A review by hollyd19
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman

challenging dark emotional informative inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

4.25

Powerful, subversive, important, and sad. Saidiya Hartman centers the lives of the Black women on the margins of the early 20th century, mostly those in NYC and Philadelphia. She does so with a historian's diligence paired with a soulful creativity to bring depth to stories otherwise left out. A particularly clever device is her infusion of a chorus throughout, pointing repeatedly to the fact that the stories she shares are not unique, but representative of scores of Black women facing incredibly unjust lives. 

Below l've included an excerpt from the final chapter about this choice which gives both a peek into the book's style and the gravity of its contents: 

The chorus bears all of it for us. The Greek etymology of the word chorus refers to dance within an enclosure. What better articulates the long history of struggle, the ceaseless practice of black radicalism and refusal, the tumult and upheaval of open rebellion than the acts of collaboration and improvisation that unfold within the space of enclosure? The chorus is the vehicle for another kind of story, not of the great man or the tragic hero, but one in which all modalities play a part, where the headless group incites change, where mutual aid provides the resource for collective action, not leader and mass, where the untranslatable songs and seeming nonsense make good the promise of revolution. The chorus propels transformation. It is an incubator of possibility, an assembly sustaining dreams of the otherwise.... The collective movement points toward what awaits us, what has yet to come into view, what they anticipate - the time and place better than here; a glimpse of the earth not owned by anyone. So everything depends on them and not the hero occupying center stage, preening and sovereign. Inside the circle it is clear that every song is really the same song, but crooned in infinite variety, every story altered and unchanging: How can I live? I want to be free. Hold on.

If you appreciated Tiya Miles's All That She Carried, Quiara Alegría Hudes's My Broken Language, or Daphne Palasi Andreades's Brown Girls, you should add this to your TBR.