In books like “Breathe” and “South to America,” National Book Award and MacArthur “genius” grant winner Imani Perry writes about Blackness in America with clarity, elegance, rage, and joy. Perry is a Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
Her latest book is “Black in Blues,” a meditation on the color blue and its role in Black history and culture. Perry talks to us in front of an audience of students at Woodburn High School.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller coming to you today from Woodburn High School in front of an audience of students, 9th graders all the way through 12th graders. It’s an hour with the writer Imani Perry.
Perry is, she has written, a child of the south and the civil rights movement and leftist intellectuals of the working class and the New England intellectual elite. She’s lived across and writes about these intersections of race, class, region, and religion. Through it all, she is one of our country’s foremost chroniclers of Black identities, Black history, Black artistry, and Black imagination.
She’s the author of nine books including “Breathe: A Letter to My Sons” and “South to America,” which won the National Book Award. Her latest book is called “Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People.” She has said she writes for the ones who till the soil and walk the picket lines and clean the bathrooms. Imani Perry, it’s a real pleasure to have you on the show.
Imani Perry: It’s great to be with you. It’s great to be here.
Miller: We’re gonna hear directly from a bunch of students, in their own voices, in the course of this hour, but we also got some questions submitted by students in advance, and I’m gonna start right now with one of them.
Perry: OK.
Miller: One student wrote, “You’ve spent much of your life trying to understand and explain systems of domination. How do you understand and explain current ICE operations?”
Perry: Oh my goodness, what an important question. One of the things that I always talk about my work is in part haunting the past, which is I feel like I’m sort of walking around in history. I try to walk around in history in such a way that I am paying attention and tending to people’s lives that historically were diminished or relatively disregarded and I do it in that way because I think that kind of attention or tending or care has lessons for the present.
So when I see agents of the federal government stealing children, terrorizing people, treating people as though they are not human beings, for me it’s certainly not something new, but it hearkens to the very worst parts of American history that for some horrific reason we have not been able to eradicate. So, you know, what is the history of enslavement but the theft of children and then marking them as people who don’t deserve citizenship, right?
And the repetition, so I am horrified now, but my horror is also a refusal to accept the framing that this is somehow because of a problem of immigration, as opposed to, it is this really horrifying habit in this country of marking some people as less worthy of care and respect and dignity. So I’m constantly wanting to attend to the history because I think one, it leads us to be more ethical, but it forces us to confront how unethical the behavior is now. So I am, I think like most people, horrified by ICE now and also I want us to attend to this now so that this can stop being the habit of this country.
Miller: What do you mean by the word attend there?
Perry: For me, attention or tending is sort of the combination of care and paying attention, there’s so many people in this society, in this world, who are disregarded or who are treated as though they are less important than other people. I descend from such people, right? And so for me, my ethics or my belief in the beloved community is about refusing the idea that there are some people who are less worthy of attention and care than others, right?
I talk about my grandmother all the time who was a domestic. She cleaned people’s homes, she washed toilets. She was also the smartest person I’d ever met, and the person who put in me all of the qualities that have enabled me to be the person who I am. And so when I think about who I want to attend, I wanna attend to people like her.
Miller: Let’s take a question from our audience. What’s your name and what’s your question?
David Rodriguez Garcia: My name is David Rodriguez Garcia, and my question for you, why do you think it was important to write these books and what do you want people to learn from them or get from it?
Perry: I’m sorry, can you speak up a little bit?
Rodriguez Garcia: Why do you think it’s important to write these books and what do you want people to get from them?
Perry: Yeah, thank you so much for that question. Writing for me serves a lot of functions, like one is it’s my art, it’s my form of self expression. I think that we all need to have our forms of art whether or not we are artists professionally, but we need a way to exercise our creative muscles and I feel like I’ve spent so much of my life studying history and culture and law.
And for me, the mission is to take what I have studied and to engage in storytelling, which is part of all of our traditions, but to do storytelling that brings in what I have studied and then organizes it as stories in such a way that my hope is that it brings us somewhere closer to justice, right? I tell different types of stories in that effort, but that’s always what’s underneath it. It also then feeds my creative soul, so it’s both a sense of mission and also a sense of almost a kind of self-care practice, about how do I feed myself in the process of trying to do something meaningful?
Miller: Let’s take another question. What’s your name?
Isabella Baldasseri: Isabella Baldasseri. In “Breathe,” you discuss how breathing can become political, depending on who is privileged enough to breathe with ease and have the space to do so. How do you think we can collectively create environments that enable communities that struggle to breathe right now?
Perry: Yeah, so it’s a beautiful question and it resonates on so many levels, because on the one hand there’s the literal question of breathing, and we see it, the range, from these horrifying police or in the ICE encounters that are literally suffocating people. But we also see it in environmental racism and so often people of color living in communities that are toxic, we see it in the rates of asthma, sick buildings. We saw it in the disparities in COVID, in terms of who suffered most, so there’s the literal breathing which demands a kind of organizing, I think, around the way we distribute harm, the way we distribute punishment.
We have to talk about it and actually push back against it but then there’s also breathing in a symbolic sense which is no less important, which is about being able to express oneself fully. And that requires, I think, a belief in deep democracy, little “d,” right, that this belief that every person should be afforded the respect to self-actualize, and to not see that as something that’s held only for the few or only people who fit in a particular mold or only people who are somehow in the middle of the spectrum of humanity.
And so, I think on multiple levels, that asks us to have commitments, the commitments to values, but also how do we act upon our values? How do we make real what we say we are committed to? We have to challenge each other to do that and we also have to be in community with other people who have fellow feelings and common values. This society is so individualistic, but one thing we know now is that we actually can’t travel alone, right? We have to be in community, we need community to give us courage, we need community in which to heal, and so that sort of feels like that’s the sort of my response to everything is together.
Miller: I wonder if you could read us just two shortish paragraphs from your most recent book, “Black in Blues.”
Perry: “Inevitably, when I’m speaking somewhere about how much race still matters, an older white man will stand up and say how terrible things were when he was a child, and he will say something like, we treated you so badly, mixing past and present with an anxious cadence, and he will say, with a dancing preface, that I must admit things are better. Sometimes there is one more sentence, one word, right?
The man who raised me, whom I call my father, also a white man who would be older if not dead, taught me to invoke Malcolm X in these moments. He taught me to ask with biting irony, if you stab a man in the back and then pull the knife out halfway, do you ask if things are better? I have always used that example privately in order to understand the nonstop bleeding of black folks, but I don’t say it out loud.”
Miller: How do you decide what to say out loud and to whom?
Perry: It’s such a good question and it is improvisational. I once said in a dialogue that I was having with the writer Kiese Laymon that if you’re trying to get free you don’t tell all the secrets. And some people who didn’t like that formulation, who felt who kind of pushed back, but I do think that I have deep commitments and a belief that certain things are true and I feel a responsibility to be in dialogue but also to be self-protective and to protect the people who I care for.
And so the decision making has a lot to do with having a sense that to speak fully is about having a sense that people are engaging with me in good faith, so I don’t need people to agree with me, but I do expect a degree of sincerity if we’re going to talk about difficult topics.
Miller: Do you feel like your antennae are finely attuned to that?
Perry: Absolutely.
Miller: I’m wondering, how…
Perry: How is it?
Miller: Yeah.
Perry: Yeah, because people say the same things over and over again, I tend to know where people are coming from, because when people are really sincere, they tend not to have like a script. It tends to be more organic and sometimes a little more stumbling, right. And there’s just, you can tell when someone is being combative, and one of the ways you often know is that they will always say that you have said things that you haven’t said. And come with the kind of, so well you take, and often I’m like that’s that’s not my position.
Miller: I literally didn’t say that.
Perry: I literally didn’t say it, nor do I mean it. And I say that with some caution, because I do think it’s meaningful to sort of really try to be in conversation with people, but you also have to self-protect. You also have to think of larger communities of people who are standing with you and behind you as you speak. We don’t often have the luxury of speaking only for ourselves and so my protection is not just for my well-being, but it’s for the people I care for.
Miller: I’m curious about flipping this, that was a question about answering questions, but you write this, in “South to America,” “Nosiness is at the heart of my gift for research and association.” How does nosiness manifest? And also, I hate double-barreled questions, but where do you think it came from, in you?
Perry: Oh, so part of where it came from is that I’m a reader, right? What I mean is that I’ve been a voracious reader since I was very young, and reading is a lot about curiosity, right? You get a good novel and you want to know the character’s business, like you’re trying to read through and figure out, well, why did they do this and why did they do that?
Miller: It’s also that, that’s internal though.
Perry: Yeah.
Miller: Well, I mean, as opposed to the courage to let your nosiness act and ask questions to others.
Perry: Some of that is my Southernness, and I like being in the South because people will talk to you, like I sometimes forget in Boston, like I’m smiling and people are looking at me like why is she smiling at everybody, so there’s something about the culture of interaction that feels human to me. You learn about grace. Like if you see people and you think, oh, I value this human being enough to look into their eyes and smile, I think that’s a good way to be in the world. So that’s a piece of it too.
Miller: How has nosiness helped you as a writer and as a scholar?
Perry: It’s huge for both. As a scholar, you have to have something that keeps you going, especially when you’re digging through old yellowed pieces of paper or you have spent hours looking for a particular detail. So I was looking recently for a particular detail of an event that happened in April of 1787, and when I got to it, it was like a bonanza, but it’s because I’m trying to figure out what happened with this criminal case in that year, right? So the nosiness keeps me going when I’m exhausted.
But as a writer, writers write about obviously millions of different topics, but at some level, we’re all trying to explore the human condition. And so the more curiosity you have about the world and its people, the closer you can get to some kernel of truth and so it serves me, because when you attend to a human being or you attend to a particular location and you’re looking at it from different angles, you learn something about that particular place and person, but you’re also learning something about humanity generally.
Miller: Let’s take another question from one of our students.
Luna: Hi there, so I’m Luna. You have a very unique understanding of people, right? I want to know, first off, kind of where you get that, but I also want to know what you think of why people don’t have that themselves. I’m very interested in that.
Perry: Can I ask you a follow-up question?
Luna: Sure.
Perry: What are you thinking of? Like what aspect when you say a unique understanding of people?
Luna: You have a very deep understanding of people, like in your book, “Breathe: A Letter to Your Sons,” you can see the humanity in a person who has hurt you. Most people can’t bring themselves to that.
Perry: Yeah.
Luna: And you can bring yourself to put humanity in people and understand the deeper thought levels of why people act like this, or why people act out.
Perry: Thank you for that. First of all, thank you for saying that, but thank you for the question. I think it’s a combination of imagination and values, right? To try to stretch your imagination to accommodate another person’s experience, I think it’s a good exercise in life in general. And I don’t think that that takes away from my own experience. I do think it helps me understand the world and the way the world works better. It’s spiritual too, I really do believe that every human being is deserving of dignity.
And I think one of the worst habits of human beings is to always be looking to be better than somebody else. If you’re serious about thinking that’s not a good thing and and trying to let it go, you have to actually try to think about the experiences of others and not feel as though being sensitive to other people’s experiences undermines your own space in the world and your own value in the world, or even your own experience of suffering. There’s lots of different ways that human beings suffer. It’s not a competitive enterprise, but it’s a practice, it requires an effort to do so and an effort that the society doesn’t necessarily reward, so it has to be its own reward.
Miller: Thank you for that question and thank you, Imani, for sharpening it. I love hearing when people who are asked questions try to truly understand what the heart of the question is. Let’s take another question from our audience.
Audience member: In your article, “Letters from Home,” you talk about death and life and like loss in general and the humanity of letters, specifically. Do you think we, as people, would view death differently if we had physical evidence such as letters left behind of the people we lost?
Perry: Oh wow, what a gorgeous question. I think that they are a balm, having those letters. As a researcher I’m often looking at handwritten letters and it’s so moving because you know that the person touched this piece of paper and exercised their muscle and their mind to express something, so there’s something just so precious and so deeply human about having a letter. And so I encourage you all, young people who are usually typing with thumbs, to take some time to actually write physical letters or cards to people you care for and to save them. If your grandparents or your elders, your loved ones are offering them to you. And for me, as someone who has experienced a lot of death of people I love over the past 15 years, these are some of the most precious possessions I have.
Miller: Let’s take another question. What’s your name and what’s your question?
Kellen: Hi, my name is Kellen. I’m curious what you were like at our age, as a teenager, and if fighting was always a part of you, and as a young person how can I feel that I’m doing enough watching all this injustice happen around me? And how do you find peace on an ever ending spectrum of doing enough?
Perry: Oh my goodness, wow.
Miller: There are a lot of questions. The first was what were you like, and were you a fighter then?
Perry: I was a fighter then. What was that like? I mean, I was a fighter. I was also goofy. I was also social. I like to hang out with my friends and talk, and I read a lot, but I also watched a lot of TV. And yeah, I was a fighter in the sense that I’ve always disliked injustice, and consistent with the way you asked that question, right? I will say this, the world didn’t feel as much on edge when I was in high school as it does now, by any means.
So I almost hesitate to answer your question because I think that your generation is going to figure out things that we failed to figure out. You’ve lived through these unbelievable historical moments, and coming of age this moment has required so much courage that I feel inadequate, when I was 17 years old, in comparison to what you all have lived through and are living. But that said, the thing that I think is important to keep in mind is to live a righteous life or what I think of as a righteous life is not a sprint, it’s a marathon.
You try to do work that’s meaningful, you learn, right? You study and grow and also try to show up in the moments of injustice where you can have a hand in moving the society closer towards justice, but you don’t wanna expend so much energy that you cannot function for the long haul, so you have to take care of yourself and – OK, I’m about to put on my mom hat – you gotta eat your vegetables, you gotta sleep enough, you have to break in the times when things are so hard, you have to remember how to laugh, right, because you have to take care of your whole well-being, while also cultivating a sense of responsibility. And asking the question you asked me, what can I do given my heart, given my commitments, given the world that I exist in, and it’s not gonna look the same as someone else’s contribution and that’s OK.
Miller: Let’s take one more question before we have to take a break. What’s your name and what’s your question?
Jocelyn Fernandez: Hi my name is Jocelyn Fernandez. I know that you always try to find the beauty in things and my question was, has your opinion been challenged or changed in the fact that what is happening around our country right now and what our president is doing and the fact that he is in charge of all of us and our safety?
Perry: For me, the beauty in things is that as horrifying as our current leadership is, he’s not in charge of our minds and hearts. And therefore isn’t completely in charge of us. And the beauty I find is in people’s refusal not just of his deeds, but the lies, the mischaracterizations. The beauty I find is in the resilience I’m witnessing. And I will say, being a student of history helps this.
So if I think about the periods in the past where we had presidents who were slaveholders, presidents who participated in stealing the land of Indigenous people, and massacres of Indigenous people, it’s not unheard of to have a president who betrayed basic human values. And so the beauty is that the people didn’t believe him. And that’s how we’re here, that there are people who didn’t believe and there are people who refused, people who still thought it was meaningful to offer their voices. When I look for the beauty, it’s looking for the beauty in order to push back, right, it’s not a Pollyannaish beauty, it’s not like oh it’s not so bad because of this that and the other thing, no it’s OK, what are our resources to move through this? That’s what I’m looking for.
Miller: In your book “South to America,” you have a really powerful section about history and memory that centers on a trip you took through this underground network of caves in Maryland called Crystal Grottoes. You wrote this: “In this period of history in which some people are clinging to the past and others are expunging it, perhaps we need to learn to acknowledge that most of us feel uncertain and even uneasy about what we will sustain and what we will leave behind.”
I was struck by the the individual nature of that part, and there’s a lot of parts in the book that are much more communal or political, but there you’re talking, I think, if I read you correctly, about the work that all of us have to do when monuments are taken down or when signs that say slavery did exist, when they’re taken down – we can talk in a second maybe about the governmental actions – but I want to start with where you started there with what’s the personal response, the individual response?
Perry: Yeah, I think it’s funny because I was thinking the personal response is both about how the positions we take in public history, but also the positions we take on the messages that have come from our parents and our grandparents, and I mean that in a complex set of ways, right? Sometimes we inherit forms of bigotry that we’re grappling with, but sometimes also we inherit histories of trauma and pain and we have to figure out how to metabolize them or work with them differently than previous generations.
I do think that those are very personal questions, and I render them personally because I believe in civic participation, and you come to an arena where it’s not just the voting booth, you come to the world and your person and community and I think we all have to be reflective on how we’re going to show up in those places. For me this was one of those questions.
Miller: What do you see as the impact when a plaque that talks about George Washington as an enslaver or a pride flag at Stonewall is taken down or facts about Indigenous erasure in national parks. I mean, there’s a very, very long list.
Perry: It goes on and on.
Miller: It’s a long list. What’s the impact of those erasures?
Perry: OK, well, I have a complicated set of feelings about this. On the one hand, I’m like, OK, this is obviously terrible. The impact is to terrorize people. The impact is to try to make the American public less intelligent and knowledgeable about history. It has a corollary, so it doesn’t just exist on its own, but it’s connected to how human beings are being treated. These are two parts of the same whole.
But I also think it’s really important for communities to hold on to their own stories because these types of things happen cyclically, right, to hold on to their own stories, their own communities, their own museums.
Because one of the things I keep saying, so this is the centennial year of Black History Month, it’s been celebrated for 100 years, and so I remember saying last year, because they took away this federal celebration of Black History Month. The federal government didn’t create Black History Month, so it can’t actually take it away, and I think we have to keep those things in mind. I think everybody who is under attack at present, which is literally the majority of the globe, like once you count up all the different categories of people it’s the majority of us, that we have to hold on to our stories even when people in positions of power are trying to erase them.
Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. What’s your name and what’s your question?
Marcus: Hey, my name is Marcus, and my question for you is probably one you’ve probably heard many times, but my question for you is, what keeps you going?
Perry: Oh, it’s such a good question. I have heard it and it’s not just one thing. Part of it, what keeps me going is how much my elders and ancestors poured into me. Like my grandmother didn’t have the right to vote until she was 48 years old. And she was the most civically minded person I knew. I feel like part of what I’m doing is carrying on something, a kind of faith and a sense of responsibility that she had. But it’s also, the biggest thing is young people, it’s you guys, right? I am always feeling, and you’re so extraordinary, and we have not given you the world that you deserve.
As long as I am still here, I feel an obligation to do better on that count. You look into faces of young people, so much brilliance, so much promise, so much beauty, so much possibility, and having to endure and navigate a very challenging world, if I’m going to earn my place as a good ancestor at the end of my life, I have to do something about the world we live in, so that’s what keeps me going.
Miller: When you became an academic, how much of your thinking about that career path was about being around young people as opposed to being someone who would study history or law or the stuff you were studying?
Perry: Well, so it’s interesting. I have a job that I can read and write. So that fit me, but I was going to be around young people regardless of whether I had that. My kids are now 19 and 22, but my house was the house that all the kids hung out at. Like I like young people, right? And oftentimes I’d wake up and there’d be like eight or nine kids besides the two I have, and that’s partially the culture of my family. I come from a very large family. My mother was one of 12, I’m sure some people in here are familiar with it, you’re at your grandmother’s house on the weekend and everybody has their little pallet on the floor. There’s like eight or nine of you together and so it’s always something that I’ve cherished, and so whether or not this was my job, that young people are gonna be a part of my life.
Miller: Let’s take another question. What’s your name?
Mackenzie Contoys: Hi, my name is Mackenzie Contoys. You’ve talked a lot about community in all the books you’ve written, every conversation you’ve ever had. Community seems to be a central focus for you, and I just was curious, how do you advise that we keep a community strong in times like this? It’s just such bad times. How to make a community out of people that might not necessarily find themselves together all the time?
Perry: It’s a wonderful question, and I wanna answer it with some degree of humility, because I don’t totally know, but what I do know is that there is a value in trying to really be present with other people and understand that presence in multiple ways. My grandmother used to always talk about, when she lived in a boarding house, she had a friend named Marie, and Marie would always give her some sugar, because Marie’s husband had a good job working at the steel mills.
My grandfather made shoes and struggled with mental illness and so didn’t have the same kind of resources. And for me that was always this important lesson about sharing. It’s a small thing, and she knew she would be able to get some sugar for her so she could put some sugar in the Kool-Aid for her kids, right? And I think that sensibility of sharing as an essential part of what it means to be a human being and then also joining something.
It used to be the case that people would belong to three or four or five organizations. In this culture that’s sort of fallen by the wayside, but if you can find something that you can join and you can say I care enough about this organization, this community group that I can stay with it for 10 years, if everybody did that, we’d have a fundamental transformation in society. It’s those things, like the sharing sensibility and a willingness to work together, and it doesn’t have to be huge, because all social transformation depends on not just joining but also being able to trust other people, and trust only happens when you keep showing up.
Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience.
Alyssa: Hi, my name’s Alyssa, and the question I have for you is, regarding everything that’s happening in our country in the world around us today, and we’re just exposed to so much heinous crimes and cruelty that I think we’ve become desensitized to the point where we can’t take these things seriously or we just don’t bring ourselves to care. What steps do you think we can take to really sensitize ourselves again so we can bring ourselves to take action?
Perry: Such a fantastic point. I do think doom scrolling isn’t good for us, and I think it’s complicated because it’s both traumatizing and desensitizing. So traumatizing in the sense that there is a psychological and emotional impact of just looking over and over and over again at the horror. But then it also can make you feel like looking at it is all there is you can do. And that’s not good either, so I do think stepping away from the screens, like keeping that in its place. I’m not saying don’t go to the screens at all, but you have to limit your connection to the screens and spend much more time in connection with other human beings.
I do think reading is helpful in this regard because reading allows you to access another person’s interior, which is not the same thing as just looking at something and I think that it can make you more deeply empathetic and reflective. Also the point about participating and being present – and it connects to an earlier question,
I hope it’s OK, when I was a kid I spent a lot of summers in Chicago. And my friend group, I had sort of three maybe different branches, we were all friends, but branches. My best friend was a Japanese American kid, a girl then, now a woman, whose father and grandmother had been interned during World War II, been in, in what American concentration camps. My friends Susana and Irma were both undocumented. My friends Yvette and Golden lived in the Cabrini-Green housing projects, some of the largest public housing projects in the country.
Everybody was experiencing either present adversity or history of trauma related to this country, whether it was based in racism and or classism or not having a recognized status. For me, loving my friends actually made me understand the world better and more equipped to think about how I could be of service, and so there’s something about paying deep attention to not just taking in horror, but paying deep attention to the lives of people around you that I think makes you both more decent and smarter in how you navigate the world.
Miller: One of the words that comes up in all the books of yours that I’ve read and that strikes me that you use in a really big way is imagination.
Perry: Yeah. It’s everything.
Miller: What does it mean to you?
Perry: Wait, sorry, I’m just laughing because – it’s terrible, but I used to tell my kids, if you watch too much TV, it’ll rot your imagination, so they would be all nervous about watching…
Miller: Also you just told us you watched a lot of TV as a kid.
Perry: I did. I know, yeah, you know, do as I do as I say, not as I do.
Miller: It will stunt your brain. That’s what I was told.
Perry: Yeah, but I don’t think that’s true actually. Imagination is the thing that allows you to actually feel another human being. I think it’s essential to love, because when you are imagining, when you love someone, you’re not just thinking about how you feel towards them, you’re imagining what they need, right? And I think it’s the same thing with a sense of love for the people. You’re imagining all of the different ways that our choices or our deeds can shape the lives of other people, so for me it’s the something indispensable. We live in a society that doesn’t value imagination that’s put in the service of love and generosity. We often value imagination that is in the service of personal gain.
Miller: Or can turn to intellectual property.
Perry: Yeah, or property right, but I actually think imagination is best used in some other ways and it’s such an extraordinary resource and it’s so sad that we only talk about it with respect to kids when we talk about it broadly.
Miller: What would a society that values imagination more broadly look like? I’m curious what it would feel like to be in that society?
Perry: I think it would feel like you get to go back to the earlier question like we could breathe more deeply, because everything wouldn’t be so competitive. We live in a way that everything is about sort of who has the most or who does the most or that everything is made into a competition. You can’t really measure imagination in that way, like you can’t test for imagination, so imagine instead of testing and engaging and counting up in a competitive way that we were actually just trying to feed each other a sense of possibility about what we could create. Or if we were imagining how to make sure that everybody could eat, or everybody had adequate shelter, or everybody could experience safety, I think that kind of society would be much, much more humane and joyful generally.
Miller: Let’s get another question from our audience.
Eva Diaz: My name is Eva Diaz, and in your book, “Breathe: A Letter to My Sons,” you shared a lot of traumatic experiences that were very personal. Do you have any advice for anyone trying to heal from a traumatic experience themselves?
Perry: My advice is probably sort of the standard advice that someone healing from trauma, having access to quality mental health services is incredibly helpful. I think we’re increasingly understanding that movement and rest are also a piece of this. Friendship, intimacy as opposed to feeling completely isolated is important.
Reading is essential, James Baldwin has this quote where he has said something to the effect of you think your wounds and your trauma are unlike anyone else’s and then you read and you realize that almost all of them are experiences that are shared with other people so just to get past the feeling of being alone, but also to know this.
I think the other thing too is healing is complicated in a sick world. I think sometimes we want to make ourselves perfect and get rid of all the ugliness when we live in a world that has created a lot of our suffering, so my therapist has asked me to focus on self-compassion as opposed to self-care, which is even being patient with my own experiences of trauma in the way that it can sometimes make it hard for me to move around in the world. That kind of self-compassion isn’t just about getting to being someone better who doesn’t have these things impacting me but saying, you know, I’m a good enough human today.
Miller: Go ahead.
Nelly: Hi, I’m Nelly. So I think it was about “A Letter to My Sons,” how I was very flabbergasted on how it’s just crazy how you empathize with the person who hurt you. So my question is, where do you get the idea to write about your personal struggles into literature?
Perry: Yeah, thank you for that question. It’s hard, because I heard in your voice this complicated thing of, and I don’t think it’s a response of empathizing with someone who’s hurt you and I don’t think it is necessarily our responsibility in some ways, sometimes the self-protective thing is to not do that. I think particularly for women and girls because so often we’re expected to empathize with people who hurt us so that we don’t hold them accountable, so I wanna say that. But again, for me it’s a way of trying to understand so that I don’t internalize it all.
Like it’s not these things that we endure, they’re not our fault, right? It’s like if I can understand the thing that has produced this cruelty or ugliness in another human being, I’m certain that I’m not the root of it, right? And I also feel a sense of power in getting in the way of this proliferating in the world, like maybe if I could throw a wrench in the works with the way so much cruelty gets replicated. I can’t remember the second half of your question because I was so moved with the first fact.
Nelly: How do you get the idea to write about your personal struggles into literature?
Perry: It’s so funny because it’s vulnerable, but I do think that there’s some power in being vulnerable, because you know that you’re offering something that someone out there is gonna connect with. I don’t know if anybody in here plays the guitar, but if you play the acoustic guitar and you’re facing somebody else who’s playing the guitar – this is my favorite thing, I don’t know, it’s not really a metaphor – but you strum the guitar and the person facing you has a guitar, then if you strum your guitar, the strings of that guitar move. It’s called sympathetic vibration or resonance, right, because the way that the air moves, it makes those guitar strings move and I feel like that’s what I want to do with writing, like if I’m strumming, to use a phrase from the singer Roberta Flack, if I’m strumming my life, I’m hoping that it resonates in a way that speaks to somebody else and also helps them strum their lives. So that’s really what’s behind it. Thank you.
Miller: Imani Perry, thank you very much.
Perry: Thank you so much and thank you guys so much.
Miller: That is Imani Perry.
Perry: You guys are amazing.
Miller: Thanks very much to Olivia Jones Hall from Literary Arts and to Charles Sanderson here at Woodburn High School, and a gigantic thanks to our amazing audience of students here.
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