San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Seeing life through a Black woman’s eyes
On the day the presidential election was called for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, I traveled into Washington, D. C., with my sister. It was a warm November afternoon, and the streets were filled with revelers. My sister held a sign with the hashtag # blackgirlmagic and found herself the recipient of air high fives, thumbs up and dozens of requests to be photographed. The hashtag invited long overdue recognition, and yet I couldn’t help but wonder what the hashtag meant to the passersby and to us, two Black women standing upon Black Lives Matter Plaza.
So, forgive me for reveling in Kenya Hunt’s timely essay collection, “Girl, Gurl, Grrrl: On Womanhood and Belonging in the Age of Black Girl Magic,” a collection that feels very “FUBU.” In its opening essays, Hunt grapples with the weight of # blackgirlmagic, the utility of the word “girl,” as well as the failed attempts to depoliticize the term “wokeness,” as she draws the latter back to its first popular use by Erykah Badu, and reminds us that to be “woke is hopeful.”
Hunt, an American woman living in London, is the fashion director at Grazia UK magazine. She writes of her choice to move abroad and of her endeavors to build and sustain community. Hunt’s refreshing reach across the Black diaspora and her willingness to view her Americanness as contrastive rather than normative allows many of her essays to sing. In “Skinfolk,” Hunt takes us to a dinner party with friends “from Brixton, Lagos, Kingston and Johannesburg,” where she navigates “passionate arguments” with her
“eyes and ears wide open and my mouth shut, mainly because my experience and point of view up to that point in my life were so oriented around America.” She writes, “history lessons … have told us far too little about each other in the diaspora.”
Hunt’s take on Sally Hemings as a foremother of the “hidden figures” in American history is not particularly unique but remains a necessary addition to a collection that both resists the idea that “Black is in” and advocates for a space not only for Black women’s extraordinariness but also for their ordinariness. Hunt offers a scintillating insider’s view of fashion’s “Front Row” and her longstanding work in the industry informs her musings on beauty. Particularly her own.
As with many collections, some of Hunt’s essays fall flat, as if she’d needed more time to consider the personal impact of a Donald J. Trump or the burning of Grenfell Towers. And yet even in this, Hunt manages to express how exhausted Black women are with distilling and conveying.
No doubt, much will be written of Hunt’s reflections on her abortion and miscarriages. The essay is, indeed, one of her best. Her stoicism gives way as she writes heartbreakingly of her losses and of the dire statistics around Black women and childbirth. And it is in this glimpse of emotion where I realized that this will, thankfully, not be the last collection from Kenya Hunt.