In light of the ongoing anti-racist protests around the world, I wanted to take the chance to share some recommendations of books written by Black authors that centre around a Black experience of the world. In literature, as with other aspects of culture, we too often read and see books that centre around white experience of the world, and act as if this is a universal experience, when in reality we know it is not.
This list is comprised of five books that I have read and enjoyed recently that are both written by, and centre around Black women:
– Girl, Women, Other
– Such a Fun Age
– Queenie
– I Know why the Caged Bird Sings
– The Color Purple
If none of these take your fancy at the bottom I have put the link to a huge list of books written by Black authors on Goodreads.
Girl, Women, Other: Bernardine Evaristo
Starting with the book I have read most recently. This book is highly acclaimed and, among many other awards, won the 2019 Booker prize.
It tells the interlinking stories of 11 Black women and 1 Black gender queer person. It covers a really wide breadth of experience of life in the UK. The characters come from all sorts of backgrounds and have completely different life experiences, but are all somehow related to one another.
The book is filled with insights about race, gender, sexual orientation and class, and the way in which these condition your life. It did a great job in showcasing some of the diverse experiences that people can have whilst seemingly in the same “identity category”: for example, the Black radical lesbian playwright has an understandably very different existence from the Oxbridge educated, Black banker. At the same time, there are similarities in their experiences: their voices are ignored, and they have to either conform to roles that don’t fit them or force their way into creating new roles.
There is little plot to the book; it meanders through 12 histories of people that interlink. But I love that about it. Instead of action, you get a real sense of who each person is. I love that you can form an opinion of someone and then that image changes when you hear the part this character plays in someone else’s story. I feel it makes for well-rounded characters who are neither good nor bad, victim nor perpetrator – just people.
Some parts feel a little as if they have been taken straight from a manifesto and, whilst for me this does not detract from the book, it doesn’t feel entirely natural. I noticed this particularly during some of the dialogue. I feel the points had already been made through the narrative did not really need to be so explicitly forced as they were already there.
Despite this, the book makes for an interesting and entertaining read. For people unfamiliar with racism in the UK, it very clearly depicts the ways in which this conditions people’s lives and it is certainly well worth reading.
Such a Fun Age: Kiley Reid
I have to admit I didn’t expect as much from this book as I got. But I ended up reading it in one sitting!
This book tells the story of white feminist blogger, Alix Chamberlain and her African American babysitter, Emira Tucker. The story begins when Alix asks Emira to take her baby to the supermarket late on a Saturday night, to get her out of the house during an emergency. At the supermarket, the security officer tries to arrest Emira because he believes that she has abducted the child. This moment is filmed by a bystander.
From then on, we see the tangle that Alix gets herself into, by trying to prove that she is not racist. At the same time, Emira is struggling with the reality of graduating from college and not knowing what to do with her life, needing a job that pays for health insurance, and just with the reality of being an adult. These two characters continue to dance around each other as Alix tries to absolve her guilt for the supermarket situation, and Emira tries to figure her life out.
Reid shows the everyday biases and racist micro aggressions to which Emira is subject. At the same time, she demonstrates the frailty of white liberal “wokeness” and its tendency towards white saviourism. Alix Chamberlain is the epitome of wannabe woke, and after the wake-up call from the supermarket incident, she wants to prove to Emira that she is not racist. She wants to show that she has a Black friend, and that she cares about Black people, but is not willing to go deeper than this and reflect on her own privilege. And we are shown very clearly the ways in which she directly benefits from white privilege and is implicitly racist. This book is incredibly educational for white people who want to avoid the pitfalls of white saviourism, and generally understand the dynamics of white privilege in a novelistic setting.
I found the character of Emira very relatable. She is does not know what career she wants, she is surrounded by people who do, and she feels at a loss. The looming need for money and health insurance give her somewhat of a tight deadline to get her life together. This is something that many people in their mid 20s around me are going through. They are working badly paid jobs, just about affording rent, and feel the pressure to grow up and get an adult job, but don’t really want to. Reid has effectively captured this uncertainty, and the feeling of being lost – especially when your peers don’t seem to be.
I was a little disappointed by the ending of the book, maybe because I would have liked a slightly different ending for some of the characters. But, in general, I thought this was a really good book, written very well. It was lightly written but dealt in depth with important issues.
Queenie: Candice Carty-Williams
Queenie is billed as a cross between Bridget Jones’ Diary and Americanah. So, as I’m only part way through Americanah now, I could only use the film of Bridget Jones’ Diary to gauge how this book would be. About relationship drama and somewhat frivolous. Which it really isn’t!
Queenie tells the story of a young black women in London, who is going through a very intense break up. She ends up with her mental health spiralling downwards, making bad decision after bad decision, and allowing all sorts of undesirable men to abuse her until she starts to lose everything and finally has a break down. After that she starts to build her life back up and learns how to love herself.
The book is written in a very inviting and easy to read style, in some parts funny, whilst dealing with some heavy themes. We see the identity struggle that Queenie faces and her struggle to love herself. This book shows the way in which her race affects her job, her romantic relationships and her family relationships. It also gives a very detailed look at both trauma and anxiety. We see the way in which anxiety can be wholly crushing, something which is very relatable for an increasingly anxiety-filled youth.
One criticism I have seen of the book is that the character seems to be fairly anti-Black men. She has a stigma about the way they treat women, and several Black people reviewing the book have said that they wished the author had delved a little more deeply into this as they feel it is not an entirely fair representation of black men. There is also some discussion that this contains a lot of stereotypes of Black women.
Despite this I felt that, although Queenie is a hot mess, her character is so likeable it is hard not empathise with her and enjoy the book.
I Know why the Caged Bird Sings: Maya Angelou
This is the beautifully written autobiography of Maya Angelou. It details her upbringing through to the age of 17. As a very young child, she and her brother Bailey are cared for by their Grandmother. They live in a segregated Southern town and are well cared for by their very devout and very strict grandmother, Mamma. However, there is the constant backdrop of segregation and the white trash from the other part of town, as well as the existence of the KKK. Both Maya and her brother turn to books to entertain themselves and end up moving two grades up in school.
When Maya is 8, she and Bailey are taken to live with their mother in St Louis, a northern city. Here, Maya ends up being sexually abused by her mother’s fiancé and, whilst she has more opportunities here, ends up hitting a real low in her childhood. She loses her voice after this incident. She and Bailey return to their loving Grandmother and end up back in rural Stamps. However, at some point they can go no further with their education, and Bailey is at the age where it is not at all safe for him to live in an area with such violent white supremacy. So, the children are sent to live with their mother again. She is now living in California – an unsegregated, but still racist, state. Once there, Maya becomes the first black woman to work on the street cars and has many other experiences.
This book is very poignant and honest, leaving no illusions as to what life was like growing up as Black child, and more specifically a Black woman in the 1930s, in both Southern and Northern states in the US. Throughout the book, we see Maya come face to face with white supremacy and the barriers put up against Black people. She suffers terrible trauma, yet manages to pull through so much. She writes beautifully and manages to transport the reader to whichever situation she is narrating at that moment.
This book is an incredible read and I highly recommend it. I would also recommend the rest of her autobiographical books, through which she continues to tell her story, honestly and beautifully.
The Colour Purple: Alice Walker
This feels like quite an obvious book to recommend; on the other hand, I feel it is such an important book, and fully deserves to be considered a classic.
The story is told through the eyes of Celie, a black girl in the deep south of the US, in the 1930s. She is repeatedly raped by her father and then forced into an abusive marriage, having lost her sister Nettie, the only member of her family who loved her. The story is told through letters that she addresses at first to God, who she sees as a white patriarchal figure, but who is the only person she can think of to write to, in her isolation. Later, when she rejects this ‘white man’s God’, she addresses them to Nettie.
Celie suffers an abusive marriage, which she puts up with submissively, constantly being told that she is worth nothing and deserves nothing.
“Who you think you is? he say. You can’t curse nobody. Look at you. You black, you pore, you ugly, you a woman. Goddam, he say, you nothing at all.”
But then she meets a pair of women who do stand up for themselves. And, over time, through the bond of sisterhood created between them, Celie discovers her sexuality, finding a lover in one of the women. She too learns to stand up for herself and find a joy in living. Together, they create a spiritual revolution, distancing themselves from the white man’s God, and instead finding joy and love in creation – believing that God is all around and inside you. Through the sisterhood, Celie is able to embark on a process of exploration and self-realisation that enable her to redefine her life and find her voice, despite the many awful things she has experienced.
This book deals with many very important issues: race, colonialism, misogyny and gender roles, domestic abuse, sexuality and poverty. The book often depicts very traumatic events and is very raw yet it is also very uplifting in its celebration of women’s power. Through the sisterhood of Black women, all of whom have suffered terrible things, Celie learns to live an independent and empowered life – at a time and with an identity that did not allow for this. Interestingly, the Black men in the novel are also allowed, as the novel progresses and Celie’s understanding develops, to grow beyond the roles prescribed for them by their society, such that the novel is also a critique of male stereotypes of the time.
This book has so much depth and so many layers that such a short review does it an injustice. If you have not read it yet, I would advise you to pick it up immediately!
Blackout the best seller book list
In the week June 18th – June 20th (this week) people are aiming to Blackout the best seller book list. What this means is that if you can you should buy books by Black authors this week in order to put books written by Black authors on the top of the best seller lists around the world.
This is important in showing the power that Black writers can have. It actually helps to encourage white dominated publishing house to publish more books by Black authors. This will in the future create more opportunities for Black people to be published. So if you have the money you have until 20th June to buy any of the above books or hundreds and hundreds more. And in general if you are not yet doing so, use this as a wake up call to start reading more books by Black authors, or BAME authors.
Links
- Article about the Blackout Bestseller list.
- A Guardian article about the Blackout Bestseller list
- The longest list of books by Black authors from Goodreads.
