The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Novel
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Community Reviews
An emotional trip of generational curses and trauma and the will to overcome it all. To find your place. I would give it a 10,000/10 if I could.
Honoree Fanonne Jeffers has created a brilliant master piece in this sweeping historical fiction. It is a love song to everything Black culture and a epic in its scope. It reminded me of Marquez’s “100 Years of Solitude” but with the magical realism expressed in the emotional kaleidoscope of the Black and Native experience in America from time immemorial. You will not get through this fast. Resign yourself to be only a long spiritual journey through a family against the racially tinged struggle that is America.
If you venture to read “The Love Songs…” please please please first read “The Souls of Black Folk,” “The 1619 Project,” “Caste,” and any other books you can on the unabashed history of America. You cannot truly appreciate the fiction part of this historical fiction until the gritty history is baked into your DNA. Only then will you realize how brilliantly Jeffers has weaved in multiple narratives and threads into this one tome. Through her well thought out characters we get an all too personalized retelling of our collective history as it concerns every facet of life.
Those deep dives into various topics make every page a journey of historical reckoning, navigating academia and it’s rigors, love and loss, race relations, blood ties, and so much more. The bitter reality it is painted against makes the collective stories feel like our own in a laugh out loud, cry out when triggered, reflective in others kind of way. It is everyone’s story and Ailey’s at the same time. I sincerely believe W.E.B Du Bois would have been proud of Jeffers bringing his long cherished pieces into the present with what I think has to be her Magnum Opus.
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