A review by veecaswell
Ain't Never Not Been Black by Javon Johnson

4.0

Ain't Never Not Been Black foregrounds Black pleasure Black pain and Black love in unflinchingly Black ways.
Engaging with themes of masculinity, racism, love, and joy, Johnson is at once critical and creative. His spoken word performance transfers effortlessly to the page, with poems that will encompass you.
This is a book about blackness and survival, and how in America these are inseparable. In a world of individualism, who can you hold close? In a world of danger, what makes you feel safe?
From a poem written in the form of a syllabus, to another about the time his grandmother literally saved his life, Johnson's creative expression is constantly enacting the feminist mantra, “the personal is political."

I am never disappointed by the books that Button Poetry publishes, and Javon Johnson’s collection is an impressive collection of poems that can be funny, heartbreaking, brilliant and honest. Touching on his experiences and his life, these poems make for touching moments and bitter truths that is life for people of colour in the USA.

As this collection is interspersed with little moments such as ‘Black Famous’ these lighten the mood inbetween poems such as ‘The Last Conversation Between Malcolm X and His Daughter’ which is heartbreaking and honest and when you connect it to ‘On Healthy Masculinity’ or ‘Cuz He’s Black’ where he talks to his niece and nephew you see the reality and how much there is a need to be taught to simply survive - made ever more clearer with ‘On The Murder of Black Children’ - this collection has been put together so incredibly well.

A collection you should read more than once, the nuance and stories the poet tells throughout this collection of joy, anger and sadness are powerful throughout, poems such as ‘Black And Happy’, ‘Los Angeles’ and ‘Enough For Everybody Or My Grand Mother Was My First Philosophy Teacher’ are moment of that jump out with such light in a collection that delivers hard truths and frustration at the world the writers lives in.

A brilliantly put together collection of poems, Javon Johnson spills out his life and personality in these poems and it makes for an intense and incredible read from beginning to end.