Robert Jones Jr.

It has to be Things Fall Apart by Chenua Achebe, who wrote so beautifully about what we now call Nigeria just before colonizers come to his village.

So fully about customs and beliefs and interactions and culture and

outside of the gaze of whiteness.

And that was so crucial to my understanding, because as you know, in the Prophets, there are some chapters that actually go back to pre-colonial Africa.

And if not for works like Mr. Chebe's, I would have never been able to imagine what that could have been like.

Another

is a little-known novel, but one that had a powerful impact on my writing.

It's by a writer by the name of Cola Booth, and the name of the book is Flesh and the Devil.

And she also writes very compellingly about pre-colonial African societies and juxtaposes them against what we are now as African Americans in the West.

That was also a very vital text for me.

I looked at The Colour Purple by Alice Walker.

That book is a very brutal book.

What happens to its main character, Celie, is enough to break the heart of

Yet you're compelled to keep turning the pages to find out how she makes it through and how she makes it over.

And so I looked to Alice Walker's work to see how to convey that, how to accomplish that.

I also looked at Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, which is another book in which the, as Toni Morrison put it, the pathetic one is Pakola Breedlove, who endures death.

And yet Toni Morrison writes about those horrors in a way that is it's almost blasphemous to say, but it's beautiful so that it balances the abuse with some sort of something to give the reader some room to breathe.

so that we're not overcome by the violence.

We realize that it is there and that it is potent, but we also have room to say, I can get through this.

that's where I found the most clear picture of what an enslaved person's day was like.