In Conversation with Imani Perry: Artistic Possibility through the disciplines of hope and writing

This fascinating conversation between Dr. Marc Lamont Hill and Dr. Imani Perry covers Perry’s recent work, process, overarching questions of the work, aspirations, rituals of writing, daily writing, and the contemporary literary renaissance. Perry speaks to working on multiple projects at once and accepting where we are with the work and the writing. It is clear through the questions he poses that Hill knows Perry’s writing deeply. He is a really wonderful interviewer and a conversationalist. This is what makes a podcast truly good—that one can listen and also fully imagine being in the space through the dynamic between the speakers. 

Perry speaks to the process of writing her most recent texts, including (title and links.) On Breathe: A Letter to My Sons, Perry describes it as a “a three-part letter.” Perry explains that the text examines “what it means to come of age in this moment that is so fraught and so difficult.” She continues,

“it is a hard time—it has always been a hard time to come of age as a Black person in this society. It is particularly difficult now and part of what I wanted to communicate—I want people to witness this—it is an internal conversation—but it is also an invitation to a suite of witnesses that notwithstanding the difficulty, there is great beauty in Black life and there are also incredible resources from those who came before—our elders and ancestors.” ​​

Written directly to her sons, the letter meditates on “how one fashions a life under difficult circumstances that can nevertheless be beautiful” and also “how to build a life that is deeply meaningful and in service to the world” as well as what it means for a Black child to have “to watch for how people are watching [them]” and how this speaks to the experience of being, at a young age, “burdened with managing White people’s anxieties.” 

Later in the podcast, Perry discusses how reading is a critical process of writing and how beginning with a question allows for an openness in the process. In response to a question Hill poses about how her work that exists across disciplines and genres and traditions, Perry responds by articulating how “every piece of writing is a methodological exercise” and how the work has to be rooted in one’s own passion and connected to what one identifies as meaningful rather than the trajectories that academia can impose as the only routes or ways of doing and being. 

In terms of the larger questions that guide her scholarship, Perry responds with two questions which reflect the role of processing pain to access possibility for and within Black community and intellectual space. 

For Perry, the first question is: 

“why—every time we seem to make progress on questions of justice there is not just retrenchment but the kind of imaginative work of white supremacy takes over such that we wind up like two steps forward, three steps back.”

Knowing the answer to this is necessary for liberation. The second question guiding the work for Perry is

“how in the imagination and particularly in the Black imagination where we puzzle through these barriers, impediments, sources of suffering in a way that leads to incredible artistic possibilities and ways of expressing ourselves in life. I find Black folks breathtakingly beautiful in how in the art that resists that domination. I want to talk and think about it and I want to do it. I want to produce it.” 

In the podcast conversation, Perry cites Mariame Kaba’s approach that “hope is a discipline” as well as Hortense Spillers’s foundational essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987).

Check out the books mentioned in the podcast, all images are linked to Black owned bookstores

Work by Imani Perry

Marc Lamont Hill's Latest Book

Books referenced in this podcast