240 pages.
First published Oct 24, 2023 (Zando Projects/Get Lifted Books)
Non-fiction/anthology.
White people have the luxury of experiencing love as a journey only burdened with the defaults of humanity. However, we experience love as an escape. It is a fort we build to shield the people we love from oppression and where we take ourselves to be repaired. The people we love are our safe zones. They allow us to direct our attention away from the veil and into the worlds we build together. When two or three of us gather to love or be loved, it is already implied that each of us had to work through a thing even to offer such an extension of ourselves, which makes our love stronger. (Lynae Vanee Bogues, On Black Love…)
Ah, such a delight! This is a book about Black Love: community, family present, absent or on the way, couples, friends, self, peers and mentors, and even jazz, hair, the Church, fishing, and travel—a collection of letters from Black people to Black people and Black experiences. There’s so much life and grace and connection in these pages, so much pain and joy and grief and celebration—in Care, Awe, Loss, Ambivalence, and Transformation, the five sections of the book. And it’s beautiful.
The book opens with a lovely (as one would expect) letter from John Legend to his wife, Chrissy. Namesake, by Natalie Johnson, a letter to her late aunt, took my breath away, as did My Black Body by Malachi Elijah and So I Can Face the Fear Of Living by Sojourner Brown, both poems about living in Black bodies. But nothing in this book is filler; every “love letter” will speak to you. I was also very touched by the letters that honour the lineage of Black activism, including Rev. Al Sharpton’s letter to his grandchild, and Ben Crump’s to Justice Thurgood Marshall.
This love letter to Blackness is a welcome and complex record of the Black experience (in the US), and will make you feel so much. Highly recommended.
Thank you to Zando Projects/Get Lifted Books and to NetGalley for access.
Support independent bookshops and my writing by ordering it from Bookshop here.
Harare Review of Books 
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