Breathe

Breathe by Imani Perry

In an extended letter to her two sons, Imani Perry cleaves to the motions and demands of the heartmind more than to any one genre, any one thesis or conclusion. At turns heartwrenching and by the next paragraph heartwarming, Perry has the slick ability to write a complex intertwining of epistle, memoir, cultural critique, and poem all while seeming to have just sat down beside you at the kitchen table, poured you a glass of limeade, and started speaking off-the-cuff, from-the-heart about her life, her fears, and her hopes.

A book kindred to Ta-nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, Breathe feels even more personal: a direct line drawn from the mother’s (Perry’s) mouth to the listening ears and full memories of her two sons. While Perry’s incandescent, gentle, almost kissing use of language is just as resonant as Coates’, she uses her words less as two hands parting veil after veil until the vista is revealed to be the entire world, and more as hands in multitude: a hand on the shoulder, a hand proferring a book or quote, a hand on her own heart, a hand cupped around the ear to protect an imparted secret, a hand warning or even gently scolding, hands uplifted in praise or in unknowing, a hand gesturing out to the wide wide world and showing, through practice, how to seize without conquering, how to hold without enveloping.

A letter written by a Black woman to her Black sons, this book is expansively about Blackness, and race: Blackness as history, Blackness as community and strength, race as a U.S. American knot, twisted tight with strands of massive possibility, passion, grace, and hopelessness, fear, pain, and despair. Perry reckons with her own racialization and her fears, as a Black parent traveling in the “elite” intellectual circles of Ivy League universities, of raising Black sons within too much whiteness Breathe is a book whose title is as much a conceptual keystone as a command. Breathe through the contradictions and fears, breathe into the possibilities and blessings, breathe into your own choices. This book, this letter, was an instruction manual in how to hold away shame and anxiety while simultaneously inviting self-reflexivity and self-critique close.

Reading Breathe felt like such a generous intimacy, a surprising, funny, sad, inspiring sojourn into the very particular lives of one woman and her children, whose lessons and ruminations nonetheless rang out in me—far flung and not one being addressed—a bell tolling out the life-giving importance of passion, laughter, dedication, and love even in times when the world seems to be approaching some kind of hopeless end.