From Timor Leste to Australia ed. Jan Trezise

a nutshell: this first-of-its-kind book shares deeply personal and often gripping recollections from seven East Timorese families who ultimately made their homes in Melbourne’s City of Casey

a line: “I remember their fear, which for us children translated into terror” (Emilia, Florindo family)

an image: I enjoyed Berta’s anecdote about the first day of courtship with her husband-to-be, Luis, who mistakenly thought he should arrive in the early morning and turned up at the family home when she was out in the fields picking peanuts (Berta, Santos family)

a thought: as demonstrated above, the interviews with family members prompted a mixture of heart-rending and light-hearted memories – I learned a great deal from this book and it is a real credit to the students and community members who were involved in making it

a fact: the chronology of East Timor’s key historical events was v useful, and I was happy to see it originated from the Alola Foundation (an org I came to know through my work with IWDA) – here’s an online timeline

want to read From Timor Leste to Australia? visit here

Singing Away the Hunger by Mpho ‘M’atsepo Nthunya

Singing away the hunger - inside cover with photo of Mpho

a nutshell: these are stories from the extraordinary life of Lesotho elder and matriarch Nthunya, stretching from her birth in 1930 to the conversations that formed this book in the late 1990s

a line: “Maybe if there is one day enough for the hunger to stop, we can stop being so jealous of one another. If the jealousy is no more, we can begin to have dreams for one another. We can build something new”

an image: I liked how chapter 11 took its title from a motto in Lesotho – khotso, pula, nala, that is, peace, rain, prosperity

a thought: as so often throughout this project, I had reason to feel ashamed of my heritage – before independence, every man (no matter how poor) had to pay tax to the British or he was imprisoned; Nthunya’s family was so pleased when they no longer had to pay that they named a child born in the year of independence ‘Muso’, meaning Government

a fact: through her job as a domestic worker Nthunya became friends with American writer Kendall while she was studying on a Fulbright scholarship, and it was Kendall’s idea to document Nthunya’s life – this autobiography is a collaboration between the pair

want to read Singing Away the Hunger? visit here

Do They Hear You When You Cry by Fauziya Kassindja and Layli Miller Bashir

a nutshell: in this moving autobiography Kassindja records how she fled Togo aged 17 ahead of kakia (female genital mutilation) and a forced marriage, ending up in the US where she spent a horrifying 16 months in detention

a line: “I’d been lost, misplaced, like luggage gone astray”

an image: Kassindja’s memories of prison guards mistreating detainees often evoked shocking scenes, particularly how she was ostracised under entirely false suspicion of TB

a thought: among the most poignant moments in this book, for me, were Kassindja’s reunions with other women detained while seeking asylum – her story is full of powerful friendships and unconditional love often in less likely corners, for instance the commitment of her cousin Rahuf whom she hadn’t seen since childhood

a fact: 97% of detained immigrants are people of colour even though 5 of the the top 20 countries of origin for illegal immigrants are Caucasian – it isn’t that white-skinned illegal immigrants don’t come to the US, it’s that they don’t get put in detention

want to read Do They Hear You When You Cry? visit here

The Dancer from Khiva by Bibish (tr. Andrew Bromfield)

cover on kindle (back of plaited hair) with fern in background

a nutshell: written while Bibish was a street vendor in a province of Moscow, this unique & spirited memoir records an Uzbek woman’s determination to live independently despite all odds

a line: “The state is like an X-ray machine, it looks right through me”

an image: with the moon in Central Asia shining brightly at night, Bibish recalls how she used to read a wide range of books while everyone slept (despite her mother’s scolding)

a thought: the author vividly documents her struggles to earn enough money to provide food for her sons, such as her raw despair at being unable to buy bread to ease their hunger as late as 10pm – this evoked horrible parallels with the current situation in my homeland, the UK, where parliamentarians refused to allow meals to be given to children needing food over the upcoming holidays during the pandemic

a fact: Bibish shared many fascinating details about her childhood in a kishlak, and particularly moving was her account of the forced labour & production quota system that pervaded Uzbekistan’s cotton fields – when I googled this I was horrified to learn from HRW that it continues to this day

want to read The Dancer from Khiva? visit here

Bahrain’s Uprising ed. by Ala’a Shehabi and Marc Owen Jones

Bahrain Uprising book against yellow wall - cover shows Pearl Roundabout

note – as this project is about reading writing by women, this review focuses on the chapter ‘Shifting contours of activism and possibilities for justice in Bahrain‘ by Ala’a Shehabi and Luke G.G. Bhatia; Shehabi is a Bahraini writer and researcher who co-founded Bahrain Watch, an NGO that advocates for accountability and social justice in Bahrain

a nutshell: this powerful chapter shares valuable insights into Bahrain’s ‘advocacy revolution’, the topography of opposition actors, and the emerging possibilities for the fight for human rights and, crucially, self-determination

a line: “the sense of self-emancipation experienced in the euphoria of mass protests can be a life-changing personal transformation”

an image: nicknamed ‘the Butcher of Bahrain‘, British officer Ian Henderson makes a brief appearance in this chapter – a figure I learned of (with horror) during my time at the Bahrain Institute for Rights & Democracy

a thought: once again, like so often happens in this project, I was ashamed of my homeland – the UK has consistently enabled the regime’s increasingly ‘acceptable’ mode of repression, for instance, as mentioned here, advising on improved discourse, better surveillance technology, fewer physical marks following torture, and fewer journalists covering developments

a fact: the authors share a bleak statistic from Eric Posner’s ‘The case against human rights‘ – 150 out of 193 countries continue to engage in torture and the number of authoritarian countries has risen

want to read Bahrain’s Uprising? visit here

I Have Come Through Torments Within These Walls by Annasoltan Kekilova (tr. James Womack)

a nutshell: this devastating poem was written by Soviet-era poet & dissident Annasoltan Kekilova in a Turkmen psychiatric hospital, where she had been detained since 1973 after she advocated for women’s rights in Turkmenistan

a line: “I am tainted and would clean myself, but it is futile”

an image: it felt to me like the poet’s repetition of “within these walls” powerfully conveyed a sense of the suppression she had so long endured – walled off by both the institution and by the Central Committee of the USSR Communist Party

a thought: I found this poem completely heart-breaking, particularly with the knowledge that Kekilova died due to forcible medical treatment while still detained; she was only 41 years old at her death

a fact: Kekilova’s poems were smuggled out to her mother and son, though many were lost and a house fire destroyed much of her writing – I learned more about her life & work through this article

want to read more of Kekilova’s poetry? visit here

The Palauan Perspectives by Hermana Ramarui

Extract from 'Being a Palauan' against sea backdrop

a nutshell: written by a Palauan poet & educator, this extraordinary collection of poetry explores identity, freedom and colonialism

an image: in Ramarui’s pages-long & astonishing poem ‘Freedom’, she suggests the US’s colonial approach to Micronesia was like a fishing expedition and asks the coloniser to throw its golden hooks away

a thought: I was intrigued by the poet’s idea of Palauan culture as a state of being – a centre in itself, hanging onto nothing – and her observation that people cease to be Palauan as soon as they fear new learning (‘Being a Palauan’)

a fact: Ramarui worked for over twenty years in Palau’s Ministry of Education and made huge contributions to preserving Palauan language & culture; she later began working on a children’s reading series and colouring book series

want to read The Palauan Perspectives? visit here

Cantoras by Carolina de Robertis

a nutshell: to me, this was an incredibly profound novel about love in various forms – romantic love, love between friends, love of place, familial love – and a fascinating insight into the Uruguyan dictatorship of the 20th century

a line: “the silence of dictatorship, the silence of the closet, as we call it now––all of that is layered and layered like blankets that muffle you until you cannot breathe”

an image: I was in tears at the final conversation between Flaca and her father, and even read it aloud hours later to my boyfriend; I won’t recall it here in case I ruin it for other readers, but I found his words deeply moving

a thought: I finished this book over three weeks ago but can’t bring myself to remove it from my bedside table – there were many lines that I’m still thinking about, including Malena’s heated remark that you do not owe your parents your life

a fact: the title comes from a word for singer in Spanish but, as de Robertis shares in this interview, there’s another word, cantante, which women under the dictatorship in the Uruguayan era used as code for lesbians – the author found a resonance in how it suggests a woman will claim her life, or voice, on her own terms

want to read Cantoras? visit here

The Welsh Language: A History by Janet Davies

a nutshell: spanning millennia, this overview of the Welsh language (iaith fy wlad – the language of my homeland) was so readable I finished it in a single day

a line: “The average Englishman … is seldom prepared to believe that the Welsh are a different nation – in fact, if there is any general attitude towards the Welsh, it is that they are a nuisance”

an image: though I learned about the Blue Books controversy at school, I still find Rev L. H. Davies’ portrayal of Welsh society mind-blowing with its claims of how ‘the females’, ahem, had a prevalent want of chastity and of how young people had a habit of rolling around in haylofts together – what a picture he painted

a thought: the roots of the Welsh language stretch back at least 2,500 years (perhaps 4,000) compared with little more than 1,500 years in the cases of English & Gaelic – Welsh is a rare example of an indigenous language of the Western Roman Empire still spoken today

a fact: in 2011 the Welsh National Assembly passed a Measure that gave the Welsh language official status in Wales, thus making it the only language which is de jure official in any part of the UK

want to read The Welsh Language: A History? visit here

Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap (tr. Tess Lewis)

a nutshell: drawn from her family’s experiences among southern Austria’s Slovenian-speaking minority, this book follows the coming of age of a girl whose grandfather fought as a partisan in WWII, whose grandmother scarcely survived a concentration camp, and whose father continues to relive the trauma of torture at the hands of the Nazis

a line: “But is the peace in this region truly ours or do the languages spoken here still wear uniforms?”

an image: Haderlap portrays the war as a devious fisher of men, which has cast out its net for the adults and trapped them with its fragments of death, its debris of memory – she imagines her Father as snagged on memory’s hooks

a thought: with the world finally paying attention to the glaring epidemic of police brutality and racism, it’s worth nothing that this book makes many references to police officers’ unprovoked attacks on both children & adults during southern Austria in the Second World War, as well as the police’s violence in tearing apart families of anyone allegedly disloyal to the Third Reich

a fact: Haderlap’s focus on the effects of conflict on survivors and their children made me think back to human rights lawyer Phillippe Sands’ talk at Edinburgh Festival, where he spoke of the intergenerational traumas that prompted him to research & write East West Street in which he traces the lost history of his mother’s family in WWII

want to read Angel of Oblivion? visit here