Publishers Weekly
★ 07/12/2021
“What might an engagement with literature written by Black Americans teach us about the United States and its quest for democracy,” asks Griffin (Uptown Conversations), a comparative literature and African American studies professor at Columbia University, in this remarkable triptych. Blending memoir, political musings, and literary criticism, Griffin considers novelists, essayists, poets, and musicians as she recounts growing up Black and embracing her community. In “The Question of Mercy,” poet Phillis Wheatley’s concept of mercy (which “brings her Christianity”) meets Toni Morrison’s (as it relates to freedom). “Rage and Resistance” recounts how Griffin discovered the poet Frances E.W. Harper, who set her “on the path to becoming a scholar,” “The Quest for Justice” explores representations of justice in Black literature recalls the killing of Philando Castile, and “Black Freedom and the Idea(l) of America” studies the writings of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X and pinpoints their influence on Barack Obama. Throughout, Griffin writes with learned poignance: “Our writers and our organizers make poetry of the rage. They have been working, building, creating, envisioning, showing us how to live like the future we are hoping to build is already here.” Perfect for literature lovers, this survey and its moving insights will stick with readers well after the last page is turned. (Sept.)
Elizabeth Alexander
"Read Until You Understand gives us Farah Jasmine Griffin in full and mighty sail. Keen cultural analysis, storytelling, and gorgeous lyricism combine in this book that makes a genre of its own. In recollection there is profound insight here; we have a portrait of a rich Black community in place and time, and of the teachers Griffin finds in neighborhood, family, books, and music. The sounds, words, and wisdom that Black folks make also make us, and no one expresses that with more beauty and power than Griffin. This book is a talking book, a teaching book, and a treasure."
Cornel West
"Farah Jasmine Griffin is one of the few great intellectuals in our time! This wise and powerful memoir is a masterpiece. Griffin beautifully weaves her profound devotion to the life of the mind with her deep and abiding love of Black people and culture. Her magical words enchant and empower us like those of her towering heroes—Toni Morrison, Billie Holiday, James Baldwin, and Wilhelmena Griffin!"
Florida Courier - Glenn C. Altschuler
"Griffin gives readers gifts akin to the gifts her father bestowed on her. She provides insightful interpretations of iconic African American writers, including Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, Griffin’s friend and mentor. And she celebrates lesser-known writers, like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper."
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - Christopher Maverick
"Griffin has produced a volume of academic criticism for the masses….Farah Jasmine Griffin belongs among the grand tradition of African American thinkers that she studies. Read until you understand — and then read some more."
New Yorker
"Now a noted scholar of African American literature, Griffin shares, in a blend of memoir and criticism, the fruits of her lifelong journey to fulfill that aspiration [to read until you understand]… She also richly evokes her childhood in Philadelphia, long a hub for Black activism where she belonged…to a family whose women, skilled seamstresses and gardeners, cultivated beauty."
Elaine Pagels
"Farah Jasmine Griffin’s vivid, passionate, and powerful tribute to the great gifts of Black culture offers a deep dive into such fundamental human themes as freedom, justice, rage, death, beauty, and love, as lived and celebrated through her own experience, music, and creative art, and that of countless others in the community she embraces, from the legacy of Black history to her own family, her wide explorations of literature and art, and her close friendships with many artists and writers."
Carols Lozada
"Quietly captivating…This is a life lived among books, and reinterpreted through them."
Ibram X. Kendi
"The insight and joy bursts from Read Until You Understand authored by one of the greatest literary scholars of our time. Thank you Farah Jasmine Griffin for this sage gift, for packaging all these sage gifts for us."
Robert Fleming
"The perfect storm of imagination, research, compassion, and intellectual analysis. [Read Until You Understand] soars to a new level of wisdom, community love, and enlightenment for readers and critics alike."
Monica Drake
"A book like Read Until You Understand takes courage to produce…Griffin’s evangelizing of Black literature does what the best sermons do: It sends you back to Scripture—Baldwin, Coates, Morrison, David Walker and others—to discover or rediscover them, to ponder and treasure them anew."
Times Literary Supplement - Douglas Field
"Read Until You Understand is brought to life through Griffin’s account of the ways in which Black culture was an integral part of her being…Griffin is driven by a belief that the cultivation of aesthetic appreciation—in which the beautiful and the political do not compete—is where real change can be found. It is a book that acknowledges life’s conflicts while still valuing hope and beauty."
Christian Science Monitor - Arielle Gray
"Griffin's effortlessly warm and engaging writing merges personal memoir with history in a way that emphasizes the oneness of the fabric of humanity…With both grace and mercy, Griffin's Read Until You Understand is a thorough exercise in Black thought, Black anger, and Black joy."
Boston Globe - Walton Muyumba
"[Griffin] is both masterful critic and master teacher."
Walton Myumba
"[Griffin] is both masterful critic and master teacher."
Library Journal
09/01/2021
Part-memoir, part-literary study, this book has something for everyone. Griffin (English, comparative literature, and African American studies, Columbia Univ.; Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II) tells her own history, intertwined with analyses of Toni Morrison's novels, Barack Obama's autobiography, and other Black literature. Griffin includes excerpts and context from the texts, so readers don't need to have read them (though Griffin encourages it). The book is organized thematically instead of chronologically, illustrating that the works often mirror contemporary Black experiences regardless of their age. Griffin writes evocatively about themes of joy, beauty, love, justice, mercy, and death, with concise language and varied sentence structures. When she describes her experience of her father's death, the sentences are short and urgent, matching her worry and confusion; in the chapter on beauty, the sentences become more elegant and descriptive. VERDICT Griffin offers a personal exploration of literature that's historical yet still relevant; readers of the works cited will be interested to learn Griffin's interpretations.—Natalie Browning, Longwood Univ. Lib., Farmville, VA
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2021-07-10
An impassioned inquiry into the literary roots of Black culture.
Griffin, a Guggenheim fellow and inaugural chair of the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department at Columbia University, delivers a glowing “series of meditations on the “fundamental questions of humanity, reality, politics, and art” by way of personal memoir and a thematic reading of Black literature, history, music, and art. The author begins by honoring her father, whose influential shadow looms large. Toni Morrison’s words, like her father’s, “shaped the way I saw and thought about the world.” Phillis Wheatley jump-started Griffin’s inquiry into the concept of mercy, also reflected in novels by Charles Chesnutt and Morrison’s A Mercy, which, like Wheatley’s poems, made her consider how writing might also be an “act of one’s will to be free.” In “Black Freedom and the Idea(l) of America” Griffin juxtaposes two giants of Black American history, Frederick Douglass and Barack Obama. Douglass “provided the ground from which Obama ascended,” and the former president’s Dreams From My Father demonstrated how Malcolm X informed his “understanding of Black nationalism.” Addressing the painful question of justice regarding slavery, racism, segregation, and mass incarceration, Griffin turns to Richard Wright, Ernest Gaines, and Morrison for answers. The author discusses the legacy of resistance via the works of the 19th-century abolitionist writer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Toni Cade Bambara, whose works show “rage felt and expressed in disciplined emotions, organized and directed toward fighting injustice.” Reading Langston Hughes, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Jesmyn Ward, Griffin ponders how “Black death haunts Black writing.” James Baldwin’s transformative fiction is “attentive to Black love,” while Black music “made of us a people.” Invoking Lorraine Hansberry’s “pioneering” A Raisin in the Sun, Griffin also meditates on the joys of gardening: “Even in the midst of crisis, the flowers bloom.” Throughout, like a mournful mantra, she calls their names: Trayvon, Breonna, George, and so many others.
The power of reading provides the emotional engine driving this insightful, profound, and heartfelt book.
