What can books do, in the face of a genocide? Everything – if we allow ourselves to act on what they teach us.
I’m a mixed-race British-Pakistani, with a working diagnosis of complex PTSD. My book, A Flat Place, turns on the impossibility of healing from trauma when the world around you tacitly accepts the deaths of racialised people like you as inevitable, or even necessary.
We’re all human, and flawed. “Everyone makes compromises,” I wrote in my book, “about who and what they count as human. Everyone makes deals around the humanity of other people, and how consistently they allow that humanity to be present to them.”
