The Black Period

A stunningly original and lyrical memoir from an acclaimed poet that crosses continents, grapples with white supremacy, and explores how the origin stories we inherit can be remade. I say, 'the Black Period,' and mean 'home' in all its shapeshifting ways. Hafizah Augustus Geter disrupts the myths of America's origins and contemporary America through her experiences as the queer Nigerian-born daughter of a Muslim Nigerian woman and a Black American man from a Southern Baptist family in Jim Crow Alabama. A unique combination of gripping memoir and Afrofuturist thought, The Black Period follows Hafizah on a journey that tells her at every turn she's not worthy. At the same time, she manages to sidestep shame, confront disability, embrace forgiveness, and emerge from the erasures America imposes to exist proudly and unabashedly as herself. Penetrative and heartening, The Black Period captures a world brimming with potential, art, music, hope, and love despite the lasting effects of white supremacy. Combining lyrical prose with biting criticism, Hafizah expertly weaves between the micro and macro, from her own experience as the daughter of a Black American visual artist, and a childhood populated with Southern and Nigerian relatives, to her days in a small Catholic school, to a loving but tragically short relationship with her mother, to the feelings of joy and community which the Black Lives Matter movement engendered in her as an adult. All throughout, Hafizah addresses the larger systems of inequity that make it difficult for non-able-bodied persons, queer people, and communities of color to move through the world. The Black Period elegantly maps the untidy work of revision to write a new origin story.