At age nine Farah Jasmine Griffin opened a gift from her father, a classic volume of Black history, to find this note: “Jazzie read this book. . . . Baby read it until you understand." Shortly afterward he died of a brain hemorrhage, leaving her to seek guidance and solace from the African American novelists, essayists, poets, and musicians he introduced to her as a child. In Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature, published September 14 by W.W. Norton, Griffin pays homage to family and community through generations of Black geniuses.
Read Until You Understand is "a talking book, a teaching book, and a treasure," writes poet and essayist Elizabeth Alexander. Griffin applies decades of experience as a professor and scholar in the fields of race, gender, and cultural politics. Her work provides a generous seminar in Black culture, unlocking years of future discoveries for the reader from Toni Morrison to Marvin Gaye. “Our writers and our organizers make poetry of the rage," Griffin writes. "They have been working, building, creating, envisioning, showing us how to live like the future we are hoping to build is already here.”
Read Until You Understand is about your experience of growing up with the canon of Black literature as something of a stand-in for your father after his untimely passing. How did having these strong voices as a presence in your life help you to come to your sense of identity?
Within these pages, I seek to share a series of valuable lessons learned from those who have sought to better a nation that depends upon, and yet too often despises, them. In the process, they have changed the world. Literature by Black writers gave me an expansive sense of self, a sense that I was part of something larger, something that existed beyond my immediate family and community, and it gave me a sense of history. It also imbued me with a sense of possibility.
Upon the election of Barack Obama, some mused that we were living in a post-racial world, while in her book Caste, Isabel Wilkerson instead compares the cultural revival of racism to the Anthrax plague in Siberia in 2016, which occurred during a thaw that re-awoke the long dormant bacteria. How long had you been working on Read Until You Understand, and did any revisions need to occur for the final product to reflect the current situation?
In some ways I'd been working on Read Until You Understand for much of my life, but I started working on it in earnest during the 2016 presidential campaign and finished during the pandemic, the emergence of the global Black Lives Matter movement, and to a lesser degree, the final though contested outcome of the 2020 election. Throughout this time, the stories that I tell, the literature that I share, and the values I explore remain urgent and necessary. The glorious uprising that seeks to advance Black freedom and the outcome of the 2020 election helped to keep the book from ending on a note of absolute despair.
Memoir, history, literature, and art all come into play in Read Until You Understand. Was there ever a point as a scholar that you felt overwhelmed by the sheer scope of your own work?
No. I never felt overwhelmed; I felt gratified to have landed on a project that called for all of these forms and genres. My goal in writing this book is to draw upon a lifetime of reading and almost thirty years of teaching African American literature to explore how, in addition to addressing concerns about democracy, perhaps even more than these, the works also speak to ideas and values that have concerned humanity since the beginning of time. Each chapter addresses a specific body of work and the issues it raises. Although you do not have to have read the books I discuss in order to grasp the lessons I share, I hope my words will entice you to pick up these works and read them. To do so will only enrich your experience, understanding, and life.
Read Until You Understand is a compelling title, as well as a profound statement. Do you believe there is a static point where understanding can occur, or is it a constantly evolving process?
By all means, it is a constantly evolving process. I am guided by the following questions: What might an engagement with literature written by Black Americans teach us about the United States and its quest for democracy? What might it teach us about the fullest blossoming of our own humanity?
This interview contains quotes from Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature (W.W. Norton, 2021) by Farah Jasmine Griffin.