Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series

On Saturday Dec. 1 we had our last book discussion for this year and it was probably one of the most intense discussions we've had so far. There were eight of us, three of which it was their first time attending. I mentioned the book Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward in the last post and I honestly considered it to be a much "deeper" book than An American Marriage , but I have to admit after hearing what seven other people had to say, I see more in  An American Marriage as I had previously. Shelara pointed out for us the three paternal relationships that add nuance to the story: Roy and Big Roy Roy and Walter Andre and Carlos Shelara: "Walter is a fun house version of Big Roy" After being released, Roy writes a letter to his biological father Walter asking him for advice. This is the first time Roy acknowledges Walter as a father. Up until then Roy only respected Big Roy, the father who had married his mother and adopted him, gave him his name an...

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones has been getting great reviews all year long. There’s even a rumor that it’s going to be made into a movie! The author indicated that she wanted to write a book underscoring the problems of an unfair justice system and mass incarceration, but she wanted to do it from the point of view of a story. The story she created describes what happens in the marriage of Celestial and Roy, when Roy is unjustly convicted of a crime and sentenced to prison.   Celestial and Roy are well-educated and modernly upwardly mobile.   Although the couple’s home is in Atlanta, they have traveled to a small town in Louisiana to visit Roy’s parents. It’s here, at the one-star hotel (the only hotel in town,) where their troubles begin.   It just so happens that a prison in Louisiana is featured last book we discussed, Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward. In Sing Unburied Sing the prison is the infamous Parchman Prison Farm. The characters are rural a...

Eight of us attended the book discussion of Sing Unburied Sing on Saturday Oct. 13, 2018. The book was so haunting but extremely well written. We all agreed that this book is very much like a Toni Morrison book, which in my opinion is the highest praise a writer could receive. Connie went as far to say that Sing Unburied Sing reminded her of Sula and Song of Solomon . Three of the women who attended on Saturday were first-timers. One was Sarah, who started the discussion with how much she hated it when the children walked out of the door to take the road trip with their mother.   Another first-time attendee is Laura, who said that this book was so unsettling that she couldn’t read it before bed. Asadie said she had “questions” about what was happening in the book. I think she meant that she found it curious that people who had already died could be seen and heard and play an active role in the story. Carla said she loved the writing and baby’s sickness really pul...

The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series met Saturday Aug. 25 with nine participants. We discussed Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy.   It was a very timely discussion, since the book consists of eight articles Coates wrote for The Atlantic magazine, and has just announced his departure from the magazine to pursue other writing options.   The eight articles were written throughout the presidency of Barack Obama, one article for each year President Obama was in office. Although the “eight years of good Negro government” in this book refers to the presidency of Barack Obama, it also refers to the “good Negro government “ that took place during Reconstruction, a period in which the history books tell us that was riddled with corruption. More former slaves learned to read during this period, although it had been illegal for them to be taught to read just a few years before. More former slaves voted during this period, and more f...

Notes from We Were Eight Years in Power Introduction p. xiii Regarding Good Negro Government   p.xiii In 1895 South Carolina congressman Thomas Miller appealed to the state’s constitutional convention: “We were eight years in power. We had built schoolhouses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system.” p.xiv Assessing Miller’s rebuttal and the 1895 convention, W.E.B. Du Bois made a sobering observation…This was simply cover for the convention’s true aim – the restoration of a despotic white supremacy. “If there was one thing that South Carolina feared more than bad Negro government,” wrote Du Bois, “it was good Negro government.” p.xv The central thread of this book is eight articles written during the eight years of the first black presidency – a period of Good Negro Government. p. xvii Before each of these essays there is a kind of extended blog post, all eight of them (the articles ) were originally published ...

Description of A Mercy (published 2008) Chapters are not named nor numbered. The story takes place around 1682. The story is not linear, but is made up from memories and images, much like a long poem where the hints are given along the way. The sexism, classism, and religious intolerance is just as present as the racism. At this time, white indentured servants are pretty much slaves as well as the Africans. The events have all happened in the past and are described mostly   by Florens, a sixteen-year-old black slave girl. Florens belongs to Jacob Vaark (who she calls Sir) and his wife Rebecca. Included in the household are Lina, a Native American woman whose village was wiped out, and Sorrow, a mixed race woman who had been reared by her father on a ship. There are also two white male indentured servants from a nearby farm who are “hired-out” to work for Jacob Vaark. Their New England farm is remote and the group is quite isolated. The one person who seems to co...

The following is Claudia Rankine reading from the poem "Making Room" from Citizen: An American Lyric. See pages 131-133.  "...where he goes the space follows him..." Below, Jason Reynolds reads from the beginning of Long Way Down  "if the blood inside you is on the inside of someone else you never want to see it on the outside of them..."

The book selected for the 2018 Big Read is Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. At 162 pages this book is dense!  Not necessarily dense with words, but dense with emotion. Of course, before reading it, I thought, Oh, a poetry book, it's pretty short so let's add another book of prose to read as well."  This is how we ended up with two books for the June 2nd discussion.  Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric is the first work of poetry to become a New York Times bestseller for multiple weeks on the paperback nonfiction list. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry, and was also a finalist for the ward in criticism, the first time in the history of those awards that a book was named a finalist in more than one category. Citizen is a genre-bending work of art combining lyric prose with visual art. This book examines racism in through specific examples of racism in everyday life (referred to as microaggressions)as well as the phys...

So in exchange for choosing Crowns: Black Women in Church Hats  for our April book discussion. The members of Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series were given passes for the play Crowns: the Musical.  According to NPR, "even before the book was finished, Marberry approached the artistic director of the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, NJ about adapting if for the stage. From the more than 50 women in the book, playwright and director Regina Taylor created six composite characters. The things that I thought were lacking in the book: a story, a person who was not in church culture, a male,  allusions to modern life, were all in the play. Even though Ms. Taylor stayed true to the real women in the book, using some of their lines verbatim, having a young person from a big city descend on the set which takes place in Darlington, SC, adds another dimension to these women's stories. Because of Yolanda, the teen from Chicago, the women themselves eventually open up...

The Urban Life Experience Book discussion Series has been immersed in the outrage against racial injustice, mass incarceration and the killings of unarmed citizens by the police. Imagine how we responded when asked by the New Haven Free Public Library and the Long Wharf Theatre to read the book Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats. The book features black and white photos taken by Michael Cunningham. Journalist Craig Marberry provides the mini-bios of the women pictured. The group met on Saturday April 14 th and actually had one of the best discussions ever. The oral history provided in the women’s stories, although not so much concerned with criminal justice or race relations, was yet meaningful, providing another facet of African American culture. The forward was written by Maya Angelou, who asserted that “Truly the Civil rights Movement was begun In the Black Church.   She made the connection between African head coverings and African A...

The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series celebrated the birthday of Langston Hughes (which was Feb. 1, 1902) with a book discussion of any biography or autobiography of Hughes, followed by the film Hughes's Dream Harlem , which was fantastic. Eight people attended the discussion and 21 people enjoyed the film. 2002 DVD Hughes's Dream Harlem featured Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Talib Kweli, and others  I read a biography written for teens, Langston Hughes: the Harlem Renaissance by Maurice Wallace which was succinct and included all the pertinent facts. I then attempted to read the definitive biography written by Arnold Rampersad. I picked up Volume 2 of Rampersad's work, thinking I would get more information concerning Hughes' participation in the Civil Rights Movement ( or the curious lack of participation according to the Wallace book), however I really didn't get much more information at all. Our facilitator read...

Book Discussion of They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement by Wesley Lowery. On the day of our discussion, there was still snow on the ground from a major winter storm and it was only eleven degrees. In spite of the freezing weather and difficult driving conditions, four of us managed to meet.  The one criticism we all shared was the “jumping around in time” in an otherwise great book. Our facilitator stated that the purpose of the book was to explain how activism of this generation started, an accounting of how millennials got involved. Fortunately for us, one of our members had shared a podcast from the Enoch Pratt Free Public Library in Baltimore, MD. The podcast series is called Writers Live and the particular podcast featured Wesley Lowery recorded Mar. 7, 2017. http://www.prattlibrary.org/booksmedia/podcasts/index.aspx?id=6951 In the podcast, Mr. Lowery relates that the purpose of his book is to tell t...