The more time I’ve spent reading about slavery this year, the more often I’ve discovered references to it in unexpected places. (Looking to catch up? Here are all the links to the previous posts this year.) For instance, in Fred D’Aguiar’s memoir Year of Plagues (2021): “When I think
For my birthday this year, Mr BIP arranged for me to have a cake with a sentence from an Alice Munro story iced onto it: “The world would be grand, if it weren’t for the people.” It’s an interesting quotation in a year when the pandemic has made everyone
Here’s a glimpse of some recent reads which lend themselves more to sampling, in a handful of reading sessions, than gobbling in longer periods of time. Not the books which require a sink-into-your-seat focus, the ones which afford the opportunity to window-gaze between pages. Mungi
Elissa Washuta’s White Magic (2021) is a personal narrative of searching and locating boundaries about her own self amid the context of colonization. (She is a member of the Cowlitz tribe.) Her writing is considered experimental but it passes for conventional prose at first glance; much of her
Indigenous activist and leader, Ailton Krenak (Aimoré/Krenak), has published three of his short essays in Ideas to Postpone the End of the World (Translated from the Portuguese by Anthony Doyle in 2020). With clarity and passion, he illustrates how the indigenous perspective acknowledges and nurtures relationships with parts
