Assembly

A Black British woman whose family is from Jamaica, has had a good education and is now working as a financial executive in London who’s slated for a promotion. She has a white boyfriend whose family has an estate and has been bestowed with ancestral wealth. She is hesitant to attend the boyfriend’s parents’ anniversary party at their estate over the weekend. The boyfriend adores her and is excited to introduce her to his family. Now, from the outside, everything seems like a dream and the narrator is seemingly living the proverbial good life. Is she really?

Assembly is an internal monologue of the narrator as she goes about living her life. A life that appears perfect to the world, is in actuality, diametrically opposite to it. The narrator visualises herself and her life through the racial constructs of an apparently colourblind society only to find it hypocritical and dismissive of her struggles and lived experience. Colourism and chauvinism come disguised as diversity that beguilingly disregards her competence and contribution. Microaggressions become insidiously inherent part of her personal and professional relationships. Her existence always gets measured by her achievements and simultaneously the same achievements get scrutinised for their authenticity and credibility. The narrator is forever filtering and self editing her thoughts and actions leading to an unconscious reaction or an instinctual internal censoring. This habitual silencing results in extreme frustration, repressed emotions, distress, resentment causing alienation, emotional dysfunction and cognitive dissonance. 

Natasha Brown’s Assembly is a brave new voice in the world of literature that is trying to dismantle racism and colourism. The acerbic rhetoric feels like a whiplash at times. The brevity of the writing is no hindrance to the profundity each word provides to the central issue. Brown’s economy of language is a reflection on the stifling effects of racism on consciousness and conditioning. However, despite the meritocracy, I did find the rendition a tad flawed, especially when the narrator gets diagnosed with a disease. I couldn’t help but wonder, the necessity of that incident and also the intention of the author behind it. Was the disease introduced as a way to mollycoddle the readers into sympathising with the narrator and to align us with her complicity? Was it an easy way out for the author to refrain the readers from taking a stand against the narrator for the choices she never makes and for her perpetual rumination on society’s racism? Was Natasha Brown subtly illustrating the physical toll of suppressed anger and racial frustration? I know my opinion does appear controversial, but I wouldn’t have minded the narrator’s connivance, hesitancy to question and non confrontational stand, because she’s the victim of covert racism and that is something, that is always deemed speculative and unsubstantiated. So though we readers would have wanted the narrator to take a stand, to pacify our unsettled emotional core, we need to ask ourselves, if the narrator had a choice. And if she did have a choice, could she have executed it and at what cost? Hence, I wonder again, if Natasha Brown was deliberate in sugarcoating the narrator’s helpless reality. 

Nonetheless, keeping my nitpicking aside, I do strongly recommend Assembly. 

~ JUST A GAY BOY. 😐