So far the most surprising, beautiful sentence in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ We Were Eight Years in Power. It’s about his wife and part of one of the meta-essays that introduce his previously published essays in this collection. Some have aged better than others, but the meta-essays alone are worth the read alone. Man, that guy can write.
I really love you,
believe me. It is something I inherited
from my mother.
From Attila József’s “Attila József” which Edward Hirsch calls his “love poem to himself.”
“I think it’s logical to assume that many, many black folk fell in love with many, many other black folk. This assumption is the rational consequence of acknowledging black humanity."
The quoted statement should be obvious, but for long stretches of history, it wasn’t. In “The Dear Pledges of Our Love,” an essay about Philis Wheatley and her husband, the free black man John Peters, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers argues that the negative portrait of Peters in the authoritative literary biography of Wheatley may be an expression of racial stereotypes against Black men. Stereotypes that still exist today.
In: The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race Jesmyn Ward (ed.) Simon & Schuster (2016)
So happy to know that love is not reserved for the sun; that even rainbows are proof of God.
Té V. Smith (via tevsmith)
Black Children Matter
I basically inhaled Toni Morrison’s new novel God Help the Child because it left me breathless. It’s a short novel, but it is so rich in everything: Language, narrative perspectives, themes, settings, characters. The prose is poetic, not as in lovely-beautiful but as in dense with emotional and intellectual heft. Characters and themes are true Morrison: Racism, colorism, lives of Black women, violence, abuse, love, hurt.
Particularly the main character, Bride, and her mother Sweetness are both modern and timeless. Their story is not only one of racism and colorism (the main character is “blue black”) but also of abuse, adolescence, growing up, woman- and motherhood. Bride answers the resentment towards her based on her skin with power based her beauty.
Morrison manages to tell so many stories of fleshed out characters, with so few words. Even the conception of characters makes an interesting statement – I believe the darker the skin tone of a character, the richer the qualities and flaws of the character. If I listed all stories told you’d never believe they’re all found within 178 pages. But Morrison makes it work, by not using one superfluous word. A truly amazing book.
That’s what love is, Georgie. Accidental damage protection.
Rainbow Rowell: Landline. 244
Because when something happens, she’s the person I want to tell. The most basic indicator of love.
David Levithan, Every Day (via quotethat)
Sometimes, I fall in love with poems. Sometimes I forsake all others, hum soft choruses, hold hands with myself and giggle at the glory of it all. Sometimes we hide under covers, forget to eat anything other than comfort food and visit way too often. Sometimes, I fall in love…
Té V. Smith, My Often Honey Pie (via tevsmith)
Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The fact that someone else loves you doesn’t rescue you from the project of loving yourself.
Sahaj Kohli (via elauxe)
