One of the first books that I read this year was Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, which is every bit as incredible as people say, a marvelously intimate and absolutely immersive history that is also a powerful work of theory that argues that young Black women in 20th century America were radicals dreaming of new ways to be free, to live differently. I think it has affected me on a subterranean level; taught me new ways of reading and thinking that I’m not even fully aware of yet. I don’t know, but at very least, I suspect that it made me read Generations differently, though I can’t entirely explain how. Maybe it’s actually the opposite, and Generations gave me another way to understand Wayward Lives. The two seem like natural companions, though they are very different in style — actually, I can hardly believe that Hartman has not read Generations. She must have, surely.
Lucille Clifton’s memoir is a story of a Black family across several generations, meandering between past and present, as she interweaves the story of her return home for her father’s funeral. Each section begins with a quote from Walt Whitman, and a photograph, and though none is more than a few pages long, each feels like an entire world, or even several. There is so much life in this gorgeous book, and its lean, but achingly luminous prose. It is absolutely breath-taking.
Kasia Reads 