I was recently re-reading the section in Farah Jasmine Griffin's Read Until You Understand (2021) where she's talking about her early encounters with Toni Morrison's work. Griffin was 13 when she first read Sula (1973). Can you imagine that -- reading Sula at 13?
This past Thursday, I did something I've done each fall for nearly 25 years in a row: I introduced students to Amiri Baraka performing his poem "
Dope."
When the poem ended, I posed a question to the class of 60 first-year collegiate Black men. "What if you had encountered Baraka in high school or even middle school, who would you be then?"
After becoming exposed to to Morrison's work at an early age, we saw what happen to Griffin. She became one of our leading scholars of Black literature. So what would've happened to us if we stumbled upon Baraka performing "Dope"?
The guys and I had a good time imagining possibilities. Among other things, we acknowledged that we all would thought of literature a lot differently. Guys acknowledged that they would've been less inclined to refer to poetry as boring, if they had been exposed to Baraka.
One student noted that he would've started thinking about and asking questions about Black people and African history. He focused in particular on Baraka's assertion that someone "killed lumumba." "Who's Lumumba, and why was he killed?" some of the students wanted to know.
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