Black Lives Matter Reading Recommendations: In Solidarity
by COUNTERCLOCK Blog Editors
In solidarity with the Black Lives Matter protests, we at COUNTERCLOCK support anti-racist education, prison and law enforcement abolition, and an end to the United States’ legacy of slavery and white supremacy.
The oppression black people, indigenous people, and people of color face in America is the direct result of white society's fragility and cowardice to reckon with the atrocities white people inflicted, and continue to inflict, through interpersonal and systemic violence.
The responsibility for everyone—but specifically for white people—in this time is to earnestly confront and hold ourselves accountable for our internalized racism as well as perpetually engage with anti-racist education. This anti-racist education must privilege and pay marginalized voices, and address the material conditions that have led to these protests.
To begin to do this necessary work of anti-racist education, our staff, as with many other publications, offer a reading list of books written by black people that have impacted us.
1. The Rose that Grew from Concrete by Tupac Shakur
Recommended by Woody Woodger
A collection of uncommonly intimate, loving, and exuberant poetry, The Rose that Grew from Concrete is an earnest sketch of Tupac Shakur the man, rather than the legend distorted and recuperated by the racist news media.
Through a series of epistolary poems addressed to Shakur’s romantic loves, his family, Huey P. Newton, himself, and many more, we are granted access to a level of vulnerability and personal accountability that few poets ever attempt.
Hanging over the collection is the knowledge of Shakur’s death and the white violence that continues to ravage the community he yearned to liberate. But this knowledge only further highlights his sincerity and clear-eyed incisiveness at such a young age. In this collection, Shakur invites us to ponder with him—ponder what it means to be a man, how best to honor his community, and how to envision a free world. To read this book is to follow his lead, to expand with love.
2. Water and Root by Shaniece Powell
Recommended by Woody Woodger
So often we honor the story rather than the person who has lived it. With every word, Water and Root reminds us of the person telling the story.
Through a series of intertextual poems and command of white space, Shaniece Powell writes herself into being and writes on her own terms. Rather than seek to explain what it means to be a black trans woman, Powell demands the audience bear witness to her experience and the experience of her community. As Powell says, “This is a text book of factual things,” and we are to treat it as such.
Powell's verse presents a history that is simultaneous, the many intersecting identities and traumas that she refuses to disentangle and make digestible for an unfamiliar, white audience. In this way, Powell gifts the reader with the totality of her pain. To read Water and Root is to marvel with a black trans woman at her immeasurable resilience. It’s an honor to witness, if even fleetingly, such strength. Powell proves indisputably that her people “are the direct dependents of the most supreme gods.”
3. Beloved by Toni Morrison
Recommended by Sarah Feng
In Beloved, Toni Morrison tells the story of a Black woman in the 1870s who lives in the free state of Ohio with her teenage daughter, Denver. Their house is haunted by an inexplicable supernatural force which rattles the floorboards and rocks the tables at night, leading Denver’s two brothers to run away from home. 18 years ago, Sethe—a decisive, powerful, and morose woman—was able to escape from Sweet Home, the barbaric plantation in Kentucky where Sethe spent her girlhood, and shed the immediate responsibilities of slavery, but she still grapples ferociously with the mental imprisonment that her history has left upon her. When Paul D, a former slave who worked with Sethe at Sweet Home, appears at Sethe’s door, Sethe’s suppressed memories of the dehumanization at the hands of Sweet Home’s schoolteachers and masters collide with her present, and her mind is thrown into the cesspool of her past. Toni Morrison’s magical realism lifts the imagined and remembered into flesh and blood, and her stinging, keen, and bittersweet prose-poetry allow us to inhabit the minds of people who have lost control of their bodies to the white society around them. It is difficult to take your eyes away from Morrison’s exquisitely crisp writing and harrowing dialogue. She plunges us into the psychological incarceration of the Black community that remains even when the physical manacles are unlocked; amidst the horror are moments of exultation as Sethe’s angelic mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, gathers the Black community in a clearing and tells them to dance, to relish the sensation of owning their bodies, and to cry as they wish. These heartrending segments of strength and relief are few and far between but still provide a glimpse of the endurance of the collective memory of Morrison’s characters through the book. Morrison’s explorations of how American society attempts to break and conquer not only Black bodies but Black minds should be read broadly and deeply, for it connects directly to the gaslighting and violence committed by law enforcement today.
4. The Tradition by Jericho Brown
Recommended by Sarah Feng
A collection of poems that explores how our world has become acclimated to violence and terror in our daily lives. In “Stake,” Brown explains that there is no “I” in Black America; it is only a monolithic “we” in the oversimplifying gaze of white society that exploits and twists each individual to one overpowering stereotype. In “Foreday in the Morning,” Brown reflects on the mythos of laziness and lack of drive, overturning it with fragments of subtle colors in budding flowers and the determination of mothers and sons. Each of Brown’s poems walk into fog and dispel obscurity, charge into a sea and crystallize its currents to illuminate every underwater particle with light; Brown’s words stride calmly, break loosely, and drift purposefully. In Brown’s triptych of duplexes, each a variation on the former, a surreal scene reveals itself before our eyes, glimmering in the heat and swaying in a field where the ruined temple of the body stands. There are so many quotes I wish I could include, but giving one line without Brown’s vivid, tender worldbuilding, superimposing myth over reality, would be like presenting a single leaf from a plant with deep roots. As we read, Brown takes us through a panorama of our world’s defects—movie theater shootings, police brutality—like a film director and a musician, showing us, cut-by-cut, how cinematic and tragic it is that we all succumb to America’s tradition of violence against the self.
5. Frying Plantain by Zalika Reid-Benta
Recommended by Noreen Ocampo
As someone with a soft spot for coming-of-age tales, short stories, and portraits of love, I adore Frying Plantain and consider it one of my all-time favorite novels. Although protagonist Kara Davis is young, the novel bravely handles ideas such as the difficulty of belonging and the complications of love, and we grow with Kara as she tries to reconcile the inbetweenness of her Jamaican Canadian identity and its impact on her relationships with family, friends, and self.
The ever-present influence of Jamaican culture in Kara’s life is intriguing and important as author Zalika Reid-Benta urges readers to consider the intersections of culture and identity, especially within a diasporic context, in a way that I think will speak to many readers. Personally, Kara’s complicated yet ultimately warm relationship with her mother especially resonated with me, and I think that readers of all backgrounds will be able to relate to and learn from Kara and her experiences as well.
If you would like to read more about my thoughts on Frying Plantain, please see my review on the blog here!
6. Conjure Women by Afia Atakora
Recommended by Noreen Ocampo
In Conjure Women, Afia Atakora demonstrates the importance of telling stories that often go unheard. The historical fiction novel follows Rue, a conjure woman of the Civil War South who takes up midwifery, healing, and hoodooing to fill the daunting role of her headstrong mother, Eloise.
Like Frying Plantain, Conjure Women highlights familial and platonic love, with love between women proving extremely prominent, layered, and moving. In addition to Rue’s complex relationship with her mother, we also explore Rue’s extremely unexpected lifelong friendship with Varina, her former master’s daughter. Conjure Women overflows with stories of magic and resilience and, most importantly, gives an undeniable power to stories from the margins. Between Atakora’s haunting descriptions of the otherworldly and unflinching depictions of truth, Conjure Women is unforgettable.
I have also reviewed Conjure Women for the blog, so if you are interested, please see my review here!
7. Hunger by Roxane Gay
Recommended by Ashira Shirali
Cultural critic Roxane Gay has an enviable online presence—her Twitter has 740K followers, and she began her career publishing in online magazines like The Rumpus and The Toast. In her memoir Hunger, Gay displays the acerbic wit that made her a Twitter icon while revealing the hurtful realities of living as a person of size. Hunger charts Gay’s relationship with her body, from gang rape at twelve to “super morbid obesity” in adulthood. Gay confronts her maladaptive use of food for comfort in clean, uncompromising prose.
Even as we see society’s treatment of larger bodies, we are reminded that people of color in America can’t escape the trappings of race. Gay recounts the contempt of white classmates at Phillips Exeter when she was accepted to Yale, the whispers about affirmative action. Gay calls herself privileged because she is upper middle class and has a PhD. Yet when she meets her new landlord, the first thing the woman says is, “You didn’t sound like a colored girl on the phone.” Hunger is an incisive and moving exploration of life as a black woman of size. The fact that fatness has been largely neglected by the literary establishment makes Gay’s words all the more valuable.
8. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Recommended by Ashira Shirali
The Pulitzer Prize and The National Book Award are two of the most prestigious literary fiction awards; winning either would make a writer’s career. Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel The Underground Railroad won both. Part historical fiction, part magic realism, Whitehead’s sixth novel follows sharp-tongued Cora as she escapes the horrific slavery of the South. The novel’s cast of characters—slave catchers, slaveholders, white benefactors, enslaved people and freemen—shows how slavery was the keystone around which all American life hummed. In this novel, no one is unaffected by slavery, not even characters like Ethel, a benefactor’s wife who claims that the morality of slavery doesn’t “interest” her.
Whitehead writes in precise, unsentimental language. His literary skill shines in the unexpected turns of the narrative. The Underground Railroad may be a historical novel, but it is anything but predictable. Parts of the novel can be difficult to read. Terrance Randall, the owner of Cora’s plantation, delights in designing gruesome punishments for slaves who err. The matter-of-fact tone of these passages reflects the chilling mundanity of such scenes at the time. Perhaps it is the scenes we want to look away from that we should pay most attention to.