With a confrontational title, the message of the book is pretty straight-forward and ambitious. The text is a long essay which consists of a set of guidelines that offers white people a way to confront systemic racism that does not fall into historically cliched and ineffectual advice.
There are some books that I appreciate above all for their political intentions. This is how I feel about the novel The Impatient by Djaïli Amadou Amal (translated by Emma Ramadan). The Cameroonian writer, who belongs to the Fulani culture, has had bad marital experiences and now uses them as material for her literature and as a drive for her activism.
As the title already suggests, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai is particularly directed at readers interested in food. The story about food allows for gentle, profound musings on language, belonging and living as a mixed-race person in different places.
This Mournable Body is undoubtedly an important book, but it’s more than a little difficult to read. The deservedly renowned Zimbabwean novelist, filmmaker and playwright Tsitsi Dangarembga presents a devastating portrait of her country after independence has finally been achieved, but has failed to produce the equitable utopia that the struggle seemed to promise would follow liberation from colonial oppression.
The slim volume No country for eight-spot butterflies consists of luminous speeches, essays and poems that Julian Aguon has written on various occasions in recent years. He addresses climate injustices, the ongoing colonization of Guam and his involvement in working towards social justice.
One of our aims with poco.lit. is to try to demystify some of the core ideas in and around postcolonial studies and the ways in which postcolonial literatures have been read. In this post, we take a look at Orientalism by Edward Said and some of its key contributions to thinking about colonial practices.
Bisrat Negassi talks to poco.lit. about the genesis of her book “Ich bin”. She also explains that as a war-born Eritrean and Black person in Germany, she has always been politicized and brings this to her work as a fashion designer.
The first thing I liked about this book was its title, and the novel certainly delivers on the sensuous and sensory promises made by these four words placed alongside each other: Butter, honey, pig, bread.