Reviews

i was hesitant at first to write a review for this. i wanted to pull the text apart and go through everything that i loved piece by piece, but the more i thought about it the more clinical it felt. the more it felt like that this book stirred emotions inside of me that cannot be expressed in paragraphs listing and explaining all the parts i liked, all the parts that moved me, all the things the the author did well and all the things that stood out to me. this book is not made for dissection. this book is alive and it lived with me.

this book crawled inside of me and turned me into something like a mixture of myself and a mixture of the text. i read it after i woke up and on the bus and behind the counter at work and while i ate, the latter of which was always such a complicated feat because i had to decide whether i wanted to eat without making a mess or whether i wanted to sacrifice phrases that i couldn't underline, passages i couldn't sticky note with one hand. i read passages then reread passages then reread them again, then took pictures of them to save and look at later on, in the middle of the night, the only time really that i put it down. i sat in the kitchen with this book on the dining table and talked about it to my mum for an hour, and my mum, who usually listens to the things i talk about with a slight air of apathy, turned around while washing the dishes and talked about it with me.

a lot of my feelings about this book came from a place of understanding something with new eyes, with a new past, with a new identity. but the points where this book hit me the hardest were the ones that felt like they had photocopied my soul and put it into print. why did racism not touch my family the way it touched me? why did i feel ravaged by it, torn apart by it, stripped raw and left to bleed, while my father could sit across from me in a council house kitchen in england and tell me that racism does not exist? why is my identity as a brown person, my experiences as a brown person, so different to that of my parents, for whom 'brown' is not a descriptor they even think to use for themselves? i suddenly saw myself, a part of myself that i cannot see reflected in the mirrors of my world. i understood, as a child of the diaspora, the surprising euphoria of visiting your motherland for the first time. the way everyone warns you, 'it's dirty, it's crowded, it's very different from england', but you go and you experience a happiness, a fulfillment, a sense of being whole that you never knew you were even capable of feeling. you cry all the way to the airport on the evening you leave, and cry again in the plane, because you know you will be returning to a loneliness that you didn't even realise felt lonely before.

this book felt like a diagnosis, one that came at the perfect time.