Harare Review of Books

312 pp. Published February 11, 2025 by Feminist Press at CUNY. Non-fiction/essays.

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Sometimes a book is “good” because it’s an entry point—a portal—into knowledge, something that expands your mind on a subject, that shows you how much you don’t know and how you can find out more. In other words, or TL;DR: I can’t tell you how much this collection moved me, made me think, opened my eyes. It’s on my list of revolutionary and radicalising reads.

In a world made newly chaotic by the last US presidential election and its consequent fallout (the attempted erasure of the achievements of Black people, trans folk, and women, the deportation without due process of people of colour, and… I guess we’ll see worse); also the rise of far right forces; once again, silenced voices must fight to be heard. Tsunami falls into the bullhorn category. Collecting essays and other pieces in translation from marginalised people—women, trans folk, Indigenous, and Afro-Latinx—in Mexico, Tsunami represents, in the main, third- and fourth-wave feminism.

Plurality and intersectionality are at the centre of the collection. One of the flaws of previous waves of feminism was how limiting they were—like the race-based issues and the absence of women from the so-called Third World in the first and second waves, corrected to some extent in the third. Here, importantly, we hear from women and trans folk in the Global South—in Mexico to be specific. Mexico is one of the femicide capitals of the world; why is that? The writers in this collection are crystal clear about the many of the dangers that women face from patriarchy and anti-Indigenous sentiment.

The importance of this collection is not just to hear about the situation in Mexico, or even to extrapolate and apply lessons from these experiences in your own setting; it it also to see that feminism must be a single movement worldwide; that the patriarchy can only be defeated if people all ver the world stand together. It’s about understanding local situations, yes, but also seeing and seeking common ground. It’s about how we can and should collaborate and be in solidarity with one another. My favourite piece is from the women of the EZLN (the Zapatista women) because this point is made clearly: aware of how they are othered, these women point out how their fight is the fight of women everywhere.

An excellent read, highly recommended. Thank you to The Feminist Press and Edelweiss for early DRC access.

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