Hafizah Augustus Geter

On Personhood, Race, and Origin

The Black Period

A stunningly original and lyrical memoir from an acclaimed poet that crosses continents, grapples with white supremacy, and explores how the origin stories we inherit can be remade, featuring original art from the author’s father, renowned artist Tyrone Geter. “I say ‘the Black Period,’ and mean ‘home’ in all its shapeshifting ways.” Hafizah Augustus Geter disrupts the myths of both America’s origins and its present day through her experiences as the queer Nigerian-born daughter of a Muslim Nigerian woman and a Black American man from a Southern Baptist family in Jim Crow Alabama. A unique combination of gripping memoir and Afrofuturist thought, The Black Period follows Hafizah on a journey that tells her at every turn she’s not worthy. In the face of these indignities, she manages to sidestep shame, confront disability, embrace forgiveness, and emerge from the erasures America imposes to exist proudly and unabashedly as herself. Penetrative and heartening, The Black Period captures a world brimming with potential, art, music, hope, and love despite the lasting effects of white supremacy. Combining lyrical prose, biting criticism, and visual storytelling, Hafizah expertly weaves between the micro and the macro, from her own experience as the daughter of a Black American visual artist and a childhood populated with Southern and Nigerian relatives, to her days in a small Catholic school, to a loving but tragically short relationship with her mother, to the feelings of joy and community that the Black Lives Matter movement engendered in her as an adult. From North America to Europe to Africa, Hafizah addresses the larger systems of inequity that make it difficult for non-able-bodied persons, queer people, and communities of color to move through the world. The Black Period elegantly maps the untidy work of revision in order to write a new origin story.

Hafizah Augustus Geter

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