Author of Shotgun Seamstress: The Complete Zine Collection, a compilation of punk rock fanzines created between 2006 and 2015 covering the experiences of Black punk rockers, artists, LGBTQ, feminists and activists.
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Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the …
I’m listening to the audiobook while I work. So far, the writing is engaging in the way that we’ve come to expect from Adichie, but I’m at a point in the book (the academic dinner party) where the characters are so insufferable, I can’t wait for this portion to be over.
From her early, often harrowing memories of life and abuse in a remote Ojibwa community, Ma-Nee Chacaby's extraordinary story is …
This book is another step along the path toward the formation and realization of Black womanist thought. I am 46 years old and grew up with a copy of The Color Purple in my home. I read Their Eyes Were Watching God for the first time when I was in high school and I minored in Women & Gender studies in college, reading bell hooks, Assata, Audre Lorde and so many others. In the last several years, I've become intimately familiar with the writing and work of Patricia Hersey. For someone like me, this book was mostly review--and I think that's a good thing. It was a good opportunity to refresh my memory and to witness younger generations building on the knowledge passed on by our ancestors.
That being said, I think what is needed now is the centering of the most vulnerable and oppressed among us. I think that …
This book is another step along the path toward the formation and realization of Black womanist thought. I am 46 years old and grew up with a copy of The Color Purple in my home. I read Their Eyes Were Watching God for the first time when I was in high school and I minored in Women & Gender studies in college, reading bell hooks, Assata, Audre Lorde and so many others. In the last several years, I've become intimately familiar with the writing and work of Patricia Hersey. For someone like me, this book was mostly review--and I think that's a good thing. It was a good opportunity to refresh my memory and to witness younger generations building on the knowledge passed on by our ancestors.
That being said, I think what is needed now is the centering of the most vulnerable and oppressed among us. I think that womanist thought will benefit from centering the voices and perspectives of trans and disabled individuals and may also make these kinds of books less repetitive for those of us who have been following womanist theory for a long time.
There were moments in the book when I thought for sure that the author would turn her focus to transgender experiences (such as the chapter on the importance of names), but she did not. She calls out transphobia on at least a handful of occasions in the book, so it's not that she is transphobic. It's just that she is limited by her own identity and personal experience, which is absolutely natural. So, it's not that I have major critiques of this book, it's more that it makes me want to seek out more womanist writing from queer, immigrant & first gen, trans & non-binary, disabled, etc. perspectives. And not just for the sake of "diversity," but because womanist theory is so potentially revolutionary, and we can only complete the mission if all of these voices are allowed to shape it.
I don't have time to build another program to supplement the racist programs that should be doing what my supplemental programming will have to do. But those programs will not do the bare minimum of including us because systematic oppression will always make it okay to leave out marginalized folk and then gaslight us into wondering if we are asking for too much. Neither are we asking for too much, nor should we have to create our own everything to be able to experience equity. I do not have time for this.
When you're reading a book, but the book is reading you.
How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make …
I never imagined that the wind would blow me here, to a kind of isolation …
“It was towards the end of our time at the house that I recognised that my experience of loneliness is relieved when I am alone; there is symmetry in it. I thought countless times in the intervening years that it must be nice to finally stop trying to belong, to walk away from it all, from them all. I thought that, rather than missing out, there must be something to gain from leaving so much behind. When someone takes things from us that we don’t really need to survive, if we look at it another way, they are relieving us of a burden.”
— Hermit by Jade Angeles Fitton (Page 38)
I never imagined that the wind would blow me here, to a kind of isolation …
"I didn’t realise until now that home could be a whole landscape; I thought it had to be a building.”
This is an art book, filled with poetry, drawings, instructional exercises and personal testimony. You can read it in one sitting, but, like her other book, it works best as a guide that you revisit over a long period of time. Personally, I find her first book Rest as Resistance to be more helpful in understanding the foundations of this movement, the call to rest. I think this book makes an artful follow-up to the first book, showing how important creativity, imagination and playfulness are to understanding and embodying her theories.
Far too many of us have claimed productivity as the cornerstone of success. Brainwashed by …
This is not a book to read once, set aside and move to the next thing. This is one to keep by your bedside and re-read until the lessons within become second nature. This may take years, possibly a lifetime. This is deep reprogramming work. Diving into Hersey's alternate reality will make you question what is and reimagine what is possible. Black liberationist, womanist, anti-capitalist wisdom for the ages.
Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past …
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A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of the Year A Quill …
