Noname’s Book Club and the importance of Black literature

Noname and her fellow readers at a Noname Book Club event, LA (Noname Book Club’s website)

During the American Civil Rights era in the 1960s, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover waged war on Black-owned bookstores. The general consensus in white America at the time was that the proliferation of ‘Black thought’ was directly linked to Black extremism. Although most Black bookstores at the time had some affiliation to Black social justice groups and/or the civil rights movement, this connection was mostly loose and informal. Figures like Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) and Malcolm X would often visit these stores when travelling through cities, but rarely did they set up militant operations in the children’s section. The widespread fear of the creation of a “Black messiah,” propped up by the literature of James Baldwin, Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panther Party manifesto was enough for Hoover to call for a barrier to the development of Black literature and political thought. White fears about Black radical thought have always manifested, with effects as diverse as the poor funding to Black public schools to stereotypes that “n*ggas don’t read”.

Early this July, Chicago-based rapper and poet Noname tweeted a picture of ‘Jackson Rising’, a book about Black self-determination and dignity in the context of wage workers in the American South (co-authored by Kali Akuno and Ajuamu Nangwaya). One of her enthusiastic followers responded with a photo of themselves holding the same book and suggested that they read together and swap notes. And so, the seeds of Noname’s Book Club were sown.

After a post asking who would be interested in a book club membership received over 5000 retweets, the rapper set up shop. The mandate of the club is simple: highlighting progressive work from writers of colour and the LGBTQ community. Noname has stated that part of her mission with the club is also to bring reading out of the academic sphere and into everyday life. Followers can suggest titles every month and discuss the chosen books through the forum section on the club’s website. Every month, two books are highlighted: one with a more academic lens and another, more creative title. The club has expanded outside of Twitter and Instagram too, with a recent in-person meetup in Los Angeles and an upcoming podcast in which Noname plans to have a discussion on the chosen titles.

Noname Book Club logo. (@Noname Book Club/Twitter)

In the sea of content that sweeps the internet daily, seeing Noname’s Book Club on the timeline feels refreshing. The response to the club has been incredibly positive, amassing over 20 000 followers on Twitter and Instagram. This is partially because of Noname’s brilliant use of the platforms. The page is peppered with meme-worthy Tumblr archive photos of Black legends from Muhammed Ali to Lil Kim holding up their monthly titles.

Aside from social media, a lot of the buzz around the bookclub also comes from young Black people’s genuine hunger for information about Black life and history. Over the last 5 or so years, conversations about representation and visibility have taken centre-stage in the entertainment industry. For many, the 90s represented the hey-day of Black representation on screen. Shows like A Different World and Moesha captivated viewers while music television was dominated by hip- hop and R&B artists. However, after the late 90s this kind of representation slowed down dramatically. These days, the growing recognition that there are too few people of colour on screen has been accompanied by the understanding that there are also not enough Black stories being told from the standpoint of Black people. Projects like Insecure, Dear White People and (not unproblematically) Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It have helped shift the narrative slightly. In literature, however, that conversation is still growing slowly.

Like generations before them, young Black people today are able to form opinions on their everyday through a combination of lived experience and knowledge of the past. Both are better contextualized through access to information and literature has long a vehicle for that access. Literature has long helped people to think about where they stand in the political hierarchy and why they are who they are. From early wordsmiths like Frederick Douglass and Sol T Plaatjie to the writings of Chinua Achebe, Mariama Ba, Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, Black people have long used literature to both highlight and understand the Black experience. Ideas about liberation, justice and equality in the face of colonialism, racial oppression, misogyny and poverty have all found a place to be articulated in Black literature.

“Literature has long helped people to think about where they stand in
the political hierarchy and why they are who they are.”

Today, Noname’s Book Club is occupying space alongside other digital initiatives employing young Black people to read. Instagram accounts like@wellreadblackgirl and @goodblackreads have created platforms to share books that illuminate a diverse range of Black experiences. Noname’s choice to focus on books by Black and LGBTQ writers feels particularly important in this context. The destructive Trump Presidency, mass incarceration, poorly funded public education, the killing of trans people of colour and the uneven effects of globalization have become important points of discussion in the mainstream. Through works like Michelle Alexander’s ‘The New Jim Crow’ and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's ‘Americanah’, literature is increasingly becoming a point of reference through which this new generation understands the complexities of Blackness.

In the space where literature and Blackness meet, many women will tell you that their early introduction to themselves came in the form of a book. For us, literature has served as a point of reference for understanding both the self and the world around us. Women existing at the intersections of racism and misogyny have used literature, both fictional and otherwise, to articulate what it is like to move through the world in this body. Writers like Alice Walker, Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison are examples of such figures, whose writing has helped develop the framework for articulating the Black female experience. Books like The Bluest Eye and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (among many others) served for many Black women as seminal texts that could be used to understand their own lived experiences and inspire their own work.

In many ways, Noname is the perfect public figure to take on the task of promoting Black thought to a younger generation. The looming war on Black thought found an enemy in the Black owned bookstore, and that war continues to be fought by independent store owners. Noname’s own mother, Desiree Sanders, was the owner of an Afro- centric bookstore in Bronzeville, located in Chicago’s South Side. The book club’s page is peppered with photographs of Ms. Sanders alongside Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni and Mae Jemison and yet despite the popularity of her mother’s bookstore, Noname has revealed that she herself has struggled with reading, a fact which only makes her later appreciation of literature more relatable. Rap and writing are borne of the same art and are in many ways connected as mechanisms through which Black thought is shared.

“In the space where literature and Blackness meet, many women will tell you
that their early introduction to themselves came in the form of a book.”

As a woman in hip-hop, Noname is occupying a unique space and the way she approaches her craft reflects that uniqueness. Maybe it is her ability to have not only overcome a difficulty with reading but to find joy in the titles that would have taken up shelf space in her mom’s bookstore that give her rhymes a distinct poetic quality. Her raps cover themes from love and sex to alcoholism and the high murder rates of the Chicago South Side. These are themes that her enthusiastic fans not only find relatable, but that they are hungry to talk about. Noname’s appeal to the masses is that her approach to the craft is unique. It’s the literature in the lyricism that sets her apart from other rappers of her ilk, as she uses projects like Telefone and Room 25 to articulate her life experiences as if they are poetry.

“As a woman in hip-hop, Noname is occupying a unique space and
the way she approaches her craft reflects that uniqueness.”

In a time when social media has opened up the realm of public thought, the need for cultural reflection and criticism is more important than ever. Noname’s Book Club has widened the space in which young Black people are able to access information that not only engages them in their own reality but also gives them the tools with which to understand and critique the world at large. Through reading, many young Black people are given the opportunity to see their stories and the stories of those around them on paper. They are given the tools to know that they can write their own stories. While a virtual Black book club may not have all the trappings of an Afrocentric bookstore in the mid-90s, it is an important addition to the literary world.

N*ggas want to read, too, and on their own terms.