A review by katie_greenwinginmymouth
An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading by Dionne Brand

challenging informative reflective fast-paced

5.0

I’ve been wanting to read some Dionne Brand for ages and this was a great intro. This is a very short book, an essay really, but Brand has such a fluid and expansive approach to thought that it covers much more ground than you might expect. I absolutely adore reading this sort of writing, it feels completely transformative to me and makes connections that can’t help but show you new ways of being or engender new modes of thought.

In this essay Brand examines how the 19th Century novel constructs a sense of self and a morality that is colonial, Eurocentric and oblivious to the fundamental contradictions at its heart where this morality is based on a deeply immoral treatment of those that are deemed to be different and lesser than the white author and presumed reader. What does it mean to read these novels as a Black woman and what effect does that have on your sense of self? What contortions do you put yourself through to take your place as reader?

“Reading narrative requires, demands, acts of identification, association, affiliation, sympathy, and empathy, actors of en/inhabiting....Narrative is not just the simple transportation of language but of ideas of the self, and ideas of the self that contain negations of other people. What is it, then, to adopt or be indoctrinated into these narrative structures, those ideas, to come to know those ideas as your own, when you are the negated other people?”

Absolutely essential reading, especially if you’re a fan of the ‘classics’.