#morgan jerkins

[thechanelmuse]

My Book Review

Morgan Jerkins was trending during the release of Kendrick Lamar's Drake hit diss record, "Not Like Us," after culture vulture DJ Vlad attempted to get her fired from her teaching position at Princeton University for telling him to mind his mf business. Black folks digitally hemmed him up for his spiteful retaliation, and he began backpedaling only after he discovered Morgan is the niece of legendary producer Rodney "Darkchild" Jerkins.

Seeing her name trend quickly made me recall her memoir, Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots. It was one of my favorite reads of 2022. I headed to this site to reblog my review. Lo and behold I never posted one on here 🙃. So here we are.

From the moment I read the title, I knew this book would feel familiar, taking me back to the my early days of deep curiosity, personal discovery, and documented confirmation while uncovering the long paper trail of my ancestry and land. (For info on lineage tracing, refer to my post here.) 

Morgan Jerkins' familial journey through Georgia, Lowcountry South Carolina, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and California made me think of my own as a granddaughter of grandparents who headed to New York during the Great Migration by way of Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina extending to Louisa County, Virginia and Boley, Oklahoma. Morgan's memoir, which is divided into four sections, is engrossing, detailed, and reels you into a seat next to her on her journey.

Here's the book's blurb:

Between 1916 and 1970, six million Black Americans left their rural homes in the South for jobs in cities in the North, West, and Midwest in a movement known as The Great Migration. But while this event transformed the complexion of America and provided black people with new economic opportunities, it also disconnected them from their roots, their land, and their sense of identity, argues Morgan Jerkins. In this fascinating and deeply personal exploration, she recreates her ancestors’ journeys across America, following the migratory routes they took. Following in their footsteps, Jerkins seeks to understand not only her own past, but the lineage of an entire group of people who have been displaced, disenfranchised, and disrespected throughout our history. Through interviews, photos, and hundreds of pages of transcription, Jerkins braids the loose threads of her family’s oral histories, which she was able to trace back 300 years, with the insights and recollections of Black people she met along the way—the tissue of Black myths, customs, and blood that connect the bones of American history.

Genealogy is a never-ending process of search and discovery for Black Americans that's met with hidden documents and some areas paper genocide, due to destroyed documents, misclassification, and several stages of racial/ethnic reclassification for our ethnic group implemented by the US government since the 1790 census. I'm pretty sure even after concluding this book Morgan continued her search, working back through her long lines. It's layered like an onion. I've been working on mine for almost two decades reaching the 1600s for a few. It gives you a sense of awakening that's an everyday feeling. It'll never dissipate, especially being able to pull black the veil and unearth the identity of ancestors whose names haven't been said for hundreds of years.

[the-final-sentence]

But when I need a salve, a space to remind myself that there need not be any limits to my interrogation when it comes to my safety, I turn to Citizen to remember to keep on living and to document those interruptions and gaps in said living as storytelling to be passed on to another black woman and then another.

Morgan Jerkins, from "To Be a Citizen"

[nprbooks]

A rare gift becomes a double-edged sword in Morgan Jerkins’ new Caul Baby, about a family of Black women born with cauls, extra layers over their skin that protects them from harm. They can share the caul with others — and sell it "to the highest bidder" — which brings trouble.

"The women that you will come across in this book, they are an amalgam of women in my life," Jerkins tells All Things Considered’s Ari Shapiro. "They may have been an amalgam of the mothers and the aunties that I've heard talk in very intimate spaces in the comfort of their own homes. They could be an amalgam of the Black women that I see passing each other on the street and engaging in such vibrant conversation."

Hear that interview here.

-- Petra

[bostonpoetryslam]

I would say to not ask for permission to write what you want to write. Whatever inspires you, whatever keeps you up at night where you can see images or sentences in your head, write it.

Advice to young writers from Morgan Jerkins, as told to Jared Jackson for the PEN Ten

[teapotsonfire]

Tomes and Tea.

@bibliophilicwitch

[shotbyshe]

"Because white men cannot police their imagination, black men are dying."

Morgan Jerkins (From "To Be A Citizen" from Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves)

[sawasawako-archived]

so Morgan Jerkins breaks down cultural appropriation (specifically the appropriation of features unique to Black culture and white women’s appropriation of Black women’s bodies) really cogently in her book This Will Be My Undoing:

“We as black women are not afforded ownership over our identities, our own bodies, the color of our skin and the texture of our hair, and yet white women can appropriate our bodies in order to suit their own selfish desires. bell hooks writes in ‘Eating the Other’ that ‘... ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.’ White women’s privilege allows them to do this with little, if any, reproach.

That black women’s bodies are problematic manifests in several flash points, such as hair, but when embodied by white women these flash points are neutralized, even admired [see: Rachel Dolezal, Kylie Jenner]... Black skin and hair are considered ‘epic’ and regal as long as they are not found on the black female body, because that kind of authenticity is not the kind of beauty that mainstream culture values.

... when there is no equality, there cannot be equivalency. In other words, we cannot judge black and white women in the same way. Although black women are pressured to be as close to the white ideal as possible, they can never call themselves white... we cannot identify as something that we can never inherently be.

... The offense does not lie only in the imitation itself, but also in the reception of black women’s body parts, which are only coveted once a white woman decides that she wants them for herself. Black women cannot reappropriate from white women and be equally desired. Yet when they want to look like black women, they still are seen as both original and acceptable. Under the white gaze, the black body cannot exist without white people encroaching upon our right to be.”

[universitybookstore]

new from Ballantine Books and editor and club founder glory Edim, Well-Read Black Girl: An Anthology. Featuring some of the most imfluential African American writers today.