So I realise that I posted this midyear review on Instagram but with all that was going on both in the world and in my life, I never got around to posting one on here. When I posted my midyear review on Instagram in July I was very much in my feelings...
Black joy is a form of resistance. There is so much joy in being Black and this joy should be celebrated. Human beings are complex, multifaceted creatures and this is true regardless of your race, gender, ethnicity etc. Have you ever found yourself crying from happiness? Or, and this one’s a little more taboo, laughing in an intensely sad situation? We behave this way because we humans are able to hold many emotions at one time...
“Growing up in the U.S., I was always taught Black history through a distorted white saviour lens. It came in small fragments, and always in the context of pain and trauma. The history I learned always highlighted what Black People didn’t have, instead of revealing what they have contributed.” —Marissa and Toya (@allegedlymari and @thereadingchemist).
We made it. We are passed the halfway mark everyone. January feels like it was ten years ago. I remember entering 2020 with so much hope and joy. There were a number of exciting things I was looking forward to this year, including a visit to LA in January which did happen and a trip home to England this summer, which won't happen...
So, the world finally woke up and realised that Black lives matter. Now what? Well, judging by my Bookstagram feed, it means that we're all going to start reading books by Black, Indigenous, and other people of colour. Amazing. While I'm glad that there appears to be a movement towards intentionally seeking out books by authors who aren't white or of European descent, I am also frustrated. I'm frustrated at those who have never given a Black author the time of day before posting stacks of the books by Black authors that they were sent from publishers with absolutely no intention of reading until now...
On January 3rd, 2019, Ilan Omar was sworn into the 116th Congress with a record-breaking 100 other women, 43 of whom were women of color. She stood there as one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress and the first Somali-American legislator. Less than two decades before she entered the country as a refugee...
When I first posted about Twisted: The Tangled History of Black Hair Culture on Instagram, one of my friends said that the woman on the cover is me. I was delighted. I never get to be the woman on the cover. If the woman on the cover is black, she rarely has hair like mine. Seven years ago I didn’t have hair like mine. I had limp hair that was dry and brittle and relaxed...
If you read nothing else of this review, let me say from the beginning that this book is fantastic and now I need to go read everything else that Andrea Levy has written...
In this volume, her grandson, Stephen L. Carter, writes not only his grandmother's biography but that of his great-grandfather and great-grandmother as well. At a time where Black people were staunchly denied the vote and when countless lynchings went unprosecuted and unpunished, William Hunton Sr was an internationally acclaimed ambassador for the YMCA, his wife Addie Hunton was a great public speaker and served on the front lines of the Second World War and their daughter, Eunice, became of the most famous black women in America...
She's gone and done it again. Toni Morrison continues to blow me away. I didn't grow up in America and so I didn't study any of Toni Morrison's books in school. Part of me is glad I didn't because I'm not sure I would have understood them back then. But a bigger part of me of wishes I had read Beloved when I was young, impressionable, and feeling like I alone was battling against a prejudice I could do nothing to change. The effects of growing in a very predominantly white city...
