The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

History repeats in a new form, stretching and changing, but with the same beating heart

Wow was this book so, so good. I cannot imagine conceptualizing and then writing a book like this, it was so intricate, complicated, and lovingly done, and yet perfectly easy for the reader to follow. It follows the ancestry of one family, and their connection to others, over hundreds of years and right up to the early 21st century. The goings-on of the current members of the clan and the stories of their Afro-Indigenous ancestors are interwoven and connected through quotes from Dr. Du Bois's writing.  It reminded me a lot of Carl Jung's concept of a collective unconscious: that parts of our psyches are inherited and not based in our own experience. Each new member of the family might have had less and less knowledge of what came long before them, but those people and events still influenced them in everything they did, and the reader gets to see it unfold. You might like it if you liked Weep Not, Child, by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, or Harlem Shuffle by Colin Whitehead.