Tending to Our Wounds: A Diasporic Memoir

by Edna Bonhomme

A profound and poetic memoir, tracing the wounds that racism and colonialism have left on Black people across borders.

With astute insight and immersive prose, Bonhomme outlines a personal and political history of life in the United States, Haiti, and Germany, discovering what it means to be Black at home and abroad. She unlearns the lies that she was told about slavery and colonialism and explores how communities are resisting the weight of centuries of history.

Whether examining debt, medical racism, art, or reparations, Tending to Our Wounds cuts a breathtaking course between the past and the present, the individual and the collective—identifying the tendrils of history in the everyday and outlining a path to real freedom.

Genres: Biography Memoir

390 pages, Paperback

Published July 21, 2026

About the author

Edna Bonhomme is a Haitian American scholar, writer, and former biologist. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science where she is working on her book manuscript Ports and Pestilence in Alexandria, Tripoli, and Tunis which addresses the convergence of sanitary imperialism and traditional medicine during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to her book project, she is collaborating with Berlin –based artists and writers who are using decolonial methodologies and diachronic practices in order to upend uneven power dynamics in archives, pedagogy, and science.

She completed her PhD in history/history of Science at Princeton University in 2017. Using a historical materialist approach, her dissertation, “Plagued Bodies and Spaces: Medicine, Trade, and Death in Ottoman Egypt, 1705-1830 CE,” examined the commercial and geopolitical trajectory of plague and as its direct links to commercial, provincial, and imperial policies in several North African port cities. In addition to her historical training, she studied biology at Reed College (BA) and public health practitioner at Columbia University (MPH).

In addition to her academic interests, she writes for publications including but not limited to Africa is a Country, Contretemps, Der Freitag, Jacobin Magazine, Mada Masr, and Viewpoint Magazine. She has previously taught for the Princeton Prison Initiative (2012), Drexel University (2016, 2017), and Humboldt University (2018).

More information about her can be found at https://www.ednabonhomme.com.

Reviews

[D Dyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book elegantly blends the personal and political, using the places Bonhomme has lived, has family history with and has experienced the racism of to explore the deeper history and origins of colonialism, white supremacy, and it’s continuing impact for the Black diaspora. that blend which sees us moving from the struggle to get therapy and Germany to the role of Germany as a colonial power pre-World War I being a precursor to later genocides and from the way, the close knit of Haitian immigrant communities in Miami could provide protection to the surveillance and violence of the police state keeps the history from becoming a distant and overwhelming collection of fact and centers it as still impactful in the present.