The Body Family (Paperback)
The
Body Family is a song of memory and revelation; it is the sublime
unearthing of what has been hidden by silence and erasure. This lyrical
and imagistic poetry collection tells the story of a family's journey to
flee the murderous reign of Uganda's Idi Amin only to land in a racist
American landscape. Wabuke excavates personal and ancestral history to
bring these poems to wrenching life, articulating what it means to be a
Black girl becoming a Black woman while navigating a diaspora haunted by
British colonization and American enslavement.
Body Family is a song of memory and revelation; it is the sublime
unearthing of what has been hidden by silence and erasure. This lyrical
and imagistic poetry collection tells the story of a family's journey to
flee the murderous reign of Uganda's Idi Amin only to land in a racist
American landscape. Wabuke excavates personal and ancestral history to
bring these poems to wrenching life, articulating what it means to be a
Black girl becoming a Black woman while navigating a diaspora haunted by
British colonization and American enslavement.
Hope Wabuke is a Ugandan American poet, essayist, and writer. She is the author of the forthcoming memoir Please Don't Kill My Black Son Please. Hope has published in The Guardian, The Root, Los Angeles Review of Books, and NPR among others. She is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and a founding board member and former Media & Communications Director for the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction.