by Glory Edim
When I was writing as a young person, I was writing for who I was as a child. I remember, so many times growing up, asking myself: “Wait a second. Why is everything black bad and everything white good?” Why did my brother come home with stories from camp about how messed up it was that getting a black card when you did something wrong was the worst kind of punishment? Why did I watch The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family and not see any Black kids on it? Where were we? Something was messed up about the messaging in my world, and that something was impacting me. Slowly, the revelation of the racism of our country came to reveal itself. With my writing, I wanted to fill the gap of all those books that didn’t represent people who looked like me and put the stories of those who did on the page. My gaze may have shifted as I got older, but the underlying current of it is the same: to make people more visible.
Now that I’m a mom with children, I have a different kind of urgency than I did when I was young. I see what my own children struggle with, and by extension what other children struggle with, and think more about those narratives. My kids have grown up with my partner and me always talking about race and issues of invisibility, and about tolerance and people’s right to be safe—all these things that my family didn’t talk so much about when I was a kid. Our kids are growing up with a sense of who people are in a different way than when I grew up. But at the same time, they still have a sense that there’s some stuff that’s not right in this world, that they themselves have work to do.
So much depends on us remembering our past. We live in a country that likes to forget—likes to forget who was here before us, likes to forget who built the country, likes to forget who this country was stolen from. And so, for me as a writer, it’s important to know that I’m standing on the shoulders of the writers that came before me, the queer folks who died before me, my friends who passed away because of HIV, cancer, lack of access to decent healthcare. I am here because of the indigenous people of this country, because of the enslaved people who were here before me, the young people of the civil rights movements who fought hard to get me to this moment.
My biggest responsibility is to recognize that I am part of a continuum, that I didn’t just appear and start writing stuff down. I’m writing stuff down because Audre Lorde wrote stuff down, because James Baldwin wrote stuff down. Because Toni Morrison and Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen and Virginia Hamilton—and all of the other people who came before me—set the stage for my work. I have to keep all of that in my heart as I move through the world, not only for the deep respect I have for them, but also for my own strength.
So, my advice to other young writers: Read widely. Study other writers. Be thoughtful. Then go out and do the work of changing the form, finding your own voice, and saying what you need to say. Be fearless. And care.
The fact that the young people continue to rise brings me so much joy. They are where I look to find my hope. Every day that I sit down to write, I think: “I’m just here to give them a couple of tools to negotiate the future. But other than that—they got this! They’re good.”
James Baldwin said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak is unprecedented in the history of the world, and then you read.” I would add, you often think your joy and your personal experience is unique, but if you read far enough and wide enough, you realize every identity, even yours, has a corollary in a book. I know that’s why I began reading and why I continue to do so. I have found myself in Francie in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, in the heroine of the Claudine novels, and in the language of Wide Sargasso Sea. When you also wish to be a writer, though, there is a special thrill in finding yourself in the work of other women of color. Here are people who look like you, who probably share, on some level, at least certain aspects of your material life. And they are imagining your spiritual life, the parts of yourself you sometimes have to suppress or at least judiciously edit to fulfill the roles of daughter, sister, mother, partner, friend, or co-worker that are required of most of us to get through life. So, below are some of the moods and selves and experiences I’ve uncovered and the books you can find them in. I hope the titles can serve as a kind of blueprint for the many selves we have the pleasure to create over the course of life as a woman of color.
1. A Book for Your Black Witch Phase
I think a lot of bookish people go through a magic phase. Why? Perhaps because the first stories we read are unapologetically about magic, and we miss that. I also think magic gives us the fantasy of control over a world that relishes chaos. And it validates the chaos we know lies underneath modern life. Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo is the book for when you are feeling your most witchy, for when you want to read about three sisters who use the magic of creativity in different ways.
2. A Book to Remind You of the Dangers of Black Bougie Life
I lived a weird half-life of having connections to old-school, black middle-class organizations like the Links and Jack and Jill, while also struggling below poverty level with a mother who spurned her debutante past. It has always made me look on that world with both longing and trepidation, and Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills speaks to the paranoia and anxiety that accompany aspirational living. It’s an ambitious novel that mimics Dante’s Inferno as it describes the social-climbing of various women in mid-eighties suburbia. Today, we may giggle at the idea of #goals, but the desire to accumulate images of all the things we wish we could have and lives we wish we could live speaks to a longing and loneliness that, if it goes unacknowledged, can curdle into something much fiercer and darker.
3. A Book to Read When You Wish You Could Pack It All In and Just Be Missy Elliott
Unlike Linden Hills, there is very little unsettling darkness in Bling, Erika Kennedy’s dishy novel set in the early 2000s music scene. When I first graduated from college, I read this book over and over again for a year, losing myself in the glamorous, scandalous, very funny world that Kennedy created. At the time, I was living in a four-bedroom apartment with a bunch of very nice, hippie white girls who were all vegans who didn’t know how to cook and loved Broken Social Scene and did not know what to do with me. Kennedy’s book was an escape, a reminder that another, blacker, more glamorous life was possible.
4. A Book to Read When You Meet That One Black Person Who Insists They Are Not Like Other Black People Because They Speak German or Something
I think most of us have met this girl. Perhaps, once upon a time, we were this girl. She is the black person who insists that she is not like other black people because of one “obscure” (but not really obscure—black people are everywhere and we have gotten into everything) interest. She will lament, “People are so mean to me because I happen to enjoy Japanese glaze pottery and no other black person likes that,” and when you point out that someone like Doyle Lane exists, she goes silent. American Cocktail is a super fascinating exploration of this phenomenon—a memoir written by Anita Reynolds in the first half of the twentieth century that wasn’t published until 2014. Reynolds is fascinating in her candid description of family members who passed as white—and how, at least for her family, passing was less a deep dark secret than an occasional lifestyle choice. Reynolds herself eventually traveled to Europe and fell in with some of the most influential artists of the mid-century, including Man Ray. She also, of her own admission, had an affair with a Nazi officer while living in North Africa for part of World War II. One of the reasons I recommend this book is because I am interested in the people who make the wrong choices in history, the people who are not necessarily role models but are compelling in their own right.
5. A Book to Read When You’ve Decided the Wind Is Now Your Lover and the Forests Are Your Home
As a kid, I used to always skip over descriptions of nature in fiction. They never held any fire for me, seemed there just to prove the writer could write a pretty sentence. It wasn’t until I got a bit older that I began to appreciate all the weird and wo
nderful ways of the natural world. In her novel The Bridge of Beyond, Simone Schwarz-Bart describes the island of Guadeloupe in ways that remind you of all the things the land can hold—our memories, our traumas, our pains, and our joys. I can’t do it justice in a few lines, so I’ll just quote the author herself: “The summit still shone in the sky, though all the earth was plunged in darkness, under the uneasy, unreal trembling of the stars, which seemed to have been put there by mistake, like everything else.”
6. A Book to Read When Apocalyptic Projections of Our Current State of Affairs Have Got You Down
When I was a child, my sister told me the world would end by the time I turned thirty. She said it so matter-of-factly, too. Here I am, in my thirties, and it seems like she’s right. I’ve been dreaming of apocalypse for most of my life and dreading it the whole time. It was a revelation to discover Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy. She is matter-of-fact, too, about the coming destruction we face—of our environment, of our resources, of our governments. Her philosophy, based on Octavia Butler’s guiding philosophy of the Earthseed books, is that God Is Change. Rather than run from it or resist it, we should embrace it, look to what the plants, animals, and genomes can teach us about adapting to survive and to thrive.
7. A Book to Read When You Are Wondering What It Would Be Like to Love in Another Lifetime
One of the most romantic songs to me as a teenager was Erykah Badu’s “Next Lifetime.” Imagine loving so deeply and strongly, the emotion would follow you through reincarnation. Alice Walker’s epic, massive novel The Temple of My Familiar follows thousands of years of human history across the Diaspora, from Africa to Central America to Asia to Europe to the Caribbean to the United States. It is a wonderful feat of the imagination that follows, at its heart, an unconventional love story. Bonus points—if you read it in conjunction with Evelyn C. White’s Alice Walker: A Life and also google some OG Alice Walker gossip from the mid-nineties, you can begin to see where Walker may have drawn inspiration from her own life to make a fictional history of love and a people.
8. A Book to Read After Scrolling Through Pictures from AfroPunk
Oh how I wanted to be a punk in high school, but that look was hard to pull off without any money. Believe me, I tried. I wish I had read Pauline Black’s autobiography Black by Design back then. Black is British, the former lead singer for a seminal ska band. She also was a biracial adoptee, adopted by white British parents in the 1950s. Her autobiography is a glimpse into the life of someone who continually, bravely, forges her own way.
9. A Book to Read When Someone Tries to Shame You for Enjoying Cardi B
One of the best lessons I ever received in my intellectual development was the falseness of the idea of highbrow or lowbrow culture. These categories shift over time, and what was once considered low culture is always, without fail, adopted and monetized by the ruling classes. Things that are supposedly beneath notice or too rude for polite society often operate in a liberated space, where cultural makers can say the things and make the associations that “civilized” people banish them for. Angela Y. Davis’s Blues Legacies and Black Feminism does two things—it rescues Ma Rainey and Billie Holiday from the stultifying air of nostalgia and reminds us of why they were such dangerous and revolutionary artists in the first place. And it also reminds us that their art articulated a black feminism that is robust, complex, and a direct intellectual ancestor to all the female artists today who are dismissed for being too raunchy, too “problematic,” too obsessed with sex or money—when really, they are critiquing it all.
10. A Book to Read When You Are Searching for Your Way in the World
How do writers become writers? How do artists become artists? How did Chloe Wofford become Toni Morrison? How did Miltona Mirkin Cade become Toni Cade Bambara? The answers to these questions always seemed mysterious and out of reach. Then I read Claudia Tate’s Black Women Writers at Work. Tate interviewed dozens of black women writers in the early 1980s, women whose books would become canon. She asked them about their work, their craft, and how they saw the world. What becomes clear is that each of these women was supported by a writing community of black women artists. And that these women loved their craft and took it seriously. It’s not always clear how we are supposed to make things for ourselves—we only feel the keen imperative to do so. The interviews for this book provide a blueprint for creative self-sufficiency.
At first glance, reading and writing are solitary acts. They require you to ignore the distractions of screens and conversations with the living to focus on the page. But as anyone who loves reading and writing quickly learns, both activities allow you to commune with the living and the dead, to listen to the thoughts of those who have come before you and argue, cajole, and sing praise for them in response.
ALL THE BOOKS IN THIS BOOK
Verna Aardema
Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears
Camille Acker
Training School for Negro Girls
Tomi Adeyemi
Children of Blood and Bone
Arnold Adoff
black is brown is tan
Elizabeth Alexander
Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990–2010
Dante Alighieri
Inferno
Hans Christian Andersen
Little Match Girl
V. C. Andrews
Flowers in the Attic
Lesley Nneka Arimah
What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky
Maya Angelou
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Alexia Arthurs
How to Love a Jamaican
Jennifer Baker (ed.)
Everyday People: The Color of Life—a Short Story Anthology
James Baldwin
Another Country
Go Tell It on the Mountain
Nobody Knows My Name
Notes of a Native Son
Toni Cade Bambara
The Salt Eaters
Helen Bannerman
The Story of Little Black Sambo
La Shonda Katrice Barnett
Jam on the Vine
Anna Elizabeth Bennett
Little Witch
Britt Bennett
The Mothers
Stan and Jan Berenstain
The Berenstains’ B Book
Pauline Black
Black by Design
Nicole Blades
The Thunder Beneath Us
Ruthie Mae Bolton
Gal: A True Life
Marita Bonner
The Purple Flower
Emily Brontë
Wuthering Heights
Gwendolyn Brooks
Annie Allen
Adrienne Maree Brown
Emergent Strategy
Mahogany L. Browne, Jamila Woods, Idrissa Simmonds
The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic
Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Secret Garden
Octavia Butler
Earthseed novels (Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents)
Kindred
Charlene A. Carruthers
Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Our Movement
Alice Childress
Trouble in Mind
Eldridge Cleaver
Soul on Ice
Zinzi Clemmons
What We Lose
Lucille Clifton
The Book of Light
The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton
Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969–1980
Colette
Claudine series
Kathleen Collins
Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?
Patricia Hil
l Collins
Black Feminist Thought
Brittney C. Cooper, Robin M. Boylorn, Susana M. Morris
The Crunk Feminist Collection
Naima Coster
Halsey Street
Roald Dahl
Boy: Tales of Childhood
The Witches
Angela Y. Davis
Blues Legacies and Black Feminism
Marguerite De Angeli
Bright April
Nicole Dennis-Benn
Here Comes the Sun
Lydia R. Diamond
Stick Fly
Rita Dove
On the Bus with Rosa Parks
Sharon Draper
Copper Sun
Tananarive Due
My Soul to Keep
Akwaeke Emezi
Freshwater
Eleanor Estes
Witch Family
Eve Ewing
Electric Arches
Louise Fitzhugh
Harriet the Spy
Angela Flournoy
The Turner House
Charles Fuller
A Soldier’s Play
Roxane Gay
Bad Feminist