Imani Perry, a professor at Harvard University and the writer of Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (2018) and South to America (2022).DANA SCRUGGS/The New York Times
For a historian, there’s often a central theme around which all their other interests rotate. For cultural scholar and author Imani Perry, a professor at Harvard University and the writer of Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (2018) and South to America (2022), to name a few, that centre is, and has always been, the Black experience – or, as it might have been understood before the transatlantic construct of race, the human experience.
The current yearning for a more nuanced understanding of Black history is reflected in the work of writers such as Perry, whose ability to render the word “Black” as a spectrum of innumerable hues resonates deeply. She’s the kind of writer who excavates history, not by reworking the well-worn soil of names and dates, but by seeking out its heartbeat.
Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People is a book that examines the symbolic weight of the colour blue across Black history. Perry argues that Blackness mirrors the complexity of blue – at once a physical presence and an emotional force. The ocean blue, for example, carried the enslaved. Sorrow and survival are embedded in the colour, just as the deep, vibrant blues of African art and religious traditions hold spiritual significance.
Perry talked to The Globe about how she sees the colour as both a burden and a beacon – history, memory and meaning, at once singular and infinite.
This can be a weird moment for a writer, when that years-long book is all said and done. How do things feel for you right now?
It’s been wonderful for it to be so well-received. But I have a kind of conflicted feeling because it’s a hard moment for people who are like-minded and with me here in America. This is sort of a blues-tinged moment. It has international repercussions.
I think the blues are all over the place right now. I guess the feeling is a kind of hopefulness. It feels very much like a thing I can offer up in the hopes that we find our way to – I don’t even know what the word is – sustaining a sense of meaning and courage and fortitude in what is a challenging global era.
Some are coming to grips with that current state of things. In reading your book though, there’s a kind of demonstrated strength in the ways that oppressed Black folks find beauty even in dire circumstances. What can we take away from that as far as the moment is concerned?
I think what history and tradition show us is, in some ways, is a display of the very best of humanity. That is to say, in facing degradation and cruelty and violence, we see a tradition of people who continue to use their imaginations to create beauty where they are – and also to imagine something for the future. That, I think, is a constant inspiration.
It’s a book that is very much rooted in the history of Black people. I think of that as having all these arteries. It’s rooted in my particular tradition – being a Black person from the southern United States – but it has these arteries that are global. Because I think we are connected globally.
This particular genealogy is about the human condition. That’s part of why I emphasize that Black people weren’t always “Black,” right? That’s something that comes about because of the transatlantic slave trade. Before that, we were all these other things – Igbo, Zulu, Akan and so on.
We were brought under this banner because of this global racial and imperial project, and then we made something beautiful out of it. Many things that are beautiful. That’s the best of what it means to be human: the spirit, the endurance and the imagination.
You’ve mentioned in the past that academic work sometimes risks stripping Black history of its nuance or emotional weight, reducing profound experiences to cold statistics. In this book, you’ve tried to resist that by weaving in symbolism. What was the act of discovering that language like for you?
I’ve been working on it for some years. The book that really served as my entry point into breaking away from academic language was the biography I wrote of Lorraine Hansberry, published in 2018.
The way I try to approach it as a writer is to retain all the research skills from my academic training. I want to keep the rigour and sophistication. But I also want to write in a way that not only makes people think but also makes them feel – and resonates with them, regardless of whether they have access to scholarly literature or if that’s even a language they’re interested in.
It’s not a rejection of academic language. I just don’t want that language to function as a barrier. So often, academic language is a way to push the heart out of the conversation. For me, the heart has to be part of it.
You’ve also added layers to certain people, like George Washington Carver. You included his queerness, among other aspects. Were there other discoveries that surprised you along the way?
With Carver, yes, he was a scientist. But he was also a painter. He was a deeply spiritual man who wandered the woods talking to God like a hoodoo practitioner. He lived with a partner on the Tuskegee campus. People are often astonished by these details because they’ve heard his name their whole lives but have no sense of the depth and complexity of the man.
At every turn, I’m trying to surprise people. I want to move past the artificial divide between science and art. I understand why we distinguish them in school, but they’re deeply connected. Discovery and experimentation exist in both realms. I wish we were in a community more robustly across professions and fields. We’d learn more from each other and get further.
With all these efforts to suppress certain Black narration and histories in schools and libraries in the United States, how do you personally process the idea that your book – and the deep cultural and historical truths it uncovers – might not reach the very communities it seeks to empower?
I don’t want to diminish the impact of that – it’s devastating. But because I have a historical lens, I always think about how, during enslavement, learning to read could be punishable by death. And yet, at the dawn of emancipation, 10 per cent of Black adults could read.
I think about Jim Crow, when public libraries were inaccessible, and W.E.B. Du Bois still wrote Black Reconstruction. I think about Black librarians who created bookmobiles to bring books to underserved communities.
We have a history of finding ways to share knowledge, even when society says we can’t. If schools ban books, we have to read them anyway. That might mean opening our homes to create spaces where the community can access them.
People often ask me what we do about banned books. We have to keep sharing them. Suppression happens because the work is so compelling and transformative. That’s why it’s targeted. That’s why we are targeted.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
