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Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 2, Ravynn: Act 2, Scene 2, Readings, Uncategorized

Week 8, Ravynn’s Spring Break Reads

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I needed Spring Break more than I even realized. What I thought would be an uneventful week turned into a deep dive into texts I’ve been dying to read for the last few months. Before I knew it, I had devoured four books, plus a graphic novel, the 6 episode Black Panther television show, and all of my usual CW shows.

I realized I needed to give my mind a break and consume things I wanted to read for me when I was developing my blog post for Week 7 (which you’ll notice does not exist). It was supposed to be a “mixtape” of all the best things I’d read for classes since the last time I did a mixtape, which was during Fall Break. I quickly realized that I was having trouble gathering up a list of the things I’d loved, but the list of things I wanted to read but hadn’t was nice and long. I scoured my apartment for unread books and made a quick trip to Barnes and Noble to amass a nice stack of things to read on my week off.

So, here’s a mixtape of what I read (and loved) this Spring Break:

This Will Be My Undoing by Morgan Jerkins

How I found it: I follow Morgan Jerkins on Twitter because she’s an editor at a literary journal I’ve yet to work up the nerve to submit to. But I’ve been following her work and was excited to find out that she had a book coming out. I bought it impulsively at Barnes and Noble a few weeks ago but hadn’t had an opportunity to read until now as I’m on Spring Break.

2 second summary: Essays on being a Black girl/woman in white America.

What I loved about it: Jerkins’s essays really resonated with me, from topics as sacred as Black hair, Michelle Obama and why finding a man is so difficult. She’s raw and honest, brutal and yet touching. I cried twice from the sheer pain of seeing on the page what I’ve felt a million times but never dared to say. She’s a literary role model for me– I can only hope that one day I can decide to be equally as fearless and write my truth, too.

Rating: 12/10 would absolutely recommend

Electric Arches by Eve L. Ewing

How I found it: I actually rediscovered this after I bought it during a Haymarket Books sale last semester. I bought it because I also follow Eve L. Ewing on Twitter. In addition to being a dope poet, she’s also a scholar and I try to follow as many Black women doing the things I aspire to do as possible.

2 second summary: Poems (and accompanying visuals) set in 1990s Chicago that explore Black womanhood with an afrofuturist twist.

What I loved about it: In lieu of an exhaustive list of all the poems that I loved from this work, let me simply quote my favorite lines for you:

Love is like a comic book. It’s fragile

And the best we can do is protect it

In whatever clumsy ways we can…

“Origin Story”

Rating: 10/10 would absolutely recommend

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

How I found it: I was perusing a call for book reviews when I noticed that this novel was tacked to the end of the list of books up for potential review. Always eager to pursue my literary side, I made a note to read it but never got around to it. Until now…

2 second summary: A young boy, Jojo, coming of age in Mississippi deals with manhood, his relationship with both the Black and white sides of his family, and a relationship with the spirit of a story unfinished.

What I loved about it: I have a grotesque fascination with death and I wonder about the departed, in particular my Grandma, whose presence I often feel. Death and spirits are complicated but fixtures of our lives which demand attention. I loved getting to spend some time thinking about the living’s relationship to the dead and why the unburied sometimes sing.

Rating: 9/10 would recommend

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

How I found it: My friend, Micah, put me on to it. Only the best of the best can impress her and so when she raved about just the first fifty pages, I knew I had to pick it up and see for myself.

2 second summary: An 8 generation story which follows the lives of two Ghanian women and their descendants, which lead to a beautiful story about the impact of both slavery and the diaspora.

What I loved about it: Yaa Gyasi is an extremely talented writer. She’s got some beautifully clean sentences in her novel, sentences that make me want to pick up a pen and try to see if I can replicate words with even half the impact. The story that stood out to me the most (SPOILERS) was Willie’s story about her husband who passed for white and then simply slipped out of the Black world. (Not without traumatizing her first, of course, though.) I’ve read a lot of passing stories that take place during the Nadir and then into the Harlem Renaissance, but this particular story hit me where it hurt.

Rating: 11/10 would absolutely recommend.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

How I found it: I don’t remember the exact first time I heard about this book but I do remember all the hype surrounding it. It was so impactful that I suggested it for review for a potential publication I was working on at the time I found it.

2 second summary: Cora is a enslaved person who decides to escape via the Underground Railroad, which Whitehead has reimagined as a literal railway.

What I loved about it: As I was reading this, I thought back on many of the enslaved histories I’ve read over the last two years in grad school and picked up on many of the details from those histories in Whitehead’s story. Never before had those histories come to life for me more than when I read Whitehead’s novel. Maybe it’s a personal failing, but I simply don’t process informational nearly as well if it isn’t presented in a literary way– if it isn’t a good narrative. It was an extremely informative read, with a strong Black female protagonist (indomitable, is the word used in the novel to describe her.)

Rating: 10/10 would absolutely recommend

There you have it: everything I’ve read– and loved– over Spring Break 2018.

I still have some books on my list that I want to read (including Citizen, An American Marriage, and Invisible Man Got The Whole World Watching) but I’m so grateful for the break and the chance to read some of the novels that have been on my mind for the last few months. I hope this post inspires you to take a look at least one (or 5) new read(s)!

Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 2, Ravynn: Act 2, Scene 2, Uncategorized

Week 2, or Meeting Johnnetta Cole

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Meeting Dr. Johnnetta Cole was the highlight of what might have otherwise been a very sad week. I ended up walking twenty minutes to class on Tuesday morning in torrential rainfall, and the feeling of being wet and angry did not dissipate until Thursday, when I remembered that class had been cancelled for that afternoon.

Just the day before, at a meeting I attended with primarily anthropology graduate students, the group’s advisor mentioned that Johnetta Cole would be hanging out with him in the afternoon before her Martin Luther King, Jr. keynote address later Thursday night and that we were welcome to drop in and say hello. As the group and I had read Dr. Cole’s work the previous semester, watched a documentary on Herskovits which featured her, and talked about her work as an activist scholar, I knew immediately how I wanted to spend my Thursday afternoon off from class.

Meeting her in an intimate setting was a lovely experience. She simply had to know everything about you and made it her mission to listen to our stories. However, she also had a way of getting to your core; the first thing she asked me, after my name and what sort of work I did, was where I saw myself in ten years.

Of the four of us, she turned to me first, and “Tenure-track in English or American Studies” sprung from my lips before I even realized I had said it. I qualified it, saying that I wouldn’t be happy unless I was writing and the Academy offered an unprecedented amount of creative freedom (comparative to many other jobs), but I also mentioned that it was my ambition to start a magazine someday. She smiled at me gently, approvingly and said, “You’ve thought about this.” Indeed, I had. I have host of things I want to get done in this lifetime, so I’ve got to plan accordingly.

Before long, our audience with Dr. Cole was over, and my colleagues and I left the room, feeling inspired, and in my case, heard. For all her many achievements, being a professor, a president of college, a director of a museum, she was grounded and it was so easy to talk to her. Despite only knowing her for a few moments, she felt like a favorite teacher who had known me my whole life.

Dr. Cole’s evening talk was riveting; she has such a striking stage presence. Before she even got into her address, she made a point to thank everyone who had been a part of helping her to come to William & Mary, and talked about the wonderful day she’d had. The highlight of said day, she told the crowd, was getting to spend time with her “star student,” our advisor, and his four students. I swelled with pride from my corner of the auditorium: I was one of those four students. She called us her “grand-students,” and the same warmth I had felt from her in the classroom spread into the massive auditorium. Then, she began her address, thinking about how Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would feel about today’s issues. She drew not only from Dr. King but from his wife Coretta as well because Coretta had her own vision of peace and justice. She called on the crowd to affect change using a three word approach: educate, legislate and agitate. Dr. Cole reminded us that our responsibility was to speak the truth as we see it, for it matters not where we stand in moments of comfort, but rather where we “stand in moments of challenge and controversy” (Dr. King). Honoring the legacy of the freedom fighters before us means that we need to refuse to be satisfied, Dr. Cole told us. We need to fight the way of the current syllabus which is too often only “Western, white, and womanless.” Most importantly, she called on us to do the work necessary.

Meeting Dr. Cole and hearing her words made me think about my place in all of this: Am I doing the work? Am I refusing the be satisfied? Am I speaking truth as I see it? I think, perhaps, I’m trying to; I’m making a solid attempt, but I’m not satisfied with what I’ve done so far. It’s not enough. In terms of affecting change, I’ve chosen my approach, to educate, but I do little with legislating and agitating. Is it enough to chose one path, or do you need to do all three? I think a good change-maker does a little of everything. Meeting Dr. Cole has made me ask myself: what can I do to affect change?

I may not know yet, but I do thank Dr. Cole for sparking the thought.

Projects, Ravynn: Act 2, Ravynn: Act 2, Scene 2, Uncategorized

Week 1, or “Branching Out” and Growing Up

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This post marks the beginning of my fourth– yes, fourth— semester at the College of William & Mary. Before I know it, this semester will have flown by and then I will be standing at the precipice of my last semester of coursework in the fall.

This semester will be great. I’m speaking it into existence. I am currently enrolled in a Comics course, Histories of Race, and an independent study on Black Arts Movement literature. I’m bringing in a student activist from Clemson to speak at a Porch Talk for the Lemon Project. The Lemon Project 8th Annual Symposium will be in March. Johnetta Cole, Henry Jenkins, and Nikki Giovanni will all be coming to speak at the College this semester. And I had a paper accepted to a conference in April just a few days ago.

I already had an amazing start to the semester with Branch Out Lemon Project Alternative Break. If you don’t remember me raving about Branch Out, feel free to check out my post from last year’s trip. Students at William & Mary can sign up for Alternative Breaks, which are typically off-campus service trips– the Lemon Project Alternative Break is the only one held on campus. During the course of the weekend, the students learn about the Lemon Project, conduct their own original research and participate in a variety of other workshops. This year, as we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of residential African American students at William & Mary, our project was timely: the students conducted interviews with the first residential African American students and created an Omeka exhibit based on their findings. (For a more detailed description of what went down, check out my article about the weekend on HASTAC.org.)

As amazing as the final product was, as happy as the students were with themselves, as much as they praised the trip afterwards, it was still extremely nerve wracking for me. Not because I wasn’t enjoying myself– I love the Branch Out Trip. It’s been a highlight of both of my years at William & Mary. The problem was that the bar had been set exceedingly high for the trip because the Lemon assistant before me put her heart and soul into organizing a project that would be meaningful, productive and effective. I had a large pair of shoes to fill.

Through a few well timed pep talks with Adrienne, who helpfully tagged along for the entire weekend (you the best, Adrienne!), I came to realize that I was gripping onto the project too tight. I was taking any minor setback too personally. And I was doing it because I cared so much. I wanted the same effect, the same magic, that I had come to love from last year’s project. But in trying to recreate the magic, I neglected what unique skills I could bring to the table. I was trying too hard to teach in someone else’s comfort zone instead of my own.

I did some growing up last weekend. I realized that I don’t teach like anybody else– and that’s a good thing. Imitation is the highest form of flattery, but there’s so much to be said for making your own path. I think the next time I try this, if there will be a next time, I’m going to not be so afraid to be myself. It was also encouraging to realize that despite all of the difficulties I was going through, the students didn’t see it. They thanked me for the trip and said all kinds of nice things about me as a person and as someone to look up to. One of the students spoke about me as if I were a role model for her but, little does she know, I feel it is the highest honor to know her at all. I’m proud of one of the site leaders for going from the quiet girl in the corner last year to the leader of the pack this year. And she still has two more years to go! Who knows where she’ll be by the time she’s a senior.

What these students don’t know is how much they are an inspiration to me. It brings me so much joy to be around people outside of my program, in particular undergrads who are so bright, intellectually curious and genuine. They make me laugh, they challenge me and make me want to work to be a better teacher for them.

If this was only week one, I can’t wait to see where I go from here.