Not a lie was said. [Plantation Memories by Grada Kilomba]

Plantation Memories is a compilation of episodes of everyday racism written in the form of short psychoanalytical stories. From the question “Where do you come from?” to Hair Politics to the N-word, the book is a strong, eloquent, and elaborate piece, which deconstructs the normality of everyday racism and exposes the violence of being placed as the Other.

Released at the Berlin International Literature Festival in 2008, soon the book became internationally acclaimed and part of numerous academic curricula. Known for her subversive practice of giving body, voice, and image to her own texts, Grada Kilomba has adapted her book into a staged reading and video installation. Plantation Memories is an important contribution to the global cultural discourse.

Primarily referencing Blackness in the context of Germany, it's wild how the universal experiences of (post-)colonial racism, as presented in Grada Kilomba's Plantation Memories, and the mindset it pervades are through the diaspora. But reading the book and learning the verbalization for this experience of being trapped in a colonial framework, one comes to realize that the universality comes from the common structure of colonial experiences. When the offense is the same, when the system to respond to or support the offense is the same all over, of course the experiences are similar.

And I say the verbalization is important because it's a lived experienced that's hard to verbalize, to delineate. When such a traumatic topic is broached, I'm always in awe of scholars and artists, or whoever it may be, who so accurate verbalizes that collective experience. As Kilomba advocates, a subjectivity to research, to learning, makes all the difference.

What can I say? How the concept of affirming and defining the self, of establishing oneself as self, as subject, is a wild and new one to me? But again, one that makes all the sense. That as I read I could pinpoint my own respective experiences of micro- and macroaggressions and relate entirely? All of that. 5 stars. I can't spell out why in the most convincing way, but I got this book. This book got me. Everything I read made sense and I want to make sense for others. Especially other Black folk. So yeah, 5 stars.

Plantation Memories: Episodes of  Everyday Racism (ISBN: 9781771135504) was set to be published May 2021.