Decolonial Daughter Letters from a Black Woman to her European Son

A Trinidadian-American writer and activist explores motherhood, migration, and identity—and how it relates to land, imprisonment, and genocide for Black and Indigenous peoples.

Having moved to Copenhagen, Denmark from Brooklyn over 18 years ago, Brown attempts to contextualize her and her son’s existence in a post-colonial and supposedly post-racial world, where the very machine of so-called progress has been premised upon the demise of her lineage.
 
Through letters to her son, Brown writes the past into the present—penned from the country that has been declared “The Happiest Place in the World”—creating a vision that is a necessary alternative to the dystopian one currently being bought and sold.

Lesley-Ann Brown is a Trinidadian-American author, freelance journalist, activist and poet. Her recent work examines methods of decolonial narratives fused with political activism. She's one of the co-founders of Say It Loud, a spoken word-poetry collective, consisting of Black women poets in Copenhagen, Denmark. Say It Loud is now the R.A.M. Poetry collective (Random Access Memory). Brown has been featured and invited to participate in a range of events, including BE.BOP 2016 Black Europe Body Politics, in Berlin and Copenhagen, and she was one of the panelists in and organizers for the first ever Women of Color Panel in Denmark.