Assembly

"Assembly" is a novel that shows the inner turmoil experienced by an unnamed black British woman living in modern day London as she navigates through a world that often sees her more as an object than as a person. Although the narrator has spent her life working hard to achieve a high level of personal and professional success, she constantly feels that heavy weight of oppression from living in a country that doesn't embrace her as well as being used to represent diversity as her job.

The narrator has a successful job working in finance and enjoys that lifestyle it provides her but finds herself disappointed and exhausted after receiving a surprise promotion. At work, she is objectified and sexualized to the point that she detaches from herself and is unemotional. In her personal life, she has a white boyfriend but views their relationship as just another step on the ladder to obtaining a higher social status. To me, the narrator secretly resents that while she has to go to work daily, since her boyfriend has generational wealth, he chooses not to work and instead plans for the future when he'll be taking over the family fortune.

Throughout this novel, there is the repeated theme that in order to belong to the majority culture, the minority culture must assimilate. Unbeknownst to most people, from an early age, most people of color are taught that there are invisible rules to follow in order to belong to the majority culture such as go to college, get a job, buy property, buy art, keep your head down, keep quiet, etc. After following these rules for years, at some point, the narrator is tired of assimilating and no longer has a real sense of who her true self is.

While this is a short novel at 102 pages, the author manages to provide that reader with insight

on the inner thoughts of being a black woman in the modern world as well as the mental toll that assimilation can have on a person. Although I am a black woman living in the United States and the narrator is a black woman living in Britain, this novel really resonated with me in reference of being an high achieving black woman who feels tired of following the the idea that no matter how much success one achieves in life, there will always be this feeling of that it success is a temporary aversion of failure. Through meditation and other self care practices, I am resolving these feelings of not being good enough. By the end of the book, the narrator has decided that after years of letting others dictate to her how she should live and what success should look like, she decides to take control of her destiny on her own terms.

How do we examine the legacy of colonization when the basic facts of its construction are disputed in the minds of its beneficiaries?

How can we engage, discuss, even think through a post-colonial lens, when there’s no shared base of knowledge? When even the simplest accounting of events - as preserved in the country’s own archives- wobbles suspect as tin-foil-hat conspiracies in the minds of its educated citizens?

But what it takes to get there isn’t what you need once you’ve arrived.

I feel. Of course I do. I have emotions. But I try to consider events as if they're happening to someone else. Some other entity. There's the thinking, rationalizing I (me). And the doing, the experiencing, her. I look at her kindly. From a distance. To protect myself, I detach.

These directives: listen, be quiet, do this, don’t do that. When does it end? And where has it got me? More, and more of the same. I am everything they told me to become. Not enough. A physical destruction, now, to match the mental. Dissect, poison, destroy this new malignant part of me. But there’s always something else: the next demand, the next criticism. This endless complying, attaining, exceeding – why?

It’s evident now, obvious in retrospect as the proof of root-two’s irrationality, that these world superpowers are neither infallible, nor superior. They’re nothing, not without a brutally enforced relativity. An organized, systematic brutality that their soft and sagging children can scarcely stomach- won’t even acknowledge. Yet cling to as truth. There was never any absolute, no decree from God. Just vicious, random chance. And then, compounding.

Why subject myself to their reductive gaze? To this crushing objecthood. Why endure my own dehumanization?

Considering its short length, this is a razor-sharp reflection of what it means to navigate a predominantly white, imperialist culture as a black person. Racism is so embedded in our society and language that people turn a blind eye to the subtleties and how they add up to a brutal total. She talks about the ways that black bodies and the idea of diversity have been commodified to further the status quo. She talks about the erasure of black experiences and identity in the pursuit of “assimilation” aka disappearance; The way that black people are forced to be complicit in their own dehumanization. There were so many quotes that were so precise that I was in awe. Do yourself a favor and pick this up.