Never Be Bored
28 June 2020
Looking Forward, Looking Back
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde. Bessie, 2015 Dee Rees film; An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon; Overgrown by Ivy Sole.
This one's dedicated to the works of queer Black women and nonbinary people. As the Black Lives Matter protests continue throughout the country and Pride Month comes to a close, take the time to be intentional about the media you consume.
I'm usually not big on biographies/autobiographies, but I adored reading Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde. This poet's prose is truly gorgeous, richly descriptive and detailed yet totally unpretentious. In Zami, Lorde covers her early life, from her childhood in Harlem to her times in Connecticut and Mexico before moving back to New York City. She describes her relationships with the women around her from her mother to her friends and lovers against the backdrop of the 1940s and 50s.
Gay bars, McCarthyism, poetry, colorism, intersectional feminism, falling in and out of love. Read it for a look at how much some things have changed and how some things haven't changed much.
If you liked reading about a more historical queer perspective, then you might like Bessie, a biopic about Bessie Smith, a blues singer who rose to fame in the 1920s. The movie, currently streaming on HBO, follows the musician's career and personal life, relationships with men and women, and features a ton of great music sung by Queen Latifah, who plays Bessie.
Enough about history, let's talk about the future. An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon is an Afrofuturist sci fi novel about a queer botanist and healer named Aster who lives on the Matilda, a plantation-spaceship-city that has been traveling in search of the Promised Land for hundreds of years. Solomon creates an excellent mystery story and their carefully crafted blink-and-you'll-miss-it worldbuilding details make this one of the best and most unique sci fi books I've read in a while.
If you liked reading Lorde, whose nonfiction writing is still practically poetic, maybe try the work of rapper Ivy Sole. I love the kind of rap that feels like a poetry reading set to music and that's exactly the vibe of her album Overgrown. See also her 2016 single "Life," which was the first song I listened to by this artist, and still my favorite by her.