The Unspoken Truth

Once upon a time, when I was a little girl, I was tucked warm and safe in my bed with a loving family to protect me. In the blink of an eye it all changed before my pretty baby blues. The grim reality of a mentally ill mother and a dying brother had become my nightmare. The reality that ripped my family apart and sent my distraught father running, leaving me to deal with my mother's mania. Left alone with my psychotic mother, I was forced to deal with the horrors that lay before me. I was a scared and confused little girl that had to learn how to survive many tragedies and overcome countless acts of abuse. This is a gripping tale of my childhood. I had to pull deep from within my soul to muster up the strength and courage to survive, with only blind faith and loss of innocence to lead the way. I was only six when my world came crashing down around me. Read my harrowing story, from a child's point of view; it promises to keep you emotionally invested from start to finish.

Real life and fiction meet as Angelica Garnett vividly evokes what it is to grow up in the shadow of artists. Her family appear in different guises in the stories, but at the centre of each one is Garnett herself. She is naïve and foolish as Bettina, desperately seeking acceptance into the grown-ups circle ('When All the Leaves Were Green, My Love'); shy and cautious, but finally disloyal, as Agnes ('Aurore'); a hesitant, uncomfortable Emily ('The Birthday Party'); and a contemplative, even witty older woman, full of appetite and guilt, as Helen ('Friendship'). Spanning an entire life, each story reveals a figure trying to understand her place not only within the polished circle of her family, but in an ever-changing world. Sharply observing a colourful social milieu and the vibrant characters that populate it, these are stories about family and friendships, yet also curdled relationships and small betrayals. A fictional counterpoint to her acclaimed memoir, Deceived with Kindness, here is a portrait of a woman seeking an understanding and acceptance of her past.

With strength and resilience, Africans have persevered through the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and were able to rebuild a life after slavery while enduring the inhumane conditions of the civil rights Jim Crow era forced upon them by the African diaspora. The lack of acknowledgement of the generational trauma these events have had on their descendants continues to create further injury. Even today, barriers prevent their healing and transition from survival to a thriving existence. Unspoken Truth is a bold collection of poetry highlighting the generational pain of Africans living in the diaspora. Through her poems, Bowden creates a panoramic view of the terrible conditions they endured for centuries. Deliberately, with dignity, she brings the trauma stories of African Nova Scotians told around kitchen tables for decades to the homes of readers while restoring the balance of humanity and royalty from which the African journey began. Despite all odds, they were able to preserve their lineage and lean on the resilience buried deep in their souls while passing this pride, culture, and strength on to future generations so they may one day fulfill the hopes and the dreams of the former slaves. This collection seeks to spark the necessary conversations the larger society needs to engage in around the perseverance of systemic racism, a society now grappling to make the connections between historical trauma and current-day conditions of inequality. It summons the conscience of every reader to acknowledge the truth and reconcile it with their own dissonance. The poems pay homage to the ancestors, honour the elders, and provide inspiration for the youth so they can heal from this historical inheritance and build upon their own narratives.

An intriguing journey that uncovers the scandalous and thought-provoking tale of family secrets, lies, lust, and abuse! Three marriages, racial tensions, a baby, and a secret affair are only some of the things that have unknowingly plagued Shyrell's family for decades. She's always asked herself, "what" and "why?" Never in a million years would she or her siblings imagine there is a "who?" n this true story, travel with Shyrell as she discovers the truth about her mother's secrets, her marriage, her family, and ultimately herself. After suffering decades of abuse at the hands of her mother, the answer to "who" would surprisingly come through a social media platform five years after her mother's death! The "what" and "why" would take years to finally come together... All the answers to "who, what, and why" had laid dormant for almost 60 years, embedded in the heart and soul of the one person still alive who would unlock Pandora's box to the "Unspoken Truth" of her mother's turbulent past from Charleston to Philadelphia regarding her unknown baby born in 1957. Will Shyrell find the answers to her past?

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the Civil War to our combustible present, White Rage reframes the continuing conversation about race in America, chronicling the history of the powerful forces opposed to black progress. Since the abolishment of slavery in 1865, every time African Americans have made advances towards full democratic participation, white reaction has fuelled a rollback of any gains. Carefully linking historical flashpoints – from the post-Civil War Black Codes and Jim Crow to expressions of white rage after the election of America's first black president – Carol Anderson renders visible the long lineage of white rage and the different names under which it hides. Compelling and dramatic in the history it relates, White Rage adds a vital new dimension to the conversation about race in America. 'Beautifully written and exhaustively researched' CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE 'An extraordinarily timely and urgent call to confront the legacy of structural racism' NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 'Brilliant' ROBIN DIANGELO, AUTHOR OF WHITE FRAGILITY

Bongani and Thando Mthimkhulu are a loving couple, wonderful parents and each running their own successful businesses. They have it all until one chance encouter with a business associate changes the entire course of their lives. It forces them to question the status quo and make drastic changes that end up having a great impact on those closest to them. Will they stay and try to figure out how to exist in the "new normal" or do they follow their hearts and live their truth?

Around the world in the twentieth century, political violence in emerging states gave rise to different kinds of silence within their societies. This book explores the histories of these silences, how they were made, maintained, evaded, and transformed. This book gives a comprehensive view of the ongoing evolutions and multiple faces of silence as a common strand in the struggles of state-building. It begins with chapters that examine the construction of "regimes of silence" as an act of power, and it continues through explorations of the ambiguous limits of speech within communities marked by this violence. It highlights national and transnational attempts to combat state silences, before concluding with a series of considerations of how these regimes of silence continue to be extrapolated in the gaps of records and written history. This volume explores histories of the composed silences of political violence across the emerging states of the late twentieth century, not solely as a present concern of aftermath or retrospection but as a diachronic social and political dimension of violence itself. This book makes a major original contribution to international history, as well as to the study of political terror, human rights violations, social recovery, and historical memory.

Religion is held to be the source of our values and morality, the impetus behind all things good. Yet it sustains an unparalleled acquaintance with death, destruction, and terrorism. And generation after generation we fail to acknowledge, much less explore, this glaring incongruity. Historians have written endlessly on the many origins of religion, and critics have written countless volumes on the immeasurable atrocities committed in its name. But here we are in the 21st century, splicing genes and colliding particles at near the speed of light, and we still don't have a coherent understanding of why we practice this most enigmatic of human behaviors. Our technical knowledge, that which reflects the rational side of human behavior, is doubling every couple of years, rapidly increasing the human ability to not just innovate, but to destroy and devastate. Yet our understanding of religion, the only irrational behavior we widely embrace and encourage, has remained virtually unchanged throughout history. The immense significance being, it is our irrational behaviors that have always been and will always be the greatest catalyst for human conflict. Only to the extent we understand our emotionally driven behaviors can we mitigate the rapidly growing dangers that naturally accompany our soaring awareness. This book provides the understanding that humanity needs to purge itself of religious conflicts and terrorism the world over.