repeatbeatpoet's reviews
157 reviews

It’s a classic for a reason! 

audiobook excellently read by Alice Walker themselves. 

First finished read of 2025!

An excellent re-accounting of the history of the modern world, placing Africa and African people  at the centre.  It’s a story told through the histories of resources like gold, sugar, silver, cotton, tobacco, and tea, of enslavement, industrialisation, plantation economies, European imperial expansion and formation, history of African people, cultures, kingdoms, civilisations, philosophies, and lives. Really loved it.

Listened to the audiobook and chapters are well-paced and cover a massive range of time in considerable detail without feeling repetitive, boring, or slow. 

Kareem’s voice is hood-surrealist, pastor’s kid with a devil tongue, street laureate. 10/10, would recommend. 

Dub novel. Dub prosody. Coming of age, with hints of romance, crime, magical realism.

In the 70s Linton Kwesi Johnson (Jean Binta Breeze, Derek Walcott Mutaburaka etc) became visible and known for how they pivoted their language and poetic formats away from default Western traditions, and recentred the Caribbean, and created Dub Poetry, writing in patois, writing poems with reggae melody and dub riddim behind them. this book does a similar thing I feel, with a British-Caribbean experience. In the same way we think about “jazz novels”, this is a dub novel. Crookes writes to, through, inside of reggae and dub, using its inimitable qualities to propel the story forward and ground it, as our MC Yemaye  searches for herself inna de dance, searches for her estranged mother, presumed dead, searches for love and finds it, searches for escape after police murder her partner, searches for autonomy and agency after being forced underground, searches Jamaica and her history for traces of her mother, searches, searches, searches. 

It’s a thrilling read, fast paced, and the audiobook is fantastic too, incorporating the riddim and melodies of dub into the reading. 

useful tool in defining, identifying/recognising, combatting, and subverting instances and systems of white supremacy (the agent of the war on Blackness) across many industries / scales; the music industry, contemporary geopolitics, history & the telling of history, and the life of a young Ugandan boy being raised in North West London (St. Raph's estate) in the late 90s and early 2000s during the birth of Grime, and later, as a poet and author. 

Glad to see George grabbing the thorny questions of what it means to want to create progressive work, and live a progressive life, under systems and within industries which have so much harm and exploitation at their core. (He also does a good job of critiquing himself and the actions of himself and those around him. He uses the retelling of a conversation being hijacked by the whiteness of the sole white voice, a friend's partner, to illustrate the interpersonal manifestations of what Kehinde Andrews would call, the psychosis of whiteness, the personal level attacks by the witting or unwitting agents of the war on Blackness).

more to say, but I'm just glad that George is forever expanding and challenging himself as a writer and somewhat public intellectual/thought leader (although he'd hate the term), and that he is doing this publicly, on the page and at the level of ideas.