My parents and grandparents had no such opportunities: I felt I couldn’t waste mine.īut this doesn’t sit well with her. I’d traded in my life for a sliver of middle-class comfort. Really, what other industry would have offered me the same chance? The financial industry was the only viable route upwards. Ruthless, efficient money-machines with a byproduct of social mobility. She feels complicit in aspiring for a life of “middle-class comfort” without challenging the institutions - the universities, banks and government - which have limited her choices because she lacked the prerequisite connections or money to venture into anything other than the financial industry.īanks - I understood what they were. It’s written in a series of eloquent vignettes from the perspective of a successful Black British woman who has climbed the career ladder in banking and done well for herself, but at every stage of her life, from school to job to buying her own home, she has had to keep her head below the parapet to avoid the naysayers who might suggest she doesn’t deserve it because of the colour of her skin.Īs she prepares for the visit to her white boyfriend’s family home, she thinks about all the events in her life which have led her to this point. On a much deeper level, it is also a scathing examination of institutional racism and the colonialist structure of British society. Natasha Brown’s novella Assembly could be described as the tale of a woman preparing to attend a lavish garden party at her boyfriend’s family home in the English countryside, but it is so much more than this. Fiction – paperback Penguin 104 pages 2021.
0 kommentar(er)
