Kenya Hunt - GIRL

‘Enlightening, relatable, warm and witty, Girl is a must-read.’ Sunday Times Style

‘ Girl is an essential, vital and urgent exploration of Black womanhood that should be on everyone’s reading list. Every page is meaningful and a call for empathy, hope and change. There is such power in the stories that are told, from Kenya’s own experience – as a mother, as a journalist, as an American in London, to Ebele Okobi’s essay on the unspeakable loss of a brother to police brutality. If any book should enrich – and disrupt – your life, let it be this.’ Harper’s Bazaar UK

‘Powerful, intelligent and thought-provoking. A must read for our times and beyond.’ ELLE UK

‘Kenya Hunt provocatively threads cultural observations through relatable stories that illuminate our current cultural moment while transcending it.’ Refinery29

‘An essential book to help in becoming an anti-racist ally.’ Dazed

‘A provocative, heart-breaking and frequently hilarious collection of original essays on what it means to be Black, a woman, a mother and a global citizen in today’s ever-changing world.’ Glamour UK

‘Girl speaks to the Black woman of today.’ Bethann Hardison, model and activist

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First Published in Great Britain by HQ in 2020

Copyright © Kenya Hunt 2020

Kenya Hunt asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © November 2020 ISBN: 9780008371999

Version 2020-10-06

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Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008371975

For Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland,

Atatiana Jefferson, Aiyana Stanley-Jones,

Tanisha Anderson, Oluwatoyin Salau,

Gynnya McMillen, Korryn Gaines, Riah

Milton, Joyce Curnell, Dominique Fells…

Cover

Praise

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Introduction

1 Girl

2 Notes on Woke

3 Wakanda Forever

4 An American in London

5 In My Feelings

6 Sally Hemings and Hidden Figures

7 Upon Reflection

Funmi Fetto

8 Motherhood

9 Skinfolk

10 Make Yourself at Home, but Not Here

11 I See Black People

12 Loss

Ebele Okobi

13 So We Don’t Die Tomorrow

Jessica Horn

14 The Lord’s House, a Queen’s Soul

15 Inferno

16 On Hair

Freddie Harrel

17 The Front Row

18 Modern Activism

19 On Queenie

Candice Carty-Williams

20 Bad Bitches

Epilogue: The Way We Grieve

Thank Yous

About the Publisher

When I started this book, I was on maternity leave with my second son. The freedom of being home all day, every day, and the disorientation of an on-demand breastfeeding schedule oddly suited my writing. It meant that I was awake and journalling during those quiet moments in the night when everyone else was sleeping. I liked the solitude that came with being housebound for large chunks of time with a newborn. After years spent hopped up on adrenaline, it felt good to be off the work treadmill for a moment and to have an opportunity to reassess my life and recalibrate. Not to mention I appreciated having a break to just focus on my family and my writing, uninterrupted by morning commutes, extended work travel and deadlines.

But now, as I complete the book with this introduction more than a year later, I’m housebound for a different reason. We’re more than four months into a global pandemic, as the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) steamrolls its way through the world, and eight weeks into a nationwide lockdown. The experience of working from home all day, while in a government-enforced quarantine, feels much less like a freedom, though it is most certainly a privilege.

Small acts we once took for granted like shaking a stranger’s hand, hugging a friend, visiting loved ones or having dinner in a crowded restaurant, are not possible for the foreseeable. Now, we walk down the street wearing face masks, paranoid about who might have coughed just steps before. And we scrub and disinfect our groceries (purchased in a whirlwind of panic after waiting in socially distanced queues that stretch for blocks outside stores) with a rigour that just months ago would have been declared a symptom of obsessive compulsive disorder.

The basics — our health, the food on our tables, a walk outdoors, a deep inhale of fresh air — now feel like life’s ultimate luxuries. But luxury’s meaning changes with context and the pandemic has made the divisions that separate race and class painfully clear.

When the virus hit, a popular line began circulating that 2020 was the end of identity politics, that COVID-19 was the great equaliser that didn’t see race or class. People of colour knew better. And the opposite turned out to be true as the news was confirmed. Black, Muslim, Latin and Asian communities were the hardest hit, and women (who make up the vast majority of ‘essential workers’) were shouldering the brunt of the load. The virus wasn’t wiping the slate clean, it was deepening pre-existing inequalities.

I’ve watched close friends lose their loved ones, jobs and mental health to COVID-19. I’ve also watched dear friends, forced to reimagine their lives in the face of disruption, begin exciting new jobs, launch innovative new projects, and enter new romantic relationships. Throughout it all, I saw my friends and family more than we had in years, checking in on each other throughout the week on Zoom, FaceTime and Houseparty to make sure we were holding up okay in isolation as sickness, death and a crippled economy inched closer.

And just when it seemed like the news cycle and our collective angst couldn’t get worse, we found joy, laughter and solidarity in the most unexpected places. At an enormous, spontaneous Instagram Live party put on by the American DJ D-Nice, I bumped into old friends I hadn’t seen in years (old media colleagues, music industry mates and nightclubbing buddies) and the imaginary ones I had only ever followed from a distance (Michelle Obama, Janet Jackson, Rihanna and Tracee Ellis Ross to name a few).

Each one of our circumstances were uniquely different and yet we were all there, 100,000 of us united in isolation and our need for human connection. Weeks later, over 700,000 of us tuned in to a live stream music battle-turned-mutual appreciation session between two women responsible for soundtracking multiple generations of Black lives, Erykah Badu and Jill Scott, and then bonded for the next twenty-four hours over the endless stream of feel-good memes the evening produced. It was a night of sisterhood and healing. A celebration of us, and all our nuances. ‘Most of the time, I’d prefer, I like to be a lady. Sometimes, I’m not. I’m a lot of things. Aren’t we a lot of things?’ Jill Scott said. We were all alone, together.