Elena Orlando

AFRAM 498
Breathe: A Letter to My Sons ​- Becoming as Freedom
In ​Breathe: A Letter to My Sons​, Imani Perry explores the strains of an unjust world on Black
children-what it means to come into being when one’s existence is full of grace yet marked by
terror. Published during the rise of Trumpism and high profile police killings that have robbed
her sons of their peers and elders, Perry endeavours to express the depths of love and community
while charging a society that has long denied the humanity of Black people.

Breathe: A Letter to My Sons ​is Perry’s sixth book, her latest, ​South to America,​ is set to release
next June. Her work also includes​​Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of
Lorraine Hansberry​, an award winning biography. The ​Hughes-Rogers Professor of African
American Studies at Princeton University​,​ Perry weaves histories of Black resilience and
struggle alongside racial terror in this intimate offering to her sons. Pursuing tenderness in an
onerous context, she grapples with the truth that “Feeling deep love and complete helplessness to
protect the beloveds is a fact of Black life.”

The question of how “To make beauty and love in a genocidal time” is central to this letter. Perry
reckons with the vulnerability of loving and mothering Black boys in a society bent upon
destroying their ability to imagine and live boldly. Of the heartbreaking reality of loving
someone whose existence is perceived as a problem, she writes, “I have known from the very
first day of each of your lives that I cannot guarantee your safety.” Perry raised her sons to resist
this reality, bringing them to protests even before the #BlackLives Matter movement rose up in
2014. Alongside struggle, she imparts the importance of balance; to resist while not be consumed
by the extensive impacts of interpersonal and structural racism.

In ​Breathe​, freedom is offered as an intergenerational process of becoming, of moving through

life in one’s purpose, practicing and nurturing one's gifts, while continuing the struggle for
liberation. Perry encourages her children to live passionately, to pursue freedom through
creativity. “How do you become in a world bent on you not being and not becoming?” she asks
in different iterations throughout this book. She offers joy as a disruption to the suffering created
by an arguably irredeemable society.

Breathe a​ lso starts to formulate a healthy vision of masculinity, often informed by the ways in
which Perry has witnessed her sons living beyond the limitations imposed by the patriarchal
society they were born into. She talks about her own experience of gender-based violence, of the
need for men to “sit with [their] own hurt.” In the nurturing natures of her sons she sees freedom
and gives pause to the ways in which her children have already begun to live beyond the
harshness expected of them. “You are never to make others eat your rage, no matter how often
you are told that this is what it means to be a man and the source of dignity” she advises,
beckoning a world that they are essential to creating.

Taking the form of a letter, previously used by James Baldwin to caution his nephew and by
Ta-Nehisi Coates to guide his son, ​Breathe ​similarly exposes the antagonisms of growing up
Black in America. But where this book departs is in its offering of life beyond careful navigation,
of breathing in as often as possible. “I want to teach you to​witness the​ugliness, to fight against
it, and still to revel, delight, feel spontaneity and indulgent joy.”As a Black woman, Perry speaks
from her personal experiences of both gender and race-based oppression, opening a more
expansive vision for freedom than her predecessors.

With ​Breathe​, Perry expels the society that has made freedom and safety dichotomous, but her
primary concern is an unwavering expression of love for her sons and for Black people. She asks
many questions of her children, none of which are concerned with how they will hold prestige or
be conventionally successful. “How will you treat your word? How will you hold your heart?
How will you hold others?” These are the questions she uses to nurture the tenderness of her
sons and of those who read this book. In this beautifully written, deeply personal expression of
love, Imani Perry imagines more joy with and for her sons.