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The Black Feather

@blackfeatherhideout

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Black writer (@relebone ) fan-girling Black writers + their work. Where the writers be.
📍: 🇿🇦
#blackfeatherhideout

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“Her novels portray the extraordinary things women do for love in fierce, powerful or distorted ways. Morrison also talks about the meaning of love to ‘Ella,’ a character in her Pulitzer-prize winning novel, ‘Beloved.’” (From billmoyers.com)

🎥 Bill Moyers, “A World of Ideas”, a 1988 and 1990 series of half-hour interviews with scientists, writers, artists, philosophers and historians.
📸 WENN Images by @blackfeatherhideout

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8 months ago

I join other South African writers in signing because watching activists on the Global Sumud Flotilla get kidnapped is profoundly enraging.
Over the last two years we’ve seen Israeli settler colonialists stealing aid. Palestinians burned in their tents. Children shot in the head. Press assassinated. Doctors tortured in Israeli prisons. Enough!

#freepalestine🇵🇸 #sanctionisrael #globalsumudflotilla by @blackfeatherhideout

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a year ago

Libraries are my favourite places!
I saw a creator on here vlog their library visit and thought I’d do the same when I went to renew my subscription.
This is your sign to visit your local library immediately 🫵🏾 📚 by @blackfeatherhideout

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a year ago

“I was not the weapon. I was only the wound.” — Safiya Sinclair, “How to Say Babylon”

I think there’s an emotional violence that Black first born daughters go through that makes us militant, and we’ve had to be that way in order to protect ourselves. Sinclair reached into the depths of herself to give readers a rich, unflinching reflection on her upbringing and on Jamaica.

Yoh her father was a nightmare!
“I knew then that I could finally build myself a world that was beyond his reach,” she writes. “That on the page I was not the princess, I was the dragon. I wanted him to see the cruel world nakedly, the way I wanted all men to see the cruel world, their deeds burned to ash on my tongue.”
At first the wound, at last a dragon. Words really do have that kind of healing power. Poetry offered her the escape.

I admire her ability to write her family’s story with compassion—despite the fact that she is a victim of its dysfunction.
We come to see what shaped them, and how generational pain can become tradition if we do not heal. Though she makes no excuses for her father especially, she has told their collective story with nuance.

Sinclair writes with a poet’s eye for detail. I love when poets try their hand at prose and do it well. The words sing! You never feel, as she is giving you background on rastafarianism in Jamaica or her own parents’ upbringing, that facts are being shoved down your throat. You don’t get lost in flowery language either.

A top ten memoir! by @blackfeatherhideout

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2 years ago

I took a one-week break (to move) that lasted a year 😂💀
Hi book besties! I’ve missed you. Girl what did I miss?! 👀

#bookstagramsa by @blackfeatherhideout

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2 years ago

I think about this scene a lot. I love that it’s a bookish meet-cute 😍
Even me I want!

How was your V-day? Did your Valentine get you *hardcover* books? 😂

Happy Friday book pals 💋

📷 Cherish the Day / OWN / Not my original content don’t flag me abeg 🚶🏾‍♀️ by @blackfeatherhideout

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3 years ago

“Call it sanctuary. Name its ghosts but refuse to believe it is haunted.”

I am 33 today. Ugh. 😩 🫠✋🏾

Quote your favourite Black poet’s bars in the comments ❤️ by @blackfeatherhideout

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3 years ago

“A woman’s body is much more demanding than her heart. Have I said this before? It has only one life and never forgets that. It keeps an account of blows like it does the memory of kisses, the wounds we inflict on ourselves and those that life deals us. It does not heal, is not restored, but forges ahead with great haste — nothing matters but the past and present; it is unconcerned with the future. Hence, it cannot accommodate any form of hypocrisy: the body scoffs at our gimmicks, unceremoniously dismisses our dalliances, the petty deals we strike with ourselves. It does not entertain excuses and irrevocably punishes lies that the heart condones.” — Hemley Boum, “Days Come and Go”

Three women are at the centre of this story. They are Anna, who is living out her final days in Paris; Abi, her daughter; and Tina, a teenager who comes under the sway of a militant terrorist faction. These three women experience their country, Cameroon, in very different ways. Through their eyes, we are able to understand colonialism’s impact on African society. The breadth of the novel is epic, tackling love and loss, politics and patriarchy, transition and modernity, religion and history. There is so much to unpack!

Anna is raised in a time when modernity and Christianity are being used to silence black people, and she, like all children of that time, even comes to love her coloniser, because they come with shiny things and trinkets and pretend to offer a better way of life, but, are in fact, there to colonise and wipe out a way of life that has been followed for centuries. She will realise only later, when she tries to find her way back to herself, that she was a victim of white supremacy. (Cont in comments) by @blackfeatherhideout

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3 years ago

I’ve never really been one for setting goals, but I want to be more disciplined in my reading habits this year, so here goes!

Seventy-five books. Of those, at least:

10 must be audiobooks
50 should be backlist
25 should be on my shelf
40 should be physical
10 should be books I have ‘unfinished business’ with, in other words, books I started reading and abandoned because adhd lol
15 can be new releases
5 should be borrowed from a library or a friend
10 can be books I bought (this feels more manageable than doing an outright book-buying ban. If I’m gonna buy books then I should at least tackle that TBR)

I just downloaded storygraph. What’s your experience with it? I haven’t started using it yet because I am so loathe to start *yet another* social media app 🙄 My goodness! But I saw that it was created by a Black woman and I love me a Black innovator. Also Goodreads has been feeling off for some time. by @blackfeatherhideout

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3 years ago

Why aren’t you part of a book club chomi?

📚 🍷 🍊 🥘 🍲 ☕️ 🍺 🍸 🗣️ by @blackfeatherhideout

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3 years ago

“You don't like the photographer, but you will stay with him. And this will be the shape of how you love. Wilfully, with all the might of your mind, numb to his touch on your body. There will be a rapture, a severing of cords, a disjuncture between your love and your passion. You'll tell yourself that no man has captured the light as he has, and though you wish he were younger, it is quite alright that he fucks you from behind.” — Lethokuhle Msimang, “The Frightened”

This is such a wonderfully disjointed novel and ironically, though it is not a story that draws a clear line from one end to the other, it flows really well. Yes, a disjointed, jarring novel that flows. It speaks to the character’s state of mind I think, that the book sort of dips in and out of coherence. She is challenging our ideas of continuity, how we perceive movement within ourselves and around us. It is an experiment I think Msimang manages to pull off well.

She has such a keen eye for the fact of being human. Her descriptions are spot on and true.

This is a story of her and her lovers, how she is undone and made by them. Their love is a dance and she mostly takes her cue for how to exist from these men, and then abandons it when she finds that they have grown tired of discovering that what she did best was reflect to them their own vanity, their own hunger to be wanted.

“First came the men, then came the madness.
They occurred in that order. Made me a woman; made me an ark; made my burning body yield and craft,” she writes.
Perhaps she is not brave enough to explore who she is on her own, and so she relies on the curiosity of a much older man, and men who have had full and interesting lives. Her own life is rich and ripe for discovery: she is the child of a diplomat and well traveled, yet she still feels as though she has nothing to offer. It’s a statement on how women navigate the self in a patriarchal world, and how what we love and lose breaks us, and if we are lucky — it builds us too.

The language is poetic and mature. A talented writer with a bright future ahead of her. by @blackfeatherhideout

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3 years ago

“…he just had this sense that it was essential not to be seen as a threat, for to be seen as a threat, as dark as he was, was to risk one day being obliterated.” — Mohsin Hamid, “The Last White Man”

A white man by the name of Anders wakes up one day to find that his skin has changed colour. He is now a POC (whether he’s become Black or another kind of brown is not specified, insert, I suppose, whatever ethnicity you prefer here).

He’s panicked, not because to change so drastically is disconcerting, but because he has become the thing the whole world regards as lesser-than. He does not think himself a racist, and yet above all the emotions that flood him, the strongest is “an unexpected, murderous rage.”
The fact that he did not ‘expect’ this rage is very telling. Most white people will say that they are not racist, but when faced with the stripping of their privilege, they become angry, because they do not, under any circumstances, want to be treated as BLACK.
This reminds me of Jane Elliot’s blue-eyed-brown-eyed experiments (swipe left). White people understand that their actions continually other and criminalise us.

Now that he has to adjust to this new reality, Anders realises that maybe he should learn how to behave as a brown man does. Before his change, he moved about as though he was the centre of the universe. He only begins to really *see* the brown people around him when he becomes brown. It’s emblematic of their race that white people only acknowledge the humanity of other races when they need them. When they want something from you. All of us brown people have a story of how the whites in the office will arrive and only greet the other whites (despite it being an open-plan arrangement) and then come back two hours later to greet you when they realise they need you to help them with a task.

(Cont in comments) by @blackfeatherhideout

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3 years ago