Latest news with #ImaniPerry
CBC
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- CBC
How the colour blue tells the story of Black history, from racism to joy
"Blackness, no matter how specific the experience, organically reaches across borders. And I followed it," writes Imani Perry in her latest book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People. "I have heard and seen blue ringing through Black life at every corner of the world, from Malian music and Yoruba cosmology to the testimonies of rural Colombians. In my blue notebooks, I steadily collected blue blues." To Perry, the colour blue is more than a colour, a mood, or genre of music. She sees a metaphor, a sound, a birthright, a sensibility, a respite and a mode of living with the cruelty of the world. The Harvard professor argues that Black people's love of the colour blue and pursuit of beauty were an assertion of their humanity in a world that dehumanized and objectified them. From birth, Perry became enveloped by the colour blue. She spent much of her childhood in a blue room in her grandmother's home. "The walls were blue, the drapes were blue, the bedding was blue. She had prayer cards with blue writing in the corners of her vanity," Perry said. That room became a portal for her, "the safest space in the world." Imani Perry continued to talk about her book, Black in Blues with IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed. Here is an excerpt from their conversation. You chose the colour blue and as you say, it's not accidental, but it also is a colour that becomes important to Black people. And I know there are a hundred answers to this because that's why you wrote a book about it. But how did that happen? Certainly, the indigo trade is a piece of it. Indigo is this colour that captivates the whole world. There's this talk, and this is why I use the phrase, 'my people gave sound to the world's favourite colour.' There is something about blue that captivates the imagination. And so you have this history of indigo cultivation. For me, there's an inception point to be found when people, West Africans, who have been creating blue items, have been cultivating indigo and using blue dye, experience what had to have been a sort of profound horror and disorientation by finding themselves no longer just cultivators of indigo, but traded for indigo — to imagine what it meant to be someone who crafted and then seeing oneself literally traded for a block of dye. There's something at the heart of that relationship to be found in that encounter. Then, of course, there's indigo plantations, and it's a very difficult crop to cultivate during enslavement. And yet, the people still love the colour blue and still want to wear blue. Even in these devastating circumstances, there's still this appeal and a sense of beauty and delight. And that, to me, is the fundamentally human part that was not destroyed, no matter the brutality. So there's some historical elements to why blue matters. In the book you refer to the writer Amiri Baraka — [and his] term for Black Americans, blues people. What does it mean to be a blues people? Baraka's description of blues people is, he pays particular attention to the way that black Americans stood apart from the American project, sort of sitting on the underside and therefore witnessing its limitations in reaching for a deeper kind of humanity, and expressing that musically, being a part of a world that was much bigger than the particulars of that nation state. I'm so interested in Baraka's conception of blues people on the one hand, and then Albert Murray's on the other, who is another one of my favourite writers who talked a great deal about how Black Americans were so fundamentally American. And so the blue note is actually a variation on this fundamentally American thing that actually is part of what creates Americana itself. Here are two brilliant thinkers who have, in some sense, opposing conceptions of what it means to be a blues people, that there is a spectrum of relationships, a vexed relation to the nation. The American project is also directly connected, for me, to why it was so important to have a sense of the international landscape of Blackness and blueness in the book because there are all these arteries of connection across the globe. Echoes, repetitions, and even intimacies, and mutual inspiration, so it's a sort of both-and. There's a particular relationship of blueness in connection with the American project, but then there's also this global sense of a blues people in the context of modernity, generally speaking. You point out more than once, very articulately that, "race is a messy and exacting business. It pretends to be precise, but it never has been and can't be." You argue, in fact, that, Black people — you point out the obvious, which is they span a huge range of colour from a creamy colour to all shades of brown to blue-black. So they're really not one colour at all. But the colour that connects them all and speaks to their sensibility and experience and way in the world is blue? It's beauty and the blues. The way I often think of it is a blues sensibility is one where people are creating beauty at the very site of wounding. And so it's not an evasion of the wounding, it's not an avoidance, but it is actually sitting in that and building a life. I think about this in particular with the history of slavery in the Americas. People were born, lived, and died enslaved over multiple generations, which means that they also loved and they also created art and they also laughed. And we have this history in intellectual work in my field in Black studies. We want to focus on the struggles for liberation, which we should, but that can lead us to forget how much people's self-creation took place in this position of deep constraint. And that actually is part of the story of who they were and how we became. So that blues, bluesiness, that blue note in the musical scale, the blues, blues people, blues sensibility, is a way to tell that story. For me, it's essential. Black Americans looked to nature for another blue to remember their dead — planting periwinkles on graves. Yeah, it's one of those pieces of history that makes me emotional every time I think about it. So for enslaved people, there were no headstones. And traditional West and Central African burial rituals were not available, although people found ways of creating new rituals, but often that was even under the cover of night. One of the ways that gravesites were marked in the Upper South, in particular, was through the planting of periwinkle because it is a hardy flower — it'll come up every year. And it's a wonderful combination of the ways history and science and documents all work together because archeological work is actually part of how we know this to be true, that so often under these beds of periwinkle flower, there are graves, there are bodies of enslaved Africans. I go places and I see it, and it creates its own sense of solemnity, but also power. I went to visit with a group of women on a trip that was called a sojourn for Harriet Jacobs, the site of the woman who wrote the first major slave narrative, Harriet Jacobs, where she was born in Edenton, North Carolina. We went to the graveyard of her grandmother. She was buried in Massachusetts because she escaped slavery. Close to the graveyard, there are patches of periwinkle. So at a certain point, this became a graveyard for Black people. I have different definitions of home that I'm working with in the book, but one of them is: a home is where you're dead or buried. It's a way of claiming a home there by marking the site.
Arab News
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Arab News
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Black in Blues'
Imani Perry's 'Black in Blues' is a breathtaking meditation on the color blue, revealing its significance in Black history and culture. This National Book Award winner captivates the heart and soul, leaving readers profoundly moved. After hearing Perry's interview on National Public Radio, I was immediately drawn in, my curiosity ignited. Perry's narrative writing is nothing short of exquisite. She masterfully intertwines her family's history with the broader tapestry of Black identity through the lens of blue. While many authors have explored colors in literature, Perry's exploration feels uniquely resonant, lingering in the mind long after the book is closed. Her writing is lyrical, infused with emotion, and her storytelling is compelling, drawing you into a world rich with experiences and memories. 'Black in Blues' also reveals the powerful correlation between music and the Black experience. This is a work for anyone who seeks to understand the motivations and movements of a vibrant community that has faced adversity yet continues to rise. The book beautifully delves into how color shapes identity, weaving personal narratives with historical context and cultural commentary. Perry's exploration of the color blue becomes a testament to the resilience and creativity of the Black community, illuminating the ongoing struggles for equality and recognition while celebrating the beauty of cultural identity. In a world that often marginalizes these stories, 'Black in Blues' stands as a vital contribution to contemporary discussions on race, art, and history. It's a compelling read that resonates deeply, inviting all of us to reflect on the complexities of the Black experience in America. I cannot recommend it highly enough — this is a book that will stay with you, echoing in your thoughts and heart long after you've turned the last page.
The Guardian
04-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘The blue blues have never left us': a new book examines the color's spanning ties to Black culture
What makes blue Black? In her latest book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, the scholar and writer Imani Perry traces the spanning, interdisciplinary connection between the color blue and the Black diaspora. The book opens with a simple anecdote: Perry's grandmother had a blue bedroom. Not just any blue, but 'bright, like the sky in August', Perry writes. She ponders why her grandmother chose that blue. Was it simply preference, a reminder of her grandmother's rural upbringing? Was it inspired by the lush backdrop of Alabama, with its 'parade of wildflowers'? 'I wanted to write toward the mystery of blue and its alchemy in the lives of Black folks,' Perry writes, arguing that blue is equal parts beauty, ugliness, joy and cruelty. She suggests that the color blue has always held simultaneous meanings for Black people: a physical representation of our pain, but also a prompt for carving possibility and a future out of the deepest betrayals: slavery, subjugation and other tendrils of white supremacy. Written over 34 essays, the text muses on that far-reaching relationship from both a historical and personal perspective. Black in Blues is not a clinical dissection of blueness (or of Blackness, for that matter). It is a meticulous and thoroughly researched endeavor on how the color blue and Blackness, as a race, have been constructed across history. Black was created as a way of sorting human beings, Perry argues, dating back to colonization and the Atlantic slave trade. Within Blackness, though, blue has always been a fixture, alongside and beyond subjugation. The color was featured by Black people in folktales, spirituality, hoodoo, and more. Further, it symbolizes harmony and balance in Yoruba cosmetology. The blues, as a musical category, originated post-emancipation, as freed Black people brought 'memories of song with them' as they left plantations. 'The truth is this: Black, as such, began ignobly – through conquering eyes … But through it all, the blue blues – the certainty of the brilliant sky, deep water and melancholy – have never left us.' In an early chapter, Perry notes that the blue in chattel slavery was both an example of degradation and also of how Black folks imbued dignity within themselves. Indigo, which was first planted and produced along the west African coast, was later cultivated as a cash crop in the Americas. Once harvested, pots of indigo were stirred in hot liquid by enslaved people, who often fell ill in such miserable conditions. But enslaved Black people also cultivated the rich color for themselves, dying pieces of clothing in blue and passing the practice onto their kin. Black people got married in blue dresses, were buried with blue trinkets, and wore blue beads upon being kidnapped and forced into slavery. 'Although the market for blue was part of the suffering of the enslaved, the color also remained a source of pleasure for them,' Perry writes. 'That too is an important detail in this story.' Beyond materials, blue cuts through Black art, culture and literature. Jazz musicians such as Nina Simone, Mongo Santamaría and Miles Davis used the blues as an inroads to experiment and expand their musical practices. Melancholy, Perry reminds, is a 'part of social movement, as is restraint'. Each artist stretched the perimeters of their genres to create a container for feelings – whether that be rage or frustration. They tapped into the global, winding tradition of Black creation. Of Davis's seminal album Kind of Blue, Perry writes: 'The elliptical nature of Black art, departure and return, local and global, connected through empires though not reducible to them, was on full display'. For Toni Morrison, blue, as seen in her novel The Bluest Eye, about a young Black girl who fantasizes about that change, was used to examine the consequences of violence we enact on each other, to question if certain dreams of assimilation could save us. As Perry notes, Morrison's work asks: 'What about if and when Black isn't considered beautiful? How would we contend with that?' Perry shines a light on how blue co-exists with various Black icons – including George Washington Carver and Coretta Scott King – providing lesser-known details on such figures. For instance, Carver, who is often relegated as a key developer of peanut products, is instead remembered for his biophilia, love of art and desserts, as well as creating the Egyptian blue color. King, for her part, wore a blue wedding dress. Ultimately, Black in Blues is an encyclopaedia, an intentional threading of the composite nature of blue and Black. Through her study, Perry demonstrates that the creation, adoration and use of blue in global Blackness isn't accidental. It's a strategy, a language, a point of departure for us and by us. 'We Black people are not quite like other Americans,' writes Perry. 'We do not live in the same fantasy that we might evade death by collecting things like dollars, houses, fences and passports. But we are as human as humans come. The incomprehensible keeps happening. Death comes fast, frequent and unfair. And we're still here. We know how to breathe underwater. Living after death.' That 'universe', she argues, is 'in blue'.
Atlantic
13-02-2025
- General
- Atlantic
What the Color Blue Reveals About Black Life
When I was living in West Philadelphia during graduate school, I noticed that my neighborhood abounded with ornately decorated Victorian-style porches, many of which featured ceilings painted in a calm shade of blue, somewhere between periwinkle and a light teal. When I asked a neighbor about what I took to be a trend, she regaled me with the history of a color she called 'haint blue'—a story about the violence of indigo production in the South Carolina Low Country, and the never-ending Black quest for safety and protection. I remembered this experience vividly as I read Imani Perry's new book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, which collects personal anecdotes, local and regional vignettes, and snippets of global Black history since the 15th century. Perry, an Atlantic contributing writer and a National Book Award–winning author, fills her latest work with accounts of ingenuity and Black resilience that are held together, loosely but intentionally, with threads of cerulean, sapphire, and azure. What might, on the surface, look like an arbitrary correlation coheres into a revelatory entry point for contemplating the Black experience. Perry's wide-ranging study seems to take inspiration from blues music, a genre that melds Black suffering with Black pride. And as I read the book, the origin story of haint blue kept flitting across my memory because it, too, evokes that duality. The color's prevalence on porch ceilings can be traced back to the spiritual practices of the Gullah Geechee people—descendants of Africans trafficked to the southeastern United States in the 1700s who believed that hues resembling the ocean or the sky could confuse evil spirits and keep them away. At the time, haint blue could be made only by cultivating and processing indigo plants, which was a labor-intensive, often dangerous endeavor undertaken by enslaved workers in antebellum America. Crops had to be cut, stacked, and heated in vats that attracted vermin and were a breeding ground for viruses. The stench that arose from the putrefying indigo plants could be unbearable. Livestock and humans alike became sick. Though the color was a product of enslavement, it was a 'source of pleasure' too. As Perry writes, those who found comfort in this particular shade knew that 'they were not mere chattel, and their lives would not be only joyless burden.' Even within the labor that degraded them, enslaved people found splendor and self-regard, something to admire in the products of their dehumanization. Wherever she looked in historical archives, Perry encountered vibrant tones of blue woven into the history of Black lives. She found indigo on the knife of the woman who trained Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the first Haitian emperor, in combat. Hunters and riflewomen in the West African kingdom of Dahomey wore blue shorts and sometimes blue blouses as part of their uniforms. Nat King Cole's cool emanated, at least in part, from the 'turquoise-hued Newports' and 'brilliant blue Kools' that he regularly smoked. Though each chapter of Black in Blues locates the color somewhere in the story it tells—the pale blue of jasperware pots; the dark blue in the gums of those most 'murderous' of Black people, according to both Black and white folklore; the cobalt blue of bottles hung on crepe-myrtle trees in the Deep South, also meant to ward off evil—the color itself often feels ancillary to the real subject of Perry's book. While working on it, Perry realized that she 'didn't want to write an exegesis on blue.' Instead, the form of her project more closely resembles a blues composition; reading it calls to mind one of Ma Rainey's songs of anguish and exuberance or Miles Davis's mercurial trumpet solos. Blues music captures the stunning complexity of navigating a freedom forever tied to a history of enslavement. As the music critic Albert Murray once argued, 'Blues music is an aesthetic device of confrontation and improvisation, an existential device or vehicle for coping with the ever-changing fortunes of human existence.' Perry arranges her exploration of Black history in a way that may seem formless but could be described as a meticulously arranged series of 'blue notes'—those tones in blues music that are played or sung slightly below what one might expect. As Perry explains, the blue note refuses stability or cohesion: 'It is a flexible relation to the scale, and the most African of interventions into Western music … A blued note is so distinctive that someone who knows nothing about music, formally speaking, can hear it is special.' Perry suggests that the everyday improvisations of the enslaved could be described as 'blue note living': the dances that expressed bodily autonomy, the laughter that overtook immense pain, the projections of curiosity and tenderness in the face of brutality. Over the course of the book, Perry builds her case for how Black people have always functioned as blue notes—often seen as out of place or deviant but also known to wrest mellifluousness from cacophony and escape the binds that have been violently placed upon them. Take George Washington Carver, the eccentric Black scientist who, in the early 20th century, helped popularize peanut butter and discovered many other uses for peanuts, both industrial and cosmetic. His work with the legume might be his claim to fame, but Perry chooses to pay attention to lesser-known aspects of his persona and life: his surprisingly high voice; his keen interest in the natural healing properties of various plants; the gossip he endured about his sexuality. He was also a talented craftsman who wove and embroidered intricate patterns that Perry describes as 'living fractals.' He made paint from sweet-potato skins and tomato vines, and even resurrected Egyptian blue, a striking shade that had been invented in Ancient Egypt, by oxidizing Alabama clay. Born into slavery, Carver lived a simple life with global implications; he found magnificence in the ordinary. Black in Blues begins and ends with intimate histories of some of the people Perry admires most—her family, and those she has encountered through her academic work. One of the last chapters features a man known as Brother Blue—a performer, educator, and family friend who was a semipermanent figure in and around Harvard Square until his death in 2009. Brother Blue frequently walked the streets sharing folk wisdom with the residents of Boston and Cambridge while donning 'a soft blue denim shirt and pants, a blue tam on his head, with streamers of all colors hanging off his clothes.' He pinned blue and rainbow-colored butterflies to his clothes and wore no shoes in order to be one with the earth, what he would call sacred ground. For Perry, Brother Blue embodied 'blue note living.' He served in World War II, overcame a stutter as an actor, and defended his doctoral dissertation by performing with a 25-piece jazz orchestra at a Boston prison—before being interrupted by an inmate revolt. Throughout his remarkable life, he insisted that authentic storytelling was crucial to Black life. As Perry reminisces, 'He taught me that all stories are ours—meaning Black folks'—even when they came from the very people who mean to keep us down and out. What matters is the telling, meaning the integrity of our voices.' Perry's memory of Brother Blue's teachings resonates with the end of Langston Hughes's 1926 essay 'The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,' in which the poet writes that Black people must be willing to 'express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.' Hughes, too, saw the blues as integral to that endeavor, calling for 'the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing the blues' to express both the beauty and suffering of Black life. Perry's book does just that: It is attuned to the high, the low, and the blue notes that compose Blackness—and we would all do well to listen.
New York Times
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Americans Feel Isolated. Imani Perry Wants to Help Them Connect.
Imani Perry often finds herself talking about things people get wrong about the South. For one thing, she says, there isn't a single South, but many Souths: the upper South, the Deep South, the urban South. The South is also a lot more racially diverse than people give it credit for, and a lot less segregated, she says. It's also not the sole source of the nation's racism that people can make it out to be — or even might like it to be. 'If you make the South the repository for all of the nation's sins, that bad place down there,' she said, 'then you don't have to think about what's going on in your own community.' Perry challenged many of the United States' most enduring misconceptions about the region in 2022 with 'South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation.' A combination of memoir, travelogue and deep-dive journalism, the book weaves together Zora Neale Hurston, Rosa Parks, RC Cola and rhythm and blues — and leaves clear that, though she may have left Alabama for Massachusetts when she was 5, Perry very much considers the South her home. Three years later, Perry continues to challenge perceptions and draw connections with her ninth book, 'Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People.' Published by Ecco on Jan. 28, her latest work takes a single color, blue, and examines how it has become intertwined with notions of Blackness, in ways that are well-known (such as blues music, and expressions like 'feeling blue ') or less known (including how indigo-dyed fabrics were traded for enslaved people in the 16th century). 'Imani is one of the most important writers of this period,' said Eddie S. Glaude Jr., a Princeton professor who co-taught a class with Perry on the African American intellectual tradition. 'In 'Black in Blues,' you get a sense of her capacious mind. She sees relationships that no other writer sees, and you get these extraordinary insights in this beautiful prose.' The years since 'South to America' have been thrilling for the writer. There have been career-defining accomplishments and plaudits, including a National Book Award and a MacArthur Fellowship, and the joys of watching her two sons prepare to go off to college. The joys have been tempered by Perry's ongoing struggles with lupus and Graves' disease, which she also wrote about in 2023. 'Sometimes my body shuts down, and I just have to let it,' she said. And all of this has come at a time of increasing polarity in this country, a nettlesome impediment for a writer whose deepest insights often come from the most intimate of interactions with people of every stripe. 'I'm curious about people, and I tend to seek out conversation,' she said. 'But there seems to be an intensity of meanness and hostility ramping up.' She added, 'I've become more cautious.' In 'South to America,' Perry describes having friendly conversations with a Confederate re-enactor at Harpers Ferry, and joining hands in prayer with a white Lyft driver from North Carolina whose description of heaven sounded to her curiously like a Southern plantation. In November 2022, the book won the National Book Award for nonfiction. 'Alabama now has a National Book Award,' she told the audience at the awards ceremony in New York City. 'It was overwhelmingly joyful,' she said. 'My children were so happy for me. When you raise children, you're caring for them and nurturing them. To realize that they want things for you, too, is just an unbelievable gift.' The following year, Perry wrote the audiobook 'A Dangerously High Threshold for Pain' about her experiences with lupus and Graves' disease, which began in 1996 when she was 23. Perry was inspired to tell her story during the pandemic when she learned about people suffering from long Covid. 'I had an emotional reaction when I saw all these people experiencing what it was like to live with invisible disabilities, as I had,' she said. She is very careful with diet and exercise now, she said, but even so, there are times when she ends up in the hospital. 'As Americans, we want to think of health as a virtue, we want to think of ourselves as superhuman,' she said. 'I have to reject all of that in order to accept myself, as opposed to beating myself up because my body is fragile.' The question of how her life might have been different if she didn't have lupus and Graves' disease gave her pause. 'Whenever I would make a new friend,' she said, 'I would think, oh, I wish they knew me before I had these diseases. They would have liked me so much better. I was a lot more fun.' For Autumn Womack, a former colleague at Princeton, the response came as a surprise. 'She's someone I think of as very fun,' she said. In August 2023, Perry joined the faculty of Harvard University, where she holds a joint appointment in studies of women, gender and sexuality and in African and African American studies. Two months later, Perry received a MacArthur Fellowship, often called the genius grant. 'Her insightful connections between individual experiences, complex social obstacles and emergent cultural expressions,' the citation read, 'infuse her scholarship with an authenticity and sense of discovery that appeals to broad audiences.' According to Womack, the award was overdue. 'When I heard she got it, I was like, doesn't she already have one of these?' Following critically acclaimed works about hip-hop ('Prophets of the Hood'), the 'Raisin in the Sun' playwright Lorraine Hansberry ('Looking for Lorraine') and the fin de siècle hymn 'Lift Every Voice and Sing' ('May We Forever Stand'), Perry is currently working on a middle grade book, for Norton Young Readers, about the lives of children in segregated schools. She also hopes to put her Harvard law degree and Georgetown masters of law degree to good use on a work of fiction — her first. 'I have this longstanding legal history slash jurisprudence project in my head,' she said. Most of all, Perry wants to create something that might be of use for our current cultural moment, when many Americans are feeling isolated and cleaved from their neighbors. 'We need to be, even at the very local level, in community with each other, engaged in mutual aid and sharing,' she said. 'We cannot just be concerned with our individual, private lives.'
