New Voices – EDI book club reads to deepen understanding of diverse experiences by Rachel Walker

I’m a massive book geek. I’ve been in three different book clubs, dabbled (badly) in creative writing and I spend large chunks of every week with my nose in a book. When I was 14, I did a sponsored reading challenge where I tactically chose 12 short books and read them all in one week. So, when the opportunity came up to join a new book club run by ARMA focussed on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) issues, I jumped at the chance. We first met in mid-2020 and have met every couple of months since, with six-ten people joining each time. We’ve each taken a turn to choose the books for the following session. The wonders of Teams meant that we have been able to participate from across the UK, representing higher education institutions, charities and independent research organisations.

I am part of the Research Services EDI group at the University of Reading and we are considering how we, as professional services support colleagues, support our researchers and what more we can do to make our offerings more accessible. It’s clear that there are some EDI issues that are outside our control, but we are taking steps to effect change where we can, for example working with the University of Reading’s staff disability network to produce a toolkit for research services colleagues, so that they can better support researchers with disabilities. My fellow book-clubbers are part of similar groups at their own institutions or are part of forums that are discussing EDI issues and pushing to remove the barriers that they discover in our sector.

We have found that we can relate the theme(s) of the books either to our personal lives and lived experiences, or to the challenges that we have faced or identified in our workplaces. We’ve found it useful to share these experiences and some of the initiatives underway in our workplaces and have all fed back in some way to colleagues at our respective institutions. We have also read some amazing books which have challenged our thinking on several issues, from race and sexuality to (dis)ability and class.

I have included reviews from some our favourites, reflecting our thoughts and comments from the discussions (though written by one participant!). We’d encourage you to read these books too and see if they challenge you as well. We’re excited to be putting out a call for new members to join the book club, so if you’re interested, please get in touch with ARMA at enquiries@arma.ac.uk. We’re taking a break over the festive period and we’d love to see you when we restart in 2022.

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

Our first book was one which came with a reputation: Girl, Woman, Other – joint winner of the Booker Prize in 2019 – by Bernardine Evaristo – the first black woman and first black British person to win the Booker Prize. The book takes on a range of issues from class and race to abuse, gender and sexuality, and delves into intersectionality, looking at how these issues affect each other. So it was a good place for us to start! As well as that, it was a really good read – the 12 chapters focus on 12 very different women whose stories are all linked in some way. This develops through the book, and some found it a little over-complex (there’s a colourful spider diagram online!), but it makes for engaging and fascinating reading. Evaristo’s writing style is unconventional: there’s no punctuation or capital letters. Most of us found this jarring to begin with but then got into it and found that it lent a fluidity and poetry to the text, allowing us to feel part of the scenes we were reading about and letting the text flow over us naturally. Conversations about the issues touched on in this book can also be jarring and difficult, so we also felt the language did a good job of taking us out of our comfort zones from the start.

Good Talk - a memoir in conversations by Mira Jacob

For most of us, Good Talk was our first foray into reading a graphic novel, and we loved it! Mira Jacob is an American woman, daughter of Indian immigrants, mother of a young boy, and married to a white Jewish man living in New York. So, she’s got a lot of different identities and influences in her life which she recounts as conversations she’s had with friends, family and strangers. Jacob has a young son who, like a lot of children, asks her questions that she struggles to answer. A particularly memorable conversation is when he asks her about Michael Jackson’s changing appearance; after a lot of tricky questions he declares, “I’m going to turn myself white!”, to which Jacob replies, “nope”. Children view things so differently from the adults around them and this exchange highlights how bluntly they can talk about challenging issues. The novel covers significant events – including 9/11 and Trump’s election build-up – which caused considerable upheaval and conflict in Jacob’s life and experiences. The final pages, which she writes to her son, brought me to tears. “You might one day be a man who asks many many questions…then you still have hope for this world, and if you still have hope, my love, then so do I.”

A Dutiful Boy by Mohsin Zaidi

Mohsin Zaidi grew up in a self-contained Muslim Pakistani community in north London. His parents had a very set view of how he should progress – straight A’s at school, law school, marriage and children. As a child Zaidi felt different and knew he didn’t want to follow this path. On pilgrimages to Mecca, he prayed for Allah to make him normal and let him fit in with his Pakistani community. When he moved to Oxford to read Law, he found himself out of place there too, in terms of class, race and sexuality. He finally came out to his family, who were shocked, ashamed and disappointed. But, through patience and sheer refusal to give up on their strong family ties and love, Zaidi found his way back to peace with his family and they found some level of acceptance. We all found that the memoir was engaging reading and his sense of humour allowed him to tackle serious topics with an uncommon lightness that made it very readable. It gives real insight into the intersecting challenges faced by someone who doesn’t fit into any of the boxes they are expected to.

Brit(ish) by Afua Hirsch

Afua Hirsch is a mixed-race British woman; her mother is Ghanaian and her father is a white, Jewish immigrant. Growing up in middle-class Wimbledon, she struggled with her identity from an early age. As well as providing a lot of historical detail about British culture, the slave trade and abolition (which led some of us to comment on how balanced/full our history education had been – a conversation for another day!), Hirsch weaves her lived experience into the book. These are vital aspects of any conversation around any conversations relating to race, as well as gender, sexuality, disability etc. We took home the message that we all need to recognise that we might be starting from a place of knowledge deficiency – we should acknowledge this and not gloss over past mistakes or history. The issue of assimilation came up through the book – the need that Hirsch (and probably many others) felt to blend into British culture, playing down their intersectional identities, regardless of negative experiences, just to be able to progress. As someone who’s visibly mixed-race, we also noted that Hirsch had no choice about showing this characteristic – her ‘other’-ness is obvious – in contrast to others who may have the choice to disclose or not disclose an invisible characteristic depending on how safe they feel.

If any of these books sound like your thing and you’d like to join the book club when we restart in 2022, please get in touch to express an interest.