Last week, I was delighted to have the opportunity to speak with Dr. Farah Jasmine Griffin, William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies and Chair of the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. The transcript of our discussion is below, edited for length and clarity.
Marc Schorin: Last night I was trying to write questions, I found it quite difficult to write any. I think, in part, that’s because your method complicates, as opposed to containing or generalizing, specific theories. There are all of these multitudes of experiences that get put down on paper, and I found it quite difficult to trace any one and then have a question about it. So I thought it might make sense to set up a discussion based off of your texts—and there were two quotes from outside of your texts that I thought were useful and relevant to our conversation.
One is from Gayatri Spivak’s 1977 essay “The Letter as Cutting Edge,” and the other is from Barbara Christian’s 1987 “The Race for Theory.” And the Christian quote is,
There is… a caution we feel about pronouncing black feminist theory that might be seen as a decisive statement about Third World women. This is not to say we are not theorizing. Certainly our literature is an indication of the ways in which our theorizing, of necessity, is based on our multiplicity of experiences.
And then the Spivak quote is, “What can criticism do?—but name frontier concepts?”
What I found relevant to your work is the stress on organic intellectualism and the continued complicating as opposed to containing. In your Ms. interview, you related this joint practice specifically to your engagement with Black feminism. How did your relationship with black feminism begin to unfold, and in what ways is your scholarship situated within or outside of it?
Farah Griffin: Sure, great question. I think I came to college… Well, I had a sense that there was a set of experiences and ways of thinking and writing that Black women had. And then there was this thing called feminism, which to me was white. And even though, I think, I considered myself a feminist, I wouldn’t name myself that because it didn’t feel capacious enough. And then when I was in college, not in the classroom but in the bookstore, I discovered this thing called Black feminism. And at the time, there were these pamphlets that were published by Kitchen Table Press. And one was Barbara Smith’s “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.” One was the Combahee River Collective Statement. There was Audre Lord and Angela Davis, and in addition to reading all the literary works by black women writers, I started reading those things, and I think I found a place that felt like an intellectual home and a theoretical home, and allowed me to embrace both the Black and the feminism.
And so that was my entry point. And it was not in a classroom, nobody was teaching it. I was so happy when I could find other people who were reading it, because it wasn’t like my friends were reading it. It felt insurgent. And it felt like that was the reason why I went to graduate school, I could be part of this insurgent intellectual project that Black feminism had mapped a way for me. And so, I have always, since that time, seen myself as engaging in a Black feminist practice and praxis, even when I was not writing about Black women. It was, “What does it mean to think about, theorize, analyze the world from this framework?” Which is why my first book, or even my dissertation, wasn’t about Black women. It was about a people’s history and culture told from the perspective of Black feminism.
MS: I think it’s an interesting point that it’s outside of the classroom, that it has to take place within specifically a popularizing [medium]… I meant like publishing pamphlets as opposed to dissertations, or books, or a thesis, or whatever. Do you think that’s still a tradition that’s occurring now at the moment? How is it engaging still with politics?
FG: I think for a while it wasn’t. I think that what happened is there was still work being done outside of the academy, but as we entered into the academy, the Black feminist praxis was both of politics but also a reading, a way of reading. And we began to institutionalize it within Black Studies, within English, within these places. And I think that that political urgency that one felt at the very beginning, you began to feel less of. There was a large march, [the Million Woman March] following the Million Man March, and it was not necessarily a feminist moment, a Black feminist moment. But I think that what has been fascinating to watch is the ways that Black feminism, Black feminist theorizing—people continue to read it and that the activists, particularly the activists organizing around Black Lives Matter, were also still reading and creating Black feminist theorizing. So that, once again, it is… Even not once again, because it was never at the center of a social movement, but it has been at the center of these insurgencies around Black Lives Matter, in ways that surprise probably the people who first began to talk about Black feminism, and certainly those of us who came of age in the academy, identifying as Black feminists.
MS: What are some of the surprises or differences?
FG: I think that we’re of a generation where Black feminism was marginal and where we had to fight for its legitimacy and fight all kinds of potential allies. And so Black social movements, while Black feminists have always participated in them, have been largely patriarchal. And to have this most significant moment in the Black freedom struggle to be driven by a certain understanding that challenges gender and patriarchy, I don’t think we could have imagined that it would be at the center. We could certainly imagine that it would be at the table, but not a driving ideology or a set of theories or political praxes that privileges the thought of Black feminist thinkers.
MS: It relates to Harlem Nocturne a lot of ways, that you look at these three women artists who are driven by politics. And in a lot of ways, it feels like that drive, even with the decline of the Communist Party, still exists but perhaps has been shifted… Do you think that there’s still this left-wing creative power that is becoming more and more central? Because it was Barbara Christian who wrote is that “the literature of people who are not in power has always been in danger of extinction or of cooptation, not because we do not theorize, but because what we can even imagine, far less who we can reach, is constantly limited by societal structures.”
FG: Yeah. Yeah. I think that what happens with those women from Harlem Nocturne, and then I’ll get back to what Christian says, is that none of them, with the exception of Primus, saw themselves initially as engaging in a left-wing politics. I think that they saw themselves as being artists who came from an oppressed people, who wanted to represent those stories and to challenge the status quo through their art. And they came of age in a period where there was a rigorous left-wing activism that created a space for them. And I think that they would have been as engaged without that movement. They would have been as interested in the issues that they were interested in without that movement, but the movement created a space for them, and then created a context and a set of institutions that certainly helped shape their perspective and their understanding of what they were presenting. And that helped to create an aesthetic, because I think that they didn’t think that they were being political and not aesthetic. I think they didn’t see those boundaries. And that when that more political aesthetic goes out of style, particularly for the writer, things shift. Whereas the composer-musician is just always changing and always driven by… She’s just like a sponge, and she’s constantly driven by whatever is out there.
With the Barbara Christian, I think that societal structures certainly have limited a certain set of capacities… But that’s what the artists do. The artists then give them an imaginary and really respect their own imaginations and what they can see as possible, and that they put forward a vision, that if you have access to it, then you begin to see it as possible, too. And it’s also what I think of organizers. Which is why I think that organizing is an art as much as it is a political praxis, because organizers also are imagining, and then trying to bring that imagination into being, not only in terms of for the future, what we’re fighting for, but how we exist in community as we struggle for what we’re fighting for. I think that that’s something that organizers share with artists.
MS: There are a few things there. One is that, reading some of your books, there is this not… I was tempted to say re-evaluation or even valorizing, but both those weren’t really correct, because it seems more that they’re just pointing out, Well, there was always this element to their work. There was always this genius and it just had been deliberately smothered.
FG: Right, right. Or a refusal to recognize it… I believe that talent and genius and… First of all, I think it’s much more democratic than we’ve allowed ourselves to believe. I believe that it is equally distributed across all peoples on the globe, and that I start from the starting point that it always exists. It always exists. Then what are the structures that try to thwart it, that successfully thwart it, and what are the avenues through which people express it anyway? And I saw this great quote from Einstein, who I have to be careful, ’cause things are attributed to him that he didn’t really say, so he might not have said this. We have to look it up. But he said something like, “There’s genius everywhere, but it’s just how we measure it.” I don’t know exactly what he said, but if we measure it by having Hazel the dog play chess, we’re never gonna find out what her genius is. That’s the way I always feel about it, that it’s always there.
And what ways is it thwarted? You take a people who you make it illegal for them to read and write, and illegal for anyone to teach them to read and write, well, that’s definitely a thwarting of it. And then what avenues are left open for it to be expressed? And in those very same people, one of the avenues that was left open was music, and yet, because of the way our society is, it wasn’t just a refusal to recognize the genius in the music. It was an inability to recognize it, because an inability to imagine that those people could even create something that complex. So, yeah, that’s always there.
MS: Yeah, and it reminds me what you say about Billie Holiday, that there’s this absurd standard that she was held to, where [for instance] she likes comic books—but so does Miles Davis. But therefore, she doesn’t understand the very obvious political message behind “Strange Fruit,” was the claim.
FG: Right. And I think now, finally, people are recognizing… The musicianship is where her genius is, is how she’s re-composing these songs in her head on the fly. That’s the true place that we need to look for what her gifts were. But also being able to see how she saw the world and understood the world, and she was there… People might not think to ask her a question about what she thought, but there are interviews where she talks about the current political state, or where she talks about, wow, she loves Louis Armstrong, she loves him. And she’s watching him on television and someone reports, and she says, “Boy, he really has to Tom to get what he’s gotten.” And a certain set of refusals that she engages in. We now theorize refusal, but she… I think so much of her life and her way of being in the world was a set of refusals. And then how we see the, “Oh, she’s illiterate because she only reads comic books.” But I also think it’s a condescension that because someone is not formally educated and haven’t read or encountered a certain set of text, that they don’t have an innate capacity for understanding and analysis. And those are two very separate things, which is what you learn when you study organic intellectuals. Yeah.
MS: Yeah. Like it’s still very much the case in academia today, that there is this idea that if you don’t read this canon or if you don’t, whatever, or if you don’t go through the academic machinery whatsoever…
FG: Right. And I think we have fewer and fewer spaces where people have access to knowledge in that way, and it’s come more and more narrow. It used to be a time when people got it in different organizations, different writing groups, and that political organizations had political education, where a lot of the people in the ’60s who read Fanon certainly didn’t read him in a classroom. And it wasn’t indoctrination, it was education. It was learning how to think critically. Sometimes unions had those things, that there were spaces outside of the academy for that kind of study. Yeah.
MS: And also for creative thought, for expressing oneself.
FG: Yeah. Absolutely. And there’s such an assault, a neoliberal assault on anything public. And maybe it’s because public can be dangerous, so a young James Baldwin sitting in the public library reading all the books in the public library, it’s all there for him to do. And public education, like a rigorous and good public education with committed and devoted teachers and resourced in a certain way, that idea of public, where everybody has access and there’s no limitation on what they can pursue. And the assault on everything public in terms of what it means for thought and what it means for creativity is astounding. And to me, it’s like an extension of the laws that make it illegal to teach people to read and write.
MS: How do you feel your place in the academy relates to the need for public resources?
FG: I have always thought of the academy as a site. One, it’s my job, and I needed a job, but also a site, one of the few sites that did still allow for a space and thinking and access to forms of knowledge, and a site where it was possible to create something, and it was possible to create Black Studies. It was possible to create an archive, it was possible to… How do I make the academic space where I am more open and more available through programming, through access to thinkers, through bringing people on campus, bringing people from the nearby communities where they feel a stake in this project? And so I’ve tried to do that… After my first book, I’ve always tried to write in a way that spoke to audiences both within the academy and outside of the academy. It’s very important to me to bridge that gap and to make those things available, make the books available, make myself available to audiences that were not necessarily elite cultural institutions or academic institutions.
MS: And there’s also… It is that, within in the academy, it’s such a vibrant… It can be, I should say, such a vibrant and productive place, but there’s such an emphasis on being able to extract resources from academia that I know the students feel is stifling. Do you have a similar understanding?
FG: I think I don’t, not because it doesn’t exist, but because I’ve never seen the academy as my only site of engagement, or even my only intellectual community or creative community. That’s always been made up of people who were both within the academy and artists who were outside of the academy, and organizers, that my community, my intellectual community, my interlocutors, the people from whom I’m learning and to whom I’m writing, and my activism, have not been bound by the academy. Not that I don’t have that understanding of it, but it has not been the source of my intellectual identity so much. Although it’s probably the source that I’m most known for, there’s a whole another world that I exist in of intellectuals who are not only bound to the academy and the structures of the academy.
MS: I think that was interesting in “Who Set You Flowin’?” the idea of the ancestors, that they’re… As you were saying, this intellectual community that is so vast and intricate and simply outside of what was even deemed to be academia. For you especially, in this book, but also I know, in a lot of ways, Toni Morrison represents a very important ancestor voice. How did your engagement with her literature begin?
FG: Yeah. I actually got this sense of theorizing the notion of ancestor from her, because ancestor figures are important in her work, and she actually wrote a critical essay on the ancestor [“Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” 1984], where I got the idea, and then I theorized it in “Who Set You Flowin’?” I started reading her as a kid, as a teenager, and reading her both was a source of pleasure and a source of aspiration. And it made sense, it helped me make sense of the world, without me knowing that’s all that it was doing. And then she became for me a real… I love literature, and I just… She became one of my most revered authors, and the books that gave the most pleasure and the books… And I learned how to write, all of that. But she, more so than other creative writers, also helped me have a framework for my own academic and intellectual work, that I felt like she was, without calling herself a theorist, or even trying to be a theorist. She did not reify theory in the way that we do. But that’s what she was doing all the time, like, Here’s a way to understand slavery. Here’s a way to understand the great migration. Here is a vocabulary and a language. And she would do it in one paragraph, and then I could take it and run from there.
And so, in so much of my work, she’s at the center of it. Her thought, not just her writing but her thought, is at the center of it. And I wrote an essay in a collection on Morrison. It talked about my changing relationship with her, it’s called something like “Wrestling [Till] Dawn.” And it starts off with that shaping and forming relationship as a teenager, and then getting to college and still being completely overwhelmed by what I was learning from her but feeling like she wasn’t explicitly feminist enough for me. And then turning to Alice Walker and those women who were calling themselves Black feminists, and saying, “This is what work should do,” but then always being drawn back to Toni, always being like, “Okay, it’s more complicated than that. It’s a little more complex, and things aren’t always that easy, and the world isn’t gonna unfold in that way.” And so, at every stage of my life, reading her has informed the way I think about and see the world, think about and see text, think about and see politics. And there have been many thinkers who have been important to me, but as a thinker, she has probably been singularly the most important.
MS: Did that change with the personal relationship with her?
FG: No. No. We became friends. And I loved her dearly. And every once in a while I’ll be like, “Oh, yeah, this is the woman whose books I’m reading.” But it didn’t change, it was just reinforced. I would still go to her to figure out what I was thinking. “What’s your take on this? How do you see this? What do you think about this?” It did not change, it was just enhanced, and enhanced in such a way that, when she died, I was overcome with grief, but also more than grief, overwhelming gratitude. And often when I lose people, grief is like that, you think you’re done, you think you’re okay, and then it comes, smacks you in your face. You’re on the subway and you’re crying. But with her passing, I’d feel it, I felt the grief all the time. But what would hit me is I’d walk somewhere, and I would just get this overwhelming sense of gratitude. I was a girl in South Philly reading Toni Morrison, who was larger than life to me. And now as a woman, her work still matters to me, and I actually knew her as a friend, Oh my God, thank you. Yeah.
MS: That’s beautiful… I was remembering the works that I’ve read of hers, but how they also, as you were saying, change as the reader changes in a way that’s indicative of really excellent literature, that it’s not frozen in any [way].
FG: Yeah, not frozen at all. One of my other favorite people is Edith Wharton. I used to reread House of Mirth every two years, and totally realized that that book was all about what I was bringing to it. I could appreciate it, or understand it, or see things based on what I could bring to it. So, when I read it when I was 18, “Oh, Lily Bart.” [chuckle] And then I read it when I was 22, or 25, or 35, just all these different ways of seeing and ways of entering. And you’re right, that’s what they do, which is why we sometimes want to return to them. And it seems unfair, because there’s so many books and so little time, that you’re like, I already read that, I don’t need to read that again. But there’s some of them that you really do want to return to because you want to see what you think. I just reread The Great Gatsby for a project that I’m working on. And once again, it’s, Wow. And because of what I know now that I didn’t know the last time I read it, I see it totally differently, those relationships that you build with certain writers across time, across space.
MS: Those relationships are also very central to your work, not only with different writers, but with different academics and people in your life, and just struck me as particular to your writing, also to Black feminism in general, a sense of collective work.
FG: Yeah. And that’s one of the things that I love about the work, is that you are engaged in a collective project, and you’re engaged in a generational project, and you’re engaged in a transgenerational one. So, you’re engaged in a conversation with those people who came before you and in a conversation with those people who are around you at the same time, and that your individual voice matters and makes a difference and hopefully furthers a project, but that it’s part of a chorus and a moment in time that you look at it and you want to enter into it, or you want to differentiate yourself from it. And it really does remind me of the jazz ensemble that we’re making this thing, we’re creating this thing together, and what you have to bring to the table individually is of necessity and very important to move it forward, but then there’s a space for you to come back in.
And I think that all intellectual work is that way, but I think that Black feminism is consciously that way, and there hasn’t been as much the need to slay the mother. Because you wanted to recuperate the mother… Your intellectual forebearers, you wanted first for them to get acknowledgement for what they did, and you want to acknowledge and honor them, even as you may disagree with the path that they took or where they led us. Collaborative work is the most exciting work to me, is what my best work comes out of, those collaborations. Even though sitting down at the page, it’s just you and the page.
MS: That reminds me of your discussion of Abbey Lincoln in If You Can’t Be Free… because you point out she’s actually maybe not a feminist thinker, but she’s still so important.
FG: She’s so important for so many reasons. That early essay in the ’60s that she wrote, it’s not a feminist essay. A lot of Black women weren’t writing feminist work then. It resonated. There was an honesty and a truth to it, and it’s still part of that tradition of trying to think through the place of Black women. And what I love about her is her growth. To me, she’s one of those examples of people who starts out being one way and she’s… Because of the way she looks, she’s gonna be fit into a certain mold and presented in a certain way, and she just realizes she wants to know more, she wants to learn more. And as she knows and learns more, she begins to create more and take risks and take chances, and really do things that are not the best thing for her career but that are extraordinary for her creative growth.
I think that her brilliance doesn’t even become apparent until much later in her life. She’s the perfect example of what we were talking about earlier. Looking at her early in her career, no one was gonna say, “Oh, she’s gonna contribute to this tradition of jazz vocalists. Dismiss her, she’s pretty.” And then even when she started writing songs and becoming conscious of becoming a jazz singer, vocalist, musician, no one knew that she was gonna write the songs that she wrote later in her life, which are… Those songs are like scripture. She is one of the best lyricists out there. And she didn’t just write the lyrics, she wrote the music, her arrangement, all of that. No one could have seen that in Abbey at 22. She wasn’t the promising She’s-Gonna-Blow-the-World-Apart.
MS: It’s even interesting that, towards the beginning of her career, and you talk about it in your book, what she sings “When Malindy Sings,” even then, there’s this reaching back to ancestors.
FG: Right. Before she even started writing her own lyrics, she was looking to the poetic tradition, looking to Dunbar. She wrote poetry by looking at Dunbar. And then Dunbar himself is writing a poem about an enslaved woman singing, so he’s helping to construct the tradition that Abbey will then situate herself in “Malindy,” who is a persona in a poem that is there to represent all the nameless voices. We have all these travel writers and people who write about black women singing, anonymous singers, and how they can’t transcribe… They can’t transcribe the notes ’cause the notes don’t fit on a Western scale, and they’re these fugitive notes. And those women, we don’t even know their names. But the people who are hearing them, oftentimes people who are hearing them who might be slave owners or maybe abolitionists—that they mediate our access to what those women sound like. And then Dunbar just gives us this poem that says, This is what’s going on. And Abbey, it’s something for Abbey to say, Oh, that’s my tradition. Yeah.
MS: What’s fascinating then is the utter importance, even beyond its beauty, but just simple importance of something like Beloved, where slave women are intellectual as well as loving and sexual. They’re full people.
FG: They’re full people. And that’s what they weren’t in the slave narratives. The slave narrative genre didn’t allow for that. It didn’t allow for interiority, because it had a mission. It was part of this movement to free people. And this is what I mean by the imagination, that we didn’t have narratives that gave us access to the interiority. We didn’t have narratives that gave us access to all kinds of things. And for the scholar, that’s horrible, because we rely on sources and we have to have sources. I remember when I was a graduate student and I wrote this paper on the WPA Georgia slave narratives, and I say, “This was about sexual violence.” And my professor was like, “How do you know? She didn’t say it’s about sexual [violence].” I’m like, “I just know that’s what she’s talking about.” “You can’t say it. You don’t know it. She didn’t say it.” We rely on sources. Whereas the creative writer, the lack of sources is actually rich, “Oh, God, great.” Or when Toni is writing Beloved and she learns about Margaret Garner—She has the clipping about her in The Black Book. But then she’s like, “I don’t want to know what really happened. Okay, yeah, but I don’t want to know that, because I’ve gotta figure this thing out.”
And we get Sethe instead, that she’s able to imagine. And I think now, in some ways, you’re starting to get the marriage of those two impulses in some of the work, like my colleague, Saidiya Hartman, is bringing those things together, but I think that it’s still very hard. “What do the sources say? How do we read them?” Versus, “I don’t need the source.”
[chuckle]
MS: Yeah, I was reading essays by Professor Hartman and I remember her talking about critical fabulation, because of exactly that issue. The sources that do exist have a very specific purpose, and she’s looking at the fact that Black women slaves only have personhood in court transcripts insofar as they can be punished. It’s just… I don’t even know if there are words for the impulse or the need for creativity and the field that just where information is lacking or else so heavily construed through a certain perspective.
FG: Right, right. Right. Yeah. I just was reading a book by a sociologist, called Gone Home, a woman named Karida Brown. It’s a beautiful book. I never thought that I would be as moved by a work of sociology, but it’s because it’s so creatively written, and she has pages and pages where she has excerpts of oral history interviews. And I think that what she’s done there, what’s so brilliant about it, is maybe we don’t have access to the past in a certain way. Maybe we don’t have access to one person’s thoughts, but we can reconstruct an experience through multiple voices, instead of putting the one voice so that that person becomes the representative. We collect as much as we can, like the shards and the bits and the pieces, and we create a collective portrait or project. And out of that, we get a picture of what an experience might have been. But then I think we also have to be left to honor and mourn that which we don’t have access to. That also has to be part of it. We just don’t have access to that. And maybe some new generation will, at some point. Who knows? I believe that there is always something out there that we don’t yet get but that somebody will find.
MS: They ultimately also tie back to what you’re saying about the methodology of Black feminism. It’s about respecting how many threads there are in a single story.
FG: Right. How many threads? How many voices? What is the chorus? And what is the unknown? What is the silent? What is the blank page? And sometimes it’s the silence that’s imposed by the archive, and sometimes it’s the silence of the women themselves who were like, “Everything about me is exposed and owned by someone else, but this you’re not gonna get. This, I’m gonna keep.” I respect that decision, and people think, Oh, it’s out of shame. [But it’s] not necessarily out of shame, out of, like, “This belongs to me. I’m not giving it up.”
And I can’t think of anything else that we’ve talked about that… I think we’ve covered most of it. Did you want to ask me anything about Gramsci?He was important to me at one point.
MS: Yeah, I was gonna ask because I think it’s only in “Who Set You Flowin’?” that Gramsci is actually cited. But his ghost is…
FG: He’s everywhere. The conditions under which he produced his thought were so meaningful to me. I was like, “Oh, wow, he’s in prison.” [chuckle] I knew plenty of intellectuals in prison, and that he seemed to be producing… He was theorizing with real people in mind. It wasn’t just a set of abstractions. That there were some real people, and that’s what mattered to me. There were other theorists that I was attracted to, but I just didn’t see the people. And then when he actually gave a way to think about culture, to really think seriously about culture in a way that it wasn’t vulgar, a more complex way. And so, in “Who Set You Flowin’?” he really gave me the framework, not in the context of African-American culture, what is dominant, and what is counter-hegemonic, and what is the political crisis that causes those things to shift and they’re always bubbling underneath, always bubbling underneath, that that all came… The way of looking at it all came from Gramsci. I would say that Gramsci and Toni Morrison, at the time that I wrote “Who Set You Flowin’?” were the two most important theorists for me. But like you said, he resonates throughout all of it later on.
MS: Yeah. In the part where he expounds upon the organic intellectual in his prison writings, he also talks about [how] the starting point of any philosophy, it’s know thyself, where you have to begin with yourself, your own history, and also your own theorizing.
FG: Right. And that felt so real. And he also gave me a way of seeing… I knew that I grew up around people who had not had access to formal… Not higher education, but who were thinking all the time, and reading, and theorizing, and figuring ways out. But I didn’t see… It was when I read Gramsci that I was like, Oh, okay, that’s legitimate. Those people do exist. They actually do, and I’m being formed in a completely different way than they were formed, but I know. And at that time, I was reading him around the same time that I was also reading—I don’t know that anybody reads the French feminists anymore—but I was reading all these French feminists (Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Catherine Clément, Luce Irigaray) and their theories of language (L’Écriture féminine), which I just thought is so beautiful and just so energizing, and very helpful in my teaching, but after a while just seemed to be like a balloon floating in the sky without a string. [chuckle] And Gramsci still had the balloon that let me look up, but at least there was a string. And that was his Marxism.
The Prog: Would you wanna also mention your upcoming book?
FG: Yeah. All I can say about it… In some ways, it is an extension of the ideas that we’ve been talking about. In some ways, it’s not, it’s my most writerly book. It’s a book that’s part memoir, and then a reading of fiction, talking about the ways I learned to read. It did not start in the academy, but started from my father who died when I was 9, and I was left with a house full of his books, and both the comfort and understanding that I found in those books. I feel like it’s the book where I am mostly a writer. Yeah. And I started it when the-man-who-shall-not-be-named became President of the United States, and I was just crazy and thinking about, What does this mean for democracy? And Black people in America have always been more committed to democracy than many of their fellow citizens who are committed to white supremacy.
So, I started it then. But a lot of stuff happened, like I helped to build a department and things got in the way. And then the pandemic came, and I had to stop traveling, and I realized how much time I spent on the road because all of a sudden I wasn’t on the road and I could finish my book. It starts in 2016, [that] is when I start writing and thinking, and that moment is informing it. And then it ends in the midst of this global pandemic, and these major political protests, uprising, all of that, so it seems like a very interesting setting for a book to the extent that it’s autobiographical. It’s autobiographical about a period where there was also another social movement when I was a kid.
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