Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature

2023; Duke University Press; Volume: 84; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00267929-10189243

1527-1943

Francesca T. Royster,

Race, History, and American Society

Farah Jasmine Griffin’s literary memoir is at once a love letter to her father, Emerson Maxwell Griffin, the man who instilled in her a love of reading, learning, and the Black community, and to African American literature itself, for its ability to pose the important questions of the “us” of Black people in America: our creativity, our ingenuity, our loves, grievances, and experiences of betrayal—particularly betrayal of the nation we call home.Griffin’s father, like many Black men of his generation, was a lifelong learner and organic intellectual, known by his family and neighbors to always have a paperback in his pocket and a stack of black-and-white composition books containing notes on what he read stashed in a closet. A steelworker at the Sun Shipbuilding Company in Chester, Philadelphia, Griffin’s father would take his daughter on outings on his days off to the Philadelphia public library, Black-owned bookstores, and Philadelphia’s many historical sites, as well as to rallies and protests, always with the goal of instilling habits of critical thinking and the appreciation of Black brilliance. His interest in the writings of the founding fathers as well as in Black freedom movements did not seem contradictory to Griffin, because “my father’s lessons did not derive from an uncritical patriotism. At times I think he exposed me to our nation’s founding fathers and the ideals they espoused so I would understand the enormity of their transgression, the enormity of the betrayal” (2).Griffin’s writing about her father reminds me a lot of my grandmother Gwen, a janitor in the Chicago public schools and a mother of six. Like Griffin’s father, my grandmother was a deep believer in the importance of self-education, who built her own library from trips to Black bookstores and Salvation Army thrift markets, as well as from books that she “liberated” from the castaways found in students’ lockers while cleaning them out during summer vacations. Griffin’s father, like my grandmother, gave testimony that literacy matters to Black lives, even those without access to academe, even as our analysis of the world sometimes goes unheeded, even as the everyday beauty we cultivate is undercut by white supremacy. Griffin’s title, Read Until You Understand, from an inscription that her father wrote to her in a gifted copy of Bryan Fulks’s 1969 folk classic Black Struggle: A History of the Negro, registers his passionate commitment to intellectual freedom and his faith in Black people’s potential to create change in the nation and world, passed on to his daughter and now to us.In Read Until You Understand, which includes a discussion of Black novels, poems, political oratory, memoir, music, and visual art, Griffin draws on her multifaceted, interdisciplinary expertise in a way that feels at once intimate and publicly engaged. A professor of American and African diaspora studies at Columbia University, Griffin draws on thirty years as a scholar and teacher of African American literature to show how this literature has guided her through the many intellectual worlds she inhabits. Her past work reflects the wide horizon of her interests, from African American literature produced by the Great Migration (in Who Set You Flowin’?), to the resistant sounds of jazz greats Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis (in her books If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery and Clawing at the Limits of Cool), to the ongoing legacy of Black feminist and progressive activists in the early twentieth century (in her books Harlem Nocturne and Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends). The range of her work gives prominence to texts both canonical and less so, popular and esoteric, and helps us understand African American literature in light of other cultural forms.Toni Morrison’s work is a touchstone throughout the book, and in Morrison’s body of work Griffin finds a critical and stylistic model to explore literature’s role in African American world making, including her own. Griffin writes, “Every time I read one of Morrison’s novels, I find passages that seem to imply, ‘Once upon a time there was a people.’ She records their speech, their poetry, and then mines both diction and syntax for larger philosophical and ethical implications. In all her works there is a sense of loss, not nostalgia, but loss of this peoplehood, this village, and the values it sustained to survive” (7). In Morrison’s writings, Griffin finds key articulations of African American worldviews and strategies, from the terror of the psychic alienation of being “outdoors” from community and kin in The Bluest Eye; to the vexed concept of mercy—especially as it is bestowed on Black people by whites—instead of justice, as explored in Beloved and A Mercy; to Sula’s consideration of friendship, community, and existential freedom in response to the pervasiveness of death. In Griffin’s reflections on the small acts of tenderness and love in her family and community—from grieving together, to listening to one another, to sharing food, to making home—we find a testament to the vitality at the heart of the Black village, which Morrison’s work also gives us.While chronicling Black vitality and survival, this work is also haunted by the continued proximity to death for Black people, felt keenly in the murders of Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, George Floyd, and so many others, as well as in the global COVID-19 pandemic’s unequal effects on Black and Brown people. At the heart of Griffin’s reflections on Black death, and the ever-present experience of Black grief, is a central experience of injustice and neglect that has shaped her irrevocably—the death of her father when she was nine. Taken to the hospital by two white police officers, who misread his symptoms of a cerebral hemorrhage as drunkenness, her father was rushed in the back of a police wagon on a stretcher that was left unstrapped and that rolled around with each movement of the vehicle. In Griffin’s poignant last moments with her father, she and her mother tried unsuccessfully to protect his body. Her father eventually died of those injuries. Griffin sees and feels this loss, and her continuing grief in the wake of chattel slavery, lynchings, police violence, and murder that shapes Black lives constitutes a grieving state that is both personal and collective. “Everyone dies,” Griffin writes. “But Black death in America is too often premature, violent, spectacular. The particular nature of Black death haunts Black writing, as it haunts the nation. It haunts this book” (131–32).Griffin persuasively shows the importance of freedom, resistance, and social justice as a dominant thread in the history of African American writings, as spurs to activism, even as they chronicle loss. The abolitionist writings of Frederick Douglass and David Walker laid the foundation for twentieth-century writings of freedom and resistance, taken up with different strategies and points of emphasis by Malcolm X, Barack Obama, Richard Wright, Toni Cade Bambara, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ernest Gaines, and Morrison, among others. In these writings we see a multidimensional response to the injustice of Black death. Griffin notes that both Walker and Douglass were important influences on the writings of Malcolm X, and both shaped Malcolm’s call for Black freedom “by any means necessary.” In Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Griffin finds a model for justice familiar from her own neighborhood, where “justice as we understood it was Divine—God would take care of it; or it was retributive, meted out by gangs, friends, and family members” (74). In Gaines’s novel A Lesson before Dying, Griffin finds a more transformative model, where “in the absence of justice, Black people have only each other and the responsibility of acknowledging and nurturing a sense of humanity among themselves” (78).In the face of pervasive grief, Griffin explores equally important themes of the transformative power of love, joy, self-determination, and growth, especially in the second half of the book. Here in particular Griffin’s “I,” the self of memoir, becomes both a narrator and a participant in the self-sustaining rituals of Black literature and art in everyday life. In these final chapters she explores the art that keeps us going, that connects us and energizes us to continue to question the inequities and struggles that haunt us. In her chapter “Joy and Something Like Self-Determination,” she conveys the importance of the Black soul music of Motown and the Philly sound of crooners like Teddy Pendergrass and Harold Melvin to weave a web of care for the community. She describes watching her cousins grow from children to adults guided by the models of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. Gaye’s What’s Going On posed serious and seriously grooving questions of ecology, racial inequality, and war, and in Wonder’s post-Motown work, on albums such as Innervisions, we encounter music as a declaration of self-determination and spiritual rejuvenation in the face of near death. For Griffin growing up from child to young woman, the women of the “quiet storm” movement such as Minnie Riperton and Syreeta Wright provided a space for self-reflection and a quiet, funky bohemianism. This music, she says, offered “a call and a response” (177), a conversation between the music and her community to restore, replenish, and rethink. In her closing chapters, “Cultivating Beauty” and “Of Gardens and Grace,” Griffin explores the ingenuity of the women in her life to create and surround themselves with beauty through the powers of their own imaginations: her mother’s gestures of care in making outfits for the women of her family; the cultivation of yellow roses by her aunt Eartha, who, like the enslaved peoples who raised gardens to feed themselves amid hints of natural beauty, offers a breathing space for her, and for the community around her.Lush, restorative, and timely, Read Until You Understand witnesses in worlds past and present the power of African American literature and art and the resilience of such powerful experience in a grave and troubling time.