February 2018 Meeting: This Will Be My Undoing by Morgan Jerkins

For the month of February, aka Black History Month we read Morgan Jerkins' collection of essays, This Will Be My Undoing. For those unfamiliar with Jerkins she describes herself as a NYC based, ivy-league educated writer, living at the intersection of Blackness and Feminism in White America. We wrestled with the ideas of perception and reality, individual lived experience and shared identity, and how much space non-white people are allowed to occupy in the literary world. That Morgan appears on the cover of her first book, almost looking as though she is waiting to exhale, is a declarative feat in and of itself. In her ten essays Morgan moves from childhood to her present life as a published writer, attempting to privately reconcile her ideas with a public persona she wishes to be. How profound her efforts are depends on where the reader is in their journey. Collectively we settled on the idea that this book has to exist in a chorus of other books and that sometimes what you leave out of your story is as important as what you choose to include. “The Black female imaginary is what happens when you look at yourself, when your body is what you hold on to and your mind focuses inward to inquire about who you are, not outward to actively combat what is out there…We need to collect our many imaginations together in order to build a body of knowledge. We are fighting just by living.”