Natasha Brown
Assembly by Natasha Brown is a one-hundred-page novel that packs a powerful punch. It unfolds in the first-person voice of an unnamed British narrator of Jamaican origin. The stream of consciousness technique allows the narrator to skip from one vignette to another, from one experience to another. Threaded throughout are illustrations of the insidious racism and sexism bombarding the narrator in every aspect of her life.
The narrator has a successful career at a London finance firm and has just received a big promotion. Even though she works diligently, tries to say the right things, tries to blend in and not call attention to herself, tolerates subtle and not so subtle innuendos and micro aggressions, she knows her male colleagues are convinced she only got the promotion because of her race and gender. She describes them in grotesque terms:
Dry, weathered faces; soft, flabby cheeks; grease-shined foreheads. Necks bursting from as-yet-unbuttoned collars. All shades of pink, beige, tan. Fingers stabbing at keyboards and meaty fists wrapped around phone receivers.
Those same colleagues never fail to remind her she received the promotion because of the firm’s eagerness to meet diversity quotas in its hiring procedures.
And then there is her white boyfriend from an affluent liberal British family. She is invited to join his parents’ celebration of their wedding anniversary at the family estate. She observes them as they make obvious and concerted efforts to demonstrate their liberal attitudes toward race.
And that’s not all. She has been diagnosed with cancer. It is spreading throughout her body and requires immediate treatment, which she has so far refused. Her doctor’s reminders to seek treatment periodically interrupt her flow of thoughts.
The novel captures the narrator’s sheer exhaustion at having to navigate and contend with racism and harassment in every aspect of her life. She is in a state of constant alertness. She analyzes how others perceive and react to her. She chooses her responses carefully. She never reveals what she really thinks, operating under a split consciousness. She feels herself to be on constant display, always projecting an image that others expect of her. Her heightened awareness that she is a black female surrounded by a white culture that benefited from slavery and that continues to benefit from systemic racism permeates all her thoughts. The cancer that is spreading throughout her body comes to symbolize the cancer of racism infecting all aspects of her life. The narrator seems to have given up the struggle on all fronts by apparently refusing to fight the cancer that is killing her.
The novel is brief but powerful. The stream of consciousness technique is highly effective in presenting fleeting vignettes of the narrator’s experiences, all of which combine to illuminate the debilitating racism that is slowly draining her life, leaving her in a state of apathy and numbness.