Review: Emily Bernard on Margaret Walker
In Book Post | October 13, 2023
“The job of a biographer is to compose a narrative that sufficiently and convincingly captures the life of a human being. What an impossible task, to explain an entire human life in a limited number of pages. Like all other kinds of writing, the writing of biography is a feat that requires as much imagination as it does investigation. That’s because a complete story of any life is, in a sense, a fiction.”
Touching a nerve
In TLS | March 3, 2023
“Margo Jefferson’s dance with the past in her new memoir, Constructing a Nervous System, feels at once spontaneous and carefully choreographed. Like its predecessor, Negroland (2015), it has been described as a cultural memoir; but whereas Negroland is an outward-facing portrait of Black upper-class Chicago, Constructing a Nervous System is a report from the personal interior. It is a portrait of a consciousness composed of dreams and dread, aspirations and recriminations, and peopled with idols and intimates, including the author’s mother: ‘You should have died before I had to witness your full descent’, Jefferson writes in the opening pages. She calls the book ‘a temperamental autobiography’, a collage of ‘the materials of [her] life’. ‘I imagined it as a nervous system … of recombinant thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations and words.’”
The guillotine never misses
In TLS | November 25, 2022
“‘Empire is like a guillotine,’ writes Tsitsi Dangarembga in this collection of essays. Her most recent novel, This Mournable Body (TLS, June 19, 2020), was shortlisted for the Booker prize and her debut novel, Nervous Conditions (1988) – the first published book by a Black Zimbabwean woman writing in English – won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. These new essays are written from the world of these experiences, but they are not about them. In other words, Black and Female is not a catalogue of its author’s successes, but a journey into a wound that no amount of applause or reward can remedy. In this case empire is both the wound and the weapon.”
Out of hatred, into the spotlight
In TLS | November 12, 2021
“What sort of person grows up to win the Booker prize? Manifesto: On never giving up by Bernardine Evaristo – who was born in 1959 to an English mother and a Nigerian father – is an attempt to answer that question by the first Black woman ever to have received the honour. It is the story of a trailblazer. It describes the life of somebody who has always negotiated boundaries and whose outsider perspective has inspired her work. Part coming-of-age story and part how-to manual, the book is, above all, one of the most down-to-earth and least self-aggrandizing works of self-reflection you could hope to read. Evaristo’s guilelessness is refreshing, even unsettling.”
Review: Emily Bernard on Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
In Book Post | July 21, 2021
““Who is she?” asks Saidiya Hartman in the early pages of her most recent work, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. The question is inspired by a photograph whose subject captured Hartman’s attention: an unidentified Black girl taken at around the turn of the twentieth century, “a small naked figured” in repose, her eyes trained meaningfully on the camera. Wayward Lives is a faithful, tender tribute to the girl in the photograph and others like her, “surplus women” of all ages, making life up on their own in the margins of Philadelphia and New York between 1890 and 1935. These were real people, “girls deemed unfit for history,” writes Hartman, “and destined to be minor figures.” Together they form a chorus in Wayward Lives, a “serial biography of a generation,” a swelling sonic narrative about the social, political, and erotic life of Black women in the modern world at the dawn of a new era, a breathtaking story that has never been told before.”
Black skin, black masks: A novel of art and ethics
In TLS | March 12, 2021
““Nothing seemed more absurd than to see a colored man making himself ridiculous in order to portray himself.” The words of George Walker serve as a portal into the world of The Rib King by Ladee Hubbard. Walker was half of the wildly popular vaudeville duo, Williams & Walker (his partner was Bert Williams), who advertised themselves as “Two Real Coons” and popularized the cakewalk. Williams & Walker were imaginative and inventive, but a certain script had already been written for them, steeped in the vocabulary and values of American racism. Is it, asks Hubbard, possible for Black people living in white supremacist culture to choreograph their own acts, and to author their own stories – or are they still only revising the narratives written by others? To answer these questions, Hubbard takes us into the story behind a grinning black face on a label for meat sauce.”
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson Is a Trailblazing Work on the Birth of Inequality
In Oprah Daily | August 4, 2020
“In her magnificent latest, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Wilkerson deepens and extends her examination of the inception and consequences of American racism, finding direct connections to the outcastes of India and the horrors of the Third Reich. Her historical opus draws on years of research, stories, and previously published works to reveal, for example, that the Nazis used U.S. miscegenation laws as a blueprint for their own approach to genocide, and that Martin Luther King Jr., on a 1959 visit to India, observed, “Yes, I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.” That realization informed his civil rights work thereafter. Wilkerson unearths bone-chilling parallels in systems of oppressive regimes that otherwise seem radically dissimilar to explain caste and how it predated and helped define racism in America.”
Adrienne Brodeur's Wild Game Is an Intoxicating Memoir About Her Mother's Affair
In Oprah Daily | October 9, 2019
“Readers of Wild Game (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), take heed: You’re about to enter an alternate universe in which roadkill is transformed into gourmet fare and a woman named Malabar wakes her 14-year-old daughter, Adrienne (a.k.a. Rennie), in the middle of the night to swoon over the object of her passion—her husband’s best friend, Ben.”
Autobiography of an Ex-Black Man: Thomas Chatterton Williams loses his race
In Harper’s Magazine | December 2019
“We are best served, as far as I’m concerned, by adopting the ironic lens of blues humor when engaged in the tricky practice of parenting while black, particularly those of us who belong to families in which the social or genetic identities of children do not match those of their parents… Self-Portrait is Williams’s attempt to liberate his mind from the shackles of conventional racial designations once he realizes that his children will never be seen by anyone—not even, most likely, by themselves—as black.”
Review: Emily Bernard on Imani Perry’s Lorraine Hansberry
In Book Post | August 30, 2019
“Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry is a story about a story. Author Imani Perry describes the book as “less a biography than a genre yet to be named.” In tender, elegant prose, Perry establishes her literary mission, which is to honor the ambition of the late Lorraine Hansberry, the first African American writer to have a play produced on Broadway, “to put down the stuff” of her life. But what exactly constitutes the stuff of a life? Perry, a formidable scholar with a poet’s voice, attends to the big-ticket events that turned Hansberry into a target for the FBI with the same nuance and compassion with which she treats the private self that Hansberry revealed in journals and correspondence. Looking for Lorraine is a refreshing and unusual life study that gives readers insight into the challenges, temptations, and limitations inherent in biography itself.”
