What I find more fascinating, though, is the reactions I’m reading from all corners of the black community–from self professed cultural critics to around the way girls–to Perry’s film and how, in most instances, people have found it astonishingly easy to separate Shange’s work from what Perry ultimately presented in movie theaters. So is the power of rabid love and selective memory.
Read MoreJimmie
I love James Baldwin for giving me: Just Above My Head and Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, two of my favorite books that, in language aching with grief and love, explore familial and romantic life without being sentimental or pretentious.
Read MoreBook: Nothing to Envy
Chronicling the lives of a doctor, a school teacher and her much richer secret lover, a fervent communist mother, an orphaned boy, and a rebellious daughter (all having defected to South Korea), Nothing to Envy takes its title from a children’s song taught throughout North Korea with the lyric, “We have nothing to envy in the world.”
Read MoreBirthdays, John the Baptist & Me
Today is my 35th birthday. If that number is meant to invoke panic about approaching middle age, sagging body parts, and introspection about where my life is as opposed to where I wish it to be, it has certainly failed.
Read MoreLorraine & Malcolm
They are such icons and heroes that, like members of our family, we are comfortable calling them only by their first names. On this day in 1925, Malcolm Little, later to be called Malcolm X, was born in Omaha, Nebraska. Five years later, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago, Illinois. In their own unique ways they were pivotal to the explosive push for civil rights in the tumultuous years spanning the early 1950s, right up to their deaths a little more than a month apart in 1965.
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