Francisca
mesmo que a edição portuguesa peque por uma tradução miserável, o pensamento político de Chomsky é aqui compilado num conjunto de ensaios publicados entre 1969 e 2013 que se tornam ainda mais relevantes à luz dos acontecimentos internacionais mais recentes. permanece intemporal e urgente para desfazer alguns mitos e narrativas que se tornaram dominantes na política norte-americana e ocidental, incluindo reflexões sobre o capitalismo, a democracia, a guerra e a catástrofe ambiental.
Just the thought of an interview conducted by Perry Anderson was enough to arouse my curiosity about this book. But what really fascinated me was Suleiman Mourad's brilliant insights into the theology and politics of Islam, by recognising its multiple stances and historical trajectories. In a sense, thinking of Islam as mosaic can be a way of reclaiming humanity to the Muslim community (umma) and thus support forms of resistance against dehumanisation imposed by Western-centred representations of Islam. It also reveals the ways in which this hatred and dehumanisation is more often than not driven by a misunderstanding of the historical context in which Islam flourished, which not only prevents one from identifying revelant links with Christianity or Judaism but also informs a recurrent narrative that portrays Muslims as the fatal enemy of Western civilization, legitimising the rise of a modern Crusade (like the one most visible in US foreign policy during the Bush era) that ultimately denies agency to a whole community for the sake of the so called national interest.
Ler O que diz Molero não só me possibilitou a tomar contacto com a tão admirável escrita de Dinis Machado - um escritor que, citando Nuno Artur Silva no posfácio deste livro, ‘‘não era do «mundo literário», da literatice, dos protocolos e dos salões. O Dinis era da vida.'' - como me alimentou ainda mais o interesse pela literatura portuguesa, que tem vindo a crescer. E foi assim que um escritor que há tempos me era totalmente desconhecido me cativou, e de que maneira, com esta obra fenomenal e espero sinceramente muito em breve estar a ler mais uma das suas obras.
Dei apenas quatro estrelas porque a constante enumeração e descrição super pormenorizada chega a adquirir um carácter um pouco enfadonho, mas aparte disso estou bastante satisfeita.
Para concluir e porque os sentimentos que este livro despertou em mim são altamente indescritíveis, cito novamente Nuno Artur Silva, que salienta que ‘‘A alegria do livro é a alegria da mistura de registos, do trágico e do cómico, do pícaro e do dramático, do palavrão e da poesia, das enumerações e o indizível, da tristeza e da beleza, a alegria da liberdade''.
I couldn't put the book down. reading this was extremely validating and refreshing but it also felt truly painful and discomforting at times, as Fern's stories about her childhood and adolescence had so much in common with mine. I laughed and sobbed. I had to re-read some passages because of how incredulous I was by how much her life had resembled mine in some tiny details, from sharing the same special interests (foreign languages, books and music) to growing up with emotionally unavailable parents (and my autistic dad seeming so similar to Fern's!), feeling trapped in toxic relationships and experiencing abuse. and it's also sad that these experiences are something that many late-diagnosed autistic women have gone through. I am so grateful to Fern for writing this book and allowing me to put all of this into words finally
I had great expectations for this book but I was quite disappointed. It took me months to finish it and considered DNFing it multiple times but my FOMO took over. The book is much longer than my usual reads too (around 500 pages without references), but I felt that it didn't have to be that way. The poor organisation of the book and its chapters compromises the overall reading experience and its purpose of bringing the “trauma conversation” to a larger audience. Most of the time the argument gets lost in the hundreds of quotes from interviews, speeches and articles that the authors manage to include —don't get me wrong, referencing is important but it is not a substitute to actually writing. In short, it felt like reading an unfinished, unedited manuscript rather than a published book. It makes me wonder whether there was any editing and proofreading done at all here. Still, if the reader manages to get through all the facts and quotes mentioned there, I think the book can provide useful and general insights for healthcare professionals lacking any knowledge on trauma-informed care, the politics of health, illness and addiction, Indigenous healing practices, or the body-mind connection explaining the links between childhood trauma and chronic disease and pain in adulthood. However, this is not the book you're looking for if what you need is to dive deeper into the contextual specific meanings, debates and experiences of trauma, chronic illness and healthcare from a clearly defined political and/or philosophical perspective that can actually drive change in collective thinking and action.
I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it delivers what it promises, in the sense that your knowledge about your body as a menstruator is enhanced and thus it helps you regain your autonomy in dealing with reproductive health issues. And that can be really empowering, redefining the way we relate to our bodies and helping to prevent and identify conditions that are misdiagnosed or mistreated. Another important aspect is the use of gender-inclusive language, bringing trans and non-binary identities to the conversation about menstruation.
On the other hand, the book often falls into an infantilizing, ‘trying-to-act-cool' approach that is simply not my taste and left me with no will to continue the reading. I know it can benefit those not comfortable about their reproductive and sexual health, but it gets really annoying sometimes and the articulation of her insights with gender, racial and class inequalities ends up being a little bit superficial. Most information is also UK (and US)-centred, which means that statistics and products mentioned do not apply to other contexts.
Overall, it's a useful read for someone who lacks a basic understanding of reproductive health and wants to make improvements in their menstrual cycle. As someone who suffers from the kind of symptoms that are commonly normalised and misheard in the medical community, I felt more empowered to not stop seeking for help and to speak out about my experiences with menstruation.
when Suckie said “It was in my nature to absorb large volumes of information during times of distress, like I could master the distress through intellectual dominance” I really felt that
4.5/5
as someone to whom magical realism often feels devoid of the depth and meaningfulness that I associate with literary fiction, this novel has completely blown me away. Bernardine Evaristo dedicates each chapter to a different character, which is portrayed in a way that captures their singular, diverse experiences as racialised women living in Britain, as opposed to a homogenised feminist narrative. Yet at the same time the way Evaristo interconnects these different stories is truly astonishing, bringing together race, gender, sexuality, social class and age, while recognising that each category holds ambiguous (at times conflicting) experiences and perspectives. the beauty of this book lies in its ability to join together individuality and collectivity, personal and political, struggle and joy.
In this small collection of essays published between 1978 and 1982, Audre Lorde—who portrays herself as a ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet'—addresses the multiplicity of identities that bring the personal and the political together on both individual and collective dimensions. The power of women, poetry and anger are thus analysed in light of these intersections and its inherent tensions that can spark radical transformation.
In ‘The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master' s House', the essay that names this selection, Lorde states that the diversity of identities within a community can spark unity, solidarity and change as long as each identity is recognised and incorporated in the struggle for emancipation as equal to other related identities in a constructive (and not solely rethoric) manner. For ‘difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. (...) community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretence that these differences do not exist'.
This statement implies that radical change must be seen as a mutidimensional, evolutive and contested process—we're not bound by the need to romanticise past experiences nor constrained by the existence of a charismatic leadership. Neither should we expect a false hierarchy of oppression (based on class, gender, sexual identity, race or ethnicity) to form the basis of revolution (‘There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives'). Unity does not entail unanimity and verticality; each individual—with its particular experiences of oppression and resistence—constructs and shapes the possibilities of revolution both within itself and as part of a community committed to a common goal of transformation.
‘Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses; for instance, it is learning to address each other's difference with respect. (...). The 1960s should teach us how important it is not to lie to ourselves. Not to believe that revolution is a one-time event, or something that happens around us rather than inside of us. Not to believe that freedom can belong to any one group of us without the others also being free. How important it is not to allow even our leaders to define us to ourselves, or to define our sources of power to us.'
In this small collection of essays, Chinua Achebe expresses the suffering and grievances of postcolonial Africa (and particularly his homeland Nigeria) with an ironic, assertive tone, which I am very fond of. The longest essays, “Africa's Tarnished Name” and “Africa is People” were the ones that touched me the most, exploring racist representations in the European literary tradition and daily practice, from the corridors of the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism to those of the World Bank, where the Washington Consensus perpetuates the “tarnished” fate of African people.
“...he needed to hear Africa speak for itself after a lifetime of hearing Africa spoken about by others.”
“...the Bantu declaration ‘Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu' represents an African communal aspiration: ‘A human is human because of other humans.' Our humanity is contingent on the humanity of our fellows. No person or group can be human alone.”
this book is not as good as i expected it to be but still... it is funny and cute. if it turned into a movie it'd probably be better than the book, i guess.
stop everything that you're doing and read this masterpiece of an article like now. and don't forget to reach out to those you might know who are struggling with chronic illnesses, mental disorders or disability
“How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can't get out of bed?”
““Sickness” as we speak of it today is a capitalist construct, as is its perceived binary opposite, “wellness.” The “well” person is the person well enough to go to work. The “sick” person is the one who can't. What is so destructive about conceiving of wellness as the default, as the standard mode of existence, is that it invents illness as temporary. When being sick is an abhorrence to the norm, it allows us to conceive of care and support in the same way.”
“The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other's vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship, an
interdependent sociality, a politics of care.”
https://t.co/UVO9wo1rEu
“Acreditamos na história do homem que tem o poder. É ele quem escreve a história. Por isso, quando estudam História, têm sempre de se questionar 《Qual é a história que não me está a ser contada? Qual é a voz que foi suprimida para que esta voz pudesse fazer-se ouvir?》 Quando descobrirem isso, têm de ouvir também essa história.”
“...while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank.”
This line perfectly sums up Rachel Cusk's Outline. It is a book about connection, recognition, ambivalence; about the power of narrative and words; about the unshaped, the unstructured, the outlined self. I was very pleased by Cusk's experimental style, which is embodied by the characters themselves, actively avoiding order, rule, logic, shape.
“But the only hope of finding anything is to stay exactly where you are, at the agreed place. It's just a question of how long you can hold out.”
“The interesting ones are like the islands, he said: you don't bump into them on the street or at a party, you have to know where they are and go to them by arrangement.”
Let me give some personal context prior to reading Outline. I found this book in a second hand bookshop which every time I visited transported me to a sort of intimate, exclusive space where committed readers met. I wasn't looking for it, yet I had the feeling this particular book would terminate the long reading slump I wanted to get rid of (and I was right). I was also surprised to see that the previous owner of the book left a pamphlet about the rights of indigenous people in Brazil, which was probably used as a bookmark, and I immediately started to wonder what kind of person had read this book before me, what their interests and background were. Right before starting this book, I found myself doing the exactly same thing the characters did throughout this book: to connect with other people not wholly but in fragments and glimpses into multiple life stories and narratives. Another unexpected parallel I found was that both the narrator and I were travelling when the first chapter opened, and soon after I was completely immersed in the narrative.
“...but the trying – it seemed to me – was almost always a sign that one was crossing the currents, was forcing events in a direction they did not naturally want to go, and though you might argue that nothing could ever be accomplished without going against nature to some extent, the artificiality of that vision and its consequences had become – to put it bluntly – anathema to me.”
The narrative is formed through brief encounters which seem like character studies, outlines of a future novel; yet the novel already exists before it is formed. I have connected with the characters in a completely different and ambivalent way, deeply and intimately and yet vaguely and distantly.
I can't wait to put my hands on the other two works from Cusk's trilogy.
it is both disturbing and liberating to read something that feels so close to home. this is the collection of essays I wish I ever had the courage to write. it definitely must have been a painful writing experience, but I'm grateful that it exists because I feel seen
4,5 stars
by tracing the historical roots of the feminist movement in the US under the lens of black, working-class (and enslaved) women, Angela Davis paints the cause for intersectionality with an appealing and urgent tone, reframinng the discussion around more interconnected forms of oppression and resistance.
would recommend it to those appalled by the current situation in the US and eager to understand the social and historical roots of racist, sexist and class-based discrimination in its multiple expressions and time periods
I loved this book so much. It's a sad yet not colorless - as the title might suggest- story. I've already read some books from Murakami and I've found out he has a very particular writing style and, even though it might seem boring and ready-made, it's a pleasure to read such beautiful stories, with extremely sensitive characters and I think his delicate, poetical writing makes the plot even more captivating.