Salvage: Readings from the Wreck

by Dionne Brand

In her first full-length non-fiction since the influential A Map to the Door of No Return, Dionne Brand explores 17th, 18th and 19th-century English and American literature—and the colonial aesthetic that shaped her sense of self and world, of what was possible and what was not.

"Coloniality constructs outsides and insides—worlds to be chosen, disturbed, interpreted, and navigated—in order to live something like a real self."

In Salvage, internationally acclaimed poet and novelist Dionne Brand offers a bracing account of reading, life and what remains in the wreck of empire. Uniquely and powerfully blending criticism and autobiography-as-artifact, Brand explores her encounters with colonial, imperialist and racist tropes in famous and familiar books, looking particularly at the extraordinary implications and modern-day reverberations of stories such as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Austen's Mansfield Park; the ways that the practices of reading and writing are shaped by those narrative structures; and the challenges of writing a narrative of Black life that attends to its own consciousness and expression. Making and remaking the self in relation to these dominant cultural narratives, Brand learned to read the literature of two empires, the British and the American, in an anti-colonial light—in order to survive, in order to live. The scene is the act of reading; the book, another kind of forensics—a forensics of the literary substance of which the author is made and from which she must recover. Or, if not recover, then piece together as artifact. Much more than autobiography, and much more than a work of literary criticism, Salvage is gripping, witty, revelatory and essential reading by one of our most powerful and brilliant writers.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Literary Criticism, Race, Books About Books, Memoir, Literature

224 pages, Hardcover

First published August 27, 2024

About the author

As a young girl growing up in Trinidad, Dionne Brand submitted poems to the newspapers under the pseudonym Xavier Simone, an homage to Nina Simone, whom she would listen to late at night on the radio. Brand moved to Canada when she was 17 to attend the University of Toronto, where she earned a degree in Philosophy and English, a Masters in the Philosophy of Education and pursued PhD studies in Women’s History but left the program to make time for creative writing.

Dionne Brand first came to prominence in Canada as a poet. Her books of poetry include No Language Is Neutral, a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, and Land to Light On, winner of the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Award and thirsty, finalist for the Griffin Prize and winner of the Pat Lowther Award for poetry. Brand is also the author of the acclaimed novels In Another Place, Not Here, which was shortlisted for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Trillium Award, and At the Full and Change of the Moon. Her works of non-fiction include Bread Out of Stone and A Map to the Door of No Return.

What We All Long For was published to great critical acclaim in 2005. While writing the novel, Brand would find herself gazing out the window of a restaurant in the very Toronto neighbourhood occupied by her characters. “I’d be looking through the window and I’d think this is like the frame of the book, the frame of reality: ‘There they are: a young Asian woman passing by with a young black woman passing by, with a young Italian man passing by,” she says in an interview with The Toronto Star. A recent Vanity Fair article quotes her as saying “I’ve ‘read’ New York and London and Paris. And I thought this city needs to be written like that, too.”

In addition to her literary accomplishments, Brand is Professor of English in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.

For more information, please see http://www.answers.com/topic/dionne-b...

Reviews

[Alan (on December semi-hiatus) Teder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Salvaged from Slavery
A review of the Knopf Canada hardcover edition (August 27, 2024) released simultaneously with the eBook/audiobook.

The central premise here has Trinidadian-Canadian novelist & poet Dionne Brand (1953-) looking back on her early life and later education and reading. Much of that reading was in the classics, but her focus here is especially the mostly untold background of colonialism and slavery in the time of the growing British Empire and the concurrent novels of English literature. The "Wreck" of the title is a metaphor for the colonial past, the "Salvage" is what we can learn from it.

Several novels which were discussed at length here were completely new to me. One of these was Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: or, The History of the Royal Slave (1688). Aphra Behn (1640-1689) is considered the first professional female author and the book as one of the first ever English language novels. Although it has been considered as an anti-slavery novel, the fate of the title character is traumatic and grotesque.

Better known is Daniel Dafoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719). But if you are reading that book as a castaway adventure story, did you ever pause to think about the fact that Crusoe embarked on his journey because he was on a slavery expedition, and that he had a plantation in Brazil which was worked by slaves? When he finally is rescued from the island after 28 years, he has the accumulated fortune from the plantation's earnings to live on.

Following on from Dafoe, another book that was new to me was J.M. Coetzee's Foe (1986), which is an alternate version of the Crusoe story introducing a woman castaway to the mix. The resultant assault and rape doesn't make it sound any more appealing.

Other extended sections of the book focused on Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) and William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847).

There were tangents in the telling here as Brand is also memorializing her early life and absent mother and aunt who left Trinidad to work as nurses in England. So this is a blend of memoir and creative non-fiction. I found it all quite revelatory and I think it will cause many to think back on their lifetime of reading and what were the untold stories behind the texts in the classics.

Trivia and Links
Aphra Behn's Oroonoko is in the Public Domain and can be read online at various sources such as Project Gutenberg or as an audiobook at LibriVox. The antiquated style may not be easy reading, so if you just want a summary you can read it at Wikipedia.

[cass krug · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was a dense one, so much to unpack! brand looks at classic english and american literature and dissects the colonialism and racism that run rampant through works like robinson crusoe and mansfield park.

i really liked how brand combined memoir and literary criticism, leaving us with an inventive type of creative nonfiction. she often returns back to a photograph of herself as a child with her sisters and cousin, sent from trinidad to brand’s mother and aunt, who were working in london at the time. it was an interesting way to incorporate her personal history, using her own experience with colonialism as a prism through which to view the novels she discusses.

the writing was gorgeous but i did struggle to follow at times, i think just due to my lack of familiarity with the books she was talking about. really wonderful reminder to continue reexamining and being critical of the societal structures that have shaped our literary world. 3.5 ⭐️ rounded up!

thank you to netgalley and fsg for the digital copy!

[Luke · Rating 3 out of 5]

A life animated by books is something that everyone may understand, but a life destroyed by books is the more complex, contradictory, mysterious proposition.

I work at a library that, for a very long time, prescribed to a 'core' collection. Each title was listed in a large, heavy directory which had to be regularly inventoried by library assistants. One described to me in detail how tedious and self-defeating it was, as while the collection had to be kept, replacing worn materials was actively avoided, and so these old, grungy, largely white male status quo works slowly but surely ossified into their cramped shelves, up until a decade or so ago when new hires came on and began to do away with it all, a surge that the pandemic catalyzed to completion. When I zeroed in on this book, I was seeking the sort of reconfiguring that had survived under said 'core', albeit equipped with analysis and insight from a far more credible place of anti-kyriarchical authority (in one respect, at least).

Alas, the times being what they are, while I can understand the need for decrying sections of the Anglo canon as flatulent, even undeserving of the title of 'art', so many of the arguments smacked a tad too much of the sort that, in my country, are aimed squarely at Black/queer lit, the kind destined to once again feverishly increase in rate and animosity for the next four years (at least). As such, I don't have the heart to rate this book any higher than I did. For I'm not about to tell someone how to do their weeding or their rehabilitation from the wreck, but when the speaker turns around to then heap praise on the drone commander in arms (otherwise known as Obama), well. If you're going to go so far as to throw the baby out with the bathwater, I expect to see all of it go, not just what doesn't make it into the texts of NPR or Teen Vogue.

[T]he adventure's end is the actualization, and triumph, of the colonial project.

As it stands, Brand brought to my attention some notable pieces that could be easily worked into an academic course flush with the Behns and the Austens and the Defoes, and I hope she has more space to retrofit such up north while my country contents itself with lurching after ghosts. In the meantime, I say to keep those desiccated parts of the canon for nominal study by those up to the task. For if you think people will instinctively understand how not to act/feel/proselytize in the imperial style without analyzing the texts that epitomize the height of the white colonial ideology, you have much more faith in the collective unconsciousness than I ever will.

[Julianna Wagar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredible, beautiful, iconic. Brand’s writing is effortless and stunning!! I just wish there was less close-reading lol

[Tina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to read Salvage: Readings From the Wreck by Dionne Brand after reading A Map to the Door of No Return and I’m glad I read this now. It’s interesting literary criticism and from the start it made me curious to look up some of the art she mentions. She talks about reading Robinson Crusoe and Mansfield Park among other books and the racist tropes and it was still interesting to read about even though I hadn’t read any of the books she mentions. I quite enjoyed the part where she says how is a Gucci bag beautiful? A paper bag is more beautiful. I’m curious to read some of her poetry and fiction now too.

Thank you to the publisher via NetGalley for my ALC!

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

In lieu of a review, here are some of my favorite excerpts:

Reading narrative requires, demands, acts of identification, association, affiliation, sympathy, and empathy, acts of inhabiting. (p. 29)

Slavery is never mentioned in [Vanity Fair], but virtue, modesty, goodness and religion and God are. So, here is a society proceeding as if these things are divisible from enslavement. Conquest gives the narrative its velocity and moral reasoning - but it is the welfare of the conquerors that is at stake. Parity never undermines them. (p. 33)

The innocence implied or introduced in the word "adventure" - the gesture toward the seemingly unknown - is not innocence at all, but a will to strive and to make something. And in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, readers understood what that something was, just as we too understand: notions of investment, finances, venture capital, etc. We know the words; we demure the meanings. As those earlier readers did. Or, we love the meanings. As they did. Crusoe is "entirely bent upon seeing the world." To "see the world" is a working phrase for exploitation; likewise, to go abroad, to make one's fortune, and so on, are all euphemisms or understandings for conquest - or profit, at least. The adventure is already violent - it presupposes an encounter that has no boundaries and from which there will be profit. . . The adventure sets out as the character does. A character who indeed may change - but only toward aggression, because he expects to encounter dangers. There is a penetrating quality to the adventure. It is prepared for violence or harm, either receiving or giving that violence. It is prepared to act, as opposed to witness. (p. 91-92)

Some contemporary readers might say, "Well, it was the time . . ." But these readers cannot have it all ways. First, enslaved people also lived in their time - as narrators without an author. They lived in the same time as this novel's author and narrator, and any equivocation places and objectifies enslaved people as inanimate and inhuman, like a chair or an axe, . . . it bestows, once again, the mantle of the human on the European. Yes, the text is a work of art - as we have come to define art. And yes, it is also reducible to its origins and its imaginaries, which are produced by its historical place, environment, quotidian details. (p. 101)

A structural problem of English literary narrative . . . all we must be concerned about is the individual plight, the individual striving against "life's" odds. This is the idyll that soothes the reader - as if the antagonism is personal and not social/structural, as if the appraisal of the state of being involves one individual instead of the mass of individuals who come under the regime. (p. 171)

A white reader encounters the flow of time, we encounter stasis. We know the duration of slavery, and we know no other life is possible for the Black protagonist/subject, no trajectory to freedom, since the novel's bedrock of landscape, character and desire self-evidently contain us as chattel. The range of emotion in these works is limiting, in that there can only be grief and fear and melancholy, not happiness or love or wonder (except the wonder in horror). In other words, the full range of emotions and repair that a novel might offer and is said to offer are, a priori, foreclosed to a reader like me. If we say that a Black reader like me ought not to notice that cataclysm, ought not to notice that the text is active, but only acknowledge its assignment through the lens of refined taste, then a reader like me is, . . . "excluded from the domain of modern reason, aesthetic judgment and the culture of taste." (p. 194)

[Gwen Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

About my tags:

- Canadian because Dionne Brand, born in Trinidad, is an honoured " Canadian poet, novelist, essayist and documentarian." We are fortunate to have her in Toronto.
- Literature because Brand closely and penetratingly examines literature written by white, English-speaking authors from the 17th to 19th centuries.
- Memoir because, as she declares, this is an "autobiography of the autobiography of reading" - Brand's personal experience with the titles.

A review in 'The Arts Section' in the Globe and Mail (December 7, 2024) compressed it well - "In this powerful work of literary criticism and autobiography, the renowned Canadian poet and novelist reads 17th to 19th century English and American literature (Mansfield Park, Pudd'nhead Wilson, Robinson Crusoe) for its imperialist, racist and colonial tropes, revealing the shadows haunting those narratives."

Dionne Brand writes masterfully with complexity and nuance to make her response to the depiction of Black people personal and universal. Sometimes shocking in her illustrations, she effectually strips aside the veneer in English literature of gentility and manners to expose the social and economic underpinning of colonialism, slavery, and white European superiority.

For example - In The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe Cruesoe was on an expedition to buy slaves when he was shipwrecked. He has no remorse in selling a companion Xury and in enslaving Friday as a servant. I read the book when I was young - as many of my generation did - and could easily have been influenced to accept Crusoe's and Friday's roles. J.M. Coetzee, of South Africa, a Nobel Prize winner (2003), wrote Foe, a variant of Crusoe's story, with an equally permeating racial bias. Coetzee published in 1986, 257 years after Defoe's - one would have hoped the human race had learned.

"As Chinua Achebe said, 'stories are not innocent.'> And so, when I read Foe, I see there all the thick, curdling histories it disallows, all the sedimented mathematics is ignored, all the sophistry it rehearses and all the discredited theories it proposes anew." (p. 129)

The stories by Jane Austen, William Thackeray - other writers of that period, Mark Twain, Hermann Melville, and what about William Faulkner? None is innocent.

For Black people - and Indigenous - "to learn the literature of the conqueror is both obligatory and bureaucratic; any aesthetic value is absent, except as a directive. ... You do not appear in colonial literature as its subject but as its implied or obvious degraded other ... You are in it as sacrifice, as detritus" (p 186-187)

Salvage: Readings from the Wreck is a powerful uncovering of the racist depth to white literature born of colonialism and imperialism. Let's add it to the school curriculum.

[Chris Wharton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this sort of in conjunction with my earlier reading of Wide Sargasso Sea, which gets a brief consideration here. The “wreck” of the title is the wreckage left behind by the literature of white European and American colonialism in the lands it subjugated and the peoples it transported and enslaved, denying them their humanity. The author’s personal experience (she was born and grew up in Trinidad under British colonial rule and cultural influence and is now a writer and academic in Canada) colors her approach, which considers works mostly of British literature from the imperial, colonial centuries, such as Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave; Robinson Crusoe; and Vanity Fair, but also later modern works by Caribbean authors (including Patrick Chamoiseau’s Crusoe’s Footprint and C. L R. James’ Minty Alley among them). She also points out that in 19th-century novels set in Britain on grand estates and manors, such as Vanity Fair, Mansfield Park, and parts of Jane Eyre, much, if not most or all, of the wealth underneath these holdings was obtained from imperial colonial enterprises (though this is perhaps not particularly evident in the novel’s narratives). In another interesting section she briefly discusses the postcolonial shift in influence after World War II from that of Britain through civil authority, education, legalistic mores, etc, to that of the US through more informal but perhaps more powerful means, such as radio, comics, and movies, The author frequently uses an academic language in her literary critiques that I found a bit hard to read at times, but her condemnation of the inhumanity and immorality of the imperial colonial enterprise comes through clear; also, she sometimes softens and personalized this approach autobiographically, telling of childhood and family experiences, including that of her mother and aunts sailing to Britain in the 1950s to become nurses there to help support family back in Trinidad. Since out of interest and experience I read a fair number of books (mostly novels) with colonial or postcolonial settings and themes, this book serves as a worthy reminder of the larger human experience, suffering, and cost involved and how it might or might not be presented in fiction.

[Matthew Molinaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

I rushed to pick up this book and had been anticipating it for quite a while. in a way, a book that promised to read older texts of the English tradition and to participate in their making and unmaking to me seemed exciting. it's a genre we're increasingly familiar with—take Morrison's Playing in the Dark, Said's Culture and Imperialism, and specific (earlier) strands of postcolonial literary studies.

so when I read this book, in a few sittings, I confess that I wondered about what it meant to read it today. I, too, sat in similar classrooms (today we roam the same city, I'm in the same department where she got her undergrad) as Brand reading Oroonoko and Mansfield Park and Robinson Crusoe, all central works to her study. but I had the luxury of reading them with merciless critique of transatlantic slavery, race-making, colonial capitalism both ushered in by professors and shared with fellow students.

it's in this way that I perceived a potential exhaustion of the form (can't we just write toward Black life!), but also a startling repetition—we live in the afterlives of these narratives, they govern most discourses, pedagogies, reading lists, and we cannot escape them. the limits of the writer's imagination is something we probe, rather than actually accept as challenge, as invitation.

we read here brand, the great writer, reading. it shows the thought behind her craft, what her career has been up against this entire time. this is where we read her autobiography of an autobiography of reading. what salvage salvages is the possibility of living by the book, those that are wrecked, but also by those that must be written.

[Book Club of One · Rating 4 out of 5]

Salvage begins with a discussion of two paintings of boats before transitioning to the losses of life when a ship sinks, considering both modern media coverage of the wrecks full of refugees and the historic losses of the middle passage. From there, Brand transitions to our present society, our need for capital trade, heavily reliant on shipping, and how the American society still exists in parallel to the world present in literary works from our past. Brand reflects on his personal biography, drawing out from an early childhood photo and critiques the world view presented through some of the great English literary novels.

The sections that draw from both the evidence of Brand's life by photography or memory and the narratives of Vanity Fair, The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Jane Eyre, and . Mansfield Park. In this she looks to the abscesses in the writing, the unsaid source of the power that made the lavish lifestyles in this books possible, but that the writer left unsaid. Brand brings it to the present from her own life and contemporary novels or re-tellings of classic works.

In all the works above (and additional titles) the assumption was their being read by a white audience and that they reinforce the imperialist worldview common held then, and still lingering.

Salvage is an insightful and self described forensic of how a reader is made and unmade. (pg. 14).

Recommended to researchers and readers of English literature, literary criticism and racism and imperialism in literature.

I received a free digital version of this book via NetGalley thanks to the publisher.

[Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

In her gorgeous, deep prose Brand explores the colonial crimes hidden behind the scenes of modern classics, from Vanity Fair to Jane Eyre to Robinson Crusoe to Mansfield Park. Using the phrase “a reader like me” to insert her own self, with her Blackness and knowledge, Brand patiently dissects the allusions to servants, far-away extracted wealth, the exceptionalism of protagonists like Oroonoco that still justify the systems of slavery and empire.

Brand even takes on the problems of reinterpretations, from Wide Sargasso Sea to Foe and others, that have blind spots of their own, from overly fond servants to a lack of imagining a non-enslaved world. It is accurate, but it is not exactly a complex or unexplored topic. Brand highlights the darkness behind these texts, but they have been explained and explored before.

It is the construction and the musicality that we are here for. From a poetic exploration of the frame of a childhood photo to recount family and her mother’s travel to Britain, to a short essay on the yearning of American music, it is in these that Brand’s writing comes fully in and feels fresher and more honed.

The book is explained as a spark from the quiet COVID times when white articles talked about lessons from classic literature that did not wrestle with the worlds and the privilege contained in them. Their inapplicability to readers like Brand. It is a beautiful book, but it feels a lesser Brand, a meditation on literature that is not necessary, but is rewarding in its own way, and refines our lens of the world.

[HeatherD · Rating 4 out of 5]

I discovered this book as I delved more deeply into the racial issues in Jane Eyre as part of a seminar course I was taking. The course was focused on the gender equality issues, but really one can't considered Bronte's creation of a feminist heroine in Jane Eyre without asking more about the first Mrs. Rochester, Bertha Mason. Bronte's text skirts the issue of the source of the Rochesters' wealth - or even that of Jane Eyre's uncle who leaves her an income. But it's there.

Brand's book is an multi-part essay and memoir/autobiography. She critically reviews novels that she encountered as a young student of literature - like Robinson Crusoe, Mansfield Park, Vanity Fair, and others. She repeats the term "elision' to highlight how throughout these 17-19th century novels Black characters are never fully drawn or featured. She notes the hypocrisy of novels focusing on morality but ignore slavery. She underlines the negative impact on "readers like [her]"

My takeaways
1) the so-called classics need to be read carefully and mindfully to identify problematic aspects. Brand refers to these novels as the "literature of empire" and argues they cannot have an untouchable status. And maybe some could be left behind.
2) to push myself to read more diverse viewpoints.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exquisitely written and impactful evisceration of colonial Western European literature and its enduring legacies. This journey through/against the canon is an autobiography of one writer’s reading life — “a forensics of how a reader is made. And, unmade” (15). Brand grew up in Trinidad in the 1950s/60s and this book is a searing repudiation of an aesthetic education steeped in colonialist ideology. Her close readings are invigorating /read/s. On Defoe: “If one were a reader like me, one would at this point wish for [Robinson] Crusoe’s demise” (99). Of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park: “Equally of no interest to this reader are the four or five flatulent chapters about a ball for Fanny” (153). She also offers a kind of counterarchive of novels written in an anticolonial Black tradition, and some gorgeously poetic examinations of a few examples of contemporary visual art.

[Venneh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic reread of a lot of the "greats" of European canon, especially as it's taught in our schools currently, and Ms. Brand reexamines them from the angle of how they handle the existence of Black persons in the narrative. I get the sense that a good deal of people are likely going to be made uncomfortable, but it is worth highlighting for the reasons that these voices are normally ignored. Highly recommended fall read.

[Mike Broderick · Rating 2 out of 5]

I also like Dionne Brand and was really looking forward to this.

However, I did not enjoy very much of it.
A graduate level seminar course would use this effectively. In that situation, I would enjoy it more as the conversations around her points would be the desert......but as a book to read for us, not interesting at all.

For anyone else giving this a go.....I do believe that in print would be mildly better than the audiobook version.

For me, this is a hard pass.

[Niya · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a University of Toronto graduate a few years after Brand was there, I am familiar with many of the names she drops - including Prof Walcott, who I studied with. I loved this because it felt like the lit crit class I wish I could have taken - accessible enough for a politically aware science student with a love of poetry and not as jargon filled as the lit crit class I did drop. Best read with your favorite comfort food, or your desert island meal.

[rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

fascinating ideas and writing, as always from dionne brand. it'll be hard to look at some of the classics she re-contextualizes in the same way ever again. nonetheless, it definitely could have been at least 1/3 shorter, and did begin to feel like it was just the same thing over again at a certain point.

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 Brand writes of colonialism and slavery in classic works such as Oroonoko by Aphra Behn, Robinson Crusoe, Mansfield Park and others. Digging deep into how these works have shaped her reading life, and how the violence of colonialism cannot be overlooked. This is a book that should shape they way your read and how you view the mistakes of the past.

[Rhys · Rating 5 out of 5]

These essays were a mix of literary critique, autobiography, social insight with a patina of the poetic. It was interesting 'for a reader like me.'

"The scrim of propriety, grace and valour marks the great elision of colonial violence – the ongoing murders, massacres, large-scale abductions and genocides. Brutal social rending is, in this way, elided in the literary" (p.72).

[Tristen Durocher · Rating 1 out of 5]

I think the essays could’ve been more poetically condensed. There were times I felt the author was striving for a word count more than a point. So much repetition and description. I’m indigenous, familiar with conversations of colonial critique. I love black female authors but this one was a chore to finish and I was relived when it was over.

[Todd · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been trying to better understand the origin and impact of systemic racism.

This book combines colonialism, literature, slavery and exclusion in a powerful narrative that challenges us to think harder. Yet another layer of sordid history to confront honestly and then do better.

[Penn Kemp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Salvage is a fierce, necessary critique examining the untold, assumed stories of the source of wealth (slavery) behind classic colonial novels like Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair and Robinson Crusoe.

Essential reading and unreading, unlearning, in this “autobiography of an autobiography”.

[Stephanie Dargusch Borders · Rating 3 out of 5]

So many salient points here and it will make you look at the classics in a whole new way. Five stars for content.
My issue is it was pretty dry. I felt like I was reading a dissertation or other academic papers. Not very dynamic.

[Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga · Rating 5 out of 5]

a re-reading of colonial texts that pushes the possibilities of using autobiography as device for exploration in creative nonfiction

[Adriana De Persia Colón · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mesmerizing.

[Sara Hill · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book does a phenomenal job of breaking down systemic racism in the literary canon, I’ll use this book as a reference for the rest of my literary career. Everyone should read this.

[J. Moufawad-Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

My full review is here:

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/revi...

[Samuelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

à lire

[ade · Rating 5 out of 5]

whew! this book pulled me out of the room spiral that I was having about mfa workshops. She is really on the nose about white literature and its ability to stir up discontent in the black reader!

[Molly Stollmeyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book met me at a time that I needed it most in my life, and I’ll be coming back to this again, and again