In the fifth episode of ‘Dirty John: The Betty Broderick Story’, a court-appointed therapist tries to guide an increasingly agitated Betty Broderick (Amanda Peet) towards seeking custody of her kids during a property settlement trial following her divorce from Daniel Broderick (Christian Slater). Custody of children, her lawyer believes, will help them push for a bigger settlement. For a moment, Betty softens at the thought of her kids, but she immediately snaps out of it and leaves. …

CW: Rape, sexual abuse, child sexual abuse

“What is it for, the past, one’s own or the world’s? To what end question it so closely?”

— Margaret Drabble, The Realms of Gold

Justice is, in many ways, a form of remembering. Memory and memorialization can play a critical role in the dispensation of justice, and in the struggle to keep victims, crimes, or perpetrators among the unforgotten. In the aftermath of war crimes, for instance, memorialization has long served as a form of reparation for victims. Memory as evidence, in the form of eyewitness testimony, has been the gold standard…

I don’t usually find myself reaching for books in the Young Adult genre. But having read Akwaeke Emezi’s stellar debut novel ‘Freshwater’, I could not wait to get my hands on her 2019 book, ‘Pet’. And I am more in awe of her writing than ever.

The strikingly imaginative ‘Pet’ is set in the utopian city of Lucille, a world in which all monsters have been eliminated, defeated by the angels who fought and won the revolution. In this fictional world, there are no backstabbing politicians, no police to fear, and no hoarding billionaires. …

With a title like this, the opening had better not disappoint. And Oyinkan Braithwaite’s ‘My Sister, The Serial Killer’ does better than that. When the book opens, the novel’s troubled narrator Korede is summoned by her younger sister Ayoola with these three words: “I killed him.” Ayoola has just “dispatched” her third boyfriend, and Korede has, once again, been called upon to attend to the crime scene. Which is just as well because Korede is an ace cleaner. She knows that bleach masks the smell of blood, and that the kitchen sink should be “filled with everything required to tackle…

The question, “what’s the use?” is the engine that drives Sara Ahmed’s queer feminist critique of use and usefulness in her latest book, What’s the Use? On The Uses of Use.

This is the third book in a trilogy that started with The Promise of Happiness (2010) and Willful Subjects (2014). All three share a similar methodology, digging into and expounding upon a single word. While “happiness” and “will” were the subjects of Ahmed’s previous inquiries, here she focuses on the word “use”.

The Oxford English Dictionary (third edition) defines “use, n.” as:

The act of putting something to work…

With hearings that began in June 1929, a verdict delivered in 1933, and another six months of appeal hearings, the Meerut Conspiracy Case in colonial India turned out to be one of the most expensive legal cases in the history of the British Empire. 31 trade unionists and activists were arrested for organising strikes and charged with conspiring to “deprive the King of the sovereignty of British India”. The accused were picked up from Bombay, Calcutta, and Punjab and taken to the city of Meerut for the trial — far from the support bases of the defendants and from the…

Some of my earliest childhood memories revolve around my grandmother’s kitchen in India. In her kitchen, food was not just a source of nourishment and a trigger for the tastebuds, but an act of care. My memories of the days and weeks that led up to her death have faded; but certain tastes and smells still trigger a nostalgia for her food, made with great love, intuition, authority, and joy.

My grandmother’s food was also the bearer of memories, with secret recipes and techniques passed on from mothers and grandmothers to daughters and granddaughters, creating an intimate bond through shared…

“We the women
Whose praises go unsung
Whose voices go unheard…”
— Grace Nichols, I Is a Long Memoried Woman (1983)

Womxn of unheard voices and unsung praises are at the heart of Bernardine Evaristo’s 2019 Booker Prize-winning novel ‘Girl, Woman, Other’. It is a book that puts presence back into absence. Within these pages are not one, but twelve black British womxn, all scripting their own individual stories within Evaristo’s master narrative. It is a powerful and joyful counterpoint to the near invisibility of womxn of colour in literary productions — both as authors and as their fictional creations.

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