A review by laura_sackton
How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir by Shayla Lawson

I loved this memoir/essay collection about Blackness, gender, travel, sex, desire, disability, aging, being creative and making art, teaching. Most of the sections are set in different places all over the world, and most center in on a certain event, whether that is traveling through Egypt with friends to discuss misogyny, or about being a Black professor in Amherst at UMass and dealing with the white liberals who are so focused on everything being correct and not interrogating their ideas, but also on how it was in that setting that Lawson came to love using they/them pronouns. There are sections on being Black in the Netherlands and working with refugees and the disconnect between Lawson’s understanding of race and that of the white people she worked with. 

Something I deeply appreciate is their insistence on both/and, basically always. They talk about learning how to see their body differently, learning how to move with their disabled body and love with their disabled body that the world does not see as worthy of desire. They write about not being a woman and how Blackness is inherently nonbinary, as it is always outside of the norm and the mainstream, and the freedom of embracing that. But they never limits themself. They are always allowing themself to continue learning, to get curious, to explore ideas of faith and death and love in new ways as they get older. 

There is also something wonderfully measured about they approaches the subject matter. It’s not just that Lawson is so smart and curious. There's something in their prose that is very calm and steady. Like They want you to really slow down and listen to what they are saying, to stick with the ideas and not feel like you have to rush on from them. I was totally riveted by the quality of their attention, the way they offer such deep analysis of history, of moving through the world as Black, woman, nonbinary, disabled, but also ground everything in these very specific anecdotes about their life.