Het boek dat Emma gaat lezen voor haar boekclub ‘Our Shared Shelf’ in maart/april is bekend. Dit zal het boek ‘The Power’ van schrijfster Naomi Alderman zijn. Dit boek is vertaald naar het Nederlands als ‘De Macht’ maar moet nog uitkomen. In januari verschijnt het boek bij bol.com.

DOur next book will be a speculative fiction novel called The Power by Naomi Alderman, winner of the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. The book asks a question we might have all asked at one time: what would the world be like if women were in charge?

In the book, teenage girls all over the world begin to develop the ability to do harm by transmitting electricity through their fingertips. News spreads quickly over social media and soon the girls are teaching older women how to harness their dormant powers. In a few short years, gender roles are reversed and the world is run by women. As governments are toppled, a new woman’s republic is born, and there’s a single new religion led by a cult leader called Mother Eve.

The book follows four main characters: Tunde, a male journalist who is following the emerging stories, and three women with new found powers, Roxy, Allie and Margot. Their paths cross as the world is heading into political and religious turmoil.

Alderman challenges the cliché that women are more noble than men, and that a world run by women would be more gentle, with benevolent leaders and no war. In fact, women become power hungry and begin to repress men. They commit war atrocities, perform male genital mutilation, rape and maim for sport and kill to occupy land.

With power dynamics reversed, the women don’t choose a righteous path – they act no better than men who have abused power throughout history. I think Alderman’s point is that people who abuse, do so because they can.

Alderman presents the main part of the book as an early manuscript of an historical novel, written thousands of years in a future where women still rule, by a male novelist ‘Neil Armon’. Through letter exchanges between Neil and his mentor, a female writer called ‘Naomi’, we see a world where men’s worth is only in their looks and ‘men’s literature’ isn’t taken as seriously as women’s. This is a really clever literary device which highlights how absurd rigid gender roles are.

Neil thinks he can prove that women weren’t always the ones in positions of power, but Naomi can’t see how the history books would lie. Neil’s reality is one where men’s contributions to history have been misattributed, or even stolen, by women.

This made me think about the fact that history was written by those who held the power. It also made me think about how the distribution of power and gender roles throughout history often seems arbitrary, and how they could have perhaps ended up very differently.

I’m excited to hear what you all make of the novel.

Love,
Emma and the Our Shared Shelf team

Het boek dat Emma gaat lezen voor haar boekclub ‘Our Shared Shelf’ in september/oktober is bekend. Dit zal het boek ‘Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body ‘ van schrijfster Roxane Gay zijn. Dit boek is wel vertaald naar het Nederlands als ‘Honger: De geschiedenis van mijn lichaam’ en is te koop bij bol.com.

Dear Our Shared Shelf,

Roxane Gay describes her book ‘Hunger’ as a “memoir about my body”. It traverses many of the issues surrounding our human bodies, the sexual experiences we have, our relationship with food, how we feel about our own bodies and the difference gender has to play on a body… When exploring how society treats people of her size, Gay asks: “What does it say about our culture that the desire for weight loss is considered a default feature of womanhood?”

What struck me the most about the book is Roxane’s searing honesty. We know that there are many people of all genders who do not feel they can talk about their experiences – who live their lives carrying the huge burden of abuse and trauma. As the author suggests, many people do not realise the suffering that follows an act like the one Roxane experienced, and how it can completely alter the way the victim identifies with themselves and others.

While parts of the book are difficult to read, it highlights the very real damage done by sexual violence and puts you in the mind and body of someone that has to move through the world in a different way. A small insight or perspective I feel grateful for now having and understanding a little bit better.

I am also re-reading essays from Gay’s ‘Bad Feminist’. We put such high expectations on ourselves as feminists, on other feminists, and the movement as a whole. It feels like such a relief to take ownership of words like “nasty woman” and “bad feminist”. They don’t have so much power this way and maybe they remind us not to hold ourselves and others to unreasonably high standards – we are all human after all and at different moments of our learning journeys. We need to feel free to be on those journeys and make mistakes. I hope if you get time you’ll enjoy what she has to say about this too.

Love,
Emma