suggestions of books you feel have helped you to start to expand the scope of your understanding about race, racism, police brutality—please share. Thank you.