In “Wandering in Strange Lands' the author reveals uncomfortable and enlightening truths about the history of black migration in the U.S.
In “Wandering in Strange Lands" the author reveals uncomfortable and enlightening truths about the history of black migration in the U.S.In her book that's out on Aug. 4, Morgan Jerkins traces her family's history back 300 years.
There are so many revelations in this book — about the history of the collective African American experience, and about your own personal family history. I’m wondering what was the most surprising revelation to you? Is there anything that you’re still kind of processing? Because if it wasn’t for our ancestors’ survival tactics, we wouldn’t be here. So we also have to be mindful of the fact that perhaps some of the ways our ancestors did survive, we would not agree with in a modern context. But we can’t allow that disagreement to flatten our understanding of who they might have been. So that is something that I had to put out there. I can’t obscure it because the whole point of doing this book was to go back, to recover whatever I could and to remain open.
Right. Because you’re talking about looking at history, understanding the nuances and the uncomfortable elements of our collective history. I’m an immigrant; I’m from Ghana, and I found myself reading your words and being so struck and moved by how similarly I felt to you, and thinking about just how crazy that is.
When I did this book, I thought to myself, “There’s been so much to annihilate us as a people and we are still here.” And I wanted to show that in spite of time and distance, we are connected. We’re always going to be connected. And I love what you said about how just cosmically through our dance, through our dialects, through our food, we are connected still. There’s this pulse, even in the pandemic where I’m isolated, that I could feel with other black people.
And so I had to tell myself that, just that you got the book deal, and you live in New York and you’re in that life, still you’re a part of a bigger life than you can even imagine, and that’s why you’re doing this traveling. So, when someone says, “Do the work,” that doesn’t just mean to me, take your notes, synthesize them, make arguments, categorize.
Right. Something that your book also made me think a lot about was memory and monuments. The book feels like a monument to Black migration. It feels like it’s holding space in a really intentional way. There’s a part in the Lowcountry section, where you talk about[the site in Georgia where in 1803 captive Igbo people died by suicide rather than submit to slavery] and how there was nothing there to sort of mark this deeply weighted space of Black death.
I really want to read back to you this last little piece of the epilogue: “The terrains of our bodies, the weary or broken are not ruined. They’re alive and fertile with dreams and possibilities and beauty. If we are the Promised Land, then that means that you, yes you, exist on a plane larger than your eyes can see. Home is wherever we decide to settle, but our truest base is each other.” That’s beautiful.
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