Changing My Mind – 4/5 Stars So this post is a compendium of reviews based initially on my reading of this, Zadie Smith’s early collection of essays. These essays are not part of an intentional collection and represent a set number of years of nonfiction writing projects for Smith. The best of them are the reviews, including and sometimes especially her movie reviews, longform journalism (which is the least interesting, if not impactful writing in the book), writing about writing, and writing about her father. […]
Always remember: This is a true story
In roughly 1841, Oluale Kossola was born in West Africa, near modern-day Benin. In 1960 his village was decimated by the neighboring Dahomey and he, along with more than one hundred other human beings, were sold to white slave traders. The slave ship Clotilda bore them across the Atlantic to the Mississippi river and into Alabama where he was sold to a plantation in Mobile. There he was renamed Cudjo Lewis and there he worked until 1865 when Union soldiers told him he was free. This is all […]
The four men responsible for this last deal in human flesh…
More than anything, this is a book about authorship. How do we define who is an author or the author of a book? In this book, we have a contemporary editor, a collection of different other writers writing forewords and afterwords, we have Hurston acting in capacity as ethnographer, and we have Cudjo Lewis himself telling his story. But all these different voices have a varying impact on the final artifact of the book itself. What is the book here? Is it the text of Lewis […]
Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board
Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston is a relatively short classic that I read because it was on my Fifty Books Every Woman Should Read Before She Turns 40 List. The introduction stated that the book is a classic because of its unique contribution to black literature: “it affirms black cultural traditions while revising them to empower black women.” I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect, and was afraid it was one of those classics that feels dated or is difficult to read and […]