A collection of images and writings inspired by/related to Chapter 6 of Read Until You Understand by Farrah Jasmine Griffin and the discussion held about this chapter.
Questions posed during the discussion:
1. “Yet and still, I don’t believe my father is dead. . . I smell him. I feel him.” Griffin describes a kind
of ongoing presence of the ancestors and beloved dead to the living in the Black community. “I
come from a culture that makes room for the dead in our daily lives.” Is this sensibility familiar
to you? Strange? What personal, cultural or religious rituals do you associate with death, if any?
2. Of the writers surveyed in this chapter who detail “the particular nature of Black death” --
Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jesmyn Ward – which do
you find most compelling, resonant, or unsettling, and why?
3. Griffin lifts up several writers who “call into question the possibility of a transcendent death”
when perpetually grieving for the “disremembered and unaccounted for” dead. Does the
chapter or any of its particular examples help you better understand how grief under the
“unrelenting climate of white supremacy” can shape various responses to death?
description
A collection of images and writings inspired by/related to Chapter 6 of Read Until You Understand by Farrah Jasmine Griffin and the discussion held about this chapter.
Questions posed during the discussion:
1. “Yet and still, I don’t believe my father is dead. . . I smell him. I feel him.” Griffin describes a kind
of ongoing presence of the ancestors and beloved dead to the living in the Black community. “I
come from a culture that makes room for the dead in our daily lives.” Is this sensibility familiar
to you? Strange? What personal, cultural or religious rituals do you associate with death, if any?
2. Of the writers surveyed in this chapter who detail “the particular nature of Black death” --
Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jesmyn Ward – which do
you find most compelling, resonant, or unsettling, and why?
3. Griffin lifts up several writers who “call into question the possibility of a transcendent death”
when perpetually grieving for the “disremembered and unaccounted for” dead. Does the
chapter or any of its particular examples help you better understand how grief under the
“unrelenting climate of white supremacy” can shape various responses to death?
Description
false