Books for the culture.

You haven't seen Black Panther? Close your browser immediately! To the theater with you - quick quick, yeah?

Black Panther was everything. As I'm not a card-carrying comic book or superhero expert, I'll just say this: the story and representation of different African cultures was on point. Seeing these cultures combine and swirl around to create the fictional world of Wakanda? Your faves could never. The complex, layered approach to Blackness and African-ness will no doubt be dissected and analyzed in future university courses. I've said it before and I'll say it again: there are so many ways to be Black in this world. I hope to discover them all. 

And hey - there's no need to let the euphoria of Black Panther die. Keep the party going with some good reads:

Forest Gate, by Peter Akinti 
At first glance, Forest Gate may look like a graphic, brutally violent series of terrible events. But it is so much more than that. This novel chronicles the experiences of Somali refugees living on the estates in London (read: the hood).

It is not belonging. It is mental illness. It is being "the other" among those already relegated to society's margins. And it is rebirth and redemption. 

"She took several steps, holding onto the edge of the table, and then turned and went back to her seat. Meina had always thought of addicts as the lowest form of humanity, but here was this woman, a mother, still trying to feed her boys. It was confusing. She has resisted the strong urge to get up and help her serve, worried that she would be overstepping some boundary. She forced herself to keep still and sighed when she realized she had been holding her breath. Did they expect her to eat the sludge that had been slopped into her bowl? She looked at James, his head down, staring at his own bowl. They all at the cold porridge. 

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White is for Witching, by Helen Oyeyemi
I picked up this novel solely because of the author's name. I expected another fish-out-of-water story about immigrants doing their best to fit in. To be sure, those stories play an important role in contemporary literature. But this novel broke from that tradition, hard. 

This neo-gothic story gave me the creeps in the best way. It is subtle, dark, refined. Like if Edgar Allen Poe hand-fed you chocolate. You'd be too terrified to say no. ​

"At home, she put the mannequin in the bath and washed it with a flannel, from face to torso to heels, until it was completely clean. The mannequin was taller than her, but as she pulled it out of the bath by its hands, she felts as if she was its mother."

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Them, by Nathan McCall
Say it with me: Gentrification. Or "yuppification", if you prefer. There are a million articles about why gentrification is so problematic. Bodegas, brownstones, and laundromats giving way to ritzy yoga studios and artisanal cheese shops, and longtime residents becoming outsiders in their own neighborhoods come to mind. 

Them brings all of this to a human place that is at once accessible and uncomfortable - and not for the readers you might think. 

"At that moment she felt in herself the potential to actually hate Barlowe, right along with the rest of them. It startled her to know she could feel that way. It crossed her mind, if only for a flash, and as much as she wanted to, she couldn't deny that she had the potential to hate. These people were starting to wear on her. How could the reject her? Many times she'd defended them - their peculiar habits and behaviors - in dinner party debates, and now they were rejecting her. It seemed unfair. 

'You know what bothers me most?'
'No, Sandy. What bothers you most?'
​
That was the first time she'd heard him call her name. In the time she had known him, he had avoided addressing her directly. She had wondered if he even remembered her name."

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What it Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, by Lesley Nneka Arimah
You start reading the short stories in this book and before you know it, you're having the crap beat out of your entire heart. 

It's a perfect mix of sci-fi, old-world reminiscence, and modern, sly wit. The stories are so short that you find yourself automatically slowing down, reluctant to finish.

"'You need something with strong limbs that can plow and haul and scrub. Soft children with hard lives go mad or die young. Bring me a child with edges and I will bless it and you can raise it however you like.' 

When Ogechi had instead brought her mother a paper child woven from the prettiest wrapping paper she'd been able to scavenge, her mother, laughing the whole time, had plunged it into the mop bucket until it softened and fell apart."

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Open City, by Teju Cole
This is not my favorite book. An angst-filled guy walking around the city, waxing endlessly about himself and the world is a little too "Catcher in the Rye", for me. But I gave it a chance and you should, too. 

The premise is a bit self-indulgent, but the novel still stands as fantastic - the people the Narrator meets are rich, each armed to the teeth with truth bombs. 

"It's a Christian idea, I said. He was a churchman, you see, his principles came from the Christian concept. That is it exactly, Farouq said. This is not an idea I can accept. There's always the expectation that the victimized Other is the one that covers the distance, that has the noble ideas; I disagree with this expectation. It's an expectation that works sometimes, I said, but only if your enemy is not a psychopath. You need an enemy with a capacity for shame. I wonder sometimes how far Gandhi would have gotten if the British had been more brutal. If they had been willing to kill masses of protesters. Dignified refusal can only take you so far. Ask the Congolese."