Tag: writing

Natasha Brown’s debut novel Assembly packs a punch with just 100 pages of prose clear and sharp as crystal about what it’s like to be Black and British.

So, when that mouth opened up and coughed its vitriol at her, making some at the table a little uncomfortable, she understood the source of its anger, despite being the target. She waited for the buzz of her phone to excuse her and – in the meantime – quietly, politely, she understood him.

In many respects Assembly reads like a quiet, repressed Howl – Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem which howled all in one breath what it was like to be othered in an America.

Brown’s prose is very close to poetry, crossing the formal line many times, like on page 30:

So come on now. Lift left foot and swing it ahead, spring forward. Don’t slow down, don’t stop. Don’t think. Just keep it moving.

Go get on the train.

But here I am,
still
stood, still
at the station.
I really should

The narrator’s nihilistic detachment is framed straight away. Where authors usually dedicate the book to their loved ones, she writes:

This too is meaningless,
a chasing after the wind.

But she has fire in her. There are so many delicious eviscerations in the book but Lou’s was my absolute favourite:

Back at the office, Lou’s not in yet. He rarely shows up before eleven. As if each morning, fresh mediocrity slides out of the ocean, slimes its way over mossy rocks and sand, then sprouts skittering appendages that stretch and morph and twist into limbs as it forges on inland until finally, fully formed, Lou! strolls into the lobby on two flat feet in shined shoes.

So why doesn’t she scream, why doesn’t she stand up to the bullies, why doesn’t she howl? Well *gestures at systemic racism around us* that’s why. On page 56, Brown writes:

Explain air.
Convince a sceptic. Prove it’s there. Prove what can’t be seen.

So Assembly is also a demonstration, through anecdotes that seem cartoonish sometimes (she’s a senior leader but expected to make the coffees and book others’ airplane tickets) but that I suspect are, like in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, all true. Why invent when reality provides so many exhibits.

There are also actual exhibits in Assembly, demonstrating how Black British people are both othered and asked to “quietly, politely understand”. These exhibits are actually formatted as illustrations in a textbook – “Fig 1.”, “Fig 2.” – and give snippets of the thousand cuts bringing the proverbial death. For those, she uses the subject “you” to pull the reader in: you get harassed and can’t say a thing, passed in the queue and asked to “keep the noise down”, and you realise with horror that even howling is white privilege.

Throughout the novel, the narrator talks about her cancer diagnosis, and her decision to let is spread – her refusal to fight it. It’s hard not to think that it’s the result of / the metaphor for that repressed howl.

The ending is subtle. A half-arsed marriage proposal, her suspended answer. In my opinion it came too soon – because I loved Brown’s writing, but also because I’ve been groomed to believe that all heroines should get their revenge. I half-hoped for a Dogville ending: burn the stolen generational wealth, at least figuratively!

But that was not the project. Brown had announced “This too is meaningless” at the very beginning. Hundreds of years of history, thousands of daily cuts prove she’s most likely right. But with her 100 pages, she makes the reader want to howl on her behalf – and that is not meaningless.