#tfbwl2019

My TFBWL reads of 2019 🖤 - (including some re reads, cause I’m on a mission to read all of Toni)

Although I had my favorites I deeply enjoyed most of them!!

Good morning!!

Just want to say thank you to everyone who supports and appreciates this project and page!! Thank you for your likes, comments, DMs and all the good and loving energy you send my way. Thank you so much for all the awesome books by Black women you send me, drop off and trade in. Thank you so much to the folks who come to the library each month and engage with the material and many activities being offered. Thank you to those who have started TFBWL branches in your area. Thank you especially to the patrons who give funds towards the growth and sustainability of this project every month through Patreon, I would not be able to keep this going without your financial contributions!! Recently I attempted to get funding from an organization that claims to give money to public practice social engagement community building type projects, multiple people told me to apply for the big money they were offering not just cause they know I needed it, but also cause they felt TFBWL was a perfect fit, but guess what!! they said this work does not have enough social impact and that I need to be doing more to get their dollars. 🤔

“After all, my life, as I saw it, was a thing divided in three; There was Brooklyn, U.S.A.,and specifically the tight, little, ingrown immigrant world of Bajan Brooklyn that I had fled. Then, once I started writing, the Carribean and it’s conga line Ig islands had been home off and on for any number of years. While all the time, lying in wait across the Atlantic, in a direct line almost with tiny wallflower Barbados, had been the Gulf of Guinea and the colossus of ancestral Africa, the greater portion of my tripartite self that I had yet to discover, yet to know”

🌍⭐️🖤

Recently finished TRIANGULAR ROAD the memoir of award winning best selling bold and astute Caribbean writer Paule Marshall. I make no secret about how I love reading memoirs (of Black women) and this one is no exception. I was quite tickled to find out that like many of our other faves (Zora, Audre, Toni, Maya), Miss Paule also worked at a library. ☺️ And currently living in Bedstuy I can’t help but think about her Bajan family moving and living through the same streets that I occupy in present day. I gagged when she dropped the bomb about attending Hunter college for free as a NYC resident. FREE college y’all!!! Whew!! Can you imagine?!

Most of all she talks about how her life, culture and travel influenced her writing and worldview. It starts in 1965, with her as a fledgling new writer and mother, without any warning she receives an invitation to join the Peoples Poet, Sir Langston Hughes on a cultural tour of Europe. She shares lovely moments from this spontaneous journey and the years that follow which found her writing/living in various parts of the Caribbean and eventually Africa. While traveling she goes through a process of constant self discovery and inspiration. She explores issues of identity, heritage and history, all of which plant seeds for the classic novels she gifted us, BROWN GIRL, BROWNSTONES, PRAISE SONG FOR THE WIDOW, THE CHOSEN PLACE, THE TIMELESS PEOPLE..Her voice here as in her stories is witty, affectionate, absorbing, amusing and real. More than anything it reminded me of the secrets & pleasures that can be uncovered when we remain open, ready and down for adventure!!

“Queenie is pure light and sweetness and obsidian skin. She smell like spicy earth things, like sandalwood and cinnamon and dirt itself. She is strong and warrior, moving through the trees like a river, carving her way through mud, elegant, dark and slow like molasses she say we should invoke for this journey. She have on a long white dress, with a white scarf wrap around the short white hair and shoulders like a woman in prayer. The woods are a green and quiet bush between her house and ocean that I know very well. Too well. I have cover every part of them bush, with the bottom of my feet and the eyes of my soul since I young. Queenie got silver bangles ‘round she wrist like broken Saturn rings, jingling each of her movements through the forest. She moves with her walking stick made of bamboo and mahogany and wrapped tight in thin copper, rose quartz, and citrine, so it could be strong and light and absorb power. She takes the lead on our journey and let me cry in her wake.” - Audre 🖤

I read THE STARS AND THE BLACKNESS BETWEEN THEM by Junauda Petrus last month for The Free Black Women’s Library Reading Challenge. I’m still trying to figure out how to talk about this book. I loved it so much, I actually shed real (thug) tears when I got to the last page, for multiple reasons. This book has fully realized gorgeous and beautiful and complicated Black characters each with a voice so distinct, you know that you know them. It is filled with poetry and patois, astrology and friendship, Spirit and Fire. This is a tender piece of fiction, a narrative that I didn’t know I needed, it reminded me of THE COLOR PURPLE by Alice Walker, it captures the essence and magic of Black womanhood that comes with us loving on each other. It’s womanist and liberating. It’s about a very special relationship between two Black girls Audre & Mabel. 💜🖤 Middle & High school teachers/librarians I highly recommend. The Black girls in your world will feel honored by this book, the queer ones especially. It gives fodder for conversations around family, seasons, dreams, Love, activism, culture and spirituality.

In the port town of La Pointe in Guadeloupe, Reynalda, a pregnant teenager is rescued from drowning by a local cook who raises her and the daughter she bears. Reynalda had run away from her mother, Nina, and the unsavory Italian jeweler for whom she kept the house. The child, Marie-Noelle is scarcely noticed by her mother, who soon leaves for a job in Paris. It is the harsh and beautiful island of Desirada where Reynalda was born, and where Nina’s hermetic mother still lives, which may hold the key to Marie Noelle’s identity and the reason her mother abandoned her. Her journey leads to America and redemption as she pursues an education so that she can invent her own life.

In the award winning 1998 book DESIRADA Maryse Conde has created a beautiful, unflinching portrait of several generations of women who must overcome much suffering to find themselves. It is as lush and powerful as anything she has written. 💙💛♥️

HAPPY NEW YEARS BOOK LOVERS!!

Who is joining me for The Free Black Women's Library Reading Challenge this year??

Our goal is to read 30 books by Black women in 2019, attached are the categories to serve as your inspiration.

Thanks to doing this challenge last year I managed to read 32 books by Black women, I got some serious food for my mind and heart in the process, I'm excited to go at it again.

Join me!!

Please feel free to share this far and wide, and tag The Free Black Women's Library in your reads on FB and Instagram!!

(Also use the hashtags so we can stay connected, especially on Instagram)

Looking forward to seeing what great titles people folks come up with and enjoy!!