During these summer months, I read more nonfiction and fiction books written by female Black authors. I found these novels to be moving, powerful, and relevant to unpacking this social climate surrounding the experiences of Black women and men. These novels educated me about feminism around the world, challenged me to reflect on myself, and allowed me to find ways that I can contribute to doing my part in promoting the Black Lives Matter movement and feminism. If you’re looking for some books to add to your T-B-R(To Be Read) list, read on!
Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
Bad Feminist is part memoir, part literary criticism, and part commentary on a wide variety of topics such as race, gender, sexual abuse, entertainment, media, & politics surrounding abortion and women’s bodies. Gay’s essays ]are insightful, poignant, and honest. I found that every essay spurred much needed conversations, and it made me think deeply about news events, privilege, our racial biases, and the debate surrounding feminism. Gay writes about how feminism is highly misunderstood because of the many expectations placed on the subject such as there being a “correct” way to be a feminist. After reading Gay’s writing, I felt encouraged to be unapologetically who I am, to keep advocating for women’s equality, and educating myself on the intersectionality of feminism and being BIPOC & POC. And that we should never settle for anything less.
Difficult Women by Roxane Gay
Each chapter surrounds a “difficult” woman, and the stories are woven together with common themes: race and gender discrimination, women’s sexualities and bodies, sexual abuse, lust and greed, and a complicated, honest view of family and marriage. The stories comment on how women are characterized as being “difficult” when they do not fit the feminine standards that society forces on them, when they speak their minds, and when they do not just settle. I found the stories heartbreaking, and they proved necessary to be addressed and known for change to happen. I highly recommend reading Difficult Women because Gay captures many women’s voices to show that they’re heard and that their experiences are valid. “Difficult women” are beautiful, courageous, independent, empowering, and enough. The term “difficult” is reclaimed and used to describe women who have the courage to break out of the traditional female roles and expectations.
We Should All be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
In Adichie’s essay-length book, she details her personal experiences growing up in Nigeria as a woman, and she highlights the double standard that exists between men and women. Through this book, she champions the idea of feminism as the standard for gender equality and as an end to gender expectations. She explains how men are raised differently than women and that to foster change, we must reject and stop the continuance of traditional gender expectations. Adichie writes “[my] own definition of a feminist is a man or woman who says, ‘Yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it, we must do better” (48). Adichie teaches us that we all have to “do better.” I found this short novel to be filled with powerful insights and reflections about her childhood experiences and her adult experiences as a woman in both Nigeria and the United States. While reading this novel, I found myself reflecting on my own gender biases, expectations and experiences as a woman, and how I can play a role in promoting gender equality. How I can “do better.”
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
This novel tells the story of twelve Black British women: their experiences as Black women in Britain through the lenses of race, gender, and relationships and family. Each story is told from a different point of view and many of the characters are related to one another. This book is intergenerational, as the storytelling moves from a mother’s point of view, to a daughter’s point of view, to grandmother’s point of view, and so on. The stories hold common threads and connections between characters, but each woman’s story is distinct. What I appreciated about Evaristo’s novel is the fact that her experimental writing isn’t conformed to a particular form —it’s a mix between prose and poetry. Just like the way her characters do not conform. She experiments with spacing on pages, punctuation marks, and capitalization. Evaristo’s diversity of voices and narratives in the novel defeats the “danger of a single story” as writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warns against. Every woman gets to own their space in the narrative and the ability to be who they are.
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Brit Bennett’s novel, The Vanishing Half, is an intergenerational novel that tells the stories of Desiree, Stella, and their daughters Jude and Kennedy. Desiree and Stella are twins from a fictional town Mallard in Louisiana, where colorism is rampant —the residents favor light-skinned Black people. The twins run away from home in the hopes of living better lives. Bennett writes about the many layers of racism that Black people endure, through the racist characters and how Stella who is mixed race also propelled racist beliefs and tendencies. Stella was taught to hate dark skinned people even though she was also Black because she wanted to be white and, more accurately, to free from the hatred toward her own skin color.
All the characters focalize at different parts of the novel, which allows for intimacy and for the audience to see things from their perspectives— to understand them, to love them, and to care for them. Desiree, Stella, Jude, & Kennedy are imperfect, honest, and human—they are not defined by their mistakes. This novel succeeds in showing the complexities of familial and romantic relationships. The themes of the novel are identity, race, gender, passing, standards of beauty, and performance & lying. I noticed how the metaphors of performing and lying, connected to passing and the feeling of being in another body that doesn’t belong to you or wishing you were in another body. It’s a performance to pretend, to forget, to create a new identity and life, and to survive.