B0047Y0FJ6 EBOK (39 page)

1. What do you think of when you hear the word “Harlem”? What does the neighborhood represent to you? How did this book change or confirm your initial impression?

2. A reviewer for the
New York Times
quotes Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, writing that she is clearly “very much enthralled by ‘something too vast to be contained on paper’ and so has chosen the medium of collage.” How is that collage like a scrapbook of your own personal place?

3. In
Harlem Is Nowhere,
the neighborhood is presented as having been both a place of great hope and a place that limited the possibilities of its inhabitants. Discuss this contradiction.

4. What do you make of the author’s personal interactions with neighbors who share aspects of their life stories, dreams, and obsessions? Do you think she shows respect for them?

5. The book quotes Alain Locke, who stated in 1925 that the cultural boom in Harlem was “the Negro’s latest thrust towards Democracy.” In an era when Americans have elected a black president, do you think neighborhoods like Harlem are still of
value? Why or why not? If they should be preserved, how is this possible?

6. The book describes the author’s relationship to various novels, poems, and photographs depicting Harlem—and the relation of those “imaginary” Harlems to what she found upon arriving. How does the book construct its own image of Harlem?

7. How do the minor historical characters to whom Rhodes-Pitts introduces us—from the collector Alexander Gumby to the impresario Raven Chanticleer—expand your knowledge of Harlem’s legacy?

“For the book’s author, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Harlem is a notional place, an idea threatened by a reality, existing most concretely in the minds of those who have loved and defended it. Rhodes-Pitts is one such, and her account of this stretch of land that may or may not begin at 110th Street and end at 168th is fittingly idiosyncratic, as much meditation as history…. Like Virginia Woolf, Rhodes-Pitts is bookish and devoted, interested in everyday matters: how people walk and talk, dress, go about their day…. Here individual experience is honored, and judgment reserved…. This is a lovely book about the romance—and dangers—of bibliophily…. No geographic or racial qualification guarantees a writer her subject…. Only interest, knowledge, and love will do that—all of which this book displays in abundance.”

—Zadie Smith,
Harper’s Magazine

“
Harlem Is Nowhere
is a tender, improvisational memoir of several years spent exploring the myths of this capital of African America and the realities of its twenty-first-century incarnation…. It is a pilgrimage, a celebration, and a cautionary note. It also heralds the arrival of a writer whose voice fits right in with the literary forebears she reveres.”

—Jane Ciabattari, NPR.com

“Enchanting…. Rhodes-Pitts respects her interlocutors’ right to opacity while affirming the importance of their stories…. Her Harlem is a place worth fighting for. It is a place more endangered than dangerous—a ‘blank, disavowed’ place bursting with the best stories never told. It is anything and everything but nowhere.”

—Kaiama Glover,
New York Times Book Review

“By weaving the past and the present together, Rhodes-Pitts reveals, even to those who may have never ventured into Harlem, why it is a place of dreams and why it endures. And, most important, she pushes her readers to explore the books and writers that made Harlem such a place of imagination and memory. For a reader like me, it just doesn’t get any better.”

—W. Ralph Eubanks, National Public Radio

“Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts is a gifted young writer.”

—
USA Today

“A fine debut…. Like a young Joan Didion, Rhodes-Pitts stands in the corner with her notebook out…. And, as with Didion, the thread keeping these disparate scraps together is her singular voice…. Even if you know the neighborhood, it is rewarding to return here with her eyes, which are certain to reveal something new, and perhaps something decent, about the place. Unlike Didion—or Ellison—she is never cruel.”

—Thomas Chatterton Williams,
American Scholar

“Affecting…. Rhodes-Pitts evokes her adopted Harlem in all its thwarted intensity.”

—Edward Kosner,
Wall Street Journal

“Harlem, once walled off by geography, then closed again by the dark will of the country, opens like a light to take its proper place at the center of the American spirit. Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts… has given us a guidebook for this kind of remembrance. Her book is not so much a history of Harlem as a kind of memoir of history. In its account of one person’s ascent up the imposing hill of centuries of Harlem’s stories, we have an example of how to read ourselves into the neighborhood, of how to think and how to believe when we rise out of the 125th Street station and into the bright heart of black America.”

—David Kennedy Jones,
T: The New York Times Style Magazine

“
Harlem Is Nowhere
is a dazzling series of linked essays on Harlem as the living embodiment of… a place and time that might somehow mend the fractured history of African Americans and make it whole…. Rhodes-Pitts honors the dreamers imagining what Harlem could be, while never losing sight of how each of them was thwarted by the disconnect between the heaven they envisioned and the reality they lived…. It is her ability to not only see Harlem on its own terms but also grasp why Harlem matters that makes this book so exceptional…. Rhodes-Pitts has the sharp eye of a reporter in prose, reminiscent of Joan Didion, that manages to be both remarkably cool and distinctly elegiac…. She is walking toward a destination she has sought from the beginning—brave enough to seek it, and honest enough to tell us that she may never arrive.”

—Mike Fischer,
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Part essay, part memoir, and part anthropological study…. Fascinating and informative.”

—Karen E. Quinones Miller,
Philadelphia Inquirer

“Any neighborhood worthy of the name is a kind of shared dream, and no neighborhood in America better illustrates this principle than Harlem…. It also has Rhodes-Pitts to account for its dream life, for what almost happened there but didn’t and for what did happen but is only half-remembered, for what its people longed for and never got and for what they loved but could not hold on to…. Rhodes-Pitts is one of that rare breed of writer who, on the strength of her hypnotic voice and idiosyncratic thinking, can turn every sentence into a crooked finger, impossible to resist…. In a way
Harlem Is Nowhere
is a ghost story, whispering to the world that the Harlem of its dreams is going, going, gone, and the Harlem that’s now here (as opposed to ‘nowhere’) will likely soon follow. Catch it while you can.”

—Laura Miller,
Salon

“Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’s is a voice you’ll want to hear again, to recapture the scratchy buzz she’s put into your head…. Ms. Rhodes-Pitts drops us inside her wide-scanning cranium as she searches for her own version of Harlem…. She seems most at home when she’s flipping, pointedly, through the work of writers like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, and Ellison himself. She has interesting, complicated things to say about each of them…. She can be just as excellent—funny and endearing—about her own way of being in the world…. This book’s alive…. It’s intoxicating.”

—Dwight Garner,
New York Times

“Boldly original cultural-studies sleuthing…. A personal and poetic work, as the author attempts to reconcile her own street-level observances with the dreamlike utopian vision of Harlem.”

—Michael Sandlin,
Time Out New York

“An expression of Harlem’s wondrous complexities…. Rhodes-Pitts’s ambivalence—her deeply rooted participation in Harlem life and her distant, reportorial observation and documentation of the Harlem world—is the book’s core. The author-protagonist’s negotiation of these conflicting roles produces the work’s most searing, intelligent passages.”

—Walton Muyumba,
Dallas Morning News

“A soul-scoping personal essay and a well-researched, deeply indexed, would-be-boring-if-not-written-by-a-Sista version of Harlem history. Rhodes-Pitts’s work here is significant because… it personalizes and accurately describes the history, architecture, humanism, and depth of Harlem in a manner satisfactory to longtime borough residents, short-term visitors, and those who have never set foot there.”

—
Ebony

“An elegant, scholarly writer… Rhodes-Pitts unearths gems from Harlem’s rich history, including the White Rose Home, a 1920s benevolent organization for young black girls migrating to the city; Raven Chanticleer, a sharecropper’s son who became a legendary dancer and founder of a black history wax museum; and L. S. Alexander Gumby, a turn-of-the-century intellectual who cataloged black history in a series of scrapbooks.”

—Joseph P. Williams Jr.,
Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Rhodes-Pitts offers a stirring exploration of Harlem’s geography, actual and imagined…. She crafts a compelling narrative voice that is bracingly intimate yet capable of dilating to encompass a chorus of voices and opinions not her own.”

—Adam Bradley,
Barnes & Noble Review

“Rhodes-Pitts concludes that preserving this vibrant Mecca is important to blacks and the country as a whole.”

—
Chicago Sunday Sun-Times

“Rhodes-Pitts has already achieved considerable renown as an essayist…. She took an apartment on Lenox Avenue in Harlem and soon became one with the neighborhood.”

—Christopher Schoppa,
Washington Post

“Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts gives a marvelous tour through decades of iconic writings on Harlem…. She commands a deep knowledge of the literature and applies it to individual buildings and streets—a unique and useful contribution. She quotes and intends to live by Alain Locke’s ‘The New Negro,’ which warned, ‘History must restore what slavery took away.’ This is an admirable sentiment.”

—Julia Vitullo-Martin,
New York Post

“Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’s enlightening
Harlem Is Nowhere
takes a new approach in her look at the venerable community. Rather than crafting a detached, straightforward account, Rhodes-Pitts makes it personal…. An inspirational memoir.”

—Ron Wynn,
BookPage

“Starting as a solitary Texas transplant in a kitchenless apartment on 120th Street, Rhodes-Pitts uses photographs, books, and stories of lifetime locals to consider her own place as an observer and inhabitant of what is in many ways the symbolic epicenter of black America.”

—Antonina Jedrzejczak,
Vogue

“Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts has written a very striking meditation on Harlem as a place and a symbol, and at a time when Harlem is changing profoundly. She is a brilliant addition to the literature on Harlem that reaches back to James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, to Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson. But hers is most definitely a fresh, new voice. There is a certain graceful cool, an unfailing aptness of tone, in her writing.
Harlem Is Nowhere
tells you things that you didn’t know you didn’t know about Harlem.”

—Darryl Pinckney, author of
Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature
and
High Cotton

“New York life and its ever-changing tones and flavors gave Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts an urgent, buzzing backdrop to the suite of memoir and reflections in
Harlem Is Nowhere:
her set of dazzling riffs on the cultural citadel of black America.”

—Boyd Tonkin, “Best Books of the Year,”
The Independent

“A tender historical memoir…. Throughout her studious love letter to her adopted home, Rhodes-Pitts is singing the Harlem Blues.”

—Sean Carman,
The Rumpus

“Hers is an ambitious project: one whose form is as evocative as its subject and content. Erudite and beautifully written, it is a book that will be read and reread, taught and debated, and it will inspire response in multiple forms…. And yet, Rhodes-Pitts accomplishes something quite remarkable. She acknowledges the tradition, builds upon it, analyzes, and states her own truth in the process…. Rhodes-Pitts has given us more than enough to consider here. In her deft hands, Harlem is a twenty-first-century landscape peopled by hardworking, loving, and lovely people, as well as a ruin upon whose ground new structures rise. Monuments to someone else’s tomorrow.”

—Farah Jasmine Griffin,
Transition

“Rhodes-Pitts has such a gift for seeing, and celebrating, the many coats of past beneath the cloudy varnish of the present. Her voice is vivid and engaging, at times haunting.”

—D. D. Guttenplan,
Times Literary Supplement

“It was Saul Bellow who invented the term ‘noticer’ to denote someone who looks and sees, stands back and takes note. In this, her first book, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts marks herself out as a first-rate noticer with the gift of being able to allow us to notice things exactly when she does. Her lyrical prose flows like the human gaze: a glimpse here, a longer look there…. Like a book of photographs, the book consists of written snapshots, often full of wit and pithiness…. We can see it all…. There is so much yearning, and there is pride, too, and maybe above all—the great pride in being a citizen of Harlem. Because Harlem is a nation, a world even…. Langston Hughes would have enjoyed
Harlem Is Nowhere,
a great introduction to a rich and complex community, as much a state of being as a place on the map.”

—Bonnie Greer,
Financial Times