The Black Period

On Personhood, Race, and Origin

By: Hafizah Augustus Geter

Narrated by: Hafizah Augustus Geter

Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher's summary

An acclaimed poet reclaims her origin story as the queer daughter of a Muslim Nigerian immigrant and a Black American visual artist in this groundbreaking memoir, combining lyrical prose, biting criticism, and haunting imagery.

“Hafizah Augustus Geter is a genuine artist, not bound by genre or form. Her only loyalty is the harrowing beauty of the truth.”—Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage

“I say, ‘the Black Period,’ and mean ‘home’ in all its shapeshifting ways.” In The Black Period, Hafizah creates a space for the beauty of Blackness, Islam, disability, and queerness to flourish, celebrating the many layers of her existence that America has time and again sought to erase.

At nineteen, she lost her mother to a sudden stroke. Weeks later, her father became so heartsick that he needed a triple bypass. By her thirties, she was constantly in pain, pinballing between physical therapy appointments, her grief, and the grind that is the American Dream. Hafizah realized she'd spent years internalizing the narratives that white supremacy had fed her about herself. Suddenly, she says, I was standing at the cliff of my own life, remembering.

Recalling her parents’ lessons on the art of Black revision, and mixing history, political analysis, and cultural criticism, alongside stunning original artwork created by her father, renowned artist Tyrone Geter, Hafizah maps out her own narrative, weaving between a childhood populated with Southern and Nigerian relatives; her days in a small Catholic school; a loving but tragically short relationship with her mother; and the feelings of joy and community that the Black Lives Matter protests engendered in her as an adult. All throughout, she forms a new personal and collective history, addressing the systems of inequity that make life difficult for non-able-bodied persons, queer people, and communities of color while capturing a world brimming with potential, art, music, hope, and love.

A unique combination of gripping memoir and Afrofuturist thought, in The Black Period, Hafizah manages to sidestep shame, confront disability, embrace forgiveness, and emerge from the erasures America imposes to exist proudly and unabashedly as herself.

*Includes a downloadable PDF of visual art from the book

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2022 Hafizah Augustus Geter (P)2022 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“In this lyrical memoir, Geter, a poet, sets down a powerful vision of Black life in the United States. . . . She asks, ‘What would it look like to emerge from erasure?’ Her father’s oil paintings and charcoal drawings, scattered throughout the book, provide one response.”—The New Yorker

“Among the most evocative and intellectually dazzling memoirs of recent times.”—Suketu Mehta, author of This Land Is Our Land

“A book of extraordinary ambition, at once bracing, beautiful, and necessary—I couldn’t put it down.”—Meghan O’Rourke, author of The Invisible Kingdom

Extraordinary

An extraordinary book — unequalled in its breadth and feeling. I haven’t read anything quite like this before. Unafraid to look — and look thoroughly. Geter’s performance is as much an act of love toward herself and her family (and intersecting families) as is this courageous exercise in memory and future memory.

A honor to read!

This is an incredible book and it's an honor to hear this author tell her story. I loved it!

Beautifully told

Thoroughly enjoyed this book! Geter speaks truth to power reliving deeply personal experiences weaved together with stories of a shared black experience. I hit rewind a dozen times or more just to take in her profound observations beautifully told.

Terrible narration

Totally turned me off of this book. She was reading it like a poem. Don’t get past the first few pages.