![]() ![]() ![]() This is in a poor neighbourhood school in the fictional city of Augustown in Jamaica and this incident sparks off a dramatic event that gets the whole town marching. Central to this book is the story of an over-zealous teacher who cuts off a boy’s dreadlocks in his classroom. In his novel “Augustown” Kei Miller also asks us to question the assumptions we make about people. It’s these very categories which reinforce structures of imbalance in our society and prevent us from seeing people as infinitely more complex than any one aspect of their identity. In this book she challenges the lazy way we divide people up into categories as if they must inevitably be one particular thing. It’s something I loved about reading Petina Gappah’s novel “The Book of Memory” earlier this year. How do we read about characters so radically different from ourselves without bringing our own assumptions into the story? It’s the same challenge we face walking down any street and encountering someone who appears to be from a different class, race, gender, sexual orientation, social group or religion. ![]()
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