Love the Dark Days by Ira Mathur

When The Journal of Indentureship and its Legacies reached out to me in summer 2022 to review Ira Mathur's Love the Dark Days, I didn't really know what to expect.Mathur is best known for her candid broadcast and multimedia journalism.Coming together as a complex tapestry of memoirs, Love the Dark Days represents a significant departure from Mathur's journalistic form.The book chronicles Mathur's most intimate relationships and traces the footprints of her family -particularly those of her grandmotheracross continents, cultures, and epochs.In this sense, it sits alongside other recent efforts (Bahadur 2016; Carby 2019, Hirsh 2018) to merge autobiographical writing with materials from personal/public archives in order to explore the everyday violence of colonialism and the ways that this violence reinvents itself across generations.Mathur's book is fascinating to read but hard to review because there is simply so much going on in it.Love the Dark Days is quite astonishing in terms of its breadth of historical and geographic coverage.It catapults the reader between India, Trinidad and Tobago, Britain and St Lucia in a series of carefully arranged recollections that link past and present.In postcolonial India young 'Poppet' (Mathur) and her siblings reside for long intervals at her grandmother's house while her parents travel, entertain and enjoy the trappings of upper-class Indian society.In Tobago three generations of Poppet's family -daughter(s), mother, grandmother -desperately try (and mostly fail) to find comfort and belonging in exile.In London we find the narrator coming of age: reinventing herself, falling in and out of love, finding her craft and coming up against the everyday violence of racialization and

Psychology

• Brit(ish)

  Shirin Hirsch•Immigrants & Minorities•2018

  Add to list

• Coolie Woman

  Bridget Brereton•Slavery and Abolition•2015

  Add to list