Tag: Black American Writing

Let Us Descend – Jesmyn Ward (Bloomsbury 2023)

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I came to this book with very high expectations.  American author Jesmyn Ward’s “Sing, Unburied, Sing” (2017) I rated five stars and it ended up in my Top 10 Of The Year when I caught up with it in 2021.  Louise Kennedy, whose debut “Trespasses” (2022) is one of my favourite novels I’ve read in 2023 has described it as “The best book I’ve read in years”.  The edition I got directly from the publishers begins with a message from Alexis Kirschbaum at Bloomsbury who makes great claims for it.  “It is a text that feels almost sacred.  The artistry is unparalleled.  You will not read another book like this one.” I couldn’t wait to begin.

We’re taken back in time to the days of slavery.  I only very recently read Yvonne Battle-Felton’s “Remembered” (2019) so comparisons for me are going to be inevitable and there is already an extraordinary book in this setting, “The Prophets” by Robert Jones Jnr (2021) who said so much of what is to say.  This is a first-person narrative which begins with mother and daughter escaping their cabin at night to practise sparring with two buried sticks.  Teaching her how to fight, Annis’ mother believes, may keep her alive.

The passing on of knowledge through the generations plays a vital part in this novel.  Annis’ grandmother Aza is remembered only through her mother’s stories.  A warrior woman, passed on by her family who becomes part of an army of women who protected a King, she is sold into slavery when she falls in love and is a broken woman by the time she reaches the plantation having taught her daughter all of her survival skills.

It’s powerful stuff and these stories demand to be told.  The human exploitation by slave owners, their belief in the right to abuse, hound or sell on never fails to provoke responses of disgust and here all this is handled magnificently.

For many in this situation a belief in God is often depicted as a survival strategy, the hope for salvation and something better in the after-life.  God is not really present here, the beliefs are in powers more elemental and spiritual.  Is Annis guided by the spirits or are the echoes she feels the ghosts of her ancestors or her own intuition as a girl educated to survive?

Increasingly, the elemental dominates.  The spirits of wind and water do give a sense of the novel as “sacred text” but, and this is a personal thing, it is not something I strongly respond to.  The novel never loses its way- it is strong throughout but it doesn’t end up for me having the same power as “Sing, Unburied, Sing”.

It is a novel saturated in grief and I was saddened to discover that the author lost her husband who was just aged 33 in 2020.  The sensitivity and introspection of this novel is no doubt influenced by that.

It’s a very strong book with sections I will probably remember forever.  And there may come a time in my life when this elemental spirituality will make more sense for me and when it does I know I’ll find it within this work and will seek it out again.  I do respect that this will become an important book for many people.

Let Us Descend is published by Bloomsbury in the UK on 24th October 2023.  Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy. 

Family Meal – Bryan Washington (Atlantic 2023)

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I’ve read quite a lot of historical fiction recently so it felt refreshing to be plunged into Bryan Washington’s contemporary Texas.  This is the third work of his I’ve read (one of the few authors I’m up to date with).  His collection of short stories “Lot” (2019) I found powerful and brutal and I rated his first novel “Memorial” (2021) five stars finding it less spiky which provoked a real emotional response from me.  This second novel feels closer to the stories in “Lot”.

Bryan Washington likes to explore family dynamics in the modern world; that’s both biological and the people you’d choose to be family, those that stick by and support.  As a gay black man who has his 30th birthday this month his characters are unsurprisingly diverse in terms of race, culture and sexual identity.  There are three main characters here who each provide first-person narratives.  Cam is a mess, he’s returned back to the Houston area following the death of his partner and is getting by through casual pick-ups and an eating disorder.  As a teenager Cam stayed with his friend TJ’s parents and TJ gets back in touch and is the second narrator.  The third is Kai, the dead boyfriend whose ghost Cam sees.  Cam attempts to get his life together as TJ begins to question his and despite the prickliness of their relationship they do what they can to support each other.

We begin with Cam which feels a little brave as he is so closed off to the world that his narrative is difficult to relate to but this pays off when TJ takes over as we gain a real understanding of what Cam has gone through and the strength of the bonds between these two as they work in TJ’s family’s bakers.  There’s a lot of talk which means progress through this book is quite quick. 

After three works set in the same location there are echoes of a modern take on Armistead Maupin’s “Tales Of The City” but here with a strong urban Black American feel and with Houston and its residents taking the place of San Francisco.  What the two authors have in common is real heart which means here throughout the questionable behaviours, the characters’ indifference to all the gay sex they seek out, the complexities of their past and present and the difficulty of negotiating the modern world there’s a surprising positivity which remains with the reader.  I did find this more in “Memorial” but it is certainly also here in a novel which will continue to enhance this author’s reputation.

Family Meal is published by Atlantic Books on 12th October 2023.  Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

Remembered – Yvonne Battle-Felton (2019)

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It’s 1910 and in Philadelphia tragedy occurs when a trolley bus crashes into a shop-front.  Spring rushes to the hospital bedside of her middle-aged son, Edward, and in an attempt to comprehend his behaviour examines stories from her own and her ancestors’ past.  Spring is haunted/supported by the ghost of her twin sister, Tempe, who manifests to others by creating breezes and the smell of woodsmoke, but to Spring remains a physical if supernatural presence, often blaming and pointing out her living sister’s shortcomings.

This debut novel by US-born UK resident Yvonne Battle-Felton was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2019 and leads us back to the time of slavery.  Free people are being kidnapped off the streets and plunged into the nightmarish world of the slave where they lack the skills to survive and are mistrusted by those who have been born into it.  When Emancipation eventually comes, who tells the slaves?  How are they able to escape their situation when their old owners make it impossible to leave- and where do they go?

These are issues raised in this powerful, evocative text.  The narrative switches between early twentieth century Philadelphia to the more distant past (and this is where the novel is strongest).  There’s an ambiguity to the more modern strand, probably caused by narrator Spring’s confusion as to what is happening that never feels fully resolved.  Characterisation is strong and this is what this novel’s success hinges on.  Tempe has remained on the physical plain but the ghosts and the echoes of the past of others that have gone permeate this novel.  Comparisons to Toni Morrison feel appropriate and this is a confident, haunting work which will linger on in the mind of this reader.

Remembered was published in the UK by Dialogue Books in 2019.

Crook Manifesto – Colson Whitehead (Fleet 2023)

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I’ve read the last four Colson Whitehead novels, two of which won The Pulitzer Prize and one of those “The Underground Railroad” (2016) was in my Top 3 Books of 2017.  His last “Harlem Shuffle” (2021) was critically acclaimed but I didn’t like it as much as the others I’d read by him.  When I found out his new novel was using the same location and characters from that I was still intrigued.  I’d wondered if my opinion of “Harlem Shuffle” was clouded by my great anticipation of reading it.  I did find it a little stilted but I did say of the main protagonist “Carney is a great character and he comes up against a number of other memorable creations here.” So, I hoped that these characters would shine through in this new work.

I did enjoy it more.  Set once again in and around Carney’s Harlem furniture store, moving things along to three different times – 1971, 73 and 76.  In 1971 the prosect of getting a ticket for a Jackson 5 concert for his daughter leads Carney back into a criminal world he thought he’d left behind.  1973 focuses on Pepper, the pal Carney turns to for muscle and intimidation who is working security for the shooting of a blaxploitation movie and who becomes more involved when a cast member disappears.  The 1976 section was the one where initially I felt the least gripped by as City Politics and corruption takes centre stage and as a British reader I struggle with the details of this but arson as a potential solution for urban problems got me back into it as events build up to an exciting and darkly satisfactory climax.  The author employs the same digressive tactics he used which tripped me up in “Harlem Shuffle” and readers do need to concentrate as new events being introduced so often trigger back stories but here I felt it slowed down the flow much less making for a more involving read.  It’s often funny and is written with such gusto that it doesn’t matter if we don’t pick up all the references.  I would suggest reading “Harlem Shuffle” first to get the most out of the author’s skilful characterisation and interweaving of factual and fictional events.  If you like that then you’ll really get a lot out of this as I felt this is the stronger novel, but then I am a bit of a sucker for 1970s settings.  I’m already anticipating a third instalment.

Crook Manifesto is published by Fleet Books in the UK on July 18th 2023.  Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

The Love Songs Of W E B Du Bois – Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

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Attracting much critical acclaim in the US and an Oprah Book Club pick which ensures high sales this is a big book in terms of size and themes, coming in at just under 800 pages and an extraordinary debut from an award-winning poet.

It is both an epic saga taking in generations of an African American family from Chicasetta, Georgia and in a parallel first-person narrative an intimate, unflinching study of the youngest member Ailey, focusing in very close detail on her upbringing and academic studies.  A family tree at the front of the book is vital as one narrative begins with the Native American inhabitants of the land moving to the rise of the plantation and slavery moving through the generations slowly slotting things into place as Ailey begins her own studies of her family history.

The historical narrative is powerful, beautifully written and impressive.  This is a long book, however, and it does at time sprawl which can place demands on the reader.  This author loves detail and this is most evident in Ailey’s account which is so closely observed and meticulous in its detail.  It was here that I felt the odd twinge of frustration, especially in Ailey’s college years and her response to American academia.  However, this is a book which will leave the reader feeling changed, this long time spent in the company of Ailey’s family (you can’t rush through this book) will provide the reader with a change of perspective in terms of American history, race and feminism.

It never gets any easier reading about slavery and it is important that it doesn’t.  Ailey’s contemporary account highlights the more subtle forms of racism, including what is referred to here as “Black Tax” where the African-American has to work harder to achieve the same results.

I know I am not the intended audience for what the author unapologetically describes in her Coda as “a black feminist novel” and “undoubtedly a woman’s novel” but I was very impressed.

The Love Songs Of W E B Du Bois was published on 20th January 2022 by 4th Estate in the UK. Many thanks to the publishers and NB magazine for the review copy. This review, along with many others of recently published books can be found at the Review Centre on the NB website.

Le Freak- Nile Rodgers (2011)

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I don’t know why it has taken me ten years to read a book which seems so suited to me.  Subtitled “An Upside Down Story Of Family, Disco and Destiny” and written by a true original, gentleman and legend in the popular music industry this is a fascinating insight into Nile Rodgers and his Chic organisation.

I particularly favour music autobiographies when you really feel like you get to know the subject, where there is no holding back and when there is a good balance between the personal and professional life. This book has these elements just right.

I thought I knew a fair bit about Nile Rodgers.  In interviews he is a great raconteur and so stories like the conception of Chic’s biggest song “Le Freak” linked to an attempt to get into Studio 54 to see Grace Jones are very familiar but there was a lot I didn’t know.  This is where the family aspect comes in.  The suave appearance of himself and musical partner Bernard Edwards always gave off well-heeled vibes of the black urban professional making a name within the sophisticated world of disco culture of the late 70’s, Nile, however, was pretty much a street kid.  Born to a mother who was 13 years old when she got pregnant he was moved around for relatives to care for him and then back to mum.  By the age of 6 he was skipping school and travelling to forbidden areas of cities to spend his day in the cinema and before he was much older than that he was following family members’ proclivities in prodigious drug taking and alcoholism.

He was largely a functioning addict so it didn’t really hold back his multi-million selling career with Chic and production duties for Sister Sledge and Diana Ross and when disco succumbed to the racist, homophobic backlash of the Disco Sucks movement as a producer for David Bowie, Duran Duran, Madonna, Grace Jones and countless more.

The extent of his addictions, his attempts at sobriety and his response to the tragic death of Bernard Edwards in Japan in 1996 when Chic were firmly on the comeback trail are handled very effectively and poignantly.

We end in 2011 with a cancer diagnosis which we know he survives as 10 years on he is still very much with us and still a musical force to be reckoned with (especially as a live festival act).  I’m looking forward to a second volume to bring the Nile Rodgers story up to date.

Le Freak was published in 2011.  I read the Sphere paperback edition.

Carefree Black Girls – Zeba Blay (Square Peg 2021)

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This is a difficult review to write for a white middle-aged man and I am sure that the author would appreciate the fact that I would find it difficult- it means that the issues she raises have hit home.

I selected this book on the basis of its subtitle “A Celebration Of Black Women In Pop Culture”.  I have often used this site to applaud the contribution of Black women within music, the arts and literature and thought this celebration was something I really wanted to be a part of.  The subtitle is not inaccurate, it is a celebration, but not quite what I had anticipated.

The author is central to this work, she is Ghanaian who has become an American citizen in recent years and works as a film critic and commentator on culture.  She also has struggled with fragile mental health, with suicide attempts and attributes this, at least in part, as her experience of being a Black woman in America.

You can appreciate from this the tone would not be as celebratory as I had anticipated.  An author’s note warns the reader to “be tender with yourself” if likely to be triggered by the issues in this book.

Zeba Blay studies the Black American female experience in terms of racist expectations and stereotypes borne from white supremacy including the body, sexual identity, skin tone, childhood and the quest to be “carefree” using women from popular culture as evidence.  Her arguments are powerful and impressive.  I do not feel it appropriate for me to comment on these truths other than to encourage a reading and an absorbing of what the author is saying.  I’m just going to write 10 quotes from the book which will be enough for you to know whether you are prepared to go on this journey with her.  I read the US edition before publication over here.  I see the UK edition has a Foreword by radio DJ Clara Amfo which may put some of this into context for the British reader.

I’ll give you the quotes as they appear chronologically within the book and also the section in which you will find them.  They will be out of context, perhaps, but I have not distorted them in any way.

“And writing about Black women is the thing that put me together again, that got me through and helped me become reacquainted with the concept of joy and freedom” (Introduction)

“To say that Black women are everything, are indeed essential to American Culture, to the global Zeitgeist is simply to observe things as they actually are” (Introduction)

“… to exist in a Black body is to exist in a persistent state of precarity, to be in constant anticipation of some form of violence” (Bodies)

“Black women’s bodies were once legally considered property.  They were bought and sold, traded and loaned” (She’s A Freak)

“How can a piece of property be raped?  Black women were therefore assumed as always being sexually available and this way of seeing them was sanctioned by the American government” (She’s A Freak)

“The fact that one in four Black girls will be abused before the age of 18, that one in five Black women are survivors of rape and yet for every fifteen Black women who are assaulted just one reports her rape comes as no surprise” (She’s A Freak)

“If Beyonce had a deeper complexion would her dominance within the Zeitgeist be as ubiquitous as it is” (Extra Black)

“My Blackness doesn’t make me depressed, but being Black in this world can be depressing.” (Strong Black Lead)

“the exuberance of Black joy springs forth from Black despair.  Collectively, we made a way out of no way.” (Strong Black Lead)

“Black women are killed in America at a higher rate than women of any other race.  Trans Black women are killed at an even higher rate.” (Strong Black Lead)

Carefree Black Girls is published in the UK by Square Peg on October 21st 2021.  Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

Harlem Shuffle – Colson Whitehead (Fleet 2021)

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Colson Whitehead’s reputation as one of the greatest living American writers took off with his last two novels which both won the Pulitzer Prize making him only the 4th writer to win this most prestigious Fiction award twice (alongside William Faulkner, John Updike and Booth Tarkington) and the only Black American to do so to date.

“The Underground Railroad”(2016) was the book that took him to the big league- I still cannot understand how it did not win the 2017 Man Booker Prize describing it thus “It ticks all the boxes for me, an involving, entertaining, well-written, imaginative, educational, unpredictable read.”.  I still feel aggrieved by the panel awarding the big prize to “Lincoln In The Bardo” with Whitehead failing to make the transition from longlist to shortlist.  I still haven’t watched the adaptation of this currently on Amazon Prime in the UK. 

Pulitzer Prize number 2 came with “The Nickel Boys” (2019) which focused on a boy’s reform school.  This was a more straightforward narrative which managed to both please and slightly disappoint me so I ranked it four stars.

This latest, his 8th novel is more understated than his two big-hitters but he is now at a point of his career where each publication is a big literary event.  Set in late 50’s/early 60’s Harlem it feels what I imagine Chester Himes to read like (I’ve never read him but I did recently buy “A Rage In Harlem” (1957) so it’s only a matter of time) with greater awareness of the history between now and then and the significance of civil rights unrest.  Here this unrest provides a backdrop more than a focus for the novel and in fact is seen at best as an inconvenience by the characters.

Main character Raymond Carney’s focus is furniture, a salesman with his own store. His desire is to become the first black shop-owner allowed to stock branded items previously only available in white-owned stores.  Carney is doing okay, he is employing staff and looking towards expansion but the start-up money derived from wrong-doings from his largely absent now deceased father and that association causes Carney problems.  Fencing stolen goods becomes part of his trade yet (and this will become the most quoted phrase from this novel) “Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked.”

The influence of family leads to Carney becoming involved in a heist at a hotel frequented by a black clientele which begins a slippery slope.  What begins as a crime caper becomes darker as Carney becomes obsessed by revenge whilst always trying to separate the personal from his business life.

Carney is a great character and he comes up against a number of other memorable creations here but I found plot development a little stop-start and the novel does not flow as well as I would have hoped.  I actually found it hard to retain what had been going on.  There’s a tendency to introduce something then backtrack as to how it happens, but this introduction caused me to feel like I’d missed out on something and started leafing back when there was no need as the author hadn’t got to that bit yet.  The plot seems too content to just simmer along, there were points when the pace accelerated and then the book really takes off. 

There’s nothing wrong with this novel and it’s totally right that an author should be allowed to move back from creating the extraordinary to do something which feels less momentous but it is not up there with his best.  I think my own expectations might have let me down here.  I’d been looking forward to the publication of this since the start of the year when I highlighted it as a must-read for 2021 and that is probably the reason why it feels for me just a touch disappointing.

Harlem Shuffle will be published on 14th Sept 2021.  Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

Sing, Unburied, Sing – Jesmyn Ward (2017)

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The paperback edition of this has sat on my shelves since it was published when I was so eager to get hold of a copy and I feel bad that it has taken me so long to get round to reading it.  Mississippi resident Jesmyn Ward made history with this book when she became the first Black American writer as well as the first woman to win a second National Book Award for fiction in her home country.  It seems incredible it took until 2017 for this to be achieved.  Her earlier win came with “Salvage The Bones” (2011) which I also haven’t read.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, the title and front cover made me think I would be in similar territory to Robert Jones Jnr’s masterful “The Prophets” (2021) but this is a Southern-set contemporary novel enriched with the rhythms and the sense of folklore, rhythms, spiritual beliefs and history of the community.  This makes it a powerful read. 

At first I was a little resistant.  I thought it might be a novel about bad parenting using thirteen year old Jojo and his neglectful mother, Leonie, to narrate sections and I wasn’t sure I fancied that, despite the quality of the writing.  A road trip (which I can also be ambivalent about in fiction) to collect Jojo’s white Dad from prison surprised me by really drawing me in even as it emphasised the poor parenting skills as the adults focus on getting high .  Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, are forged closer together during this time because of their strong feelings for one another and their mother’s indifference.  They leave at home Jojo’s grandparents, Pop, who is filling the gaps Leonie creates through his care and his stories of the past and Mam, rooted in mysticism and the supernatural but now in terminal decline as cancer ravages her body.  The other side of Jojo’s family is dominated by a racist who wants nothing to do with his son’s choice of partner.  The ghosts we carry around with us become palpable as the narrative progresses leading to an extraordinary last third which so impressed but which wouldn’t have functioned had not the character development in the opening two-thirds been so strong.

It is rare that I am drawn to a book both so lyrical and spiritual and on completion I experienced that shift in my perspective which you get from reading top-quality fiction.  It definitely had some difficult, challenging moments both for the characters and the reader and it cannot be consistently described as enjoyable but it certainly provided a powerful experience and it will stay with me for a long time.

Sing, Unburied, Sing, was published in the UK by Bloomsbury in 2017.

The Vanishing Half – Brit Bennett (2020)

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Another book from my What I Should Have Read In 2020 post (I’ve now managed to get through 60% of these).  Here was one I suspected  that I would really like but I enjoyed it even more than I imagined.  This is American author Brit Bennett’s second novel and after this I would certainly be keen on seeking out her 2016 debut “The Mothers”.

This, however, is the book that has established her breakthrough into the big time, appearing on so many Best Of The Year lists and has been shortlisted for the 2021 Women’s Prize for fiction.  The hype has built up which is often a dangerous thing for me and my expectations, but I’ll emphasise this, my expectations were exceeded here.

I came to it knowing roughly what it was about but there was so much more to it . Two light-skinned black twin sisters disappear from their small-town home and head for the excitement of New Orleans.  One, Desiree, eventually pairs up with an abusive, dark skinned man and has Jude, whose blue-black darkness of her skin shocks the residents of her home town, Mallard (where its black residents generally have a much lighter tone) on her return whereas her twin, Stella, ditches Desiree to disappear once again and decides to “pass” and live her life as a white woman.  In a decades spanning time frame we have as our starting point 1968 when Desiree returns to Mallard with her young daughter. 

There are so many discussion points in this novel regarding identity that one might expect it to feel issue-driven but no, plot and characterisation are both very strong and that together with its immersive readability provides an extremely impressive rounded work.  Those plot lines and unpredictable turns do drive the reader forward.  It’s not without a healthy dollop of melodrama and on a few occasions the authors use of cliff-hangers resembles the soap operas that one of the characters makes a name for herself on, but this is also a good thing, making it feel highly commercial, this together with its relevance where its publication alongside the media coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement created publicity at a time when lockdown ensured the usual avenues of publicising their work were not open to most authors.  This book deserved the exposure, however, not because it was of the moment but because of the sheer quality of the handling of all areas of the book.

Performance has a major part to play.  Many of the characters are donning a disguise and playing a part, some professionally and some within their lives and even within their closest relationships.  I found the implications and repercussions of this fascinating.  It has the unusual advantages of being both a thought-provoking important novel and a great holiday read and I hope many more people will discover this work over the summer.  My only criticism of a book I found very difficult to put down is that perhaps the ending felt a little flat and less defined than I would have hoped but that may have been because it was the end of the novel and there was no more to read about these characters. 

The Vanishing Half was published in the UK by Dialogue Books in 2020.  The paperback edition is out now.