Emily Raboteau’s Lessons for Survival is filled with poignant, important essays that explore raising children in catastrophic times.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
“Interspersing punchy essays with striking photos of bird murals in her Bronx neighborhood, Raboteau chronicles her search for solace as a Black woman and mother in a world awash in political rage and threatened with climate disaster.”
In her own words, here is Emily Raboteau’s Book Notes music playlist for her essay collection Lessons for Survival:
My book, Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “the Apocalypse” is about what it feels like to parent in these uncertain times of intersecting crises. It grew out of a series of essays I wrote, starting in the Trump era, on social and environmental justice issues while raising two Black boys in New York City to be sensitively global, feminist citizens, while facing existential threats. Its themes include police brutality, school segregation, pollution, the pandemic, climate collapse, but also resilience, inheritance, community, joy, hope, and play. The book includes a lot of photographs I took of bird murals in my neighborhood, which offer solace and beauty. The songs I’ve chosen for my playlist loosely follow these themes, toggling between storms and birds; crisis and hope.
“I Knew I Could Fly,” Our Native Daughters
This song reminds me of The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales a book I grew up reading as a kid in the 1980s, by Virginia Hamilton (with beautiful illustrations by Leo and Diane Hamilton.) In the eponymous folktale, flight is a metaphor for freedom. “I follow the stars / I carry my scars” The lyric I love the most: “I won’t live in fear.”
“BirdFlu,” M.I.A.
I love the defiant bird sounds in this song, as well as its use of folk Tamil urumee melam/gaana and dappankuthu music. This song makes you need to dance. I love how non-Western its rhythm is. I danced to this song with my younger son when we were stuck in our tiny apartment in New York City at the height of the pandemic, and it made us feel better to sweat to it.
Hurricane, Bob Dylan
One of the themes of my book is grief, on both personal and planetary scales. I lost my dad to dementia while writing it. He was a big Dylan fan. My brothers and I used to love going through his impressive record collection. I picked this Dylan song, “Hurricane,” from the album Desire, in particular, because we are experiencing more and worse hurricanes owing to the climate crisis. “Here comes the story of the hurricane.” But also, this song is about the racial profiling, false trial, conviction, and wrongful imprisonment of boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter (1937-2014).“If you’re Black, you may as well not show up on the streets, ‘less you wanna draw the heat.” My book is also about police brutality, racism, and climate apartheid. That is, how the global poor are being left to sink or swim.
Hurricane Betsy, Lightnin’ Hopkins
Another hurricane song. I love how plaintive a lament it is. Here’s verse three:
Backwater risin’, it’s comin’ all in my windows and doors
Backwater rise, woah, it’s comin’ all in my windows and doors
Woah, my good friend done left me
I may not never see his face no more
Now I cry, everybody
High Water Everywhere, Charley Patton
Charley Patton recorded his magnum opus Delta blues song in 1929. Hear how he beats on the guitar body, and how ragged his voice is. It’s about the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the largest flood in American history. It devastated Patton’s home. Like Hurricane Katrina (which affected members of my family) it exposed inequalities in the treatment of Black American, and it led to an exodus. “I would go the hill country but they got me barred.” This lyric likely refers to the levee in Greenville, Mississippi, where Blacks were held in the aftermath of the flood, and not allowed to leave. The were bound to the custody of the landowners they sharecropped for, and weren’t free to move where they wanted to.
Blackbird, Nina Simone
This song was released in 1966 during the Civil Rights Movement. “Why you wanna fly Blackbird / You ain’t never gonna fly.” It speaks to the struggles and pain of Black women, as black birds. She expresses the pain of feeling unloved and uncared for, jeopardized, threatened, misunderstood. The lyrics express a kind of collective pain, something I tried to do in my book, in an essay called “Caution,” about chronic pain and inequitable health outcomes for Black women.
Grandma’s Hands, Bill Withers
One of the essays in my book, “Lessons in Survival” began as a book review of Elizabeth Rush’s book, Rising, on the threat of sea-level rise and the importance of resilience that I wrote for the New York Review of Books. But it is equally a tribute to my grandmother, Mabel Sincere Raboteau, who fled the terror of the Jim Crow South after my grandfather was murdered in a racially motivated hate crime. She was pregnant with my dad at the time. She brought him and his older sisters north to Michigan. I meant to connect her flight, and the courage it took, to the flight many of us will have to make, and many are already making, from coastal communities, owing to the rising sea. I am interested in learning lessons from historically resilient communities.
Living for the City, Stevie Wonder
My book is in many ways a book about New York City, its threats and opportunities, and in particular about living in the inner-city–how hard it can be. This song tells the story of striving and not making it.
I hope you hear inside my voice of sorrow
And that it motivates you to make a better tomorrow
This place is cruel, nowhere could be much colder
If we don’t change, the world will soon be over
Living just enough, stop giving just enough for the city
Skylark, Cassandra Wilson
Another bird song — this one full of longing. I love Cassandra Wilson’s version of this jazz standard. I saw her perform it when I was in college. She said the secret to her voice is cigarettes.
A Change Is Gonna Come, Aretha Franklin
Here’s Aretha Franklin’s version of Sam Cooke’s classic. It’s hopeful despite adversity.
Breaths, Sweet Honey In The Rock
I saw Sweet Honey In The Rock perform this song in a concert at McCarter Theater in Princeton in the 1990s with my family when I was a teenager. The group insisted that the sign language interpreter at the side of the stage was a part of the band. I love how they use breath in this song, which is based on the poem, “Les souffles,” sometimes translated as “Sighs,” by Senegalese poet Birago Diop. My dad used this poem as the epigraph to his book, Slave Religion. I read from it at his funeral, and also quote four lines of it in my book:
Those who are dead are never gone:
They are there in the thickening shadow…
They are in the hut, they are in the crowd,
The dead are not dead.
Global Warning, Steel Pulse
This reggae song is a call to action and solidarity against man-made global warming. The militant lyrics refer to pollution, acid rain, and mass extinction, and the beats are likewise militant. As with “A Change is Gonna Come,” it insists on change.
What about the wild life
Save them from extinction
Have a sense of purpose
Putting up resistance
Destroying earth was not Jah’s plan
It’s the work of man
Gut Bucket Blues, Louis Armstrong & His Hot Five
The second to last essay in my collection is called “Gutbucket.” It includes bars of music from this Louis Armstrong song, written in his wife Lil Hardin’s hand. I wanted to gesture visually at W.E.B. DuBois and his use of spirituals in The Souls of Black Folk. When my dad died, his former colleague from Princeton University, Cornel West, gave a eulogy in which he referred to my dad’s home place as “Gutbucket, Mississippi,” a nod to the fact that he’s from the Mississippi Delta, where the blues were born, and also to how far he traveled in his life, to become an Ivy League professor. Because in his scholarship, my dad wrote about African cultural retentions that survived the middle passage, I wanted to explore the idea of the gutbucket (a simple bass instrument sometimes called a washtub bass that ethnomusicologists trace to the African ground bow) as a cultural retention in a larger exploration of survival of white supremacy and colonialism.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Emily Raboteau’s playlist for her book Searching for Zion
Emily Raboteau writes at the intersection of social and environmental justice, race, climate change, and parenthood. Her previous books are Searching for Zion (2013), winner of an American Book Award and finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the cult classic novel, The Professor’s Daughter (2005). Since the release of the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, she has focused on writing about the climate crisis. A contributing editor at Orion Magazine and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, Raboteau’s essays have recently appeared and been anthologized in the New Yorker, the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Nation, Best American Science Writing, Best American Travel Writing, and elsewhere. Her distinctions include an inaugural Climate Narratives Prize from Arizona State University, the Deadline Club Award in Feature Reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists’ New York chapter, and grants and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, the Lannan Foundation and Yaddo. She serves regularly as nonfiction faculty at the Bread Loaf Environmental Writing Conference and is a full professor at the City College of New York (CUNY) in Harlem, once known as “the poor man’s Harvard.” She lives in the Bronx with her husband, the novelist Victor LaValle, and their two children.