Imani Perry - Breathe

In Breathe, Perry offers a lyrical meditation that connects a painful, proud history of African American struggle with a clarion call for present-day action to protect, defend, and celebrate the promise of the next generation.

STACEY ABRAMS , founder and chair of Fair Fight Action, Inc.

Perry urges her sons to hold history but not be hindered by it. She is determined that the dissonance that accompanies growing up young and Black in this country is not destiny. This book is an honest examination of the contradictions that make us whole and human. Breathe is a love letter to and about us all.

PHILLIP AGNEW , codirector of The Dream Defenders

Breathe: A Letter to My Sons is deeply cathartic and resonant for parents attempting to raise their children with intention and integrity. Imani Perry shows deep compassion for both parents and children... while incisively underlining the realities of raising Black boys in a country that will inherently betray them. It is a book filled with love and insight for difficult times.

TARANA BURKE

Beautifully written with brilliant insights that leap off the page, Breathe announces the arrival of Imani Perry as a literary force. With each sentence, Perry reveals her mastery of the genre of the essay and her vast knowledge of the tradition of African American letters. From that deep well, she offers her wisdom not only to her sons but for all of us. This is a must-readespecially in these dark times.

EDDIE S . GLAUDE JR .

Breathe is what is says it is, a letter from a mother to her sons, but it is more than that. Its a meditation on child-rearing, world-building, fire-starting, and peace-building. Imani Perry combines rigor and heart, and the result is a magic mirror showing us who we are, how we got here, and who we may become.

TAYARI JONES , author of An American Marriage

Imani Perry wants her young sons to make beauty and love in a genocidal time. Bless them! And bless her, for this book is a wonderful model for doing just that! So much joy and caring and pain and rage distilled into soaring, striking sentences.

AMITAVA KUMAR , author of Immigrant, Montana

Breathe is a masterpiece. With an approach that is at once vulnerable and brave, scholarly and artistic, critical and hopeful, Imani Perry has written the book that we desperately need. Breathe arms us with the wisdom, courage, and hope necessary to parent Black children within a White supremacist world. Breathe not only demonstrates Perrys deep love of her sons but also her profound and abiding faith in the rich traditions, ambitious freedom dreams, and boundless possibilities of Black people. This is an offering of profound beauty and brilliance that marks Imani Perrys emergence as the leading writer and thinker of this generation.

MARC LAMONT HILL

Before reading Breathe, I knew that Imani Perry was the most important cultural worker in my professional life. But I had no idea that Imani Perry, or any writer in this country, could pull off what she pulls off in Breathe. More than any book Ive read in the last twenty years, Breathe boldly reminds us that artful intentionality is not nearly as important as artful effectiveness, and artful effectiveness is shaped by the love a writer has for her intended audience. Somehow, Perry manages to mourn, celebrate, theorize, and welcome us into the space between, and around, this Black mother and her Black sons. Though the language here is different from all of Perrys other work, the attentiveness to sustained analysis is even more apparent. One feels that Perry had to write her other five books to write this one, the smallest and ironically the most rigorous, personal, and soulful of all of her genius work. Breathe is the first book Ive ever needed to read out loud with my mother.

KIESE LAYMON , author of Heavy: An American Memoir

There are moments when a piece of writing is so honest, so personal, that it crawls into us. Moments when words attach themselves to instances in our pasts, visions of our futures, or the purgatorial questions of today. Breathe is that. Perry gives us a look into what it means to love her childrenher Black sonsin a world that may not. What it means to arm them with information, history, culture, spirit, pride, and joy. What it means to celebrate with them the vastness of their lineage and the tight network of community, which affords them an impenetrable freedom to be. To just... be. And as Perry gives this to her sonsher familywith such candor and respect, I couldnt help but hear my own mother speaking her truth, our truth, to me.

JASON REYNOLDS , Newbury Award honoree and author of the Track series, Ghost, Patina, Sunny, and Lu

Breathe is at once a resplendent meditation on the labor and art of parenting and on the special calling of mothering Black boys in America. By turns fierce and loving, intimate and erudite, and drawing with deep complexity on her Catholic theology and spirituality, Imani Perry interweaves the most universal of dreams and desires with the particular traumas of our world of wild-eyed whiteness. In so doing she offers her sonsand all the rest of us, and our sons and daughtersa vision of human resilience and wholeness that could reframe and redeem this young centurys painful reckonings.

KRISTA TIPPETT , founder and CEO, The On Being Project, and curator, The Civil Conversations Project

For the ancestors
and the children

Children imitating cormorants

Are even more wonderful

Than cormorants.

Even on the smallest islands,

They are tilling the fields

Skylarks singing.

KOBAYASHI ISSA

Through good, nothing, or ill, your mother stands

behind you, in front of the looking glass.

The boy standing before his mother blinks.

And there is another, stalk high.

Seeing a child, and another

I know and do not know.

My own and belonging only to himself

and to himself.

Smuggling truth off the well-worn and decent corridors.

Mother to son, we race in the woods,

through an underground railroad of all ways.

Dear sons of cotton, muscle, and bone

I am for you.

I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name

My name is my own my own my own

JUNE JORDAN

It must be terrifying to raise a Black boy in America.

EVERYBODY AND THEIR MOTHER (AND FATHER TOO)

B etween me and these otherswho utter the sentencethe indelicate assertion hangs mid-air. Without hesitation, they speculate as if it is a statement of fact. I look into their wide eyes. I see them hungry for my suffering, or crude with sympathy, or grateful they are not in such a circumstance. Sometimes they are even curious. It makes my blood boil, my mind furnace-hot. I seldom answer a word.

I am indignant at their pitying eyes. I do not want to be their emotional spectacle. I want them to admit that you are people. Black boys. People. This fact, simple as it is, shouldnt linger on the surface. It should penetrate. It often doesnt. Not in this country anyway.