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
It was late when I picked up Emmanuel Mbolela’s memoir Refugee (2021), nearly time for bed; it occurred to me that another book might make more suitable bedtime reading. I’ll just start, I thought, because it was a borrowed copy and due back soon at the library. Straight away,
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
In Dog Flowers: A Memoir (2020), Danielle Geller is immediately relatable; as soon as she shares her Arby’s sandwich from the airport with her cat Little Foot, I’m hooked. When she binge watches an entire season of DragRace, with a guy she meets through an online video game,
Mini Aodla Freeman’s Life among the Qallunaat (1978; 2015) is the third book published in the University of Manitoba’s First Voices, First Texts series. It chronicles her experiences as an Inuit woman adjusting to life south of the Arctic in the 1950s, working as a translator for many
