Arts & Culture

James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown is a striking film. Centered on a young Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet), the biopic chronicles the folk music community that bounced in and around 1960s New York City, offering stellar musical and acting performances in the process. But its wisest scene takes place off stage in an intimate conversation between Dylan and Pete Seeger (Edward Norton).

IN “KITCHENETTE BUILDING,” Gwendolyn Brooks, the first Black Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, considers the challenge of dreaming in grim places. The setting of this 1945 poem, published as part of Brooks’ first collection, A Street in Bronzeville, is the titular kitchenette building, a housing unit of many cramped, run-down apartments, often rented by Black residents in that era in cities like Chicago. Tenants are “grayed in, and gray,” worn out by systemic injustice and the demands of daily life, such as paying rent and putting food on the table. Still, the speaker — who speaks on the behalf of a collective “we” — wonders if a dream could rise “through onion fumes” and “sing an aria” in the building.

The dream in “kitchenette building” is delicate and “fluttering,” something that requires time and contemplation — luxuries that systemic oppression makes nearly impossible. Brooks’ biographer, Angela Jackson, in A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun: The Life & Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks, describes this poignantly: “Life is grim in these kitchenette buildings ... entrapment as in a prison. People here are not people; they are things, dehumanized by the nature of a system they did not volunteer for.” Later, she asserts that kitchenette residents “cannot even consider” a dream greater than a cold bath “[before] a realistic necessity comes up ... They take what they can get.”

Brooks makes it clear, though: Imagination is a vital precursor to liberation. “Kitchenette building” plants seeds in questions: What would happen if dreams of freedom and freshness had space to grow? What would liberation look like for Black communities and the U.S. as a whole?

JEAN-LUC GODARD'S 1967 anti-consumerist film Weekend is difficult to explain in the space of a column, but a single scene offers a cross-section of its absurdity.

A bourgeois married couple begin a road trip to kill the wife’s parents and inherit their fortune. Naturally, once the deed is done, they each intend to kill the other and run off with their respective lovers. But first, they must maneuver traffic.

A country road is frozen in bumper-to-bumper traffic, and for nine excruciating and exhilarating minutes, the camera methodically tracks along the road, gawking at the jam. Some people play chess in the roadway while others toss bouncy balls between vehicles; children have emptied out of a school bus and run through the grass; there are lions, a llama, monkeys; people lounge and flirt as the couple weaves through the mess. The scene is made even more chaotic by the insatiable, mechanical wail of competing car horns and screaming squabbles.

I LOVE WORDS. I love etymological dictionaries packed with word genealogies. I love that apricot is a cousin to precocious, kitchen, and charcuterie. That the word word (from the Old English) is rooted in utterance and promise, in the theological sense. As in, to give one’s word.

Words spoken are different creatures than words written. Christians designated written words as more trustworthy than oral composition, but early Judaism prioritized oral transmission of sacred words — as many Indigenous communities do still. But written words (like these) can be controlled and manipulated. Writing prevents the breathed utterance from passing through the orator’s flesh to be inhaled by the communal body. Orality is to literacy as wildfire is to candle flame.

Maybe that is why I moved heaven and earth in 2000 to hear Irish poet Seamus Heaney read in person, accompanied by Liam O’Flynn on the uilleann pipes. Having studied Heaney’s written word, especially the collection Station Island, I wanted to hear the man himself, to hear him orate (from the roots of utter and praise before an assembly). I wanted to inhale his language (tribal and tongue).

Since our earliest issues, Sojourners has maintained that culture coverage is just as much a part of our mission to articulate the biblical call to social justice as news stories and commentaries. And after reviewing the list below, we suspect you’ll see why. The books on this list span many genres, but they all circle the same core question: What does our faith call us to do in the face of injustice?

Over the course of the HBO series The Penguin, Sofia Gigante transforms from abused daughter of Gotham City mobster Carmine Falcone to a proper supervillain, the head of her own crime family. Sofia has chosen a new surname for herself. By going from Falcone to Gigante, she signals that she’s different from her father. Sure, Sofia’s still committing crimes (like he did) and killing people (like he did), but she's convinced there’s something righteous in her ascension: Her rise to power represents a rejection of the misogyny that’s always plagued her.

“What happens when strangers meet?” is the driving question of the Silkroad Ensemble, an instrumental group conceived in 1998 by cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Musicians from around the world connect and communicate through music in response to this question. Lines between East and West, classical and folk blur as musicians work together to give old sounds new life. When musician and historian Rhiannon Giddens became artistic director of Silkroad in 2020, she focused the musical conversation on railroads. What emerged, and is still emerging, is American Railroad: A Musical Journey of Reclamation — a multiyear collaborative project including performances, residencies, an album, and a podcast exploring the untold stories of the people who helped lay the tracks connecting the United States. 

I WANT TO believe there’s a live band at a church somewhere in the U.S. playing Joy Oladokun’s latest album, Observations From a Crowded Room. After all, Oladokun is no stranger to sanctuaries: By the time she was 16, Oladokun was leading the worship music at the charismatic nondenominational church her family attended. But around the age of 24, she quit, explaining in an interview with NPR, “I just felt like so much of my attention was going towards taking care of people and singing the right songs and not saying the wrong thing on Sunday.”

I think, for a long time, I’ve been looking for a church willing to risk singing the wrong thing on Sunday—to risk singing something like these lyrics from Oladokun’s “Dust/Divinity”: “I’m a skeptic who still prays / ... ’Cause though it hurts me to believe / It kills me not to / And I am trying to find my way through the middle / And I am desperate to receive every good thing / From now until eternity / From dust until divinity.”

Trauma changes your memories. When I think of traumatic experiences in my life — what happened, how I felt before that moment, how I felt afterward, the changes I’ve noticed in myself since — they often play in short bursts. Those bursts are rarely sequential, and the length of time they last depends on how long I allow myself to linger on a memory.

Filmmaker RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is a record of trauma. It tells the story of two Black boys’ experience at an abusive reform academy in Jim Crow-era Florida. The fictional Nickel Academy is inspired by an actual place, Florida’s Dozier School for Boys, where students received brutal treatment at the hands of staff. A 2012 investigation by the University of South Florida uncovered dozens of human burial sites on the property.

Ross does something unique with this story about trauma, memory, and how they relate to each other: He makes it feel authentic.