Special session of the Mind Book Club with guest Mary Martins, all welcome! No need to book, just turn up on the day.
Mary Martins is a documentary filmmaker and final year PhD Student at the Centre for Research and Education Art and Media, University of Westminster. Her doctoral research expands on her creative practice as a documentary animator, shifting her professional practice from exploring the history of Black communities in London to Lagos, Nigeria and Salvador, Brazil. For the past ten years, she has been formulating a deeper understanding of cross-current, African-Brazilian colonial histories, intersecting film, animation and archive material to reflect on the lived experiences of marginalised voices through the preservation of their history and culture.
For this book club session, we will discuss one of the key writers that has informed the theory and practice of her research, Saidiya Hartman, with a focus on her book Lose your mother: A journey along the Atlantic slave route.
In Lose Your Mother, “the slave,” Saidiya Hartman observes, “is a stranger torn from family, home, and country. To lose your mother is to be severed from your kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as an outsider. In Lose Your Mother, Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana.”
Hartman is a Professor in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in the US.
Book club is an opportunity for people to come together to explore the wonderful world of stories & storytelling, discovering new genres, authors and adventures.
From fantasy to crime, poems and plays, there is something for everyone.
Age and ability are not important to us, just a love of reading, learning and sharing something new.
Each week we will:
· Start the session with a mindfulness exercise
· Agree on a genre and book or poem together
· Have group discussions to share our thoughts, feelings and ideas.
Please contact us for more information on sonia.cummings@mindchwf.org.uk