Geter, Hafizah Augustus
 
ISBN 9780593448663, 0593448669
Trade Paperback | 448 pages
 
WINNER OF THE PEN/OPEN BOOK AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews • Acclaimed poet Hafizah Augustus Geter reclaims her origin story in this "lyrical memoir" (The New Yorker)-- combining lyrical prose, biting criticism, and haunting visuals.

“I say, ‘the Black Period,’ and mean ‘home’ in all its shapeshifting ways.” In The Black Period, Hafizah creates a space for the beauty of Blackness, Islam, disability, and queerness to flourish, celebrating the many layers of her existence that America has time and again sought to erase.

At nineteen, she lost her mother to a sudden stroke. Weeks later, her father became so heartsick that he needed a triple bypass. By her thirties, she was constantly in pain, pinballing between physical therapy appointments, her grief, and the grind that is the American Dream. Hafizah realized she'd spent years internalizing the narratives that white supremacy had fed her about herself. Suddenly, she says, I was standing at the cliff of my own life, remembering.

Recalling her parents’ lessons on the art of Black revision, and mixing history, political analysis, and cultural criticism, alongside stunning original artworks created by her father, renowned artist Tyrone Geter, Hafizah maps out her own narrative, weaving between a childhood populated with Southern and Nigerian relatives; her days in a small Catholic school; a loving but tragically short relationship with her mother; and the feelings of joy and community that the Black Lives Matter protests engendered in her as an adult.

A unique combination of gripping memoir and Afrofuturist thought, in The Black Period, Hafizah manages to sidestep shame, confront disability, and embrace forgiveness: to emerge from the erasures America imposes to exist proudly and unabashedly as herself.